Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz — Journal Notes from Backstage — Marcelle Alix Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 21 → May 17, 2014

Journal Notes from Backstage
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

21.03.2014 — 17.05.2014, vernissage 21.03.2014

We come back with pleasure to the eccentric beauty of the films and installations of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. Their works always call for us to explore the best part of ourselves, this freedom and utmost openness we would like to practice each and every day, forsaking the social codes which impede us.
In an elated group spirit, they master to perfection the elaboration of letting go moments, which enable us to consider in a definitive queer mode the very contemporary subject of the cultural construction of identities.

In “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness” (1), the author, teacher and militant feminist, bell hooks, imagines the margin as a possible space of resistance as well as oppression. From this marginal position may stem a radical openness, which would enable the creation of an alternative to the dominant world. The backstage that Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been staging for several years, can be understood as a pop figuration of that marginal space. With their fellow traveller Werner Hirsch (actor in the majority of their films up till now: Normal Work, N.O. Body, Charming for the Revolution, No Past/ No Future, Toxic) or Ginger Brooks Takahashi, they form a true troupe, whose backstage adventures are as crucial as what could happen “on-stage”. Because what is important to them is not the show, this globalized entertainment form, but the marginal ways to address the public, which could be a queer version of the rocker’s interview after her_his stadium show. In Toxic, Werner Hirsch reenacts a fragment of an interview of Jean Genêt for the BBC, in which he finds fault in the technicians in charge of the recording to spur them to rebellion and speak out against the fact that the interviewers, true representatives of the law, try to suppress him into the televisual norm. This gap between the norm and the margin, the “on-stage” and the backstage, always reproduced in the works of Boudry and Lorenz, goads the spectator into considering a true aesthetic in the improvisation of the backstage, where everyone’s subjectivity lurks beyond the adoption of a normalized persona by the pre-established rules of the spectacle.

The partition of To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, a composition by Pauline Oliveros and dated from 1971, asks each musician to choose five tones and to maintain them for a very long time. The interpreter’s ability to improvise is thus put into the limelight, until, half way through the partition, they are asked to imitate the tones and modulations produced by the others, thus preventing the domination of an interpreter on another. It’s after having read the SCUM Manifesto, an anarcha-feminist manifesto by Valerie Solanas, that Oliveros created her musical opus. The choice of this partition as a backbone for Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s latest film, emphasizes once again the marginal voice: the voice of Solanas, ambivalent figure of the New York underground, the one of Pauline Oliveros, little-known pioneer of electronic music, and that of their interpreters—artists and performers of an underground established here as a true space of radical openness.

Without any audience, beyond representation, the backstage—a witness to the transformation of musicians and actors from the city to the stage, and back again—is perhaps the ultimate free ’drag’ moment, where one is both her_himself and other (and maybe even a third person), where the well-oiled mechanics of the show does not apply. A space of freedom and resistance where the theater’s fourth wall disappears. Backstage, the public comes to meet the artists, and the hierarchy implied by the show slowly dwindles. One can be eccentric with no goal, has no necessity to please the spectator, nor be the object of his scopic drive, nor replicate the active/passive divide that the show induces (2). The backstage is thus the place of an invention of one’s self, an image of the margin as a chosen place for an artistic position, that could have access to the center.
The backstage is “that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonized/colonizer.” (3)
IA

(1) bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”, 1989, available here
(2) These notions (in relation to the cinema) are developed by Laura Mulvey in her book: Visual and other pleasures, second edition, ed. palgrave macmillan, 2009
(3) bell hooks, op. cit.

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz live in Berlin. In 2013, they had solo presentations at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, CAPC, Bordeaux, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts and Les Complices, Zürich. Toxic was produced at the occasion of the Triennale in Paris in 2012, and was shown during their exhibitions at les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and at South London Gallery on the same year. They have recently participated to the following collective shows: CAFAM Biennial, Beijing, Disobedience, Archive (The Republic), Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Per Speculum Me Video, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bad Girls, FRAC Lorraine, Metz.
A new monographic publication will be published soon by Sternberg.

Special thanks to: Sonia Droulhiole, Camila Renz, Delphine Cornut, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (Amaury Seval, Mathilde Villeneuve), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Anne Dressen, Carmen Sokolenko), Badischer Kunstverein (Anja Casser, Nadja Quante), Les Complices (Andrea Thal), Robin Margerin, Raphaël Zarka, Natasa Petresin, Virginie Bobin, Electra (Irene Revell, Fatima Hellberg).