Audry Liseron-Monfils

CORP-US, MY FAVOURITE SWIMMING POOL : On a Work-in-progress by Audry Liseron-Monfils

By Isabelle Genay

"A MAN CONNECTING WITH THE SIDEWALK

A MAN CONNECTING WITH THE SIDEWALK SURFACE

A MAN LYING ON THE SIDEWALK, CONNECTING WITH THE GROUND"

-Audry Liseron-Monfils

Corp-us is the general title for a series of actions and exhibits.   It indicates an operative principle, one that brings together artistic elements that interact with one another, including ourselves, as the artist engages us in his artistic process.   The term Corp-us designates a compounding of our bodies and others.

With the specific title Corp-us, My Favourite Swimming Pool , Audry Liseron-Monfils seeks to mix things up.   The title suggests that the performance location is a swimming pool; while on the contrary, the artist proposes a performance on the sidewalk, in the street, in the city.   The paradoxical association of the two locations is a play on bathing in context.   Immersing one's self in order to capture the individual's space in an urban and socio-political setting, in all its richness, with all its over-consumption, sounds, etc.

A Performance

Isabelle Genay: "What is the role of performance in your work, and how does it relate to the other forms of expression you practice?

Audry Liseron-Monfils: "Utilizing performance is a way to define an artistic device, to connect to and establish an alchemy of action and reaction.   Performance calls upon the dimension of existence, the here and now.   One must take into account that the action takes place before the eyes of other people.   For me, this form of expression explores an experience akin to revelation - when something exists or happens before our eyes, usually latent aspects of it can be revealed.   I may have a structured idea at the outset, edifying during the performance, only to find it changed and subject to forces and stimuli, to the reactions of those present.   To use performance as a "tool" is to glance into the depths of an experimental window."

Description
A man dressed in a specially-made outfit, evolving face to the ground, on a street sidewalk or subway platform.   The character is wearing a steel eggshell that completely coves his face (replacing the face), in such a way that only a few holes allow him to breathe.   The shell makes him blind to his surroundings.   He crawls "face to the ground".   He stays silent, mute.   His life and mobility depend on the people around him.   They push him to evolve, talking to him, clapping, giving him directions.   These active agents directly influence the character's actions.   They quickly realize that their participation multiplies the possibilities for this character.   The paradox is that of an anonymous being (voluntarily anonymous) among individuals want to make their mark or themselves known, an abnormally slow being among those who want to be apace with or ahead of others, a being that crawls when others walk.  

This performance inevitably brings to mind Paul McCarthy's Painting face down - White line, 1972 .   In a video of the performance, we see an individual (Paul McCarthy himself?) crawling along, holding a can of white paint at arm's length in front of him.   The paint spills before him and he passes over it, leaving a line, a trace, in the paint.   Not because these two performances use the same process (Paul McCarthy's doesn't require spectators to exist and the location is the gallery or the studio, the trace of the artist), but rather because the individual has a stake, an existence to create and there is fecundity, a daydream opposed to or interposed on the banal.   If Paul McCarthy's performance directly questions the artistic act, Audry Liseron Monfils' questions the existing (the individual) in a real (the street) and social context.

The Active Agents

This term designates any person who willingly collaborates on an action.   It is a field of expression that implicates collective spontaneity.   My appeal could be translated as: I need you.   The use of the word need is as much a question of adhering to a set of ideas as to an artistic practice.   It is also a consideration of the 'energy' emanating from a group of people.  

-Audry Liseron-Monfils

This necessity of taking into account a group, its implications, its reactive aspect and its energies, (an individual and a group, an individual reacting to a group) is a strong element in the work of other artists.   For example, RoseLee Goldberg, in Performance Art:   Futurism to the Present (selection translated from édition L'univers de l'art) says: "The implication of other people ... led Acconci to the notion of 'fields of energy' ... each individual emits an energy field containing all possible interactions with others and objects in a given physical space."   For Audry Liseron Monfils' performance, the momentum created by the active agents provides stimuli for the performer.   There is interaction between the action of the active agents (the emitters) and the reaction of the performer (the receiver).  

The active agents intervene in two stages.   First, Audry Liseron-Monfils encounters them throughout the duration of his action in a place.   He makes contact with them, and the network of individuals contacted increases through the influence of those involved.   He puts them in a participatory mindset with regard to his work, and in informing him on such and such place, its history, the people who live there, these active agents communicate knowledge, inform him, give him some landmarks of sorts.   Secondly, their inherent role is their behavior on location during the performance.   Through speech they have the performer react and move, crawl in one direction or another.   His blindness makes him totally dependent on what the active agents tell him.   His conduct and his survival are entirely in their hands (the street remains a dangerous place and this performance reminds us of the fragility of the human being in a context that might seem as commonplace as a street or a subway platform).   Even if Audry Liseron-Monfils does not want to include danger in his work: "I want to conjure up connotations of safety, and by deduction, ideas related to violence."   The active agents are in the midst of a larger crowd, including locals familiar with the performance location.   ("Do you know him?", "Is this for television?", "Is he handicapped?" and "Why is he doing this?" are the questions that come up most often).   They also begin to participate and engage, becoming active agents as well.  

