ALAIN DECLERCQ
HIDDEN
6 Feb 2009 to 7 Mar 2009
For his solo exhibition at the gallery, Alain Declercq is showing Hidden Camera Obscura, a new series of photographs taken in New York last year. He crisscrossed Manhattan getting these images of some 70 sites where photography, precisely, is prohibited. These prisons, police stations, tunnels and bridges have had their security status raised since 9/11, so in order to take his forbidden pictures, Declercq built his own lo-tech pinhole camera by making a tiny aperture in a plastic box. He would then cut a piece of film, place it in the box, place this on the ground facing the location, and let the light in to print the negative.
The resulting photographs are often hazy, imprecisely framed, sometimes inadequately lit because of the fluctuating exposure times - everything draws attention to the crudeness of the homemade method. And yet with this very simple tool Declercq made a breach in the law, methodically stealing that which is supposed to be hidden from the public gaze, yet exists at the heart of public space.
Alain Declercq is fascinated by all things more or less directly related to paranoiac logics of security, to the political manipulation of fear and its use of collective hysteria, and to any kind of conspiracy theory. His subjects are control apparatus and systems of repression, manipulation and disinformation. He does not try to find out who is behind it all or what their motives are; rather, he reveals the methods that can be used to twist reality and scramble communications. To do this, he therefore becomes a bit of a scrambler himself, but seemingly without intent. He is more an antihero1 than an agitator or charismatic activist. He works in the background, an "invisible player," as he himself describes his positive double, Mike, the eponymous hero of his post-9/11 docudrama which follows this purported secret agent between Cairo, Washington D.C., Paris and Amsterdam. Without explicit denunciation, Declercq uses the very tools wielded by those who are the object of his critique. The two chief methods seem to be infiltration and overexposure. In Welcome Home Boss (2001), he trained powerful spotlights on the homes of Montreal's ruling classes at night. At the Centre d'Art in Brétigny-sur-Orge (2000) he invited visitorsto use a police car, and in his video État de siège (2001) he secretly filmed soldiers, while in another piece he reproduced a cruise missile and plastered it with the insignia of American Airlines. In his interview with Pierre-Henri Bunel (2) he brought to light a highly detailed and iconoclastic analysis of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, an event that has become illegible because of over-exposure.
Declercq's targets are both the apparatus of violence and repression and ideological apparatus, and he approaches them by means of fiction. When the French criminal investigation department searched the artist's own flat in Bordeaux, fiction and reality began to mirror each other to disturbing effect. On the strength of the fake weapons, plane tickets and press cuttings that he had gathered for the shoot of Mike (2005), Declercq found himself talking to the anti-terrorist brigade about this mysterious figure.
In response to the condition of bodies and minds, the artist offers tools for expropriating a reality that has become dilated and incomprehensible. "What interests me is the possibility that a work of art can be activated by others. To sum up, I seek to offer the spectator tools that make them a potential user. For example, when I reply to letters using a computer programme to imitate the handwriting of the person who sent them (Faux en écriture, 1997- 2004), the work can be seen as a kind of manual." Neither agitation nor propaganda, Declercq's work chooses to proceed by deciphering and investigation. It reproduces and documents the tools of power in order to give us a grip on its workings.
Marie Cozette
1. One of Declercq's earliest photographs, dating from 1998, is a full-length self-portrait entitled Anti-héros. It shows the artist sporting two left arms.
2. This former French intelligence officer wrote chapter IV of Le Pentagate, a book by Thierry Meyssan which details the inconsistencies
Image:
Alain Declercq
Hidden Camera Obscura - Bayview Correctional Facility
Manhatton 20th Street, 2008
Color print after negative, camera obscura, 50 X 50 cm. Edition of 5
© Alain Declercq/Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
Manhatton 20th Street, 2008
Color print after negative, camera obscura, 50 X 50 cm. Edition of 5
© Alain Declercq/Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
Galerie Loevenbruck
40 rue de Seine,
2 rue de l Echaudé
F - 75006 Paris
France
+33 (0) 1 53 10 85 68
40 rue de Seine,
2 rue de l Echaudé
F - 75006 Paris
France
+33 (0) 1 53 10 85 68
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