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...et fondatrice. (1) But like him, one would also have to nuance such a claim and try to understand the manifestations of violence which, at times, seem to be imposed by apparent social conventions, the purpose of which one does not always grasp.
If there is violence, as Alain Pessin writes in the introduction to Violence et transgression, "from the moment one oversteps the norm and the law from both the interior and the exterior" (2)--which some might also call transgression (of the forbidden)-surely there is violence in the work of Mumbai-born artist Maria Marshall. In her work, the mise en scene of children, with references to play, involves the child above and beyond the limits of familiar realities. In no way does this violence serve to denounce a situation, nor does it serve to witness intolerable acts; it appears much more surreptitiously, adding a strange weight to the image which, in the context of the representation of childhood, throws things off balance.
Maria Marshall addresses the world children in an odd way though her films and videos--a world which, moreover, is often represented by the figures of her two sons. As well, she often appears in her own videos, as is the case with Pinocchio (2003), in which she is represented with a doll on her knees. Thus, artist and mother simultaneously explore the sites of childhood, trying to rejoin other psychological spheres, which are often identified with the adult and, more precisely, those spheres for which "the make-like" arises on condition that it call into question our values and prejudices.
Her images unfold with insidious brutality and with a slowness necessary to imprint the scene precisely in our minds and make us aware of our helplessness when faced with the child, whose exhibitionism is, to say the least, rather disconcerting. For example, in When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Cooker (1998)--a sentence the child uttered one day--the artist's son, aged two, smokes a cigarette, its glowing tip giving the impression that the inhalation is real. Predictably, smoke rises from the child's mouth and, during the twenty-second duration of the video, fills the space occupied by the image. Meanwhile, the child blows smoke rings as if he were repeating what the adult had shown him to be an entertaining performance. (3) In fact, behind this act lies the appearance of a game which, to some degree, entitles the child to perform this sort of imitation. In a way, Maria Marshall places herself within the logic of "one must not believe but make believe," which was already at play in the work of Gianni Motti, (4) and the comparison is not limited to this example alone. As such, this work remains a work of fiction, insofar as it uses, to achieve its ends, a context or accessories which, in staging young children, "make us believe" that we are dealing with games. These games should nevertheless be understood by their equally implicit "serious" content. For the game is not only fun, as Jacinto Lageira aptly explains in the catalogue accompanying Marie Fraser's exhibition "Le ludique," when he says that a "pure, completely gratuitous game has none of the seriousness of play, because a game must be taken seriously to be experienced as such." (5) To which he adds, in conclusion, that "a game with nothing at stake is boring; it is not interesting, [while] a game that is too real is no longer a game." (6) From this, and from what we know about Marshall, we now understand that as much as "make believe," investing play with reality turns out to be fundamental for play to occur.
In fact, for there to be play, the play space should be situated between make-real and entertainment. However, in Marshall's case, not only is the entertaining aspect virtually absent, it even reverses itself to make way for some unsettling, twisted effects, which intervene in our "judgement" of the work. One learns that Marshall has (obviously) used special effects in the mise en scene of the child with the cigarette, special effects which in no way change the final impression. It seems appalling that a child could develop such bad behaviour and, from this "state of fiction," one presumes that if faced with such behaviour one would, of course, forbid it. Strangely enough, violence in Marshall's work occurs perhaps less in the scene as such, which we know to be the product of pure invention, than in the putting to the test of what we might label human or social values, even morals, to use a loaded term. Or, to put it otherwise, what is unsettling is not the content of the mini-tale we are being told, but the acknowledgement of our intransigence or, at the very least, our troubled response....
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine
Philippe Grandrieux: l'au-dela des visages.(Biography), July 01, 2006
Bruno Dumont: le sacre et notre experience de la violence.(French film..., July 01, 2006
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, ed., The Memo Book: Filme, Videos Und Inst..., July 01, 2006
Martin Kippenberger: Tate Modern.(mainstream painting's artist)(Biogra..., July 01, 2006
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