Installation-action, Art-cade galerie des bains douches, Marseille, 2020
“Bref, face au poncif de la farce ou de l’image d’Epinal, les normes
esthétiques sautent.”
Peter Szendy, Tubes, la philosophie dans le juke-box, p.38
La Petite Torpille Esthétique (The Little Aesthetical Torpedo) is a series of performances and installations settled up as chain-reactions, involving jokes and hoaxes mechanisms and carrying references and gestures from popular magic shows.
The performer acts as a conductor to initiate a sequence of events led by the installation where every object is producing an act. A non-hierarchic and experimental storytelling is created by following all these objects-acts and that’s how the noisy, colourful and caricatural corpus is made.
Each happening lasts until exhaustion of every device. The installation is growing bigger every time its displayed because every object-act is reused and enhanced. La Petite Torpille Esthétique comes and goes between the stage and the studio, each object calling out for a new act and conversely, to set-up this D.I.Y flavoured silly entity.
Installation view
A spotlight appearing as a video surveillance camera. A big clown boot mimics the appearance of an egg. A furniture dressing table overhung by a second mirror, attached to the wall. A pile of breeding ground with sparkling green reflections from which two sunflowers emerge. The flowers are calling us repeatedly : “Psssst … Psssssst … hey! … Whistle … Hey, ho !” .
The scene is set up.
Suddenly, a character wearing a white mask, equipped with a majorette stick breaks open the installation and starts blinding the camera by using a fun string spray. He throws the spray on the ground once it’s empty, turn around and, in a fierce move, blows away the furniture dressing table’s mirror with his stick: “KLANG!”.
The camera rotates on itself, distraught.
The furniture dressing table contains a mask wrapped in a sheet and a make-up set.
The character puts on the new mask and starts to make himself up as a clown, observing his reflection in the second mirror.
Once it's done, he starts digging into the pile of breeding ground and finds a little sledgehammer. He plunges his left foot into the boot, and after a few seconds, hits repeatedly the boot with the sledgehammer. The shoe opens like an egg shell. The character starts searching inside and finds a tiny balsa box which looks like an art handling case model.
He opens the box and finds 5 tiny latex banana peels, a small bag filled with glitter and an inflatable worm … Wait ! He is now arranging the banana peels equidistantly on the ground, draws a glitter pentagram and inflates the worm …
It’s a diorama from the original performance of La Petite Torpille Esthétique !
