Event detail
In Ang Lee's film The Ice Storm (1997), Mikey Carver gives a presentation to his class on smell: "Because of molecules we are connected to the outside world from our bodies. Like when you smell things, because when you smell a smell it’s not really a smell, it’s a part of the object that has come off of it, molecules. So when you smell something bad, it’s like in a way you’re eating it. This is why you should not really smell things, in the same way that you don’t eat everything in the world around you because as a smell, it gets inside of you. So the next time you go into the bathroom after someone else has been there, remember what kinds of molecules you are in fact eating."
In Laure Prouvost’s work, smells, sounds and glances connect us directly to the general ripeness. From the drawings to the videos, the tenor is one of forced intimacy. It evokes the body odour of a fellow commuter, both repellent and strangely eloquent: a smell “is not really a smell,” but an unspoken contract, an illicit intercourse. And the voices – which carry over from the videos to speak to us from even the paintings and photographs – attest to this too, as they act on the overwhelming evidence of their senses and demand, with stalkerish confidence, that we reciprocate: “You are the only one…”
Prouvost draws on the strange, daily, deictic assault of contemporary language in the same way, savouring the unasked-for intimacy of a faux-personal spam message or a threatening chain letter. These ridiculous demands nonetheless inflict tiny fractures on our sense of separateness and self-containment. We cannot rid ourselves of the residual hope that these carpet-bombing come-ons are really for us, rather than, as Marks & Spencers once put it, “exclusively for everyone.” But for Prouvost’s confiding personas, the desire for such a sense of connection constantly spills over: a reverie over an orphaned photo spirals off into conjecture and towards the further reaches of empathy, pathological projection.
Spillage, cross-contamination, synaesthesia: these carry over into the plethora of Prouvost’s forms. In her videos, pure colour fields come to stand in for smells and sensations, in a kind of hypertrophied Symbolism. A box constructed for the viewer does not so much isolate them as make them aware of other people entering their crawl space, while for several works shown on monitors the painted mise-en-scène is also splattered across the surface of the monitor. Her paintings often seem to be fringed by suburban foliage, as if in a bathetic moment a baroque picture frame had collapsed into subject matter; they are entropic, even if they sometimes come with headphones which seem to narrativise them – before we realise the narrator is another unreliable alibi with designs on us.
Heed the voices, and forego your “personal space”. This one is just for you.
Mike Sperlinger
Laure Prouvost was born in France and completed her BA in Fine Art at Central St Martins School of Art. Prouvost has exhibited widely, and her work is held in the collection of The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in the UK. She is director of tank.tv and was recently selected for East International 2009.
