Pierrick Sorin represented France at the São Paulo Biennale, and his works have been exhibited worldwide, but this video installation from 1998 is of particular interest. Derision touched with indecency is a powerful weapon when faced with popular opinion and its dictation in matters of taste and cost, and we are familiar with the artist's reticence vis-à-vis the habits and customs representative of a milieu which he has constantly been up against. When filming himself, the artist mercilessly indulges, from the outset, in a violent critique touched with melancholy by portraying his own face divided by that of a dunce, in which helplessness becomes a sort of creed, and the right to speak is constantly jeopardized. It is as if there is an underlying error in every movement, and as if we, the viewers, were witness to some tragic-comic episode in the life of an individual suffering from permanent lapsus, fatigue and failure. This individual alternates between assuming the traits of the artist himself, his double, or some intangible other, when exposed to the accident that he provokes or, more generally suffers. We smirk. As witnesses we are on his side but feel somewhat intimidated in our comfortable position as viewer; unease sets in amidst two guffaws. It's Really Nice follows on from this heralded “collapse”. The visitor stands “exposed” to a wall of 32 screens literally oozing with the ostensible and the excessive, with 32 close-ups of heads, 32 hybrids disguised as socialites, 32 faces, parts of which are fiercely exaggerated, and show signs of unexpected, uncanny transformations. A crowd of potential monsters in animated images, whose voices can just be caught, broken by sounds of swallowing; whether dead or alive they still mechanically spill out the stereotyped phrases: “It's really nice… I like this work very much…” Here again, the visitor is bluntly hailed, confronted with his or her own environment and assertions identical to those of these dumbfounded clowns, staring with enormous eyes, these digitally reinvented clowns of shrivelled flesh, clones stammering out customary platitudes without conviction. The piece was originally going to be called Les Regardeurs (The Watchers). Sorin always seems to be at cross-purposes. Far from a sociological-style critique, it is the extreme futility of our movements that floods this spectacular piece; it is a statement, but also a game, a subtle way of emphasizing, in spite of everything, our social ecchymosis, just as much as our pretensions to analysis. Making us accomplices certainly restrains us, but it also leaves us without response, without condemnation, an object of confusion, a fragile subject, a roaming “watcher”, immersed, leaning on a grotesque world, leaning on what is crumbling, reflected and alone.

Pierre Giquel

Translated by Diana Tamlyn