Preamble

Justin, like Dorian, was born in 1986. During their childhood, they played one another in local tennis tournaments without ever really getting to know each other. When they met properly, they were still teenagers. They both went on to study. They both became artists. They got married and each founded a family.

Justin lives in Paris. Dorian lives in New York.

They have been friends for a long time.

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The artistic concept of transforming a gallery space already has a long history. The gallery in terms of an institutional entity has been an object of criticism since at least the 60s. At various instances it has been emptied, closed down, wrapped up, stripped of its finery (the desk, the counter, the storeroom, those nice pure white walls…), it’s been turned inside out, moved around, lived in, rejected, trashed, forgotten, restyled and transformed into a multitude of non-artistic spaces.

On this occasion, the space has become that of a domestic interior: there is a table, a chair, a ceiling lamp, some shelving, a television complete with remote and sofa, a few decorations on the walls and some flowers. The floor is carpeted. Like in almost all apartments at one time or another, there has been water damage and we can see a puddle of water on the floor. The title of the exhibition “Que la Famille” might lead us to believe we find ourselves looking at a family portrait (the hypothesis of an exhibition in homage to the first album of the rap duo PNL, brought out in 2015 and bearing the same name, can be quickly dismissed) but of course, things are never quite so simple. 

First of all, there is the fact that the strictly personal dimension of the objects is very limited. Admittedly, the table belongs to Justin’s grandmother and the videos are partially autobiographical. The rest of the objects however, were either produced for the exhibition or in some other artistic context. Furthermore, this apartment has nothing functional about it; it is more an image of an interior rather than a space that one could really inhabit. The floor is slightly raised and the positioning of the carpet, which defines the start of the exhibition space proper, establishes a certain distance from the outset reminiscent of deliberate staging, something that the smoke produced by a machine does nothing to dispel.

So what’s behind this choice of a domestic scene?

Firstly there is a reference to the community of life and work that unites the two artists. From this point of view, the choice of an apartment (or rather a bedsit, bearing in mind the size of the space) emphasizes a political vision of the world of art based on sharing and friendship, one of work carried out within the substitute family that all artists (not just Dorian and Justin) join when they start to work.

Even if in a real sense the artists have never lived in this space, the exhibition has its roots in exercises such as those of the “Ateliers du Paradis” in 1990. During this exhibition, now considered historically important, Philippe Parreno, Pierre Joseph and Philippe Perrin met up in the Air de Paris gallery, new on the scene in Nice, and took possession the space, where they spent their holidays.  The feelings of camaraderie, their reflection on how the time should be spent and their leisure activities counted for as much if not more than what the three artists actually created in the space that Liam Gillick went on to describe as “a playground for spoilt children.” 

“Que la Famille” perpetuates the utopia of artistic creation that was originally conceived as a way of communally inventing a means of liberating time from the imperatives of productivity and consumerism and alongside this, realizing a desire for “constant creation” (R. Fillou). This approach originated with the Fluxus Movement and we can find a number of traces of it within the exhibition. The strange sofa-sculpture, which occupies the further reaches of the space, makes one think of John Armleder’s Furniture Sculptures (a term he used to describe groups of paintings associated with pieces of furniture). Armleder was one of the leading members of the Écart group, founded in Geneva in 1969 and adhering to the spirit of Fluxus. The manner in which the videos are shown also reflects the ideas of flux and constant creation. They are broadcast simultaneously on four different channels, on one television. You can hop from one video to the next by using the giant remote control, (which Justin describes as prehistoric) made of marble and equipped with a single button (Après, Dorian Gaudin & Justin Meekel). However in order to watch a video in its entirety, the spectator has to wait for the program to begin again from scratch. In this way, what is viewed is more of a “re-run”. Here once again we encounter the seemingly essential question of passing time and how it is occupied. As for the puddle-sculpture, it’s both a call to play and a lure towards the accidental, a perfect invitation.   

The domestic device also permits each separate element to be given equal attention (It is often the case that within an exhibition, video projections capture the attention of the spectator more easily). It should be emphasized that it isn’t a simple task to bring together oeuvres that are the fruit of imaginations as dissimilar as those of Justin and Dorian. Justin’s work is materially lightweight. He readily focuses on relational and social aspects of life: the majority of his oeuvres are the result of chance encounters with unknown people and places and are based on forms of popular art and skills often scorned in the world of fine art. The bronze roses (Barfleurs, Justin Meekel, 2017) for example, indirectly relates the predicament of itinerant flower sellers in Paris, often in precarious situations of extreme poverty, who move from bar to bar selling their wares and the drunken creatures who buy from them. The title Barfleurs is also a reference to the American term “barfly” designating a person who spends his time drinking in bars (it is also the title of a film). The lamp was created with the help of a blower of giant bubbles, who he met in the street. The whole body of his work bespeaks of the poetry of chance and the acceptation of what it can generate, in both life and art. 

Dorian’s work is much more physically present within the exhibition space and finds its inspiration in the fields of mechanics and machinery. He creates anthropomorphic mechanical installations, which are deliberately clumsy and which are prone to collapse or sudden leaps and bounds. He twists, smashes and distorts his materials. He is interested in quite different aspects of the accidental, not those of chance but rather those associated with catastrophe and play. For example, in his film Saâdane et Sarah, we watch the events befalling two protagonists subject to the effects of gravity (the action takes place on a steeply sloping floor). The décor is that of an apartment but is visibly staged and all the objects present tend to slide downwards: the effects of gravity create the dramatic structure of the video.

The configuration of the exhibition brings all the oeuvres together within a constrained space, in which the various themes and shapes may interact with each other. Justin Meekel’s video Dompanach (2015) with its maritime setting echoes a moving wooden sculpture (itself drawn from the décor of Dorian Gaudin’s video Prime Time, 2015). In the same manner, the shape of the puddle on the floor reflects that of the glass lamp on the ceiling. This type of echo effect can be seen throughout the exhibition.

In the end, the gallery, transformed in this manner, becomes like any other interior space, a universe in miniature. There is moreover an aspect of model making in many of the works (something that is particularly true concerning the animated wooden sculpture).

“Que la Famille” functions as a conceptual model of an exhibition: A space where inside and outside become interchangeable, and where each element, every type of material and every kind of shape can co-exist freely in their own temporality. It is an enclosed universe like a sonnet, its whole made up of relationships that sometimes reveal themselves in silence. The perfect way perhaps to formally describe a long friendship.

Jill Gasparina,  about the exhibition “Que la famille” by Dorian Gaudin and Justin Meekel, 2017