Délit d’initiés (Insider Trading) is an exhibition currently taking place at the “Passage de Retz” Gallery. Michel Poivert, Contemporary Art History professor at University Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, presents it as follows: ”
Bachelot Caron’s current project belongs to a subterranean history of photography. A history going back to the very origins of the medium, to those archaic mises en scène stuffed with melodrama and fable; a history taking its course today in equally impure jumblings of the painterly and the photographic. A history that is above all that of immoral photography. Given that photography has to do with morality. Not as we might think because of social codes and decency, but because photography, in all its forms and all its uses, has built up its own set of values. Values concentrated in the observation of technical rules and the ensuing aesthetic: a photograph has to match reality or be officially fictional. No muddling of the true with the false.
The result, for this mode of recording, was an accent on the naturalistic: speedy, exact and accurate, photography was a visual swearing on the Bible. Plus it left room for infinite licence: you could play with it at much as you liked, from montage to mise on scène; but the other side of the coin – the shift from license to licentiousness – never gained acceptance from common sense or the orthodoxy of the discipline. In “Photogenic Painting” (1975), his famous text on Gérard Fromanger, Michel Foucault reminds us of “a shared practice of the image… on the borders of photography and painting, which was to be rejected by the puritan codes of art in the twentieth century.”1
Bachelot Caron practise photography as an anti-discipline. Combining mise en scène and the craftiness of graphic palette processing, they push transgression to the limits, overlaying artifice of pose with equally artificial retouching. Their art consists in the deliberate display of the improbable. In other times – a century ago, let’s say – the enemies of Pictorialism would have howled, “That’s not photography!” Fortunately history has since shown that “photography” covers more than one reality register.
Retouchers in the age of digital post-production, stage directors at a time when theatricality has become a major facet of contemporary photography, Bachelot Caron might simply seem part of an international trend. Except that their practice is rooted in vernacular photography’s most classical source: the news item. True, since Fake the recent work has cut free of those early years devoted entirely to Détective, even if they are still turning out material for France’s oldest illustrated true crime magazine. Détective turned out to be a kind of laboratory for the pair, although at the start there was no project or programme for using photo illustrations as a way of “breaking into art”. This is how their work found its distinctive character: rooted in a tradition of compromise with the visually in-your-face, with crime and low-level documentary, Bachelot Caron images have nothing in common with what was once the “healthy” gene of contemporary photography – the prosiness, emotional distance and aesthetic of the neutral that bespoke the preciosity of Conceptualism. What they have done is move towards a mutant form at the opposite extreme from any Contemporary Art elitism; and they did this for Détective and its pornography of doom and gloom. But the cancelling-out of thinking begotten by the sensational image is replayed here in aesthetic mode, i.e. detached from its use value.
So the Bachelot Caron oeuvre came out of a practice of illustration enhanced by the skills of their initial trades: set design and costuming. Making images to flesh out a narrative attracts little esteem in any modernist vision of art: in its flagrant, unconcealed lack of autonomy it can even be seen as art’s opposite. In the world of photography illustration seems to confirm Baudelaire’s put-down of the discipline as the “humble servant” of the arts and sciences. It is not, however, the ultimate in triviality, where the prize goes to reproduction – except that the latter has been given a boost by the philosophy of art as the secret agent of some dual reality. Illustration meanwhile remains art’s backyard.
Transcending the status of illustration calls for a sacrificial operation: you abandon content and approach the subject as a mere pretext, then you put your money on the expressive power of your formal explorations. This is the price to pay for displaying inventiveness, without any content to challenge its supremacy. And yet Bachelot Caron pay no heed at all to this general rule: they tackle the formal side while abandoning nothing of their news-item iconography. And lead us towards a nightmarish unreality. Which explains the presence of vampires and other disquieting creatures. As if, somewhere, Symbolism had crossed paths with noir.
Their mises en scène start out from the sensational photo as an antiquated genre, then overtly assert their own staginess. These are performed images in the sense that everything is set up in advance and the viewer is situated outside what he is seeing. The image isn’t created so much as constructed and bluntly affirmed. Shock material is in no way played up the way it was by Pop artists – think Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. Here it is the locus of an artistic experience.
