mercredi 5 octobre (commissaire Manon Tourigny)

Nadège Grebmeier Forget

manger lécher rentrer couler sortir pousser tourner embrasser

 The grotesque and the sublime. Sublimely sublime. Sublimating. Sublimated. Subliminal. Sated. Saturated. Scintillated. Suffocated.

The grostesque and the sexy. Sexy? Painfully sexy. An orifice of extraordinary proportions lights up the screen at the far end of the pool. The artist hiding – the artist residing in another part of the space, her own backstage. What goes on backstage? Erving Goffman would like (us) to know.

What goes on is this: bottles and jars and containers and receptacles of liquids and solids and candied small objects. Golden and silver sprinkles too – the kind that make collages vibrate.

This is definitely a sensory collage, an imbibed collage of drunken proportions that makes me cringe and salivate all at once. I am excited and mortified. I am titillated and disturbed. She becomes edible. She eats, slurps inhales slobbers and she becomes edible. Scatological. A substance resembling shit emerges but from the wrong orifice.

des doigts qui poussent la langue qui tourne la salive qui coule et la bouffe qui devient du sperme qui devient de la merde toutes ces sucreries qui jouissent l’alimentaire et le pornographique en mode performatif c’est cochon, littéralement 

 Repeatedly kissing the drawing paper placed on the floor – makes a transformation in us. We don’t feel the same way each time she comes back to the sheets to luxuriatingly place lips in a succession of seductive smacks.

Takes a mouthful of sprinkles on her tongue a perfect candy blanket and moans. Then crunches and it becomes distasteful as she opens her mouth again and again to reveal a pulverized candy coating.

(A trace of these successive actions is also created during the performance courtesy of Photobooth and she plans to post these to facebook – creating a third stage of performance (the first being her backstage, the second the screen in front us, our mediated access to her)).

An extreme performance, which is extremely evocative, it compels us to wonder: how intimately is food tied in with a person’s identity? In the case of Nadège’s performance we can no longer distinguish between what is to be ingested as (nourishing?) substance (liquid, solid and all sorts in between) and what is to be worn – which is to say, the way in which we engage in a daily re-invention of ourselves to be presented out to the rest of the world. In her backstage we witness a multiplicity of possibilities, of possible bodies in a continual transformation. Between what is food and what is her body.

Que retenons-nous de cette performance? Repensons-nous à la présence si naturelle de l’artiste, sa convivialité, aux séries d’actions qu’elle a posées ou plutôt à ses regards qui croisaient le nôtre et qui nous informaient qu’elle savait très bien ce qu’elle était en train de faire? Et nous : quelles permissions sommes-nous prêts à nous accorder?

Nadège Grebmeier Forget