The Centre de la photographie Genève is very happy to present to Art Genève Jules Spinatsch’s latest work with the enigmatic title: Tableau d’Éclats / L’Éclat c’est moi.
Far from referring to light or even to the Enlightenment, Tableau d'Éclats deals allegorically with a subject that is the very opposite of the Enlightenment's desire to form public opinion on a rational basis. The artist refers to a text published in 1989 by Helmut Moser with a title not without humour (black): "L'Éclat, c'est moi" followed by the subtitle, "Au sujet de la fascination pour nos scandales". The political scientist observes that in our "democracies", of which the press was supposed to be the fourth pillar, the mass media are less and less involved in the rational formation of public opinion. On the contrary, they intervene by "revealing" scandals. Helmut Moser observed the mechanisms of their treatment and identified 7 stages in the course of their emergence in the political landscape (revelation, publication, attack, defence, dramatization, negative identification and degradation of status).
But Jules Spinatsch does not illustrate what the sociologist said. The artist first photographed muddy eruptions in Iceland. By analyzing the images of viscous liquid to establish a kind of visual language, he decides on the hanging in 7 categories and finds the title Tableau d'Éclats for the whole and L'Éclat c'est moi for the individual photographs. Convinced that he must not be the only one to have found this pun, he came across on the Internet the publication of the same name by sociologist Helmut Moser, which also applies to his thesis, 7 categories.
The Geneva Photography Centre will present the two sides of this work: 3 large individual photographs and in 7 series, 112 photographs of volcanic mud eruptions, small bluffs of apparently unscaled appearance and giving the impression of an accident or even a disaster. These circular photographs, presented in a linear grid, are only traces of permanent explosions occurring daily under our feet, a few kilometres inside our planet.
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Jules Spinatsch has already shown his first panoramic work at the Centre de la photographie Genève in 2003. Temporary Discomfort – Chapter IV PULVER GUT was a view of snow-covered Davos, packed with fences, gates and all sorts of anti-riot devices, during a ten-day period. By hacking the webcams that were supposed to display skiing conditions, the photographer succeeded in showing how an alpine village can turn into a high-security place under siege. Since then, Jules Spinatsch has appli [...]
Jules Spinatsch has already shown his first panoramic work at the Centre de la photographie Genève in 2003. Temporary Discomfort – Chapter IV PULVER GUT was a view of snow-covered Davos, packed with fences, gates and all sorts of anti-riot devices, during a ten-day period. By hacking the webcams that were supposed to display skiing conditions, the photographer succeeded in showing how an alpine village can turn into a high-security place under siege. Since then, Jules Spinatsch has applied his system of methodical scanning of a given place to other situations, whether during a qualification football game for the World Cup 2006 between Switzerland and France, or the meeting of Toulouse city council on 30th June 2006. The artist’s practice is double-edged indeed. While we are fascinated by the huge amount of information available to us, including the tiniest details that can be seen in large-scale blow-ups – such as the hand-written message left on a deputy’s desk, which gave the work its title Fabre n’est pas venu (Fabre didn’t turn up), the technique that Spinatsch uses can also turn into a fearsome, all-controlling weapon. There is a fine line between the panorama and the Panopticum.
Jules Spinatsch is known for his framing method, employing first a webcam, then an SLR camera. He sets the timing of the shots and the field covered by the camera, sometimes covering 360°. The CPG was the first institution to show his Semiautomatic Photography in 2003. That body of work was subsequently displayed at some of the leading museums and biennial exhibits, from the MoMA in New York to the Tate Modern in London, by way of the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Kunsthaus Zürich.The CPG showed a retrospective of these pieces in 2018–2019 and has just published a book under the same title. Super Meta Eclat consists again of semiautomatic photography, but without the panoramic aspect.The camera here was pointed at a volcanically erupting hot spring in Iceland. This showing in OSMOSCOSMOSis a first, while also representing the CPG’s sixth collaboration with the artist. The video projection of this work creates a permanent flow of impressions that become superimposed, oscillating between abstraction and representation with a meditative effect.
10 collaborations took place until today between Jules Spinatsch and CPG.
