Hervé Graumann

Hervé Graumann – Geneva – installations by the artist are on display at the Musee d’art moderne et contemporain

ArtForum, Sept, 2003 by Hans Rudolf Reust

Raoul Pictor cherche son style… «Anniversary show 1993-2003»

Composition (version flash), 2003 – inkjet print – 350 x 500 cm.

That Raoul Pictor is a painter is obvious. Wearing a black beret and the white smock of his profession, he paces back and forth in his studio in search of inspiration, from the stool to the bookshelf to the table where a wineglass stands and then over to the easel. Wildly, he dunks a thick brush and begins to paint, accompanied by the sounds of splattering pigment. By the time he takes his masterpiece down from the easel and carries it off, we’ve still seen only the back of the canvas–and, indeed, we can only view the completed artwork by printing it out. With Raoul Pictor, Hervé Graumann has created a virtual painter who pursues the aura of the painted original via the random constellation of a computer-generated image. With the click of a mouse, our dear painter will paint as many pictures as we like. The auctorial gesture of painting serves to animate the black-box image production of the computer processor, which is ultimately invisible. The computer as artist, assuming it has an intelligence distinguishable from the designs of its programmers, wears every face and no face at all. So why not the one under the beret of a Montmartre painter?

At the exhibition in Geneva, this piece, Raoul Pictor cherche son style… (Raoul Pictor searches for his style…), 1993, could be navigated from the sofa in a small lounge, bringing a living-room mode of perception into the museum while ironizing the aesthetics of image consumption in the ’90s. L.o.s.t., 1997, Graumann’s piece for Documenta 10, was housed exclusively on the Web. In a luminous white circle controlled by the mouse, like the beam of a searching flashlight, fragments of a text appear–traces of language in the search for a network of lost existence, ending in an offer of contact with a cryptic e-mail address, perhaps that of the person lost. The blackened monitor screen becomes a metaphor for the dark, incomprehensible side of global connectedness.

In comparison, the installation of Pattern–Vanité 2b, 2003, which filled one of the bays at MAMCO such that it became inaccessible, seems easily comprehensible. Graumann worked for a time in the neuroscience and dermatology department at a hospital in Geneva, and here he created a sculpturally fantastic ensemble from the little objects one typically finds by a patient’s bed: Surrounded by the sweeping oval of a cannula, pill cups in primary colors are piled up along with a gleaming, silver-colored plastic plate topped with meringue; a CD shining in rainbow colors rests on a paper doily with an enormous nail that has pierced a tin-foil ball; on the very top of the plastic-cup tower is a little polystyrene skull with silver rays (in the form of pipe cleaners) beaming from its dark eye sockets, gleaming in the bright museum light. Next to this is a still life with a breakfast egg, a red rose, and a large syringe. The many elements of this nature morte alternate between the traditional meanings of a memento mori and the contemporary realities of high technology in medicine. On the floor, through the perfectly executed repetition of the same filigree, eighty times, a hallucinatory pattern emerges–threatening to reproduce endlessly and to absorb the entire world. The fascination of glittery Christmas decorations in a store display is combined here with the fear of the uncontrollable growth of one’s own cells.

Pattern – Vanité 2b, 2003 – installation, objets divers / installation, sundry objects – 400 x 500 cm.

–Hans Rudolf Reust Translated from German by Sara Ogger.

© 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
© 2003 Gale Group

in cat Cairo Biennial 2006

e-still life, 2006 – endura print mounted on alu dibond – 180 x 220 cm.

In the 1990s, Hervé Graumann was among the pioneers of digital media art in Switzerland. He became widely known in 1993 with his work “Raoul Pictor cherche son style…” (1993), a slightly modernized version of which is available on the Internet to this day (www.raoulpictor.com). In this computer animation, we can watch the artist Raoul Pictor – a simple little cartoon man of the generation of “Super Mario” – at work: he is painting a picture for us. It is only at the end of the roughly five-minute clip that we get a front view of the painting once we have printed it out. Until then, we follow the painter, who is represented with all the characteristics of the archetypal romantic artist, through the heights and depths of the creative process: he mixes colors, he consults works of literature, he experiences artistic ecstasy in the act of painting, he interrupts his work to take a drink etc. At the end, the finished painting bearing the signature of the artist is ready for print-out. Both the creative process and the printed “painting” are different every time due to the digital random generator used for the animation.