A Time to Crawl

Audry Liseron-Monfils says, "I am a sub-slug in the sense that, in the end, the slug evolves on its own whereas I evolve at the will of others...".   To crawl.   It is to accept putting one's body in an abnormal, uncomfortable situation. It is to go against our evolution (homo erectus). This horizontal displacement requires a physical effort, a fight or an embracing of one's whole body with the ground and the content of the ground, in a rather animal attitude.   The trajectory is no longer linear, it becomes diagonal, jerky, develops a kind of choreography of the ground.   Taking the time to crawl is also to develop a perspective from the ground.   In changing the parameters of locomotion, Audry Liseron-Monfils confronts several temporalities:

- The time of pedestrians, the beat of a walking pace, the one inherent to the environment and to the socially accepted speed of single chord rhythms.  

- A unique time, that of the artist (we might say his tempo).  
- A time to crawl along the ground and inject slowness, communication, chance events whether protective or dangerous and discontinuity.  

The trajectory is not towards a goal as is usually the case with a move but rather directs itself at the pace of the journey and what happens along it.   Taking the time to build, construct and multiply the events and possibilities.   The journey becomes a test (a challenging experience and a questioning).  

The audience, watching this body in motion, anonymous, reacting to their words, turns its attention further and further from the individual (an identifiable human being), who moves to focus on the movement, on the action of the body in movement to concentrate on the movement, on the action of the body in movement and its trajectory, with occasional perverse games of trying to take the experience "to the limit", by suggesting perhaps to this prostrate body the quickest way under a car, only to be quickly contradicted by some, more conscious of the real limits and risks involved.   There is a fascination with movement and the public may even wait, walking at the same pace, taking an hour to cover a distance that usually takes less than twenty minutes.   One could ask the following question: what can provoke such fascination that more than fifty people (or more at times) are capable of giving up their own objectives (their concerns, work) to follow, help, talk to, encourage and touch this figure on the ground?

Invade the Real with Fiction

There is a latent danger in the location choices Audry Liseron-Monfils makes.   Because the local population is "at risk" or because the very physical characteristics of the place are potential threats (car traffic on the street or the subway track, the site of numerous deaths from falls).   But also, in the other sense of the word danger, he unbalances us with regard to our usual patterns, utilizing a place everyone knows (the city, its transitional spaces) by showing us through another use, meanings and significations that we had pushed aside or lost from sight.  

Thierry Davila wrote: "Fictionize the real, introduce fables into the movement of the city to show it for what it is...",   (selection translated from Marcher, Créer , édition Du Regard). Audry Liseron-Monfils creates a subtle distance between the real and fiction in his intervention, which, with its simple aspect (simplicity in appearance and in the structure of the performance) engages more closely with the real (integrating itself into it).   It is an ephemeral action that is content to be there.   The individual becomes anonymous, to make visible the idea of the individual and thereby his action.  
In The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau (translated from édition Folio, essais) offers definitions of the words "place" and "space."  

"A place is thus an instant configuration of position.   It implicates an indicator of stability... Space is a crossing of motions.   It is animated by the totality of the movements deployed within it."  

Bring a new approach to this system: make the place a space to be invested, a course in experimentation by oneself and others.   Erase the systematizations, the automations in the reading of the real, and inject doubt into the banal, everyday life of the street.   To reinvent the path is to question what was taken as a given, normal and social, and to question the attitude to adopt, this is what is at stake.

A Vertical And Horizontal Approach To Work

For Audry Liseron-Monfils, one can bring together information (from the real) and incidental givens (which appear during the performance). This cross-referencing can be imagined as a mathematical work.   The vertical axis represents the data of the real (information).   The vertical approach shows the action's literal aspect; which is to say the formulation of the story, the posture of the character, the material of the outfit.   The horizontal axis is the abstract elements.   The horizontal approach counts the ideas that are grafted onto the performance; that is, the active agents, time for crawling and the movement face to the ground.   Together they create a graph, according to the energy and crossings of the two.   Each point is the events taking place, the dismantling and experience of the real, potential elements, flux, accidental or latent factors, narrations, attention to and surveys of the voices of the active agents and other indicators.   Each point is also that which the captor/performer translates into it - a movement, a change of direction, an immobility, blindness, attempting to measure a context and to put into view.   Jacques Rancière tells us the following in Le partage du sensible (selection translated from édition La Fabrique):

I call the sharing of the perceptible that system of perceptible proof that shows at once the existence of commonality and the divisions within it that define respective places and parts.   A sharing of the perceptible thus establishes a shared commonality and exclusive parts.   This distribution of parts and of place is based on a sharing of spaces, times and kinds of activities that determines the very way in which a particular commonality lends itself to participation and in which each and every one has a part in that sharing.

This reflection seems to find an echo in Audry Liseron-Monfils' work and ideas.   What initiates the process of an action in an individual?   What makes that happen?   What provokes the body into motion, are we moving or reacting to our environment?   What is the part, the percentage of each?   Does the environment influence our direction (real direction, geographic, and certainly that of the story, of the narration which is constructed between all human beings in society, that is to say the direction of its history)?   And at last, how to become conscious, how to act or react?

Translated from French by Marta Dansie, 2005