Pierrick Sorin: Peep-Art Pioneer
Pierrick Sorin Une vie bien remplie 1993 Installation view / photo Guy L’Heureux
“Une vie bien remplie” at the Fonderie Darling presents French artist Pierrick Sorin’s variations on the auto-filmages that granted him attention in the late 1980s. These short film and video works show the artist executing a series of everyday activities and mundane rituals; performed with slapstick theatricality, they are as grotesque as they are banal.
The show’s focal installation and titular piece consists of twin self-portraits: two large-scale video projections on the back wall of the foundry’s large hall. In front of these projections is a constellation of video monitors mounted on individual plinths, each video on a loop, representing Sorin performing a single ordinary action (getting out of bed, brushing his teeth, blowing his nose, etc.) on eternal repeat. The piece effectively reorganizes the unobserved events of a single day into simultaneity, resulting in an effect both vertiginous and chaotic. The manic parody of the auto-filmages is not as much a celebration of the everyday as it is a criticism of its clichés and platitudes.
Sorin also incorporates his auto-filmages into hybrid sculpture/video works, such as Titre variable #2 (known to some as Tourne-disque), a revolving record player crowned by a projected video of a miniature Sorin running in place, unable to get ahead and, craning his neck to look behind him, afraid to fall behind.
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Pierrick Sorin Titre variable #2 1999 Installation view / photo Guy L’Heureux |
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