Laure Prouvost

Laure Prouvost’s works at the HangarBicocca in Milan are as difficult to untangle as frizzy hair, they are an exploration of communication and its counterpart, non-communication.

My grandfather used to tell me to bite my tongue every time I badmouthed, and show it to him when he needed information on the state of my digestion. Defined “an unruly member” by the poet Edgar Lee Masters, the tongue, the organ of taste, is a highly mobile muscle upon which all flavours are deposited. The word is also used to mean “the speech or language of a people or race”. Precisely between these two interpretations – organic and linguistic – flows (“pours down in buckets” would be a better description) the solo show of Laure Prouvost at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan (on until 9.4.2017; curator Roberta Tenconi).

Right at the door, under a sign reading “The entrance for all the visitors”, an enormous rubber tongue lies unfurled on the floor (impressed on it are the scuff marks of many shoes in all different sizes). It is an immediate gauge of the humour and human element inside. The route to the exhibition passes through an oropharynx-like aviary where two giant breasts hang down in place of the uvula. The space is a kind of dark oral cavity where everything comes toward you at once, all mixed up. It is not the messiness of clutter, but more like the chaos of a nuthouse. Not a market, but pandemonium, thundering screens and monitors, banging and clanging and recorded laughter, deformed and cracked mirrors, anatomical organs and boudoir furniture. A lot of stuff, I mean.

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France in 1978. Her work is complicated to sum up in a few lines, even long ones. It has to do with communication, and adopts the more choreographical aspects of video clips, TV series and Web platforms. It also has to do with the opposite: non-communication, rendered by means of translation errors, homophones and cultural misunderstandings. Her work is about what is true and what is false. There is a strong echo of certain feminist theories and 1970s structuralist films, from which it steals the serpentine editing, convoluted narration, and the identification dynamics between who is on this side of the screen and who is on the other side.

Here is a spectacle with a double, triple, quadruple bottom, found in the conglomerate of installation + video, although the latter receives most of the artist’s effort. It is the result of confection, where the rules of the game are dissonance, synaesthesia and redundancy – the same subjects over and over again, the same allusions, the same images. Breasts, for example, appear here as voluptuous oversized bosoms, there as hardened nipple-headrests, and elsewhere as milk-spraying cups. Yes, there is feminism, but there is also much femininity, a good dose of reverie, and no lack of the outlet of song (sometimes rising to a baroque shriek), infancy and lust, perhaps more of the former than the latter.

My grandfather fixed things and spoke in dialect. Prouvost’s was a conceptual sculptor, a friend of the avant-garde artist Kurt Schwitters. Or at least that’s how the story goes in this show, entitled “GDM – Grand Dad’s Visitor Center”. It is a kind of memorial museum where her illustrious forefather and his early artistic tragedy (one day, he disappears into the tunnel he was secretly digging to unite his studio with Africa) function as the portrait of an ancestor. Here, no formal order is tied with a double knot to the laws of vision, and we understand this right from the start in the picture chosen for the advertisement of the exhibition: a pair of eyeball-marbles resting in the palm of a hand.

There are about 16 videos and installations by Laure Prouvost on show, and they are as difficult to untangle as frizzy hair. Without a doubt, the most amusing one is the mise en scène of a phantomatic hair salon, an installation from 2013 called God First Hairdresser / Gossip Sequence. It is part of the larger project The Wanderer, all based on the improbable translation of Franz Kafka’s book The Metamorphosis by the Scottish artist Rory MacBeth. In God First, we witness a classic spat between a mother and her son on how to make braids. Surrounded by rollers, curling irons and a portrait of Jesus with heavenward eyes, we too want to lean back our heads and ask for a shampoo and set.

