Elsewhere, what elsewhere can there be to this infinite here?

I do thinking with my blood...

I do thinking with my breath...

-Samuel Beckett

Look at the piece of bread absorbing bloody juice from a small pond on the dish. "There is no distaste in beefsteak," but the eating ritual hurts as a cannibal. No cannibal is around: the idea hurts, rather than the image. The closer, the more mysterious things become, yet we suppose we know them already, and we think of them vaguely, we believe we have an idea, enough, so we don’t really look at them. Seeing too much can be disturbing. Trémorin opens his trilogy of videostories with that piece of bread pressed by human fingers, and he turns three times the soft inside of the bread toward the camera. It is the only time you realize the camera is present, an active sponge as the bread. Blood is in the middle: an emblem of what life is, and art -- Trémorin seems to say -- to keep themselves together they suck up each other’s fluids.

The closer the artist goes to the fragment of reality that is going to become image, the more distant he seems to be, almost surprised, he keeps inquiring.

Peter Kirby There is no judgment in the camera. Yves Trémorin is there, he and the camera the whole time gazing at death, sex and playful happenings -- outbursts of excitement or cautious fingers in uncertain journeys through skin and human hair -- with disregard for continuity or connections you can foresee, as in Godard’s films. These videostories are killers of any syntax or words.

R Do you remember when Beckett says, "blot, words can be blotted and the mad thoughts they invent"?

Peter Kirby No, but the parallel works: images make the thoughts, thinking through images. At first Trémorin’s eye tries to find a sense in each scene, but very soon the moving image, in its own development, gives rise to such an intensity of feelings that thoughts vanish, absorbed by the eyes. This happens to both artist and spectator.

R Along with the movement of each story, he invites you to step back from measurement, from the vigilance you have when you must understand. Do you mean the mind’s vigilance does take us away from really seeing what’s going on? Should I give up with intellectual frames, ideas or visions that are impersonal, until my own awareness appears, and I think with my blood and breathing? I wish I were a philosopher.

Peter Kirby Maybe Robert Rauschenberg can help. He said somewhere that if a painting is good it is impossible to remember exactly what’s in it. I suppose he was referring to the way connections work as a dynamic system, offering multiple outlooks. He was also pulling back and forth between painting and sculpture all the time, using his own contradictions to avoid stillness in his work. Maybe Trémorin does the same swinging between photography and videography.

R Both of them, anyway, choosing to "ennoble the ordinary," both terrified of things that do not change. In Trémorin’s stories, even a dead rooster comes to life again as a toy -- a comic animation of death -- and a boiled potato smashed on a nose -- nothing could be more dull, inert matter -- reenters the life’s cycle by falling into the mouth. I’m struck by the fact that every story happening to the others you are facing on the screen is also our own experience, it is the comedy of intimate relationships among people, animals, and objects which is only known to exist by the senses.

In We Others, the mystery of transubstantiation reappears, transplanted into a garden of visual inventions -- a natural history of living bodies, not necessarily human. Our visual experience is altered, dragged towards a realm of mental displacements; the mouth is a cave, the eyes a fountain, just a spring of water. Fingers are antennas testing a portion of skin, nostrils, and teeth. The mind of the artist is a sculptor creating visual perception, playing with accidents and coincidences, letting them dance, until a fuzzy point is reached in each story. You feel that something menacing, almost unbearable, appears; you are not clear about it, whether the story is switching or your mind feels menaced because something happens that you do not understand. Sometimes the whole story is indecipherable. We others is us, and we get lost in our own bodies, not to mention our minds.

Do the eyes receive anything different from what our mind projects on them, aren’t they mirrors capturing what the mind sends out? Maybe we live in a world we have invented. Or maybe it’s a world that somebody else has invented, and then inserted it into our mind in such a way that we accept it as true. Seduced by these appearances, we would grab our own ghosts. We can expect some cacophonous effects. (This was Jean Dubuffet, impatient to put up his primordial question.)

There is a huge vague terrain, an indefinite ground artists never cease to look for. It’s a scape missing the land, where any mind who has an intentional, architectural thinking will only encounter living entities saying, you can’t stay here unless you are willing to eat your words. In the beginning, the world was not your mind. Whatever you are, it comes from a cave of flesh. If you are expecting a description of the tape, you can stay on line, waiting for Godot.

Samuel Beckett No, no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go on without any of that junk, that’s all dead with words, with excess of words, they can say nothing else, they say there is nothing else, but they won’t say it eternally...

Trémorin has painted his cave. There was a place where the neck of a rooster, whose head has been guillotined, blooms like a pomegranate, men let their faces be painted white, children breathe through a mask, or play with the cut head of a rooster managing to reopen his eyes (perhaps the same beast we saw before -- who knows), a tongue explores an eyelid. In the end, you don’t care whose body these fragments belong to, you never know any name -- the mosaic falls apart -- two hands are interwoven, one helping the other seemingly paralyzed, you wonder if they belong to two different bodies, mouths kiss one another asking for breathed savor. Old or young faces, hands, feet, in disconnected broken pieces, show a range of expressions through their happening actions. When a white opalescent fetus of dog splashes on the floor, spilt from a jar that fell with a great crash you are not allowed to see, a needle of ice enters your eyes, which were warmed up by the sparks of a Christmas tree burning in one flame.

