No Soda: No Fun
"No
Helmet", "Who's driving my bus?",
"Tattoos: should I get one?", "Why
do I get blamed?", "Parents:who are
they?", "No Time For Family!",
"School's Out:Now What?"… In a
cream coloured space, some wild inscriptions are
running on the furnitures of an archetypal
parent's leaving-room, revealing the pre-teenage
worries and questionings of the one who has
engrave them.
Through multimedia installations (music,
painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and
video), Elisabeth Arkhipoff dedicates herself to
describe the functioning of groups in search of
individuality and recognition.
Her field of research is the difficulty theses
groups (New Ages, hippies, teenagers, rockers,
Pop fans, fashion addicts, artists and
self-managed Collectives) face from a
socio-cultural context where personal discovery
is often conditioned by professional success and
social prestige, and Arkhipoff's work suggest a
complex and exploded re-reading of our search for
individuation.
Laurent Fetis
.................................
Rebel Without a Cause
Denis Angus : Why do you construct an aesthetic
close to one of revolted
adolescents? Is it because it is artificial to
act like rebels now that we
are adults?
Elisabeth Arkhipoff : It's too late when you're
thirty. To look like a rebel
is not the same as being a rebel. And lots of
artists keep this fake
adolescent attitude till their fifties! Not going
to an opening is perhaps
the ultimate rebellion! But the youth revolt is
sincere even if it looks
naive or stupid. I like to show this boredom of
the youth that can drive you
to ‘crazy’ behaviour, like murder or
torture in Dennis Cooper’s or Bret
Easton Ellis’ novels. To Explode One's Head
(S'éclater la tête), 1996, shows
a sexy silly strip tease that you can do at a
party when you're loaded and
you can see a settee, too, where someone could
have eaten chocolates on the
corner of it, looking at The Loser's Day, an MTV
program where the loser is
the winner. The title, To Explode One's Head,
suggests dramatic fun, drug
abuse, even an o.d. or a suicide. Just like Brett
Easton Ellis’s novel, Am I
less than zero?
D.A. : It’s hard for most of us to exist,
because it's difficult to find our
own place in society, so we try to become a
special and original member in a
group we think will share our ideals. Is it a
solution?
E.A. : The way society looks at you when you're
inactive, unproductive is
really difficult. To become integrated, we have
to lose our integrity and
make many concessions. We only dream of being a
rebel. We'd do anything not
to be alone. Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, an
installation, which I realized in
1998, is a parody of our rebel attitudes. The bed
was embroidered with a
gigantic anarchist ‘A’ symbol. The blue
jeans were torn, the belt was
studded, but all the clothes were under plastic
protection and the Doc
Marten shoes had boot trees inside.... We try to
look trashy, but it's like
a Dior advertisement. We just have the look. The
revolution of the past is a
lost dream. It's not easy to act like a
Dostoievski character. We don't have
faith anymore, even if we still play with the
attitude.
D.A. : The New Age hippie revival inspired your
acid series of works.
E.A. : "The school of the conscient
breathing" sounds like an extraordinary
title for one of my installations, but it simply
was the real name of a
course I had to attend in my art school! It was
totally fake and the teacher
was an artist not a Buddhist philosopher. I read
the Hippie's Little Pink
Book with sentences like “God lives in a
sugarpiece”! Or, “The flowers you
wear on your head are not as important as the
ones that grow in your mind”!
You could hear the New Age music that came from a
TV advert. The hippie
ideals have been perverted by our consumer
society.
D.A. : Your installation No Soda: No Fun is a
trashed living room tagged by
teen slogans like “No Time For Family”.
It made me think of the lack of
communication between the adolescents in Greg
Araki's film Nowhere that ends
with so many suicides.
E.A. : Our anarchist or nihilist discourses have
no reality today. They're as ineffective and
ridiculous as these dazibaos (In french, dazibaos
refers to free expressions/graffiti written on
the walls by young people during the Chinese
Cultural Revolution). We are rebels without
causes. Capitalism has won and only tolerates a
peripheral riot by the poor from time to time.
But it has to be mastered, directed, limited,
agreed, and at special occasions. So I show
private riots without consistent motives. It is
dirty when everything must be clean, but the
demand is pathetic, useless. We still perform,
but without an ultimate goal.
D.A. : You play on our expectations of artists.
But art isn't an answer to
the vanishing of ideals?
E.A. : Of course not. I don't agree with people
who think that artists
should open the minds of everyone. Like heroes or
Jesus they should show
huge suffering, wounds, or take risks... it's
stupid. Artists are like
post-punks. They just play on concepts and don't
plan to change the world
any more. No more agit-prop, feminism. We live in
a postmodernist, post
philosophical period. We practice art without
planning. We don't believe in
any progress. But read the tags on the furniture
in No Soda: No Fun. Neither
living nor rebellion has any meaning: “Who's
Driving My Bus?”
Interview by Denis Angus
|
Elisabeth
Arkhipoff is born in Ivory Coast in 1973 by a
russian father and an armenian mother. Gratuated
in contemporary literature and philosophy,
Elisabeth Arkhipoff starts an artistic carreer
since 2000 (exhibitions in Paris Museum of Modern
Art, Rooseum-Center of contemporary art of
Malmö/Sweden…). Her works had been
reproduced in several catalogues and magazines
such as Frieze, Süddeutsche Zeitung, IDEA, ZOO,
Dazed & Confused and Studio Voice.
She lives and works in Paris. |
