Filmed in the studios of the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1978, Video 50 is made up of 50 thirty-second spots 1. In little front-on playlets, Robert Wilson shows strange rituals which are as innocuous as they are fantastic (Linda's Eye, Muscle Man...). We see embryonic fictions in which the treatment borrows advertising's elaborate aesthetization of bodies and decors. Very quickly, the advertising rhetoric stops short. the norm is invaded by disturbances: apparent gratuity of the meaning to the detriment of the "shock" editing. Non-academic bodies contaminate refined decors - sweaty bodies; fat stomachs, hoarse voices. The rhythm remains slow and the fiction constantly closes in on itself. The work resembles a collection of haïkus. The sound is fundamental in the constitution of the architectural skeleton of each sequence in the videogram, which appears imbued as much with the experience of repetitive music as by the seriality of minimalist art. Robert Wilson pushes the logic of television until it becomes a nonsense, reconstituting the fragmentary, discontinuous view retained by the viewers, as if constantly changing channels. All these visual sketches were produced with the idea of intervening between television programs and dealing with any problems (replacement of the test card). They are designed to surprise the viewers when they are least expecting it. But Video 50 is also intended to leave the screen in the living-room, considered by Robert Wilson above all as a piece of furniture, to be shown in public places. The 1980s saw the multiplication of video screens in places of transition (subway, banks, shops, etc.). In the form of brief irruptions, these spots would arrive in people's lives like accidental projections, lasting for as long as their passage. The allusion is reminiscent of certain films by Warhol which do not require any more attention than wallpaper. This video is unlike film in that it does not have to be read in a linear manner or as a single block. Viewers can focus their attention on the sound or the picture, fragmenting the work or not, as they wish: "It's feasible because it is designed to be part of an environment in which we can be selective. 2 By wrong-footing the theatrical and televisual modes of representation, Robert Wilson not only envisages an aesthetic economy specific to the medium but also prefigures what would be called "creative video" in the mid 1980s in France.

Dominique Garrigues

1 There are two versions of the work: one of 36' (CNAC-GP, 1978); the other is a re-edited ZDF (1980) lasting 25'.
2 Jean-Paul Fargier, Danielle Jaeggi, "Entretien avec Bob Wilson", in Cahiers du Cinéma, Paris, number 336, May 1982.