I didn't know the meaning of the expression "on the wagon" (abstaining from alcohol) untill I looked for the title of the exhibition of Jeanne Susplugas's work at the ESBAMA, Fine Arts School of Montpellier.
Born in 1974, Jeanne is a childhood friend of mine. Her parents were professors and researchers at the Pharmacy university, as well as her paternal grandfather. The family also had vineyards. I did my first grape harvests with them - I was frightened to death by an éphippigère des vignes (ephippiger ephippiger). They were interested in plants and took me, before that, on botanical walks.
Jeanne studied History of Arts and Fine arts and became a famous artist. I remember craving for one of her first drawings and photographies. Her pictures of pills were incredibly attractive; pills aren't attractive, but the view she gave of them was. It was a revelation: one can desire a pill, need/love so much its action that one finds it beautifull. Loving its shape or its colored shadow was a way of wanting to lie in this egg-shaped womb, or to watch life with an antidepressant. She developped a puzzled child's look on wine and medecines, and through it, on dependancy, life, and death.
An example.
Aspirin is the champagne of the morning, wrote Marie Darrieussecq. From this sentence, Jeanne worked on social pressures and socia(bi)lization. Champagne isn't supposed to make you drung, but to make you joyfull. Aspirin is supposed to make you an efficient worker - especially after a short night of sleep.
Jeanne built with some ESBAMA students a 3-panels cupboard, which reminds at the same time: a doll house with floors and rooms, a pharmacy cupboard, or some piece of furniture for artist's tools or a collection. It could also be a big bar...
It is big and has wheels. The students exhibit some of their work on the shelves.
The title of one of her previous exhibitions naturally comes in mind: the sick house (la maison malade). How can a house be sick? From accomodating sick people, or medecines, wrong medecines or too many medecines, from isolating someone and enclosing its prey with an heavy treatment or an addiction?
This mysterious cupboard turns the viewer back into a puzzled child, far from Damien Hirst's "Lullaby Spring" which rather uses references to TV (The Experts?).
Two videos are also presented in the exhibition.
On one of them, the camera turns aroud the face of a brown woman repeating a few words endlessly. The image is projected into a cupboard. She might represent a woman suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders partly locked into herself, or in some psychiatric hospital, were she would be studied from all sides. She is moving.
The same actress also plays in the second video. A man and two women are talking in a café. The man coldly talks about the oath of Hyppocrate. The youngest woman is twice upsetting. She recites a very long prescription. It was found, she says, on the bedside table of her grandmother after she disappeared. The man asks if the old woman died, she answers that no, she vanished. Then she talks about the distilben her mother had, and the functionning ovary she doesn't have. One has never seen such a café conversation. The 'dialogue' was written for Jeanne by the writer Marie Darrieussecq. You can watch it on Vimeo with english subtitles: it is called Iatrogene. It is as striking as unexpected. Personnal, absurd, funny and acrid, as the legend tells.
I won't propose any thought about the photography of the mask, but feel free to comment.
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