So Bachelot Caron tell stories. But they have mastered the art of compressing the narrative into a single image. They have learnt to bring together all the clues to the story in a unity of time and place. Their theatricality obeys the rule of the charged moment that Lessing made the core of modern representation in his discussion of the Laocoon sculpture group in 1766: already he was suggesting the sheer horror of bodies being devoured solely through the means of art. In Bachelot Caron’s work this is the protocol: this perfect instant concentrates the drama – although less the action, sometimes, than the moment of its taking shape, or its dénouement. Once displayed these images lose all value as illustration: there is no text to explain what they are about. Only the aesthetic of the tableau vivant is capable of functioning within this artificial mode. The avowal of artifice – antinaturalism – is vital to the exemplifying of the drama. From Diderot to Brecht and right up to the cinema of the French New Wave, exaggeration has always been the means of conveying the force of a performed narrative, of rendering it perhaps instructive and unfailingly spectacular.
The recent series Délit d’initiés/Inside Job set their work definitively on the path towards the spectacular: panoramic format, things happening in public and on the sporty and social scenes. Here the shock photo comes to terms with heroic fantasy. The image processing continues its play with the expressive potential of postproduction, but the complexity of the scenes – sometimes involving dozens of characters – cuts the retouched look down a little. It’s still there, though. The surface is that of an écorché in a display cabinet: images in which the skin is drawn back to reveal the internal organs, i.e. the composites brought out by the graphic palette: overstated colours, blur, detail sacrificed, etc. But since the final image is unquestionably a photographic print, the effects are all slicked down. Like a glass mount, the uninterrupted surface is at odds with the visual matter expressed by the processing: an in vitro image, to borrow André Bazin’s analogy for the aesthetic of filmed theatre.
The violence inflicted on the medium is at least as potent as that of the subjects. What Bachelot Caron do to photography – to the body of the photographic image – is displayed in the very brutality of the news item. They are not illustrating, they are speculating about the possibility of making art coexist with triviality. In a kind of symbolic backlash, the Bachelot Caron oeuvre reverses the traditional movement between high and low in art and culture. While the entire history of the avant-gardes has been that of an attempt to reduce culture (“reduce” in the military sense), the artists demonstrate that aesthetic inventiveness and speculation are being experimented with in an illustrated press typical of the culture industry. Their relationship with the popular image is congenital. Bachelot Caron belong to a generation in which the class struggle has become meaningless where images are concerned. Or more exactly, a generation for which the democracy of images is all that counts.
Should you ever encounter Bachelot Caron, beware of their false ingenuousness; it can be a source of the worst infamies. But in fact the harm has already been done, for the viewer is unknowingly observing the artists who, recurrently but not systematically, put themselves in the picture. Their presence can be explained by the obvious practical reason – their availability as models – but it has its symbolic implications as well: this slipping of narcissism into some morbid anecdote is not innocent. This is their way of signalling the reflexive character of their work. They take a malicious pleasure – explicit here in Autoportrait [Self-Portrait] – in having a composition replicate its own creation; or in creating an interior – the workshop or the studio – in which their own images are hung on the walls, in which Caron seen from behind plays with the mirror and its reflection of an attacker (with Bachelot clenching his fists and ready to do battle): this is Las Meninas given a shakeup by Mr Punch. The performance is as lurid as the colours in its summing up of the ongoing Bachelot Caron gamble: the definitive union of the tragic and the grotesque. And there they are at work in the midst of these bloody dramas, posing or laying on the charm. For the oeuvre pays its dues to both narcissism and eroticism. Pinups are everywhere and the crime is never sordid enough for bodies not to be intimately exposed. Like a residue of life in the midst of death.
Erudition chips in too. Behind almost every image lies a historical reference – Velázquez, as already mentioned, but also Millais, Ingres and even Watteau. More fundamentally, their style is resonant with the entire history of photography-inflected painting. From Richard Hamilton to Eric Fischl via Gerhard Richter and Jacques Monory, all this painting is a kind of capital they are busily squandering after having held up a museum.
In the end, what Bachelot Caron’s images conjure up for me lies in the dénouement of the drama depicted (figuratively speaking) by Michel Houellebecq in The Map and the Territory: the description of the murder of the hero-narrator who is none other than a contemporary artist-photographer named Houellebecq. A carnage worthy of the pages of Détective is scrutinised by a policeman who, seeing the splashes of blood, wonders whether the killer might have been influenced by Jackson Pollock. Always anxious about its social usefulness, art history is now reassured by the knowledge that it can be a branch of forensic medicine: its task is to examine the murders
By sometimes inserting their own battered artists’ bodies into crime-story narratives, Bachelot Caron promise art the fate of ghosts, zombies and vampires: a nocturnal, avid, foreboding presence.
1. Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, trans. Adrian Rifkin, London, Black Dog Publishing, 1999, p. 88.
Délits d’initiésn Bachelot Caron
Until February 23, 2012
Passage de Retz
9 Rue Charlot 75003 Paris
01 48 04 37 99