Is the Lamb of God, or God made Image, the small fetus on the floor among the broken glass? The white figurine overlaps in my mind with the image of a lamb, carved in ivory, inserted into the red cover of a gospel. It was a book for my first Communion. That ivory leaning out, for my seven-year-old fingers, was the core of the book. The same whiteness, much more fragile, in Trémorin’s fetus lying on the floor, detached from any page -- like the other stories on the screen.

Did you notice -says Michael C. McMillen - that each action is framed in strange angles, almost carved, isolated? No background. Instead of displaying, Trémorin limits what you can see. You look at something that tells you you are not allowed to see everything. You are invited to speculate, to try to make sense about images only apparently unimportant, and unexpected, often funny instants of the daily life; but things remain puzzling. Stop on each image expanded over a segment of time, it becomes monumental.

R It’s like pushing a photo back to the action that was alive before the photo-gram, the bite of the camera. Do you think the camera is one more mouth, chewing images like the mouth of that man in the tape who chews the tip of a pen, drinks soda, and never swallows the piece of plastic? Do you think the pen, the tool, the camera of course, are impossible to digest? Is it a preverbal reality that we are seeing in We Others?

Michael C. McMillen For sure it’s a rural representation. But the only manipulation that people, animals, and objects receive in this piece is made by the artist’s eye. I feel these images like a reminder of an endless cycle of life and death, how they connect despite our unawareness...

Friedrich Nietzsche Why don’t you consider the animal's viewpoint? I’m afraid the animals can see the humans being equal to themselves, despite the fact they have lost in a very dangerous way their own healthy, animal intellect. Humans like raving, laughing, crying, unhappy animals.

Roberta Margolis Oh, the lady kissing the boy, she is treating him as a puppet. He doesn’t like it.

To make it plain (which is not explaining), what is one of the many points? What’s the point in having no words, unless they are lullabies blowing on the lips like bubbles of chewing gum? In having no named identity, no who’s who? No what’s what? There is something there, existing, impersonal -- a gasping fish, an old woman shaken by laughing, a boy jumping his magic abracadabraword -- living molecules of vision, visual events just existing as a curtain of rain, or a handful of dust. In this fullness of the matter we are impersonal, we share with a leaf of lettuce or a fish exactly the same destiny, if the matter is natural existence. But existence in art is artificial, construction and translation. The artist’s self is an eye, an ear, both together, so it is for the viewer. Suppose things abandoned by names, and you will have a landscape of anonymous presences. Each of them, transferred on the screen, is paradoxically "aware" that artificial life is the only way not to die. The only reality they live is the perceived present; for them there is no such thing as the future.

R Is the artist out of the game?

Peter Kirby Not at all, I told you, he’s standing unbelievably close to the scene. What disturbs us is that we don’t think about this. We take the image as the creation of a mental camera, ourselves as invisible voyeur. But the artist is the one creating the action: the other invisible character who creates the story.

We are so used to the idea of the camera’s impersonal eye that captures a constructed scene that we forget the person behind the camera. Where is the viewpoint? Godard had the same problem, and he tried to humanize the camera; Aaton built very small cameras for him. There is always some body who takes the picture.

R That’s right, the artist is the sewing person who gives more or less tension to the thread, cuts, or lets go.

Judy Russell I can see his framing, his special angles. But the action inside the frame looks spontaneous, as if Trémorin were starting with a choice and then letting go, so you sink into a meditative space, but not for too long. Tensions strongly shaking you share that space with peaceful details you don’t usually notice in life.

Lies Kraal He pulls the length, going and going longer than expected. Time is the color of his painting, revealing the unexpected.

R Tension is orchestrated by him, the unseen "We," it doesn’t come from a separate "other" disconnected from "We." But what we see in the tape is not only our mind’s ghosts, as in Dubuffet. The tension is three times multiplied, sent by the person behind the camera, reflected on the visual action, and refracted on a "We" that includes us, the viewers. It seems a circular movement, ending in the round and soft orifice of the mouth. Teeth are there like soldiers, ready to smash thoroughly...

Andrea Leonard see the artist almost celebrating defects or imperfections, the positive and negative chance every action has to rise and fall. Something makes the situation uneven, and one does not even know what it is: the pink drops menacing the feet of a child in the tub, for instance. Yes, the camera is always there, strikingly dumb.

Roberta Margolis Such an unromantic piece! You are allowed to get close to the "Others" only without being sentimental. The situation is abstract enough that you can identify yourself with those a little bit aberrant actions, push-pull between consensual and not consensual. You can do it because the body is always cut in pieces, it is never shown full size. The artist forces you to focus on details, he grabs you inside the "Others" game, but, once there, you can’t escape its viscosity and you are trapped like the frog in the water. (An American children’s game: put the frog -- a real one, alive -- in a pot with water, and warm it up.) Every story is foreshadowed, like an abstract drama. Conclusions are unknown.

