Laure Prouvost: It, Heat, Hit

The French artist Laure Prouvost’s current exhibition at e-Flux in New York (It, Heat, Hit, until 26 October), opens with a subtitled explanation: “This six minute film requires all of your attention. Each detail of Part One will be essential to Part Two. The characters in the film are glad you are here to join them; they would do anything to get your attention. They are desperate for you to engage: they need you to exist. If you do not collaborate they will ask you to leave the room on the sixth minute.” 

The work makes demands, as do many of Prouvost’s videos: you must concentrate, engage, exist. You must create your own system of viewing. You must respond to the work in all the different registers in which it constantly challenges you: visual, textual, audio. But when you listen to the voiceover, it doesn’t match the text on the screen. You watch the images and they escape too quickly, evaporating like a drop of water on a hot surface. You read the text and it’s beautiful—“the images got dusty fr om waiting”—but inexplicable. The threat is then realized: six minutes in and you’re asked “Can you leave this…?” “Room” is left unsaid. 

Prouvost’s work is so specific that it’s almost impossible not to adopt some of its linguistic manners. You start writing in “you.” You get a little convoluted. You want to race through certain sentences and then slow down with others. You wonder about whether it’s worth adding more writing to a work already loaded with words. Prouvost, an artist known for her large-scale installations, which often include video and architectural constructions strewn with objects, always speaks to language and its inability to contain meaning.

Her work isn’t about consistent storytelling or collected ideas. Instead, it’s a system of frustrated representation; it has a slippery meaning. It conflates environment with sound, image, and text (often read by Prouvost in a feminine French accent) but the connections are constantly shifting. With It, Heat, Hit, the viewer is bombarded with images: a car racing to a corner, a splash of red paint, a flabby green pudding on a white plate, a jumping horse, a fire. The film is interspersed with white text against a black background (“In his anger the images were burning” and “back home”) that doesn’t cohere to a narrative. Instead, it forms a reflection on the impossibility of coherent narratives. “You want to caress the image,” the voiceover in the video lingers, but how can you caress what you cannot grasp?

Considering how prolific Prouvost is—she has created at least ten large-scale, complex installations since earning her MFA from Goldsmiths University in London in 2010—the choice to show a five-year-old piece (It, Heat, Hit is dated 2010) seems puzzling. But with Prouvost, Goddard’s famous declaration—“a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”—rings true. Iterations of the same work include additions and other changes. When It, Heat, Hit was shown at the Taipei Biennial in 2014, it was screened in a specially-built diagonal room surrounded by plants and sculptures (some of which are recognizable from earlier installations like The Artist, 2011). At e-flux, the black-box construction almost fills the entrance of the gallery to the brim, but the installation around it is gone—no living things, no sculptures dangling from the ceiling—and has been replaced with eight framed texts, each written by a different professional (a rector, an ironmonger, etc.). Each was asked to watch the video and respond to it, creating yet another narrative and another set of response to the work. Again meaning is slippery, again it is individual.  

It, Heat Hit keeps with Prouvost’s earlier interests in complex, disconnected narrative. In Before, Before (2011–13), she created a maze of stage sets through which the viewer wanders in search of Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis until ending up in a new installation,  After, After (2013), which the artist described as “a different kind of 3D film,” a darkened room wh ere flashes of light shine on different objects to create a story by way of sequence. The two works do not congeal, except in language. “Before” and “after” connote linearity, a coherence that is never present.

Prouvost’s work is messy, funny and playful, but it is also always serious. It adds another line to the long history of image literacy. It feels contemporary because it’s fast: in It, Heat, Hit, the shifts between scenes can take just one second. Images wash over you while you’re still decoding what the voiceover said. This aesthetic is exactly the meaning of her work. It shows how images, sounds, words—even when you try to hold onto them—are evasive.  Prouvost offers a very different suggestion from the prevailing sentiment that images are meant to be decoded, that pictures are meant to be read.

Orit Gat is an art critic living in London and New York. She is a contributing editor of Rhizome and the managing editor of WdW Review.

