Eric BAUDELAIRE

ERIC BAUDELAIRE

Né à Salt-Lake-City, États-Unis, en 1973. Vie et travail à Paris. Plasticien en Photographe A fait ses études à l’Université Brown, à Providence aux États-Unis. En 2002 reçoit le Prix de la New York Foundation for the Arts, en 2005 le Prix HSBC pour la Photographie. http://baudelaire.net/

SUGAR WATER, (Awaiting the Time-Image).

HD video projection, 72 mins, 2007
Henri Bergson, who didn’t care much for cinema, wrote in « Creative Evolution » that in order to have an authentic intuition of duration, one had to experience it, and he took the example of sugar in a glass of water. The lesson seemed clear: « I must wait for the sugar to dissolve; » it is in the experience of vision and waiting, when my duration blends with that of the world, that the intuition of a moving reality emerges. But how does one learn to wait in a modern world that seems to be a constant flux of continuous images, yet never ceases to extract stopped images, obsessive images, and then projects these fixed images into what seems to be a perpetual cycle? « Sugar Water » can in a sense be seen as a vast metaphor of the days that followed September 11th experienced like a challenge to Bergson’s edict: the same fixed images, almost like advertisements, constantly cycling in the very heart of our daily lives, until they produce a perfect misunderstanding: we wait to see the moment where the car explodes, while the « real people » in the film (for the most part) simply await the metro and don’t see anything at all. But it can also be read as something else entirely: the daily nature of violence, of advertising, devoid of subject, void of significance, with the same PA announcements and the same barely audible song that create the rhythm of the sound track, in a cycle that mirrors the sequence of images overlapping on top of the blue monochrome of a billboard frame. How does the time spent waiting for the next image to reveal itself become something else than a repetitive old tune? Here, a sort of portrait of the artist as a billposter.

Pierre Zaoui, from « On The Communication Of Events. »

stills from the video :

[SIC]

15 min. SD video

Chronology of events:

1907: Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code outlaws the sale and public display of « an obscene document, drawing or other object. »

1947: Article 21, paragraph 2, of the postwar Japanese Constitution reads « no censorship shall be maintained. »

1957: The Japanese Supreme Court upholds a ban on D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the main piece of jurisprudence seeking to clarify the apparent contradiction between Article 21 of the Constitution and Article 175 of the Penal Code, the high court upholds the ban on obscenity, which it defines as « that which unnecessarily excites or stimulates sexual desire. »

1976: Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses) is shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was shot in Kyoto, but the negative was developed and cut in Paris. As a trial balloon for a release of the film in Japan, a book containing the script and twelve film stills is published in Tokyo. In July the publisher is charged with obscenity. During the trial, Oshima requests that the high court explain the philosophical, political, legal, conceptual and practical visual standards used to define « that which unnecessarily excites or stimulates sexual desire. »

1982: The Japanese Supreme Court declines to clarify the concept of obscenity any further, but nonetheless acquits Oshima.

2009: In a legal and semantic grey area that remains to this day, graphic materials imported into Japan are subject to subjective self-censorship: explicit anatomical representation is replaced with ‘bokashi,’ a fogging, blurring or scratching of male and female genitalia in films and publication.

stills from the video :

ANABASES (chapter 3)

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images.

in competition at FID Marseille, and on view at the CAC la Synagogue de Delme until 25/9/11:

Qui sont May et Fusako Shigenobu ? Fusako, leader d’un groupuscule d’extrême gauche, l’Armée Rouge Japonaise, impliquée dans de nombreuses opérations terroristes, s’est cachée pendant près de trente ans à Beyrouth. May, sa fille, née au Liban, n’a découvert le Japon qu’à 27 ans, après l’arrestation de sa mère en 2000. Masao Adachi ? Scénariste, cinéaste radical et activiste japonais engagé auprès des luttes armées et de la cause palestinienne, reclus lui aussi au Liban avant son renvoi dans son pays. Par ailleurs, initiateur d’une « théorie du paysage », le fukeiron : en filmant le paysage, celui-ci dévoilerait les structures d’oppression qui le fondent et qu’il perpétue. Anabase ? C’est le nom donné depuis Xénophon au retour, difficile voire erratique, vers chez soi. C’est cette histoire complexe, sombre, toujours en suspens, qu’Éric Baudelaire, artiste réputé pour se servir de la photographie afin d’interroger la mise en scène de la réalité, a choisi d’évoquer en usant du format documentaire. Tournées en Super 8 mm, et comme dans la veine du fukeiron, des vues de Tokyo et de Beyrouth aujourd’hui se mêlent à quelques images d’archives, de télévision, à des extraits de films, pour dérouler le décor sur lequel les voix de May et d’Adachi vont faire remonter leur mémoire. Il y est question de vie quotidienne, d’être une petite fille dans la clandestinité, d’exil, de politique, de cinéma, et de leurs rapports fascinés. Pas une enquête, une anamnèse morcelée.

Jean-Pierre Rehm

UNFINISHED BUSSINES

French artist Eric Baudelaire explores relationships between images and events, documents and narratives. Baudelaire also uses simple techniques of assemblage, sampling and mechanical reproduction, applied to real documents, to playfully extract fictive narratives or new formal vocabularies.

El artista explora los lazos entre las imágenes y los acontecimientos, los documentos y las narrativas. Baudelaire utiliza técnicas simples de ensamblaje, de sampling y de reproducción mecánica, aplicados a documentos reales, para extraer narrativas ficticias o nuevos vocabularios formales.