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We first met on the street. Or was it on a page? Flows of encountersor flux of images? Sometimes, when an experience is sufficientlyintense, memory shades my performances, screens the margins ofthe event, and evacuates the context’s materiality. Details areabsorbed and condensed into an image. She had left a note, anony-mous, a bright yellow note bearing a gift. Or rather, a summary net-work of black marks that coalesced into a gift, crossed out and held inplace by the blade of the windshield wiper. Odd how it could be bothso insistent and so quiet, so generous and so violent. I did not yetknow who, what, or even if, she was. The note was there, on my caras it was on all the others. Her egalitarian generosity had instantlyand impossibly constituted a community of gift recipients, and cho-reographed our delayed performances of reception. She had comeand gone, dispensing her gifts as many others, before and since, havedispersed notices. But there was a difference. Open and ambiguous,Le Cadeau [The Gift], 1997, was about circulation and exchange, aboutthe distribution of roles and spaces, about networks and processes.We would awkwardly extricate our gift from the grip of the blade

and dispose of it in accordance with the meaning constructed in ourpuzzlement, amusement, indifference, or annoyance. This pattern ofdelegation, distribution, and amplification sustains MarylèneNegro’s practice.

In our immersive image-world, images carry their extinctive fac-tor of boredom. Negro programs this extinctive boredom into herimages—through seriality, repetition, slowness, the mundane, anddeadening close-ups, for example—which operate through anorchestration of contradictory impulses.

Negro’s works are also tales of adventure. They are precise inter-ventions into the performativity of images, explorations of the con-tours of our performances with images, and repertories of theperformances enabled by images. As such, they explore and extendthe notion of the image. And, as images are always images of others,Negro’s projects are adventures on the edges of identity where con-vergence ironically yields divergence, where the desire to bringthings closer irrevocably confines them to alterity.

Negro herself gives us a model of engagement in her video-manifest Io, 2003, whose literal meaning perversely plays with theenticement of first-person utterance. A montage of fragments fromall her previous videographic works, Io enlists metonymy to engagewith a tool of artistic self-promotion—the artist’s compilation. Io alsoacts as a paradoxical index. Inhabiting the temporality of futureanteriority, Io combines the classificatory and retrospective dimen-sions of the index, the dynamics of metonymic relation, and antici-

RESTLESS INTERFACE

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patory productions through a generative and reconfigurative succes-sion of multiply-oriented sequences. If Io pressures the notion of the autonomous artwork, it is nonetheless, and first of all, a work of art. As such, it evinces stable relations between the artwork and its documentation.

In both the production and the dissemination of her work, Negrorelies on a double and paradoxical approach that combines absorp-tion and projection. Her mode of production often develops anddeploys a conceptual grid out of the lessons of images spontaneouslygathered. Likewise, her work deploys two apparently paradoxicalmodels of display—receptive structures and incursive movements—that are nonetheless sustained by a shared delegation. Each model is,in turn, also declined in spatialized and temporalized serialities. Herwork can thus be seen to orchestrate interpellations whose stake isthe negotiation of the unstable territory that extends, retracts andwarps between self and other. A territory tested, contested, invested,and stretched through the photographic or videographic serialityshe puts into play.

In such projects as Donnez-moi une photo de vous, 1997, Et toi:[And You:], 2004, and the three films Ni Vu-Ni Connu [Neither SeenNor Heard] she has produced since 1997, Negro relies on a theatre ofimprovisation shaped by a three factors: the support, terms, inflec-tion, and dissemination of an invocation; the site and material con-ditions of production of the image-event; and the terms of itsregistration. Each work is thus a triply inflected apparatus, a latent

structure that is serially and cumulatively activated by others whouse it for their own diverse purposes. Site, communication, and docu-mentation all shape the image-event. They also inflect the impossi-ble identification programmed by the work, and produced bymisappropriations.

This is also at play in Pratiques [Practices], 1999, a series of sevenimages whose reception has so far been conditioned by its distribu-tion as cards and notepads that condense unspecified and contradic-tory uses, and where the addressee is no ultimate destination but asimple relay. In their explorations of impossible identifications, theseprojects operate a pointed critique of interactivity and reductivenotions of the relational through a double, and parodic, movement ofenlistment and excess. The neo-liberal ideological frame of stable, ifrelational, positions is systematically unbound through Negro’squestioning of programmed communities, myths of subjectivities,and restrictive agencies.