On the face of it, Graumann’s animation appears to be an amusing persiflage on an obsolete image of the artist. Upon closer contemplation, however, it calls for some reflection on the condition of art and the status of the artist in the era of digital reproduction. On the one hand, we have modern new media artist Hervé Graumann who writes programs that in turn generate pictures. As is the case with computer lyrics, the question arises what we are actually holding in our hand when the printer spits out a “painting”: is it a work of art by Hervé Graumann? by Raoul Pictor? or no art at all? On the other hand, the digital world presents us with the classic view of artistic genius: Raoul Pictor with his brush and his beret fighting an inner battle to find his own “personal style”, unique and authentic, qualities that the artist substantiates by putting his signature on the paintings. A rather outmoded image of the contemporary artist perhaps, yet one that is still at the heart of the world of art and its economic structures. At least none of the young computer and Internet artists has so far succeeded in establishing himself on the Mount Olympus of contemporary art with programmed works that can be reproduced in any quantity.

The characteristic wit and critical potential of many of Hervé Graumann’s works is based on a process of a transformation and dislocation whereby elements are displaced from one system to another. As part of this dislocation, certain rules from the old system are retained in the new one, and it is for the very fact that they seem out of place there that they become noticeable. In the video sculptures “EZmodels”, virtual rides through computer-generated rooms, Hervé Graumann uses a computer to convert photographs into three-dimensional objects. Whereas mental adjustments are easily made for the opposite process of flattening space to create a photograph the resultant products being read as a faithful replica of reality, the conversion of photographs into three-dimensional structures gives rise to a disconcerting and uncanny world with visual blanks revealing all that was lost when the photographs were made in the first place. The same disconcerting quality can still be detected in the virtual worlds of computer games, though it will probably not be long before we feel at home as much in the space of the video sculptures as we do in the showroom. The path from space to picture and back to space corresponds to the media change from nature to photography and from there to video. Hervé Graumann’s artistic research focuses on such media changes and their implications rather than the actual use of the “new media”.

At first sight, Hervé Graumann’s works from the series of “Patterns” which he shows in Cairo seem to represent what their title suggests: ornamental compositions with an endless repetition of a single motif. After all, it is precisely in the world of computers that such visual ornaments have once again attained a ubiquitous presence in the form of wallpapers for desktops and other sites. That said, Graumann’s “Patterns” only pretend to do justice to their name, for they were not created on the computer, in the economic spirit of “copy and paste”. Instead, they are based on traditional artistic handicraft: Hervé Graumann builds his compositions as spatial installations and subsequently photographs them for further use as a framed picture or wallpaper. Thus on the basis of various media changes, his patterns unite different genres characterized, in the European tradition, by different rules and valuations. The synthetic object accumulation of the installation – in the tradition of Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme – overlaps with the mimetic details of the perspectively shortened pictorial space of photography and also with the abstract world of the ornament with its balanced color and form compositions. Depending on point of view and cultural background, this interaction of various visual elements can be seen as a path from “low” to “high” and back to “low”. Akin to fables and travesty as a theatrical device, the real nature of the figures is revealed when they are dressed in fake clothes. But even the power of clothes only fully manifests itself when they are worn by fake figures.

Andreas Münch

Hans Rudolf Reust in Monography HG

“Échanges de surfaces”, 1990 – meubles, découpage, collage / furniture, cut up and collaged

Hervé Graumann’s work on the deep structures of a current worldview

Since Hervé Graumann exploited the personal computer at a very early stage in his artistic practice, one is often tempted to see him only as a pioneer of electronic media-based art in Switzerland. Since he uses names and signatures as elements of landscape representations or colour orders, one also suspects that conceptual art resonates in his oeuvre. In both cases, such identification results from hasty judgement based on technology alone, specifically the technological translation of a thought. However, closer study of Hervé Graumann’s work to date reveals many different forms of material and virtual articulation of a complex mental universe. The present publication offers an exciting opportunity to explore the artist’s work in a larger context. The following essay will attempt to analyse his practice with a view to the diversified means with which he transforms deep structures into surface structures.

The distinction between deep and surface structure goes back to the theory of transformational-generative grammar, advanced by Noam Chomsky in the late fifties of the last century. His grammar describes idealised speech situations, possible surface structures, which have been generated from a deep structure by means of transformation. The four essential transformative operations consist of substitution (replacing one or more elements by others), permutation (changing the sequence of elements), deletion (eliminating one or more elements) and addition (adding one or more elements). These four modes of transformation aptly describe Graumann’s work in structuralist terms, i.e. apart from any discussion of specific media, materials or the limitations of a defined approach. The only thing that the rules do not govern is the sequence in which they are applied.

