Double entendre, 1981
11', U-matic PAL, noir et blanc, son
Double Entendre: Two Sites Two Times Two Sides (for Roland Barthes) documents a live teleperformance by Douglas Davis (1933-2014), staged on May 16, 1981, between the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris. Using a two-way satellite link, the artist orchestrates a transatlantic encounter between two lovers—Davis himself and actress Nadia Taleb—attempting to overcome geographical, linguistic, and emotional distance. In a carefully orchestrated interplay of live and pre-recorded sequences, the work explores the tensions between the global scale of broadcast and the intimacy of personal exchange, offering a meditation on the enduring gap between technical connection and genuine communication.
At each venue, the performance unfolds in parallel: Davis in New York, Taleb in Paris, each standing before large screens that serve as virtual windows onto the other side of the Atlantic. Through this portal, they engage in a dialogue inspired by Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977; English translation: 1979), exploring desire and separation across physical, cultural, and symbolic divides, as they enact a relationship that, over the course of thirty minutes, moves from attraction to repulsion, from breakup to reunion. Each takes turns speaking in a game of echoes, repetitions, and translations from French to English, where every utterance is duplicated, fragmented, and displaced—a “double entendre” further complicated by the simultaneous transcription of their words on screen and the inevitable delays of live satellite transmission. Gradually, the contours of their identities begin to blur, until the two lovers seem to merge into a single, ambiguous figure. In the process, the satellite connection becomes as much a mirror as a bridge, destabilizing conventional distinctions between self and other, male and female, French and English.
Eventually, the teleperformance culminates in a playful gesture of transatlantic union: through a clever montage of pre-recorded footage and the interventions of stand-ins, Davis appears to leave the Whitney auditorium, running down Madison Avenue, only to reappear moments later—as if teleported—on the Place Georges-Pompidou in Paris. Taleb rushes to meet him, and the lovers embrace, giving physical form to the work’s central fantasy: the collapse of distance.
At once a love story and a technological demonstration, Double Entendre subverts the global satellite broadcast network, transforming it into a space of intimacy and proximity. The piece, like much of Davis’s telecommunication work, reveals both the promises and the shortcomings of the utopian ideal of immediate, universal connection.
Clara M. Royer, 2025