The Collector’s Daughter Théo Mercier

A remarkable artist and director with a penchant for assembling diverse forms and disciplines, Théo Mercier’s new show is more composed than his first, Du futur faisons table rase (2013).

It’s not always easy to meet Théo Mercier. Not that he snubs critics and journalists, it’s just that he’s always on the move. To find out about his new projects, you have to do your investigating in his studio in Mexico City, Marseille or Paris, or maybe in the rehearsal studios where his actors and dancers are at work, or the auditoriums in the many cities that host his shows. For about ten years now, his sculptures, drawings, installations, photos and texts have been exhibited in the most prestigious

galleries and institutions and received plentiful plaudits. Usually made up of disparate elements, they focus on the clash of heterogeneous elements, summoning the harmony of opposites and subverting symbols, with a marked taste for Dadaist provocation. This logic of poetic, narrative assemblage is also found in works like Le Solitaire (2010), who is a kind of Thinker with strange blue eyes, more than two meters high, consisting wholly of cream-colored spaghetti, or again, Mémento mori ( 2016), comprising a new tire with an animal skull in white resin in the middle.

LET’S PUT THE FUTURE BEHIND US

In 2013 the artist, not satisfied with making only objects, embarked on a career as a director and playwright by putting on Du futur faisons table rase. A mash-up of music, monologues and dances, it was improvised in a matter of days and drew on TV entertainer Patrick Sébastien’s cabaret show and on Molière’s Illustre Théâtre in Jalousie du Barbouillé mode. An organized dramaturgy, not so much in parallel as asymptotically with works of visual art, based on formal similarities and constant contiguities, it has a punk-style negative energy. Its title explicitly references the “No Future” slogan and it invokes the spirit of inexperience and self-determination in tune with the punk movement’s “here are three chords, now form a band” ethos. “This first show—and this was both its weakness and its interest—was not the result of work on stage but of studio work, and the set was put together two days before the show. I must add, too, that this was the first time I was setting foot on stage and that I have no training as an actor. The performers hadn’t all met before the première and most of all they didn't know each other’s score. Hence the fragmentary look, the diversity of the aesthetics and the brutality of the collage, with no dissolves, and that finale with the live performance by the electroclash duo Sexy Sushi. Three years later, I put on a second show, Radio Vinci Park, which was much more composed, with a biker, a dancer and a harpsichordist. My thing with theater goes back to being a teenager in Germany. I used to go and see Frank Castorf’s shows at the Volksbühne in Berlin, but also the productions by René Pollesch and Christoph Schlingensief.(1) They were all big influences because their productions were as much installation and, sometimes dance, as they were theater. Today, as a spectator, I’m more interested in the darkened room than in the white cube. As for cinema, I’ve no desire to make films because the prism you have to go through is too technical. What I love is working in direct relation to the eye. My shows don’t really take me far from my work as a sculptor and staging doesn't take me far from exhibiting. So I’ve never felt it was such a big step going from one to another.”

THE WORK OF WRITING

Du futur faisons table rase put no limit on excess. It intrigued because it revealed an expressionist mindset rarely seen in French theater, which tends to be more well-behaved (honorable and occasional exceptions being the actor and director Vincent Macaigne, the extraordinarily energetic Zerep troupe, and Gisèle Vienne and her dark phantasmagorias). It was these spicy ingredients once needed for Mercier’s theatrical cuisine and now tempered by the longer work of rehearsal and writing, that led to the creation of La Fille du collectionneur. Mercier and his temporary troupe of actors, dancers and one circus performer concocted this new show in a more deliberate, structured way, with what comes across as a more conventional narrative format. Says Mercier, “La Fille du collectionneur moves away from the humor of my first shows. It contains a text that was written mainly with the actors Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet, based on discussion, a collection and a genealogy. Viewers follow the main character, the daughter of a collector who does nude modeling, as she passes through what are a museum, the private rooms of a collector and store rooms, while also exploring her own and her father’s memory. The tone will be much darker than in the first show, suffused with melancholy, nostalgia, memory evacuated or abandoned. Altogether rather contemplative. I asked Marlène Saldana to show more fragility than she usually does. She will be kind of acting against type and there will be none of the trash side people expect rom me. The idea is to realize the impossible dream of a work that is not by me.” Begun late 2016 in collaboration with designer Arthur Hoffner, the project materialized as a big installation in the Théâtre NanterreAmandiers set workshop in January the following year. The set elements consisted of large-format works that the artist defined as still lifes, tableaux vivants, and post-organic sculptures. It served as a kind of teaser for the 2016–17 program, but also as a support for the work. Mercier, who really does seem incapable of doing things like everyone else, inverted the usual order according to which a set is supposed to adapt to the actors. Here, it was the actors who composed on the basis of the set and props, in a kind of reminder that there has never been a hierarchy between visual arts and the performing arts, but rather an eternal complicity.

Translation, C. Penwarden

Alain Berland is a critic and curator. (1) Theater aside, this very provocative tendency could also be seen at the Venice Biennale in 2011, when Christoph Schlingensief recreated a church nave combining reliquaries, screens, readymades, videos and photos in a very Fluxus spirit. Théo Mercier Né en 1984. Vit et travaille à Paris et Mexico Dernières créations : 2016 Radio Vinci Park, The thrill is gone (exposition), Musée d’art contemporain de Marseille ; The thrill is gone (concert), Friche Belle de mai, Marseille

2017 Panorama zéro, Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris ; Visite d’atelier, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers