On Hélène Fauquet at Kunsthaus Glarus
Hélène Fauquet, Sensoria, detail, 2023
Hélène Fauquet, “Phenomena”
Kunsthaus Glarus
July 9–November 19, 2023
Spirals of Memories
The invitation card and poster for Hélène Fauquet’s “Phenomena” feature an image from the promotional material for Dario Argento’s eponymous 1985 film. A girl holds out to the viewer a hand full of squirming insects; it almost seems like it could pierce through the image’s surface. But just almost. If the inscrutable gaze of the girl reveals anything, it might be loneliness. Despite her willpower, she knows she cannot step out of the image or out of her role. But do the viewers also know this? Isn’t there a chance they could still be attacked by these creepy crawlies or their innermost fears? The protagonist of the film, conversely, has a positive relationship with insects and their larvae—she can communicate with them telepathically.
Jennifer Connelly (the actor) as Jennifer Corvino (the protagonist) bears a striking resemblance to the artist. But she, de facto, is not her. Fauquet projects herself as an other in her own exhibition. She doesn’t succumb to the temptation of mounting a self-portrait onto the original, although she does edit the source material. She removes the original tagline from the advertisement (“JENNIFER HAS A FEW MILLION CLOSE FRIENDS. SHE IS GOING TO NEED THEM ALL.”), otherwise hardly changing a thing. She adds two more variations of the motif to the ones still in circulation, treating the poster and the card differently. While the digital overlay, which appears as a subjective trace, is immediately apparent on the poster, the change on the card is less noticeable. Here, the image-editing programs are foregrounded in updating the motif in relation to the original. Fauquet’s approach to the source material is simultaneously a distancing. This back-and-forth between conceptual aesthetic form and psychological charge can also be seen in Argento’s work. The influential representative of Italian giallo and horror films forces his viewers to confront horrifying images that he dissects with ruthless precision to reveal their inner workings. When he depicts the dramatic murder of a young woman, for instance, between the lethal thrusts of a pair of scissors he inserts a close-up of the murder weapon making a cut in the air before its final stab. The perpetrator is not visible. Here, not only is tension built, but reference is also made to editing as an important tool of filmmaking. Through this formal intensification, it is possible to take a coolly analytic approach to the extreme acts of violence on screen, and even appreciate them as distinct from real horror.
It’s hard to get these images out of your mind. However, Argento’s film only appears in homeopathic doses in the Glarus exhibition. Fauquet refers to the director’s artistic approaches rather than his spectacular slasher scenes, repeatedly addressing the interfaces that also interested the director—between irrationality and rationality, between inner visual worlds and the external world. The reference to Argento is less sensational than initially assumed when we learn that Phenomena was filmed in the Säntis region in Switzerland—close enough to the canton of Glarus to establish a local connection. The road to the city of Glarus goes through a dark green, narrowing valley, whose imposing panoramas are both impressive and unsettling. The restrained postwar modernism of the Kunsthaus blends into the surrounding nature despite the building’s strict cubic form. Inside, closed spaces alternate with open ones. Both the floors and the ceilings are structured by a grid. Simple, durable materials, balanced proportions, and agreeable lighting complete the overall impression of untouched Swiss sophistication.
Fauquet makes use of this well-tempered atmosphere. In a windowless room with uniform overhead lighting—a container that underscores the storage function of the museum space—she places eight office desks characterized by their functional design. The desks stand individually. Not conference tables, they are desks from an office or library, suitable for work and organization. A variety of picture frames is arranged on each desk, each installation carrying its own title: Flash of the Blade, Sleepwalking, Mechanica, Delicate and sensitive, life-world, Psyche, Sensoria, and natural behavior (all 2023). Contrary to what one might expect, the framed images have nothing to do with everyday office life or personal memories. Rather, alongside pictures of insects, other animals, and loby-card from Argento’s film, the frames contain macro photographs of bubbles or droplets. The air pockets and liquids of different viscosity form almost perfect circles or curved lines, or regroup into beaded chains or unstable froths without ever crystallizing into a fixed form as if, while still in the process of proliferation, they were immobilized by photography. Fixed in both the image and the frame, they are entombed like in a reliquary or exposed like in a vitrine or on a microscope slide—in any case, available for close examination.
The numerous frames mark a transition between artificial image and real space. Some are opulent, some are modest and elegant. Some correspond to the images, some reflect the surrounding space, alluding to the artist’s earlier works of shiny glass domes or images of semitransparent Victorian stainedglass windows. With the abundance of representations and points of connection, it is impossible to gain a complete perspective, especially since no system of order (whether museological, scientific, sacred, operational, or personal) can consistently be applied to all elements of the exhibition. Drawing on preformulated methods of organizing knowledge and visual information, Fauquet applies them to one another, exposing their logics and contradictions. She references the grid as an institutional structure while simultaneously rendering it inoperative. The desks are aligned with the grid of the floor but placed in a staggered formation that deviates from the room’s axis. Though the composition of the picture frames may at first seem intuitive, it is not arbitrary. For example, the frame teeming with life-size flies is on the same desk as a violent image, from Argento’s Phenomena, of a girl crashing through a window; both thematize the boundary between inside and outside. Thus raised is the question of the relation between image and reality, of the reality of images, of their flow.
Some images, unlike those of the bubbles and droplets, were not photographed but selected and collected, like the picture frames and desks. They aresourced from a natural history book, which explains their analog patina: a butterfly pupa, also considered a metaphor for transformation and the psyche (in ancient Greek, butterfly is psyche), a lizard, a mandrill baboon, insects. There is also a nautilus, the deep-sea cephalopod that was a popular collector’s item in cabinets of curiosities; the cross-section of its shell forms the shape of a logarithmic spiral, a mathematical figure ubiquitous today. Fauquet’s approach, as well as titles like life-world or Mechanica, alludes to historical models of explaining the world. Delicate and sensitive, on the other hand, is descriptive. However, the title is from an advertisement for skincare products, perhaps referring, like Sensoria, to hypersensitivity to environmental influences.
In this context, we return to Argento. In 1996, he directed the film The Stendhal Syndrome, which bears the name of a psychological state of overstimulation that manifests in panic attacks and hallucinations accompanied by fears of the dissolution of the self. The exhibition in Glarus observes from a distance. It advocates for freely floating between condensation and letting go, which also brings humorous aspects to the surface. “Flash of the Blade” is a blood-drenched song, by the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, that appears on the soundtrack of Argento’s Phenomena. In a work of the same title, a cut through a deep-red droplet evokes the iconic sliced-eye scene in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), but it might also be raspberry sauce, an interpretation based on the technical aspect of the image: macro lenses are often used for food photography.
Fauquet’s presentation refers to a film that in turn refers to an exhibition, namely the highly successful “Phänomena,” that took place on the Zürichhorn lake promenade in 1984 and aimed to provide a comprehensive explanation of the mysteries of the world. Argento acknowledges this influence by distributing his film in Europe with the same name; in the United States, the film was given the title Creepers. Given the fantastically high number of visitors, one can gauge how strong the desire for the Grand Narrative must have been and how enormous the effort to conceal fractures and incongruities. “Phenomena” in Glarus stands for the exact opposite. It is an exhibition about exhibiting that aims to expand interstices, not patch them up. It turns on a spiral of evernew possibilities of connection and, before its components threaten to solidify into ornamental patterns, it opens onto new horizons. This “Phenomena” does not explain; it provides instruments for navigation.
Translated from German by Max Bach