installation - 540 x 250 x 120 cm
aluminium, composite panels, resin, USB fans, cables, clamps, survival blankets
aluminium, composite panels, resin, USB fans, cables, clamps, survival blankets
DAVID DROUBAIX (FR) - LA VIOLENCE EST UN LANGAGE, 2017
OBEY.
As I discover John Carpenter’s film They Live, that came out in 1988, the scene with the politician on the platform behind whom the watchword OBEY appears strikes me. Despite a lingering B movie odour, the film hasn’t lost any of its relevance and stubbornly denounces the pitfalls of our agonising democracies - the power of consumerist propaganda, industrial overproduction, unemployment or workplace alienation, police abuses, the population’s loss of any critical aptitude... Only the hero, wearing (almost against his will) a pair of glasses created by the guerrilla, can see the truth. In the fiction, humanity isn’t responsible for the deviances at the hands of an unbridled capitalism; it is the victim of an invasion of creatures whose real faces are skulls with dark and shiny globes in their eye sockets. We would only have to get rid of them for America to become “great again”.
This isn’t exactly what David Droubaix seems to think, at a time where police abuses can go unpunished and a state of emergency is the norm. If we can doubt the human nature of violence and greed at work in our societies, the lucidity glasses will only reveal what we already know. Droubaix, brought up on science-fiction as well as Fréderic Lordon’s texts, takes over the injunctions of Carpenter’s film - “WORK 8 HOURS” among others - written in led on the mini usb fan’s blades, placed along sculptures rightly named Violence is a language.
The artist seems to be asking which fight is the right one. In this referential deviation, Droubaix pulls perilous works, the last escapees of a violent battle. These aggregates of aluminium and polymer seem to have miserably survived while the fans are spinning in a last-ditch warning effort. No need to look for those responsible for the failures in our system that is both dead and alive, of which, according to Lordon, the zombie is the most representative character.
A mould of a pair of glasses, placed at the end of a shaft made of resin, reminds us of the optical device’s majestic uselessness. Between attraction and revulsion, Droubaix’s works are not looking to demonstrate a truth, located between Carpenter’s hero at war with the invaders’ enslavement and the passionate squire from chivalrous novels - a selfproclaimed wandering knight, fighting fictitious giants. Which one is alienated, which one is enlightened? Is the perception of reality universal? Can the fight to its recovery also be universal? If so, which weapons should be provided?
This isn’t exactly what David Droubaix seems to think, at a time where police abuses can go unpunished and a state of emergency is the norm. If we can doubt the human nature of violence and greed at work in our societies, the lucidity glasses will only reveal what we already know. Droubaix, brought up on science-fiction as well as Fréderic Lordon’s texts, takes over the injunctions of Carpenter’s film - “WORK 8 HOURS” among others - written in led on the mini usb fan’s blades, placed along sculptures rightly named Violence is a language.
The artist seems to be asking which fight is the right one. In this referential deviation, Droubaix pulls perilous works, the last escapees of a violent battle. These aggregates of aluminium and polymer seem to have miserably survived while the fans are spinning in a last-ditch warning effort. No need to look for those responsible for the failures in our system that is both dead and alive, of which, according to Lordon, the zombie is the most representative character.
A mould of a pair of glasses, placed at the end of a shaft made of resin, reminds us of the optical device’s majestic uselessness. Between attraction and revulsion, Droubaix’s works are not looking to demonstrate a truth, located between Carpenter’s hero at war with the invaders’ enslavement and the passionate squire from chivalrous novels - a selfproclaimed wandering knight, fighting fictitious giants. Which one is alienated, which one is enlightened? Is the perception of reality universal? Can the fight to its recovery also be universal? If so, which weapons should be provided?
Sophie Lapalu, 2017