The deceptively simple invocation of projects like Donnez-moi unephoto de vous literalizes the alterity of images, and divulges the oper-

MARYLÈNE NEGRO’S RELAY IMAGES

TEXT / SYLVIE FORTIN

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Inside front cover, bottom: Marylène Negro, Ours, 1999, video, 57:41 minutes, edition of 3 / page 26: Marylène Negro, from the series Le Cadeau, 1997, color photograph, sup-port and dimensions variable / page 27: Marylène Negro, from the series Les Passeurs, 1997, color photograph, support and dimensions variable / above: Marylène Negro, fromthe series Ici, 2000, color photograph, support and dimensions variable / opposite, top to bottom: Marylène Negro, Pratiques (Viewing), 1999, color photograph, support anddimensions variable; Marylène Negro, Pratiques (Zapping), 1999, color photograph, support and dimensions variable; Marylène Negro, Pratiques (Faxing), 1999, color pho-tograph, support and dimensions variable (all images courtesy of the artist)

ation of an impossible identification in the project’s structure andlanguage. Prompting the project and informing its apparatus, the ini-tial simplicity of the exchange between a giving "you" and a receiv-ing "I" rapidly thickens, and opens onto the gulf between order andsupplication. Both singular and plural, the invited "vous" hoversbetween singularity and community. It also inscribes distancewithin the relation—the distance of shades of politeness and theimmensity of separation of "vous" from "moi". In turn, "moi" is sitedin the gallery and speaks through its communication networks. It isthus a public, multiple, and serial "moi." If, at first, the "moi" seems tostand for the person of the artist, it rapidly reveals itself to be a cor-porate "moi." And here, Negro’s usurpation of corporate communica-tion strategies reveals its subversion, as it uses one corporation toreveal its other. Finally, the "photo de vous" stretches to encompassthe ambiguity and elasticity of the "de," locating "vous" as agent ofthe photographic capture and object of its action. The deceptive sim-plicity produced through Negro’s choreographies of images and lin-guistic modulations pulverizes certainties, disperses positions, anddistributes agency.

As Negro explores the territory and process of impossible identifi-cations, she reveals their extraordinary flexibility and absolute ubiq-uity. In projects like Pratiques and Ici [Here], 2000, identifications

invest the thinness of liminality, a thinness that condenses the worldand pressures stable boundaries. If Pratiques consists of sevenimages, Ici also enlists a modest seriality that ensures ambiguity,filled with the quiet yet resonant violence of undecidability. Collisionof heterogeneous bodies, absorption of one into the other, or the sur-real marvel of unpredictable osmosis? In both series of images, thecontact zone between bodies and their surroundings, ranging fromtools of daily communication to fragments of domestic architecture,produces the tension that is the subject of the image. The thinness ofthat distance is explored, morphing some objects into bodily exten-sions, anthropomorphizing them, and absorbing some bodies intospaces and objects. Impossible identifications shirk distinctionsbetween animate and inanimate, and dissolve limits by indulging inpromiscuous pleasures. In Faxing, for example, the arm loses its vol-ume and dematerializes into an image as it plunges into the faxmachine. In Viewing, the laptop’s screen mirrors its female user andacts as a surface for the reflection of the surrounding physical world.Acting as screen, mirror, and interface, it doubly opens the reflex-ive/absorptive surface onto physical and virtual worlds.

Significantly, Negro’s most abstract images also rely on the violentsublimity of the dispersion of difference. Ici points to the site of thebody’s disappearance, the site of dissolution of its boundaries into

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the surrounding space, the sited process of its quiet and ecstaticsurrender. In one of the series’ images, the reflection of a fuzzy pur-ple elbow on the dark lacquered surface of a coffee table directlyinvokes painting and comes to evoke Mark Rothko’s signaturestyle. Symptomatically, however, the ambiguous infinity of thespace/surface that horizontally dissects Rothko’s canvases andmobilizes the two mirroring forms is here translated into the mir-ror effect of a painted surface. From Rothko’s ambiguous segrega-tion to Negro’s unstable binding, mirroring indissolubly mergesboth functions. The mirror is thus a microcosm of the recipient andincipient models that are folded into the very structure of Negro’swork.

