HALTERES-NATIVE
How to explain the relative lack of cultural studies in aesthetic practices and theoretical hexagonal? This may be because there are in France, since the post-war, ideological mistrust towards the arts and popular traditions that young artists such as Jocelyn Villemont prefer to draw their inspiration from Anglo-Saxon sources. Whether it's rock'n'roll, tuning, sports, folk or indigenous peoples, the formal vocabulary employed by Jocelyn Villemont comes from a broader conception of culture and the exchange ratios that raises.
Born in France, installed for some time in Glasgow, Jocelyn Villemont belongs to a generation that revisits the historical nesting of minimalist and pop legacies. By mixing these influences in his work, he reveals the strategic proximity of these two neo-avant-garde - abandonment of notions of originality and authenticity, integration of industrial and extra-artistic themes - and reassess their relevance to the confronting some of the fields contemporary culture. His installations contradict the historical assumptions that confuse rationalism and minimalism. The return of the repressed post-modern play here in the form of a recurrence of the story in its broadest sense - both legendary, magical, fun and efficient - and a vitalist conception of nature; not without mentioning a certain kinship with the minimalist psychedelic West Coast trend of the United States. In this respect a work like Pacific Palisade (a screen made of plywood surfboards), suggests both the first sculptures made by Anne Truitt in 1961, that the famous Planks by John McCracken, left here in a primitive unfinished state. A mottled and bastardized Minimalism, therefore, by the intrusion of traditional combinations outside the scope of fine arts.
Jocelyn Villemont, who has assimilated the pop lesson, is not interested, however, into a generic imagery mass as developed in the 1960s: no soup cans or movie starlets. The frame of his work, however, buys the records of specific popular cultures and subcultures. With Sunburst for Chief Joseph (2009), for example, he created an altar consisting of a minimal disk of polished wood, of a carpet and a few branches, evoking the crafts and cultural practices of Native American Indians. For The Force of Nature (2009), the artist, during a performance, debits tree trunks into slices to make rough dumbbells. Between logging and body-building is emerging, in short, a Do It Yourself gymnastics. Sports halls, studios repeated folk altars ... Facilities generally operate as potential scenic area (must it be reminded that theatricality, according to Michael Fried, is a characteristic of Minimal art?). Sometimes close to the cartoon (Trickster Wall, 2009), these sets are places of production of vernacular practices (DIY, appropriation, diversion) rather than signs, noting, in the words of Michel de Certeau, a certain "cultural poaching".
Gallien Déjean, 2010
GRANITE IS A HARD CORE ROCK
For The Glasgow School of Art MFA degree show Jocelyn Villemont presented a collection of works entitled Granite is a Hardcore Rock in a small, self-contained room in the former Glue Factory on Speirs Locks.
The collection explored the physical, literal and cultural associations of the rock, and comprised a series of wall-based works, two sculptures and a sound piece.
The wall-based works included a series of fluorescent 'posters' with variations on the work's title, altering the absurd statement 'GRANITE IS A HARD CORE ROCK' to the truisms 'GRANITE IS A HARD ROCK' and 'GRANITE IS HARD'. Pasted on grey MDF boards (with the corners cut off to imitate broken paving stones) and mounted against the breeze-block walls, the posters looked like something between a poster promoting a club night in the student union and a slogan on a political fly poster.
Alongside the posters, and also mounted on grey MDF, was a photograph of two small boys (a childhood picture of the artist and his brother) pushing a huge rock several times their own size, and clearly making no progress in their pursuit. Coincidentally the two boys are dressed in fluorescent outfits, providing an indication of the age of the photograph, and a formal link to the posters.
On the floor was large granite disc, marked with a smiling 'acid' face like an oversized ecstasy pill. Balanced upright so that it appeared almost weightless, the smiley face was drained of its normal yellow hue and took on the sombre tones of the grey concrete floor.
On the other side of the room stood a pair of speakers covered in a homemade camouflage net, splattered with grey paint like a cheap terrazzo floor rather than a standard moss green. Underneath the speakers pumped out a monotonous, though slightly unusual, techno beat, seemingly made from the sound of stones hitting against one another like executive office toy.
The works presented at the MFA show are amongst a number of works by Villemont that use rocks and stones in various states and guises. From cast concrete paving stones moulded into fake boulders to large plinths covered in marble effect vinyl, the physical qualities and magical associations of this traditional material (and its numerous imitations) present an ongoing fascination for the artist. By combining the ritualistic use of ancient stones with the altered states induced by music and chemicals, Villemont unites two diverse subcultures though a play on words and objects.
