Pascal Grandmaison
"Pascal Grandmaison" by Cameron Skene, Summer 2008, p. 100
Stanley Kubrick wasn’t much for dialogue. He let the camera tell the story, often leaving his viewers wading through a narrative in a bath of visually expressed ideas. While some of his films were box-office flops, many also became classics of cinema.
Pascal Grandmaison’s ode to Kubrick, a piece entitled Increasingly Empty Forms: 1928–1999 (2008), is a series of photographs of the side profile of the book The Stanley Kubrick Archives, edited by Alison Castle. In each close-up image, the indented, itemized and tabbed pages of the book lie in a faux-minimalist stacked sequence, like an indented pile of industrial cardboard. As the pages are turned, negative space fills up the surface of the image. A life story is read, examined and played out sequentially, leaving nothing but empty space in its wake. Except, of course, that most contemporary of traces—an image burned on film.
Grandmaison’s treatment of the medium of photography mirrors Kubrick’s notoriously obsessive concern with technology. In order to adequately capture candlelit scenes in the period film Barry Lyndon, the director once adapted and patented a lens that had been manufactured for NASA satellite photography. Like Kubrick, Grandmaison has an infectious love of machinery: references to imaging technology abound in his work, with things like the zoom ratios of lenses measured and reincorporated in new forms.
An obscure nod to Antonioni’s film Blowup in one work turns a crumpled piece of photographer’s Seamless background paper into a large-scale, pristinely blown-up sculptural poem. In another, a very analog-looking electrical power pack is the source of light for the work itself, with multiple images of the object arranged in a deadpan repetition that recalls Warhol’s Electric Chair series.
Mechanical Dream I and II: Ohi Plant, Nikon inc., Japon, 1980 (2008) are close-up views of a Nikkor lens, complete with branching coloured lines marking its f-stop settings. These slim lines reach up across a black surface, tracing the way to numbered light exposures: an accidental elegance that hovers ambiguously, leaving the viewer reflecting on the point where technological necessity becomes aestheticized.
At times, the subjects of Grandmaison’s works seem a bit beyond the range of a viewer lacking technologically specific knowledge. However, in their formal crispness, his pieces—even shorn of conceptual embellishment—are an unconscious nod to his favourite filmmaker. You can watch 2001 without sound and get it.
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