Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet The Exoteric Wall

With their fictional institute International Institute of Important Items (I.I.I.I.) the French artists Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet (b. 1981/1981, live und work in Paris) produce genre films, lecture performances, guided tours, talks, installations and radio programmes. Fragments of literature and film, historical archive material and (pseudo-)scientific documents form the inspiration for professionally researched and extravagant plots in which fiction and reality, illusion and spectacle flow indissolubly together.

In their first institutional solo show in Switzerland they are showing two films that they have linked together into a walk-through installation; the super-8 film Pythagoras and the Monsters (2011) and the 16mm film made especially for the exhibition, The Wall that Bleeds (2012). In the spatial installation elements from both films are taken up and complemented with a wall painting and several objects so that the motifs link into a coherent narrative. The thread running through the exhibition is spatial separation, the temporary exclusion of the audience, in the form of curtains or walls, that is repeated in the films and also in the spatial installations. In cultural history, curtains have often served the purpose of suspense, giving the audience an empty space for the imagination and a cause for spine-chilling expectation by partially or entirely concealing an event. The secret look behind the curtain or the abrupt revelation of something hidden appears as a motif in countless works in the history of art, literature and film. Hervé & Maillet give their films the aura of bleached historical film recordings with Super8 or 16mm film projections in which elements of various genres, from sword and sandal to horror movies are connected into mysterious plot strands. The representation of fiction in historical costume and the re-enactment of historical motifs are important methods of their artistic practice. Their installations thus often convey the character of a pseudo-scientific research display.

Pythagoras and the Monsters is a mixture of horror and history movie dealing with the legendary historical figure of Pythagoras. Many ambiguities and contradictions surround Pythagoras, and the film places the scholar in different scenes as a scientist, a hermitic shaman, a hero defeating a curious monster on the bank of a river, as a romantic knight on horseback or a messianic guru with grieving disciples. According to historical sources he founded a school whose members formed a conspiratorial community. According to one tradition, Pythagoras only ever passed his knowledge on to his pupils orally, hidden behind a curtain or in dark caves. This half-historical, half-legendary material is ideal for treatment by Hervé & Maillet. The artists interweave the motif of the curtain with the genres of the horror and history movie and return to this element on different levels of the exhibition. For example, they paint a wall with the trompe l’oeil of a curtain edged with a traditional floral pattern from the Glarus textile industry, thus establishing a local connection with the Kunsthaus.

At the centre of the film The Wall that Bleeds, produced in the genre of a psycho-thriller, is a wall papered with elaborate floral patterns. A man is the victim of claustrophobic fantasies, documented in a tense panning shot over various stages with changing wallpaper motifs. With a terrified look in his eyes he passes through various scenes in which he seems to fall victim to an invisible power that lies within the papered wall. Here too the artists use pertinent motifs from the genre of the horror film and the gothic novel. In such works decorated wallpaper is often used as an element that can lead someone into madness or behind which invisible powers are hidden. Other art-historical implications, such as the modernist polemic Ornament and Crime (1908) by Adolf Loos, the pioneer of modern architecture, are references that the artists call in. There the ornament, or a piece of ornamented applied art, stand for the exaggerated and inferior culture of Jugendstil. Counter to this, Loos postulates strict functionality and the absence of ornament as a sign of higher cultural development.

When carrying out research in Glarus, the two artists encountered further elements that they introduced into their installation. For example they present textile samples from the local 19th century textile industry or collect elements at the Anna Göldi Museum in Mollis. In the Glarus ‹Witch› trial (1782), the last in Europe, again there is an enticing connection between history and horror, a defining factor in the work of Hervé & Maillet.

For the exhibition in Glarus, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet have created not only a walk through the work complex, but also a special lecture performance through the exhibition. During the opening, the artists themselves will carry out a guided tour in English and French. In this ironic and poetic performance, they deliver their talk with severely combed-back hair and in uniform twin-sets. Rhetorically brilliant, sometimes in the linguistic jargon of science and didacticism, sometimes in the chatty tone of the story-teller, they discuss the essence of history and art, research and the academic principles behind it. In the lecture performance they also investigate communication strategies typical of cultural institutions. This performance will also serve as a script for later guided tours. It takes in the presentation of additional research material, with which visitors will be sensitised to the backgrounds of facts and fictions. This hybrid form of story-telling, which simultaneously includes fragments from historical archives, pop culture and everyday life, also comments in passing on the explosion of all bodies of knowledge that reaches its peak in the Internet, and fundamentally changes the conditions of story-telling.

The artist duo’s works have previously been shown in solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2012), the synagogue in Delme (2012), at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims (2011) and at the Galerie Marcelle Alix in Paris (2010). Frac Nord Pas de Calais in Dunkerque (2011), the Centre d’art contemporain de Genève (2011), the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010) and the Grazer Kunstverein (2009) have included the works in group projects.