Ermitologie Clédat & Petitpierre

With Ermitologie, Clédat & Petitpierre have put together a show based on their sculptures. These become sets and costumes and thus create a very physical link between contemporary art and live performance.

Since the 1990s, the duo Yvan Clédat and Coco Petitpierre, visual artists and performers, have adopted an approach that recognizes no boundaries. While usually in France artists are confined to a single discipline, medium and field of experimentation so that they can be identifiable and identified, Clédat & Petitpierre mock these distinctions. She is a master of techniques involving soft materials (cloth, foam, clothing), while he excels in the fabrication of pieces made of materials like resin, wood and metal. In 2008, they made a piece symptomatic of their division of labor. Mon mou, ton dur (My soft, your hard) is a sculpture combining a pineapple-like shape made of fabric with a faux soft element made of wood, resin and car shellac. They partner their respective interests and skills to produce often unusual and atypical work. With their playfulness and penchant for citation, they hybridize sculpture, costume design, live performance, theater and sound art. Their joyous shape shifting interrogates two kinds of spaces, that of the exhibition and that of the theater, reallocating and combining the traditions and conventions of two worlds too often held apart.

MOVING SCULPTURE

Their experiments are based on sculpture, the spatialization and activation of volumes by means of the human body. Their pieces are often staged, comprising scenery and costumes along with a carefully considered corporeoal circulation in space, choreography and lighting, sound and special effects. Sculptures—volumes, autonomous objects—become costumes that one or the other slips into. The presence and action of the body sets the artwork into motion so that it performs. At first they conceived of their sculptures as prostheses, elements to which a body (theirs, or guest dancers and actors) had to adapt. Little by little their sculptures became costumes, habitable, performative shapes totally hiding bodies. These sculptures were not always conceived to optimize the comfort and freedom of movement of those who activated them. Usually, the performers suffer from reduced visibility and a mobility restricted by the materials, mass and volume of the artwork.

ART HISTORY

For them art history is just a giant toy box, an inexhaustible source of inspiration that they can stretch, shift, translate and reincarnate as they like. An unrestricted resource considered as an ensemble, from the most conceptual to the most kitsch. From Bauhaus to the Zerep theater company, not to mention folk tales and comics, Arte Povera, circus acts, minimalism, film and the Renaissance, all references, time frames and styles are grist for their mill. Their pieces are all a result of a collage, a sensitive, absurd and wacky rereading of art history in all its variety of media and genres. Clédat & Petitpierre like to mash up Annette Messager, Donald Judd, Leonardo da Vinci, Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois, Uccello, Keith Haring, Magritte, Oskar Schlemmer and of course Duchamp.

ERMITOLOGIE

The Ermitologie project was first launched in 2016 in the inactive mode, starting with the making of sculptures. The live version was presented in November 2017 as part of the New Settings festival. Materially speaking, the piece is made up of six elements installed in an exhibition or theater space. A rectangular stage marked out by fake paving-stone marquetry recalls Renaissance art and the invention of perspective. On it are five sculptures, five characters: the cave, the hermit, the Paleolithic Venus, the ball of vegetation and the temptation of Saint Anthony. Inspired by the Jacopo del Sellaio painting Saint Jerome in the Desert, on top of the cave is a miniature landscape, rainy and smoldering. We also find a walking man, a tribute to Giacometti, whose faux leather suit was custommade for the dancer Sylvain Riéjou. The enormous, thin figure interacts with a callipygian Venus (after the Venus of Willendorf, embodied by Petitpierre) whose generously curved body is entirely made of folded tulle. A ball of false vegetable matter drifts to the surface of the stage. Inhabited by the dancer and circus artist Erwan Ha Kyoon Larcher, the piece bounces up and down, rolls, edges back and forth and smashes into other characters or climbs on them. The Temptation of Saint Anthony is a remote-controlled moving robot emitting light and sound. It is taken from the eponymous 1945 Max Ernst painting featuring a strange bird with green feathers, long ears and a very long beak. Clédat & Petitpierre operate artistic and historical translations to put together a narrative, a problematic, not to say impossible, love story about a giant anchorite and a Paleolithic Venus whose bodies are utterly incompatible. The ambience in this performance is unusually somber and lugubrious. This impression is reinforced by the lighting and sound track (the reading of Flaubert’s 1874 text of the same name), accentuating the dramatic dimension of the stage setting. “Would that I had wings, a carapace, a shell, — that I could breathe out smoke, wield a trunk, — make my body writhe, — divide myself everywhere, — be in everything, — emanate with odors, — develop myself like the plants, — flow like water, — vibrate like sound — shine like light, squatting upon all forms — penetrate each atom — descend to the very bottom of matter, — be matter itself!" (Translation Lafcadio Hearn.) Through this story, Clédat & Petitpierre reflect on the history of sculpture: shape, verticality, floor, material, technique and space. From rising up, jumping and walking to falling down, these artists attribute great importance to the physical relationship between the artworks and the actors inside them. Inside, their bodies are not free; they have to use all their wits and try out various positions in an attempt to break free of the constraints (confinement, heat, blindness). To interact with the space around them the performers have to contort themselves, crouch, bounce, lie down, curl up into a ball and move very slowly to avoid falling. We witness a struggle, an organic tension between the bodies and sculptures whose materials and dimensions generate constraints. It takes considerable physical effort to budge these augmented bodies. Clédat & Petitpierre navigate with ease between the arts, between theater, fine arts and performance, blending together aesthetic and conceptual languages. In borrowing so freely from art history, they shake up paradigms, frames of reference and deeply ingrained habits.

Translation, L-S Torgoff