Prouvost’s videos shoot images like machine guns shoot bullets, spewing forth pell-mell. Tableau follows tableau, relentlessly. There are familiar situations: an applauding audience in Grand dad where are you (2014); someone talking to you vis-à-vis, a lit fireplace and a cookbook in Monolog (2009). Less familiar, or rather irritating beyond measure, are the editing scissors that jump-cut us into taking outrageous rides, and the fluty tone of voice that attempts to be alluring, half childish and half lascivious. Sometimes it’s breathy, sometimes it wishes for something, and sometimes it's bossy. Everywhere, it’s the off-screen narrating voice of the artist talking directly to the spectator, often emphatically so.

In the video How to Make Money Religiously (2014) a downpour of coins alternates with a cascade of images of religious services and waving people. “This film will make you richer,” we are informed, after which we are commanded, “Take off your clothes now” while the refrain of L'italiano sung by Toto Cutugno adds images to images: ...gli spaghetti al dente, un partigiano come presidente, l'autoradio nella mano destra, un canarino sopra la finestra, lasciatemi cantare! implores Cutugno. Behind us, the installation Karaoke (2014) offers a microphone on a stand as an invitation to exercise your uvula. On a monitor above it, the lyrics to the 1980s new-wave hit Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics scroll by.

Karaoke is dedicated to Prouvost’s grandmother, a fan of the British synth-pop duo, and so is Grandma’s Dream (2013), an all-pink room that looks lit by an apotheosis, littered with clouds, airplane-teapots and fried eggs. The tale of the granny is the same old story: the AWOL spouse that you wish were still at home, the classic motif of the absent husband (it's always a man) that rules the lives of his survivors with the weight of his memory. A dreamlike trip into the subconscious of the grandfather is Into All That Is Here (2015). In I Need to Take Care of My Conceptual Grandad (2010), the role of grandfather is given to the British book-burning conceptual artist John Latham, to whom Laure Prouvost used to be an assistant.

But what gives salt to the farce of the missing grandfather is Wantee (2013) – the title being an abbreviation of “Would you like some tea?” Earning her the 2013 Turner Prize in Great Britain, this installation invites the public to drink tea in a surreal living room, but the much-desired (or so we are told) exchange between the audience and the stage is, as always in Prouvost’s work, short-circuited by overly intense scenes or studied jokes that unhinge the usual narrative mechanisms on one side, and the usual mechanisms of reception on the other. This seems to be the habitual way in which she edges closer and then distances herself from specific patriarchal and macho reasoning that prevails even in the art system.

Prouvost’s work does not flatter us as spectators. With all director’s notes pruned away, she explains the baseline through absurd anecdotes, shockers, commands, pointing index fingers and statements that sometimes have the flavour of deception. In the video The Artist (2010), for instance, we are ordered to “Take a seat,” “Look this way” and more. In the dark bowels of Magic Electronics (2014) – the show’s most popular piece, according to a small survey I held on the day of the inauguration – snapping fingers and the artist’s recorded voice manipulate the audience into following the arabesques of a stroboscopic light, making you whirl your eyes round and round, up and down, and suddenly you are abandoned in the pitch black empty room.

Wantee is not founded on imperatives, but on a question, “Would you like some tea?” It becomes coercive when asked by a child. How can you refuse? “Yes, please.” But then the little one says, “You have to pour it. I’m too small and the teapot is too hot.” You obey. As you knock back the tea, you notice it has been spiked with gin. “Would you like some milk?” the tot insists. You utter a feeble yes, and start pouring the two liquids. Of course it’ll be like drinking liquid soap. “Some potato chips?” By now you've been made subservient. You merely nod. Prouvost’s work does not speak clearly and straightforwardly. Everything is inciteful, never resolved, and it just might leave you in sort of hypnotic state, with your tongue feeling a bit shrivelled.

until 9 April 2017
Laure Prouvost GDM – Grand Dad’s Visitor Center
Curator: Roberta Tenconi
HangarBicocca
via Chiese 2, Milan

Laure Prouvost

Laure Prouvost’s works at the HangarBicocca in Milan are as difficult to untangle as frizzy hair, they are an exploration of communication and its counterpart, non-communication.

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