While Watching and Viewing already pointed in this direction,the series Ici is also prophetic as the distribution of reflexive sur-faces is operative in many subsequent works. What is at stake inthis recurrence of reflexive surfaces, screens, glass, and mirror?They interface the domus with the socius, modeling one on theother while also keeping them separate, a modeling that far tran-scends the simple equation of the personal with the political.Pratiques, Ici, …s’en sortir sans sortir, and La mouche present thenegotiation of the socius from the domus. So do the videosRavalement and Pièce matinale. The first is a short work that enlistsvoyeurism and its desiring productions in the observation of thegendered rituals of the construction site from the solitary safety ofthe window, while the durational video Pièce matinale charts thesweeping incursions of the early morning sun across a bedroom.Other images—Le Cadeau, Eux, Ours, Girafe, Dehors, Un mot devous, Ni Vu-Ni Connu and perhaps also in Les Passeurs—also figurethe insurgence of the domus within the socius.

A windowpane marks the terminal point, a telescopic destina-tion, in …s’en sortir sans sortir, 2003. It had already provided theground for La mouche, the screen in Ravalement, and the filter inPièce matinale. It thus illustrates the domus-socius relation thatsustains Negro’s practice. But this work’s terminal point, the win-dow, is also a relay. …s’en sortir sans sortir proffers a slow-pacedvideographic voyage of discovery, the taming of a domestic spacethrough the seriality of videographic images. It also traces a mapwhere topographic highlights are replaced by objects, fixtures, andfurnishings that evoke relations and intimacy. Despite this topo-graphic intent and a steady outward gaze, the camera also dis-closes and translates a performance behind itself, as it longinglyand insistently repertories various types of pairings. This doubleperformance of body and camera domesticates and estranges thespace, concomitantly palliating to the solitude of the cartographicaction, and amplifying it. If, at first, the trajectory and pace of thecamera’s traversal and its choice of details seem incongruous, itultimately weds longing and solitude with a decisive, resolutemovement to present a domestic space’s traversal that thoroughlyreconfigures it. From the opening of a door into a private apart-ment, to its abandonment through the window-interface, sociusand domus are negotiated anew.

The photographic project, Dehors, indeed emerges from this tra-versal, on the other side of the glass. It also intersects with the win-dow front serial engagement with mannequins in Eux [Them],2002, or the insistent quest for recognition in the eyes of the cap-

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tive Ours and Girafe. In Dehors, however, there is no longer a protec-tive glass or cage. The foreignness of Tokyo itself is protectiveenough, just as the foreignness of the Western tourist ensures a cer-tain invisibility (even when it operates through hypervisibility). Thevideographic exploration of the domestic space and the transcen-dence of its confinement in …s’en sortir sans sortir opens onto the ter-ritory of a strange and unknowable city. The game of discovery nowadopts an urban scale. The photographic project Eux, whose prehis-tory stretches back to the early twentieth-century preoccupations ofAtget and the Surrealists, also informs Dehors. Both projects alsoevoke a negotiation of the city, the performance of a female bodyacross the urban space, a peregrination punctuated and anchored byphotographic releases. In Eux and Dehors, images mark interruptionsof that gendered trajectory, intersections, acknowledgments, andinstances/ instantiations of recognition. If the deploring of the reifi-cation of human relations is a staple of modernism, Negro literallydeflects reification by investing too much in proxies, by imag(in)inggazes of acknowledgments from mannequins, animals or architec-ture, to reengage. What interpellation is in play, what is at stake? Ifshop windows present images for quick consumption, what happensif we stop in order to engage? What happens if we engage too much,and too literally? Is reversal possible? The subversion of Negro’simages resides in overidentification which, carved into the social,becomes the ground for gendered improvisations.

