Suzanne Lafont (born 1949) is a major figure on the French art scene. Her work came to the fore in the 1990s. She had a solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume and exhibited at MoMA (New York) in 1992, and then at Documenta IX (1992) and X (1997). Hers is an extended practice of photography which incorporates references to theatre, performance, cinema and literature.

The exhibition at Carré d’Art offers a perspective on her most recent works, most of them made specially for the event, but drawing on the photographs she has taken since 1995. These provide the raw material for each proposition, allowing her explore different regimes of images in a series of situations.

By way of introduction, 468 of these data are organised in the form of a slide show (Index). The exhibition then develops around the figure of the actor/performer. This protagonist first activates the space around the viewer, then, with Situation Comedy, from General Idea's Pamphlet Manipulating the Self, it takes over the field of the book, before giving way to it entirely (The First Two Hundred Fifty Five Pages of Project on the City 2, Guide to Shopping). Finally, it reappears in the adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Mystery of Marie Roget.

The exhibition ends with an announcement concerning coming talks (On annonce une série de conférences) which, given the absence of informative content, restores the literality of the museum.


Publication
French / English bilingual catalog.

With a text by Marcella Lista and a conversation between the artist & Jean-Marc Prevost. The book is designed as both a catalog reflecting the exhibition and a book directed by Suzanne Lafont. The text of Marcella Lista analyzes the work of Suzanne Lafont by placing it in a history of photography but also in performance. The interview with Jean-Marc Prevost tracks the development of the artist's work while addressing the challenges present in the most recent works.

SUZANNE LAFONT 192 pages ca. 140 documents Format 22 x 29 cm Unbound book

Conversation Between Jean-Marc Prevost and Suzanne Lafont

Given your training in literature and philosophy, I was wondering what it was that made you take an interest in photography in the 1980s?

I don’t think I was every really a philosopher. However, when studying at university I did become interested in a certain form of philosophy that connected ideas and situations.

Let’s just say that through a particular form of Socratic dialogue I discovered a way of contextualising ideas in verbal exchange and the movement of walking. I also read Mikhail Bakhtin. From this I discovered those literary genres that combine gravity and comedy, the rational and the irrational, philosophical debate and adventure stories. At the same time I was reading Don Quixote, Jacques le Fataliste, and Bouvard et Pécuchet. The question of reorienting my work only arose when I experienced the difficulty of writing. Actually, this wasn’t like starting from scratch, more a gradual shift driven mainly by cinema and dance. Cinema, of course, represented time and the mechanical image. Dance represented the real unfolding of time in space. I went regularly to the American Center, where I saw Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Lucinda Childs in the late 1970s. I was interested in ordinary movements, and of course in walking as part of the movement of dance. My choice of photography wasn’t guided by a particular taste for the medium, or by knowledge of its history. I became interested in photography because of this concern I had to make cinema without the resources of cinema. This meant that proposition would be constituted not by one image, but by a set of images, which required movement from the beholder in order to be activated. My interest in photography began with questions about time, which could only be driven by the viewer. Obviously, too, there was an economic factor in this choice. Unlike cinema, photography had no production apparatus. It offered a guarantee of autonomy.

You spoke in an interview about the use of quotations in Flaubert’s late works. In art, quotation was used systematically by Pop Art. But, coming back to Flaubert, and therefore to language, it strikes me that the use of quotation is a strategy to indicate the autonomy of language, bearing in mind that there is no natural connection between signifier and signified.

This absence of fit between signifier and signified inevitably affords freedom with regard to literary form, which is what we find in Laurence Sterne and James Joyce. Photography, in contrast, automatically introduces the idea of indexation, being indexed to the real.

It was also literary quotation, particularly in Flaubert, that led me to photography. In the same way as linguistic quotation corresponds to a regime of readymade language, so it occurs to me that photography is on the side of the “death of the author,” to use Barthes’s words, because apart from the framing, which is a choice, the camera proceeds by the undiscriminating recording of what it has in front of it. We might ask if recording is what guarantees the world, and if by an effect of osmosis, what is withdrawn from the subject is necessarily chalked up to objectivity. I don’t think that the decrease in the “author” coefficient necessarily coincides with a rise in the “world” coefficient. It is more by meaning, the direction attributed to it with language, that a photograph attaches to a referent. Benjamin called the captions under images “signposts.” Without these pointers the image would lack a context. A caption is a way of making a world. There are several possible worlds in an image, and several narratives can be linked with it: that of literality, that of dream, that of poetic utterances or that of descriptions. Which is why some of the images in Index are described in several different ways. Photography draws on reality and the index, and any photograph, even the emptiest, is like a shop bursting with things. But not until it is captioned and made part of the weave of meaning does contact with the world seem to be established. That is why uncaptioned photos seem surrounded with such a dense silence.