Contextualising these works, and Villemont’s practice in general, is his collaborative project 'It's Our Playground', an online artist-run space. IOP projects are virtual exhibitions that overcome the physical constraints of the real world by using the unlimited space and endless images available on the internet. A recent project entitled ‘The World is Stone’ (itsourplayground.com/23/the_world_is_stone) presents his own work alongside other rock-related creations including well-known artworks, found images and home videos. This surprisingly seductive online environment provides an ideal context for his work while prompting us to question whether a good picture is as important as a good work, echoing Villemont’s interest in the qualities of re-creation and imitation.
Kitty Anderson, 2011
MINING THE HORIZON
Pursuing moments of traction between subaltern narratives, namely the druidical prehistoric and 1980s acid club and rave culture, Villemont’s video work ‘Hard Times’ brings seemingly incongruous histories into proximity. A perfectly carved slab of granite in the form of a smiley face, usually associated with stoner and dance cultures serves as the artist’s protagonist; as his foil, an aging raver. Their scripted conversation makes uncertain suggestions as to the stone’s history: a stone-aged rave, in which a winter solstice’s primal, ecclesiastical ecstatic is conflated with a techno-fuelled gathering of antediluvian shepherds. Villemont has placed the featured ‘smiley’ stone permanently in a rural location along the east coast of Scotland, attaching it to the mythical, ‘transcendent’ experience of standing stones. Yet the universal ciphers the artist locates in emoticons and “dancing language” deal with recognition and recurrence. The looped video becomes a Sisyphean encounter, a self-reflexive gesture that reprises both the stone’s predictive words and post-modern conditions of forgetting: “Basically, you don’t remember anything so you come back the next day or the next week”.
Visual motifs leak onto the gallery’s grey walls, which are covered with an almost scatological pattern of squiggled, caulky reliefs. Floor carpets and shirts hanging from the walls are similarly painted in the speckled, faux-stone Granito of kitchen countertops, inadequate office partitions and public toilet floors. Villemont fashions an uncertain environment for the viewer, which falters between illustration and installation. Drawing on classic designs – the monitor stand is a doubtful, expedient nod to Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton cabinet – pop music videos and faded clubs, the space is rendered with an outmoded patina, a kitschy, flattening monochrome. Within ‘Hard Times’ and its surrounding, theatrical environment, Villemont creates narratives and objects which (literally) converse across time. Tracking the epistemologies of the ‘stone’, wordplays and semantic games give way to a vernacular that proposes interruptions, folds and repeats in how we read history.
Nicola Celia Wright, 2011
How to explain the relative lack of cultural studies in aesthetic practices and theoretical hexagonal? This may be because there are in France, since the post-war, ideological mistrust towards the arts and popular traditions that young artists such as Jocelyn Villemont prefer to draw their inspiration from Anglo-Saxon sources. Whether it's rock'n'roll, tuning, sports, folk or indigenous peoples, the formal vocabulary employed by Jocelyn Villemont comes from a broader conception of culture and the exchange ratios that raises.
Born in France, installed for some time in Glasgow, Jocelyn Villemont belongs to a generation that revisits the historical nesting of minimalist and pop legacies. By mixing these influences in his work, he reveals the strategic proximity of these two neo-avant-garde - abandonment of notions of originality and authenticity, integration of industrial and extra-artistic themes - and reassess their relevance to the confronting some of the fields contemporary culture. His installations contradict the historical assumptions that confuse rationalism and minimalism. The return of the repressed post-modern play here in the form of a recurrence of the story in its broadest sense - both legendary, magical, fun and efficient - and a vitalist conception of nature; not without mentioning a certain kinship with the minimalist psychedelic West Coast trend of the United States. In this respect a work like Pacific Palisade (a screen made of plywood surfboards), suggests both the first sculptures made by Anne Truitt in 1961, that the famous Planks by John McCracken, left here in a primitive unfinished state. A mottled and bastardized Minimalism, therefore, by the intrusion of traditional combinations outside the scope of fine arts.
Jocelyn Villemont, who has assimilated the pop lesson, is not interested, however, into a generic imagery mass as developed in the 1960s: no soup cans or movie starlets. The frame of his work, however, buys the records of specific popular cultures and subcultures. With Sunburst for Chief Joseph (2009), for example, he created an altar consisting of a minimal disk of polished wood, of a carpet and a few branches, evoking the crafts and cultural practices of Native American Indians. For The Force of Nature (2009), the artist, during a performance, debits tree trunks into slices to make rough dumbbells. Between logging and body-building is emerging, in short, a Do It Yourself gymnastics. Sports halls, studios repeated folk altars ... Facilities generally operate as potential scenic area (must it be reminded that theatricality, according to Michael Fried, is a characteristic of Minimal art?). Sometimes close to the cartoon (Trickster Wall, 2009), these sets are places of production of vernacular practices (DIY, appropriation, diversion) rather than signs, noting, in the words of Michel de Certeau, a certain "cultural poaching".