—September 25, 2015

In her current show, Laure Prouvost, a French-born artist who won the Turner Prize in 2013, combines the punchy urgency of movie trailers with ideas derived from film and literary and psychoanalytic theory. The central work, “It, Heat, Hit,” is a six-minute movie screened in a small, trapezoidal theater built for this show. The film starts with an announcement: The characters are glad you are here; they “need you to exist.” But if you don’t “collaborate,” you’ll be asked to leave. The film then hurtles into a series of jump-cut images that veer from the sensual (a feather grazing the camera lens) to the bucolic (horses and landscapes) and the suggestively violent (objects being chopped).

On the wall opposite the mini-theater is a row of texts offering fictional viewer responses. The butcher’s wife thought the film was “modern and different,” and the priest felt “apprehensive, nervous and deeply unsettled.” The ironmonger responded by making a twisted metal object, while the psychoanalyst observed that “the provocation of the gaze provokes sexual satisfaction.”

All of this feels familiar. Freud and Lacan are cited in the texts, and the film owes a clear debt to theorists like Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis, and particularly the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. (There are also echoes of Surrealism, the Situationists, Sophie Calle and Bernadette Corporation.) Nonetheless, the work is seductive — that is, until the last seconds of the film when the pictures disappear and the narrator commands you to leave the room. Suddenly the liberated reader proposed by Barthes in essays like “The Death of the Author” (1967) is banished, and Ms. Prouvost reminds you who’s really in charge of the artwork.

—October 20, 2015.

Laure Prouvost’s latest outing in New York was up front about its own capriciousness. Upon entering the gallery, you encountered a printed sign reading: “Keep left (to the right).” If you did go to the left, you saw It, Heat, Hit, a film made in 2010 by the London-based French artist, in a recessed black-box room. Its opening title card says, “THIS 6 MINUTE FILM REQUIRES ALL YOUR ATTENTION. EACH DETAIL OF PART 1 WILL BE ESSENTIAL TO PART 2.” Yet Prouvost’s film is not conducive to focused concentration. Images and sequences appear only momentarily. Garbled snippets of text flash as intertitles between segments of video. Rattling percussive music clamors throughout, becoming increasingly erratic, and Prouvost utters cryptic messages and responses to on-screen imagery (“It smells damp,” “It feels wrong”) in both intimate whispers and commanding pronouncements. The film’s text and the artist’s interjections form a murky diegesis centered on domestic encounters (“YOU ARE WELCOME TO HELP US IN THE KITCHEN”) and poetic visualizations (“DROWNING AND SWALLOWING THIS TEXT”). At certain points, Prouvost’s voice counts down the time left in the film. “THEY USE SOME RED TO SQUASH YOU TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN,” reads the last title card, before two palms clasp together, barely visible against a hostile scarlet monochrome. The experience might be seductive if it weren’t so aggressive.  

When It, Heat, Hit was shown at the 2014 Taipei Biennial, rows of sculpture flanked the film’s black box. But at e-flux there were no sculptures, and the theater occupied most of the gallery without distraction. The structure’s tunnel-like shape drew the viewer into the viscera of the film, where glass breaks, charcoal burns, skin sweats, gelatinous substances rot and cars take off in plumes of exhaust. The film’s logic is not one of continuity or categorical affiliation, but rather one of surrealist association. Throughout It, Heat, Hit, comma signs flicker on-screen to the sound of a thin snap. Like the commas in the near-homophones of the title, the film accretes connections without explaining them. Phonetics can connect words as much as meaning; affect can chain images together no matter what they depict. Reading the film is a task of synesthetic sense-making. 

Prouvost supplemented the film with a second room that housed a small iron sculpture of a tree and a collection of printed responses to the film by an audience Prouvost selected in London. Each text was labeled with the writer’s name and day job. A neuroscientist drafted her response in the form of a scientific paper: “Perception and Association of Visual Information in the Imagery of It, Heat, Hit by Laure Prouvost.” A ghostwriter responded with an aestheticized description in elliptical sentences. Scanning the texts, you started to understand the fallacy of both the analytic and the poetic readings. It was the iron worker, the tree sculpture’s maker, who seemed to get it right: “When I watched the film I felt comfortable. It felt relaxing, like I was paralyzed. The story is like a new galaxy, a new world …” In Prouvost’s provocative aesthetics, the sensorium learns to trust its instincts, absorb phenomena, feel it out.

—Decemebr 14, 2015.