In the exhibition we find the presence of language as much in Index as in the use of the space of the book or the apparatus announcing a cycle of talks.

These are three different regimes of language. Index is a non-exhaustive set of data linking each image with one or several linguistic inputs. Accompanied by their captions, the images are oriented towards different contexts. The linguistic inputs also make it possible to establish a classification of the images that does not take into account the chronology, themes or any other kind of classification. It is indeed the job of a dictionary to make items available by disconnecting them from any kind of correlation. The exhibition therefore begins with a kind of backroom, a space darkened for the needs of projection, where the useful data is assembled. For about ten years, starting in the late 1980s, I photographed the human figure. These images were staged and the figures represented in the course of what were generally ordinary activities. Actions such as looking in such and such a direction, breathing, grimacing, lifting an object, moving it, dancing, dreaming, etc., enabled me to take into account the space occupied by the beholder. The images of grimacing faces directed towards the public, in particular, helped me understand that the two territories, the two-dimensional wall and the three-dimensional room, could intersect and resonate together, and therefore that the action was connected with the present of the exhibition. It was only when I started making large-scale photomontages combining photographs of actions and photographs of elements of the setting that I became aware that the representation was withdrawing into the space of the wall. The more complicated the action, adding other planes to planes, the less it entered the spectator’s volumetric space. I think that this is where my interest in books started. Situation Comedy appropriates a book, which it replicates on the wall in the form of plates. It was surely an ironic joke to have chosen to repeat a book whose theme is, precisely, a gymnastic movement! As for language, in the form of page numbers and the distribution of roles, it remains on the paper. At the exhibition exit there is an announcement concerning a series of talks. But the information is very vague, with none of the detail you would expect about places, dates, times, the names of the talkers, the talks and their subject. In just a few seconds it places those who might be interested in hearing them in a state of expectancy, while a digital clock counts the real time in portions of 30 minutes, the purported duration of each talk. A few photographs of chairs are hung in the museum room by way of decoration and evoke the furniture conventionally used on such occasions. The statement acts as a perpetual declaration of a session opening. It dramatizes the presentness of the situation and gives beholders their space back, but while confiscating the spectacle from them.

In the 1980s photography gained its hard-won autonomy in the art system. Photography began to be interpreted in relation to painting and, more particularly, the idea of the tableau. Jean-Marc Bustamante called some of his works tableaux photographiques. What do you think are the limits of this kind if interpretation, now that, today, we find it natural to read photography in relation to video, cinema, performance and theatre? It was also a moment when photography no longer had to justify its status.

In the 1980s it was maybe in Europe particularly that photographs were understood in relation to the tableau. In the United States people like Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre started using photographs in book form, which is a long way from the tableau, back in the 1960s. My starting point was not the tableau, nor was it conceptual art, which I knew very little about at the time. I had studied the dialogue form and I had worked on these questions with Jean-François Lyotard, so I was bound to be familiar with forms that are traversed by contradiction, with different regimes of language. The fact that speech does not convey a finished and closed image of reality had, in a sense, initiated me into collage. I was also reading Brecht. I dived head first into the interruption of illusion. This is the context that later led me to develop forms that draw on theatre and cinema. Jean-François Chevrier, whom I started working with in the mid-1980s, gave me a vision of photography and its history. In the debate around the image/tableau, I was logically more attracted by editing procedures. I started taking photographs, aiming to give them a kind of “insufficiency” that would allow them to enter into relation with each other. I was working with the idea that, for example, a mountain would not be photographed among the set of elements that constitute a landscape, but as a unit. This doesn’t mean that it would necessarily have the fragmentary appearance a detail, but more that of a “spare part.” As spare parts, these images looked to me available and repositionable, in exactly the same way as the words in a sentence are in the context of other sentence. Which, of course, does not prevent words and images from existing on their own, as elementary parts.

Looking at the different series of photographs you can see references to cinema, sometimes explicitly, as in L'Argent, a homage to Robert Bresson. What is your relation to cinema and moving images in general?

Interrupting movement in images, and by the multiplication of images, reintroducing time into the viewer’s movement. What interests me is the displacement of time questions into space and the integration of the context in the experience of perception.

One can also find links with theatre but I really don’t think we’re talking about the kind of theatricalisation you find in Jeff Wall, which is inside the image. If there is a reference to theatre, it’s above all in the definition of a sensorial space where images are assembled in a temporary way, taking into account the context of their appearance. Am I right?