Gallien Déjean, 2010
GRANITE IS A HARD CORE ROCK
For The Glasgow School of Art MFA degree show Jocelyn Villemont presented a collection of works entitled Granite is a Hardcore Rock in a small, self-contained room in the former Glue Factory on Speirs Locks.
The collection explored the physical, literal and cultural associations of the rock, and comprised a series of wall-based works, two sculptures and a sound piece.
The wall-based works included a series of fluorescent 'posters' with variations on the work's title, altering the absurd statement 'GRANITE IS A HARD CORE ROCK' to the truisms 'GRANITE IS A HARD ROCK' and 'GRANITE IS HARD'. Pasted on grey MDF boards (with the corners cut off to imitate broken paving stones) and mounted against the breeze-block walls, the posters looked like something between a poster promoting a club night in the student union and a slogan on a political fly poster.
Alongside the posters, and also mounted on grey MDF, was a photograph of two small boys (a childhood picture of the artist and his brother) pushing a huge rock several times their own size, and clearly making no progress in their pursuit. Coincidentally the two boys are dressed in fluorescent outfits, providing an indication of the age of the photograph, and a formal link to the posters.
On the floor was large granite disc, marked with a smiling 'acid' face like an oversized ecstasy pill. Balanced upright so that it appeared almost weightless, the smiley face was drained of its normal yellow hue and took on the sombre tones of the grey concrete floor.
On the other side of the room stood a pair of speakers covered in a homemade camouflage net, splattered with grey paint like a cheap terrazzo floor rather than a standard moss green. Underneath the speakers pumped out a monotonous, though slightly unusual, techno beat, seemingly made from the sound of stones hitting against one another like executive office toy.
The works presented at the MFA show are amongst a number of works by Villemont that use rocks and stones in various states and guises. From cast concrete paving stones moulded into fake boulders to large plinths covered in marble effect vinyl, the physical qualities and magical associations of this traditional material (and its numerous imitations) present an ongoing fascination for the artist. By combining the ritualistic use of ancient stones with the altered states induced by music and chemicals, Villemont unites two diverse subcultures though a play on words and objects.
Contextualising these works, and Villemont’s practice in general, is his collaborative project 'It's Our Playground', an online artist-run space. IOP projects are virtual exhibitions that overcome the physical constraints of the real world by using the unlimited space and endless images available on the internet. A recent project entitled ‘The World is Stone’ (itsourplayground.com/23/the_world_is_stone) presents his own work alongside other rock-related creations including well-known artworks, found images and home videos. This surprisingly seductive online environment provides an ideal context for his work while prompting us to question whether a good picture is as important as a good work, echoing Villemont’s interest in the qualities of re-creation and imitation.
Kitty Anderson, 2011
MINING THE HORIZON
Pursuing moments of traction between subaltern narratives, namely the druidical prehistoric and 1980s acid club and rave culture, Villemont’s video work ‘Hard Times’ brings seemingly incongruous histories into proximity. A perfectly carved slab of granite in the form of a smiley face, usually associated with stoner and dance cultures serves as the artist’s protagonist; as his foil, an aging raver. Their scripted conversation makes uncertain suggestions as to the stone’s history: a stone-aged rave, in which a winter solstice’s primal, ecclesiastical ecstatic is conflated with a techno-fuelled gathering of antediluvian shepherds. Villemont has placed the featured ‘smiley’ stone permanently in a rural location along the east coast of Scotland, attaching it to the mythical, ‘transcendent’ experience of standing stones. Yet the universal ciphers the artist locates in emoticons and “dancing language” deal with recognition and recurrence. The looped video becomes a Sisyphean encounter, a self-reflexive gesture that reprises both the stone’s predictive words and post-modern conditions of forgetting: “Basically, you don’t remember anything so you come back the next day or the next week”.
Visual motifs leak onto the gallery’s grey walls, which are covered with an almost scatological pattern of squiggled, caulky reliefs. Floor carpets and shirts hanging from the walls are similarly painted in the speckled, faux-stone Granito of kitchen countertops, inadequate office partitions and public toilet floors. Villemont fashions an uncertain environment for the viewer, which falters between illustration and installation. Drawing on classic designs – the monitor stand is a doubtful, expedient nod to Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton cabinet – pop music videos and faded clubs, the space is rendered with an outmoded patina, a kitschy, flattening monochrome. Within ‘Hard Times’ and its surrounding, theatrical environment, Villemont creates narratives and objects which (literally) converse across time. Tracking the epistemologies of the ‘stone’, wordplays and semantic games give way to a vernacular that proposes interruptions, folds and repeats in how we read history.
Nicola Celia Wright, 2011
