La Ribot

Born in 1962 in Madrid (ES)
Lives and works in London (GB)

  

Despliegue

2001
Video installation, coulour, sound
Duration: 45'
Purchased in: 2003

It is in the field of choreography that Spanish artist La Ribot first made a name for herself, taking part in the 1990s in a movement to renew dance which revisited certain codes of performance art (alongside people like Jérôme Bel, Xavier Leroy and Alain Buffard). She devised her ‘Distinguished series’, a set of short sketches (lasting from 3 seconds to 7 minutes) performed solo and bringing her own body into play with various props for the stage. Simple but radical gestures, executed following a broad range of different procedures reinterpreting, often with savage humour and absurdity, a breath of spontaneous experimentation drawn from historic Body art and happenings. For example, drink a litre of water in one go. Draw on your skin by rubbing your body up against a felt pen. Stick polaroids of your body on yourself. Stand screaming on a chair before throwing a plucked chicken etc. The ontological ambiguity of these gestures relevantly takes issue with art’s accepted categories. A live show or visual art? The very show venue (museums, art centres as often as theatres), a refusal of front-on performance (the audience is invited to move around or come onstage), the spatial and temporal immediacy of the action, and even the economy of the work (the solos are for sale to collectors): all these experiments are the basis for a plastic practice of dancing, which re-enacts the association between Conceptual art, performance and choreography which in the 1960s brought together choreographers and plastic artists around the Judson School in New York. A full-size floor projection with a high-angle shot showing the artist arranging numerous props and doing her mini performances to background music, the video installation Despliegue is a complex work which, above and beyond its performative aspect, very clearly revisits modern and classical pictorial traditions. It is a reduction of the stage space to two dimensions, a large format canvas, a primary grey ground in cardboard. Elsewhere in the installation, a play of mirrors referring back to certain representative games of reflexivity (Velasquez, Manet, Renoir), a display of materials assembled on the canvas (New Realism), a chromatic play of manufactured items (Pop art), or even the regular crystallization of the action into frozen compositions as for a genre scene. Counterbalancing this vast tableau vivant, there is a small-screen broadcast of the same scene taken from a handheld camera which plays on the dialectics of immanence / transcendence of the performative gesture and also recalls Dan Graham’s experiments on viewpoints of reality.

A veritable unfolding, as the title indicates, the installation is the reflection of an intuitive, generous, proliferating work that gives everything it has. A panoramic retrospective of a singular practice somewhere between dance, painting and video, taking the form of a constantly expanding sculptural system.

^{Guillaume Désanges}

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