Dehors and Eux also intersect with three of Negro’s previous videoprojects, Girafe, Ours and La Fleur in their sustained quests for

encounter with the other’s gaze, for recognition and acknowledge-ment, for the confirmation of one’s existence through the other. ButDehors also exceeds them to emerge as a chronotopic projectthrough an interrogation of the contemporary landscape.1 If the proj-ect was driven by a quest for features that evoked a gaze and its con-ferring of existence, what ultimately emerges is Tokyo’s cityscape.The gaze produces, in its surplus, the possibility of an encounter witha foreign place. It also produces a kind of repertory or grid in therecurrence of a sign that draws a map across the city. Negro’s projectthus turns topographic, a mapping that, as Deleuze and Guattarihave so productively evoked, is "entirely oriented toward an experi-mentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce anunconscious closed in upon itself: it constructs the unconscious…Themap is open and connectable in all of its dimensions…The map has todo with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged‘competence.’" 2 Dehors is produced by ambulation, spatial distribu-tion and access, just as it is predicated on the performance of theviewer within the exhibition who must first look at a number ofimages and discern the rules of the games, to then draw up her ownconceptual and political map. Something else happens then, the cityitself becomes visible, emerging behind the work, produced by the"map." Thus, the object of Negro’s project becomes the screen thatenables the emergence and the negotiations of otherness.

This type of emergence is precisely what happens in Dehors’ othercomponent, which operates on the scale of urban advertising. Here,the pretext shifts from a quest for recognition to the synchronization

above: Marylène Negro, stills from …s’en sortir sans sortir, 2003, video, 24:30 minutes / opposite: Marylene Negro, from the series Dehors, 2003, color photograph, supportand dimensions variable (all images courtesy of the artist)

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MARYLÈNE NEGRO lives and works in Paris. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe,as well as in Asia and North America since 1990.

with others’ imaging performances. This other also lucidly reconfig-ures the native informant. Time and timing newly enter pictures thatoperate as chronotypes. These images compress and distribute fourlayers of time and space: the landscape, the performance of thestranger who carves a "significant" space out of the original land-scape, the otherly defined "significant" landscape that manifests onthe screen of the mobile phone at the moment of picture taking, andthe image of this compound performance delivered by Negro’s largeposter image. The artist thus acknowledges, in her invocation ofadvertising images, that the interface is the performance of Japanesestrangers who frame, for her and for us, the cityscape. If she recog-nizes the failure of Western knowledge to discern what is significantin the contemporary Japanese landscape, she equally recognizes thatthis is not a matter of indigenous knowledge either, that such knowl-edge does not exist, and that all of these operations are bound andbounded by the corporate-technological apparatus.

Many contemporary artists, mobilized by the artworld’s recentglobalization, unreflexively enlist nomadism in their work. In con-trast, both of Negro’s recent photographic works humbly posits herinability to see Japan. How precisely to encode this position withinthe work, without submitting to muteness? How can one still look ata city, gain knowledge of and from it? Negro again chooses to rely ondistribution and delegation. Her work becomes an index of encoun-ters and performances, instead of a survey of sites and peoples.Dehors foregrounds and juxtaposes the cultural encodings of vision.In these images, context, community, and technology foreclose a

wide range of possible significant images. What the image deliversto us, in the gallery, is our relation to the filters that tourism imposeson far away places, the confinement that publicity and mass mediaimpose on images, and the screens that images erect to mediate rela-tions. In Dehors, these filters are transformed into interfaces and,made vectorial, enable a reading that chronotopically traverses thefour layers, never reaching stability.

We are left stranded in telescoped landscapes, scrambling throughmirroring and serial images. Was this not, precisely, what wasalready happening in Io, where the operations of the index andmetonymy telescoped fragments of Negro’s previous video works. Jeest un index. Dispersive images enlist impossible identification to actas interfaces in the distribution of identities… Street or page?Encounters or images? What are you really looking at?

NOTES

1. "The chronotope is an optic fore reading texts as x-rays of the forcesat work in the culture system from which they spring." M.M. Bakhtin,The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist, tr., Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1981, 426.2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi, tr., Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987, 12-13.

Sylvie Fortin is Editor-in-Chief of ART PAPERS.