Aline Bouvy — La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel
Aline Bouvy reactivates her exhibition Le prix du ticket at the art center La Ferme du Buisson, a sculptural project full of humor and invention that plays with the codes of amusement parks to highlight their organic tensions—and our own.
Science comes first, with chemical compounds embodied in monumental pills and tablets scattered throughout the path. Then come primal emotions: fear, captured in a massive face with an exaggerated grimace that screams a soundtrack of various cries, and laughter, portrayed through the parody of cross-dressing, with magnificent costumes to wear or watch parading in the space.
The vital need for sustenance is also addressed, with the magic formula of fast-foods recreated in a sculptural room, carefully keeping its waste and excesses out of sight; the imagination’s escape doesn’t need to be reminded of its earthly roots. Finally, vice—or at least mischief—appears in an installation made of two-way mirrors, serving as both a relief booth and a surveillance room, allowing visitors to observe their peers’ wanderings.
This is a joyous, polyphonic concentration of elements, allowing the artist to explore numerous directions and issues concerning the codification of our leisure spaces, their grip on our imaginations, and the means of freeing ourselves from them.
Because, from the economic laws driving the proliferation of leisure spaces that keep visitors open to consumption, to the hygienist and moral representation of the body that accompanies them, play turns out to be more dangerous than expected. The “ticket price” in the title might not refer to the entrance fee, but to a lottery; what is the true cost of happiness through “entertainment,” and what do we leave behind in this search for elsewhere? What can we gain?
Perhaps the possibility of inventing our own desires, escaping norms to set our own. Maybe even borrowing these magnificent costumes hanging like miners’ work uniforms and embracing the ambiguity of their injunction; since we must have fun, we might as well dive headfirst into the body of the lobster offering its arms to us, become the jellyfish that frightens us… These other possible worlds are within reach, overlapping and blending together. Aline Bouvy makes them coexist for what they are: possibilities that cannot be reduced to a moralizing interpretation. She herself is part of the journey, with sculpted doubles of her body that can be read, at the viewer’s choice, as servants, clowns, or enemies—a familiar carnival trinity that topples idols. But here, there is no disguise; the reversal of values doesn’t hide its subject but makes it the very site of indeterminacy.
This is the strength of the exhibition, which never loses sight of its intelligence and subversion, highlighting the ambivalence of our choices, the necessity of leisure, its creative and pleasurable power, and the risks involved in handing it over to commercial enterprises. Through every step of the exhibition, the question of bodily pleasure is constantly reiterated. If the surveillance society tends to alienate our desires by appropriating our bodies, the artist seems to respond by injecting a unique sensuality into the codes of the consumption machine. Without imposing a form or confining it to representations, she invents a free-flowing eroticism, readable but also elusive, free and impetuous, revealing itself only in brief glimpses. The monumental face ends in an immaculate, anthropomorphic morphology, the artist’s nude doubles gaze at us, defiant and playful, a box of tissues is available in the booth that shields us from prying eyes, and synthetic drug pills (among other things) trace a path through the exhibition.
A final playful wink rounds out this lively reflection on attraction; is it a call to cure ourselves of it, or to exhaust ourselves in it, armed with pills that give us the strength to keep going? It’s up to the visitor to decide, but it will be clear that all the paths offered carry a share of fear. And it’s up to them to venture down this winding road to consciously decide what price they are willing to pay to get lost in it—and thus pay the ransom of pleasure.