Paul McCarthy I don’t know whether the first image is emblematic or not: blood, circle, plate, circle, second image red liquid again, circle in the glass, distortion, the kid through the circle of the glass’s foot, other distortion. A theater of circumscribed actions -- a family? -- like the wasp in the bottle or a fish dying in not enough water. Simple situations in a private space. The camera is always too close. They, the "Others," want you to think they are the same family, but who knows? Some of them are models, we don’t know which ones. The viewer crosses the line, gets into an intimate space. The sound is inside, as close as the image. What’s going on with Grandma? Who is doing what to her? To make art within the family, abstracting the hidden life: the subject, within the frame, is a presence of life. I’m wondering how we can associate the different chapters of this piece.

Karen McCarthy Chapters are like a series of photographs.

Peter Kirby I would rather look at it as a poem; though you try to make connections, you cannot find a unifying narrative arch.

Paul McCarthy True, but an abstract play is everywhere, so is experimentation. And you don’t see the house, there is no environment. Inanimate objects are made active, or at least held by somebody’s hands: the rooster’s head, the blue balloon, the tree, the fish head. This piece is not about dead things. Trémorin is saying that life is heat, and energy, and seriously playful.

Wake up the sleeping dog!

Peter Kirby I keep seeing in We Others the mundane, contemporary translation of religious stories that have become visual vocabulary, almost unconscious symbols so widely spread by Trémorin in this piece that they work like an abstract texture beyond the formal, undeniable discontinuity.

Let the piece talk by itself, like in the old comedies. The story doesn’t have a conclusion, the last image is a handful of nothing. Time is the infinite time of relationships, managed by limited and often damaged beings. "Proximity is more valuable than the matter of fact," says philosopher Levinas. Trémorin shoots his arrows as an invisible archer, and he hits you inside, not so much in your head. He breaks the unconscious order built in each of us by conventions, commonplaces, social rules deciding which one is the hidden or the visible part of our life, our organized sense of modesty. One needs to be injured, to be able to show the visceral side of life, in real time, without trace of pornography. The artist recreates our proximity to "Us," the "Others," the neglected sensual fluidity barely contained in our skin, with blood, spit, and teeth in action. No actionism, no Viennese cult of obsessive bloody rituals. Wanting to use a conventional term, it could be expression, once more without "ism."

Trémorin lets the body say what is not said by him. One drop after another from one breast, a stream of milk slides along a right side, and doesn’t rest on the groin, it gets lost in the pubic cave until a sudden fall of urine fills the screen, sounding loud, a storm of urine. The visual poem is made by the artist involving us among the active components, interweaving an abstract texture of feelings, inside the art piece, outside, unlocking the chastity belt -- the illusion of mind as a purifying fountain. In this century, many artists felt prisoners, "frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away." Trémorin instead offers a place to go, knowing it is a place filled with private, slimy secretions. Sometimes he reminds a very early Max Ernst, au pied de la lettre, letters with feet. The painting is a cage in a thick wooden frame. The cage is open, so two children are menaced by a bird ( 2 enfants sont menacés par un rossignol, Max Ernst, 1924) -- the children are a tiny presence in this visual story, lost beneath a big sky in a regular landscape with perspective,. On the contrary, in Trémorin’s videopoem, human and non human bodies fill the whole space -- but still it is a menaced, unsafe, and human landscape: trespassing or not? Would you be afraid of a robin? Are you afraid to look? Sure, this is my gentle, personal ejaculation -- he could say -- it’s a spring of life, the only signature that makes sense.

Rosanna Albertini,1999

Thanks to the participants, dead and alive, (in memory of Monsieur de Fontenelle):

Jean Dubuffet artist

Peter Kirby videoartist

Lies Kraal painter

Andrea Leonard visitors services manager at the J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and radio programmer

Roberta Margolis multimedia manager and videoartist

Karen McCarthy artist

Paul McCarthy artist

Michael C. McMillen artist

Friedrich Nietzsche philosopher

Judi Russell artist

References, direct or indirect, to:

Samuel Beckett, stories and texts for nothing, New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1967

Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things, New York, Vintage Books, 1989

Julie Taymor, Titus Andronicus, film, 1999

Louise Bourgeois, her texts in Louise Bourgeois - Sculptures, environnements, dessins 1938-1995, ARC, MuséeD’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 23 juin - 8 octobre 1995

Jean Dubuffet, text by Jean Dubuffet introducing his Theaters of Memory, Nov. 14, 1976, republished in Jean Dubuffet - les dernières années, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1991

Max Ernst, Rétrospective, Centre George Pompidou, November 1991- January 1992

Friedrich Nietzsche, La gaia scienza, Italian translation by Ferruccio Masini, Torino, Einaudi, 1979, paragraph 224

Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre, Paris, PUF, 1979

Gertrude Stein, Look at Me Now and here I Am - Writings and Lectures 1909-45, Penguin Book, 1967