I was saying that dialogical forms led me to the representation of actions, not in the form of “tableaux” assembling all the information, but by the arrangement of disparate bits. In editing it’s the brutal reality of the cut, which arbitrates the transition from one image to another image, from one space to another space, which liberates the play of associations and underscores the provisional character of the representation. It’s also interruption that sets aside a territory for the viewer, even if only as a mental projection, for the interval that joins and disjoins the elements, however slim, is occupied by real space. But it is really when the plates are organised in a grid, and the grid, in turn, is organised volumetrically and stands proud of the wall, that the reader/spectator regains a physical space of confrontation, in the movement of the hand leafing through and turning the pages. I think that editing helped me in my approach to the book form. This exhibition comprises a book, its catalogue.

To consider the theatrical reference is also to find a performative dimension in your work. You work with actors, even if they’re not professional actors. This can be seen, for example, in Trauerspiel, made for Documenta in Kassel, and my impression is that this performative dimension is even more present today.

I wouldn’t say that there is performance simply because an action is played out. In fact, spectators find themselves before an action that is acted and photographed. There are actually two moments of the dramatic action. One is the taking of the photo; the second, the exhibition. The first moment occurs in a studio, away from the public. Only the actor is present, along with any bits of set that may be needed. The apparatus is constituted by the camera and any lighting there might be. The action was decided in agreement with the actor. It is rehearsed and acted in the field of the camera. The actions are not studied to be photographed live, but to be the product of an optical experience. Benjamin mentions this when speaking of cinema in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” The camera, he says with regard to cinema, has so deeply penetrated reality that only the artifices of editing can give the image a semblance of naturalism. People have often remarked on the excessive theatricality of the figures I photograph. Paradoxically, what appears “theatrical” is what takes them away from theatre and effects the actions on the territory of observation and within its limited framework. I am not trying to “capture the reality” of acting as a studio photographer would. The image obtained is at once the representation of the action and its documentation. I would be tempted to say that the image, at this stage, is a document endowed with a potential for action. It is in this double form that it is conveyed to the public. This is the second moment, when the “active” documents are organised in the exhibition (scale of images/positioning in space) and seem to be play-acting as they fish for the beholder’s empathy. With the question of the book, this aspect of the work took a backseat, although it is evoked thematically in Situation Comedy. In contrast, On annonce un cycle de conférences is wholly oriented towards the viewer and performative experience, but without the medium of documents/performers.

In the exhibition, Situation Comedy is a reference to Manipulating the Self by General Idea, who developed a visual and performative language within a post-Warholian aesthetic. How did this work come about?

I was interested in the idea of an appropriation. There were lots of reasons for this particular choice. First of all, the name of the collective, General Idea. Also, a liking for the name of that publication, Manipulating the Self. These names are indications. Because it was a gymnastic movement that existed only in a book. And also because I really like the way that at the turn of the 1970s these artists opened their life space to the public in the form of a boutique, presenting the market as a poetic document of existence. So, I got hold of the book with the intention of replicating all the occurrences of this fascicule. Still, I decided to make it undergo a certain number of modifications through repetition:

- only the named occurrences of the book are repeated.
- the images are no longer in black and white but in colour.
- the original underground community is replaced by a false community, a group of students who exist as a community only insofar as they are brought together by the institution.
- the participative dimension has become prescriptive; the original photos taken in the places frequented by the protagonists are replayed following a unvarying photographic protocol: unity of place (the school’s photography studio), artificial lighting (the colour filter on the lamp varies from one location to another), the photographer arbitrates and records the scene (I took on this role).
With this series of rather academic exercises, the project dramatized the devaluation of lived experience. The chromatic palette of the lighting in each sign served only to endow them with a pseudo-spark of singularity. However, at this moment of the work, the proposition left only separate occurrences, with absolutely no sense of a community experience, not even the lifeless one of puppets. What this collection of individuals brought together by a given action lacked was a surface for communication, precisely what would make it possible to create situations and give them a community foundation. I therefore decided to continue by photographing the space without an actor, showing the full range of its hues (in other words, three cubic metres of coloured light), while the attribution of the roles was maintained in the form of notations, in the style of a programme or film credits. The twenty-three actions can, when actually performed and photographed, be set against various coloured rhythms, or find their chronologically assigned place when the ensemble takes the orderly form of a colour chart. Starting with a historical proposition, I tried to make a poetic document that substitutes the reduction of individual experience with the existence of a game.

In his book Art and Objecthood Michael Fried points out that Robert Morris uses the term “situation” to signify that every element in a given situation has its importance, this being the condition of objectivity. Might the frame be in a sense more important than the subject, or at least just as important?

Yes, the interplay between the elements is the condition of a situation. According to Winnicott, it is the basis of the symbolic construction.