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8/9/2019 Les Armes d’ Acier
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/les-armes-d-acier 1/2
Les Armes d’ Acier / The Tears of Steel by Marie Jo Lafontaine
Sometime in 88 (or was it 89? I can’t recall), at the front space in the Whitechapel Gallerystands Marie-Jo Lafontaine’s monumental Les Armes d’Acier constructed from twenty
seven video monitors encased in black framing structures. The voice of Maria Callas
soaring in aria provides the soundtrack to images of handsome young men weightlifting ina gymnasium. They have the glamourous, sleek beauty of a young Richard Gere, the
archetype of the successful have-it-all professional seen in endless advertisements for
aftershave, fast cars, financial services. These men strain to maintain their perfection andthe ongoing effort to sculpt the body is highlighted by the steel machinery around them andthe hard black geometric forms encasing the image.
This is man caught in the machine and made machinic. Syncopation develops
as the image changes and shifts across the screens in cycles. The male figure in close uptakes on an aspect of martyrdom as seen in countless historical paintings. This straining yet
disciplined physical effort becomes a thing in itself without a foreseeable end other than
upholding great strength and thus appears sisyphisian.
I struggled with the impact of this work. Its connotations of fascism and spectacularisation
possessed disarming neutrality impossible to decipher.
It appeared to define a surface beauty dictated by actions of the body and in turn confrontthe viewer with their own act of ‘looking’ and consuming these images.
The workings of capitalism seemed oddly at the centre of this piece.
As many works I may consider as having a significant influence, I did not necessarily like
what I saw. Indeed, liking had and has very little to do with it. Les Armes d’ Acier
penetrated me and forced me to ask myself difficult questions.
8/9/2019 Les Armes d’ Acier
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/les-armes-d-acier 2/2
What was most compelling about all of Lafontaine’s work was her use of the monitor, used
sculpturally to architect a psychological space and to implicate the viewer within this arena.
In work after work she challenged assumptions about spectatorship while exposing anintricate geometry of looks and gazes, in which images and actions interrogate one another
and their audience.
At this point in time, my peers and I were working primarily with the monitor, not only as a
piece of equipment but as an object which had different connotations depending on where
and how it was placed, while making references to surveillance, the viewing of television, ascreen for a private space, a vessel for portraying time captured, frozen, re-run, repeated.
Most artists using the moving image were seriously engaged in the placement of the
viewing apparatus to create dense and particular environments – this positionality beingcrucial to the work. Video projectors were a luxury but even at that they were used with
caution.
Currently the video projection has come to be de rigueur . It is both dismaying andrevealing to see projection used so often without any consideration for the work or the
space in which it is placed – thus in re-visiting Lafontaine’s work again I feel some realexcitement.