Julien Bismuth Stereotypes the Universe

Julien Bismuth’s ‘Beat the Matrix’ rewards viewers with subtle revelations across an array of works that consider print and digital culture in a global – even cosmic – context. A patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground (newspaper white, ink black) (2022), for instance, is a readymade of sorts in title as well as content, reproducing the deepest picture of space yet captured by the Webb Telescope as a wallpaper work. A paired piece, the universe started out young and blue, and is growing gradually redder (cosmic spectrum green, cosmic latte) (2022), presents what astronomers consider the average colour of the universe, calculated in two ways. These titles are worth lingering over: they epitomize the show’s concern with the often-arbitrary nature of our desire to make sense of the world around us by means of data.

The standout work in the show is a 16-minute video, Passer Montanus (2023), which traces the paired fates of the titular Eurasian tree sparrow and the Chinese ornithologist Tso-hsin Chen. During the period of social reform known as the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), Chairman Mao Zedong – believing the birds to be pests – instituted the ‘Smash Sparrows’ campaign and placed Chen under arrest for his conservation efforts. The environmental imbalance resulting from Mao’s attempt to eliminate sparrows led in part to the Great Famine (1959–61). Shot in Hong Kong, Bismuth’s film reveals the intertwined histories of censorship and ecological destruction. On the trail of a mysterious, never-found image of the ornithologist being humiliated by a crowd of Maoist sympathizers, the film meanders through the public spaces of Hong Kong, alluding to the city’s rapid development and uncertain fate.

Standing in as an overarching thematic for the show, A collection of stereotypes and clichés (August 9th, 1974; January 1st, 1980) (2022) is a set of readymades that exhume the histories of obsolete printing technologies. ‘To beat a matrix,’ the artist writes in the press release, ‘is to press paper pulp into a tray of metal type (or matrix) so as to make a mould for a printing plate. This process is called stereotyping, and the plates it produces are called stereotypes or clichés.’ Richly associative, the word ‘matrix’ calls to mind everything from the maternal (in Latin, matrix connotes a pregnant animal) to the eponymous dystopian sci-fi film series in which humans break out of a prison devised by artificial intelligence (1999–2021). In this context, ‘beating the matrix’ might mean resisting easy truths and reimagining the place of the individual observer in a time of media saturation and political repression.

A stippled-ink drawing, written in binary using peas and carrots (2022), depicts a children’s science experiment that spells out the message ‘Science Friday Rules!’ using the simplest of codes. The work is indicative of the show’s refreshingly lo-fi character and representative of the ‘poor images’ described by artist Hito Steyerl in her essay ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’ (2009) – intentionally low-res pictures that do not utilize the latest digital technologies. The artist here is not an omniscient truthteller but a drifting observer gently jostled in a crowd. As Bismuth notes in the press release: ‘These works neither contain nor communicate anything other than the potential to become what alone they can never be.’ Perhaps the poorest images in the show, at least in terms of verisimilitude, are the graphite drawings of birds that the artist creates in the dark during periods of insomnia. Accompanied by instructions for their reproduction, works such as the rare bird (2023) are intended to be replicated, differing with every instantiation so that – unlike digital copies – they recede ever further from the matrix from which they emerged.

Julien Bismuth, ‘Beat the Matrix’ is on view at Simone Subal Gallery, New York, until 11 February. 

^{Main image: Julien Bismuth, a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground (newspaper white, ink black), 2023, prints, silksceen, digital file, certificate with rights to use the pattern, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York; photograph: Greg Carideo}