Échanges de surfaces, 1992 – papiers de couleur, découpage, collage / coloured paper, cut up and collaged – (2 x) 50 x 70 cm.

Things / Pictures / Names with Rules and Controls

To save memory, not every picture in a sequence of pictures is stored in its entirety; an initial form is defined and the computer calculates only what deviates from this form in each subsequent picture. All the intersecting sets of pixels that describe the reproduction of an object in various positions become a picture in themselves. Graumann conducts a surprising investigation: he takes a picture of a rubber boot, duplicates it, overlaps the two pictures as if the one were the shadow of the other and by blacking out where they coincide, comes up with the contours of a third rubber boot. This shape is related to the object not directly but only indirectly through the computer. Digital economy leads to a model of second-order reality: to the original digital boot. As an intermediate image derived from pictures, this form is not pure simulation; it is in fact an auxiliary construction that contributes to making the digital re-production look even more like a precise illusionist rendition of surface structures. Yet it still remains a “landlocked” form, which is only twice conveyed and almost accidentally shows a similarity to the familiar shape of things. The processor follows its own logic in generating its own pictures out of the data of the visible world.

Cross objects, 1992 – photographies, découpage, collage, peinture noire / photographs, cut out and collaged, black paint – (3 x) 40 x 30 cm.

Are we here confronted with the age-old distinction between immovable substance and accident? Hervé Graumann is not looking for constants. Instead, in one example after the other, he examines the changes in the relational rules that govern the deep structures of the fleeting moments of visible reality. He brings the co-ordinates that determine our constructions of reality into play, and thereby puts aesthetic perception itself on the line. He does not select his rules of play arbitrarily; he educes them from the logic of the machine, from language, from the structure of a natural landscape, or from the statics of everyday things. However, by exposing the very rules that govern the construction of realities, he is also putting himself on the line. In the domain of art, the logical processes of the machine or the conventions of language are confronted with the potential of their incessant change.

A chair, a painted seascape: an object of everyday use and an object of non-teleological contemplation are sawed into numbered squares of equal surface and subjected to the same process of analytical dissection. Upon reassembling the squares in numerical order, the resamples once again form a chair and a picture of surf – but their inner cohesion has lost stability. Both their physical and their semantic engineering have become shaky. The sequence of volumetric elements can be altered according to a variety of regulatory systems. Cubes of the most varied orders can easily be interchanged. Substitution would break up the rough unity of matter; the only thing that remains constant is the immovable datum: the bit, as a pixel or “plastel”. The notion of a basic element of representation whose content and position can be changed at will is intimately associated with the long-cherished dream of the atom, as if the existing or any other conceivable world could be generated out of ineluctable, indivisible building blocks. Thinking in terms of data packages necessitates rules that regulate their relations and potential means of intervening in the program. Behind that assumption lies the lasting idea that one or countless worlds can be arbitrarily manipulated and controlled to the point of achieving the best of all possible worlds. 

In his well-known representation of the semantic triangle of the chair as object, photographic reproduction and the copy of an encyclopaedia entry (One and Three Chairs, 1965), Joseph Kosuth restricted himself to illustrating the connection in a theoretical drawing. Hervé Graumann offsets Kosuth’s concept with direct intervention in the object. His thinking is inseparable from the specific act. The chair and picture were, after all, visibly cut into pieces: Graumann’s redesign is an act of brute force. His handcrafted gesture returns the concept to the world of tangible objects and, with a gently ironic undertone, indicates that it is possible to effect visible change in surface structures through intervention in the program. But he also demonstrates the static limits of pure manipulability and thinking based on the fantasy of wide-ranging control. In a landscape of flowing borders, the self-contained form is tantamount to scandal. “…the continent of Atlantis was an island which lay, before the great flood, within an area we now call the Atlantic Ocean…”

Slight changes in rules therefore chart not only an open field of possibilities. Hervé Graumann discovers degrees of freedom in fixed controls as well. Every additional interrupter that is built in between a coloured light bulb and an outlet increases the potential of different possibilities – and decreases the probability that the current will actually flow. Greater complexity turns the simplest switch, with its binary choice of electricity or no electricity, into a random generator for the viewer – or user – of a work of art. The power of Graumann’s simple images illuminates the complexity of a reality under the thrall of high technology, although always with a comic touch that exposes the absurdity of seeking complete domination of circumstances. 

Proper names in various languages refer to colours or elements in nature. Hervé Graumann meets Ms. Snow, Ms. Mountain or Mr. Brook. He places Mr. Damien Blanc (white) on the shoulders of Mr. Alberto Blanc, and, by placing white on white, gently undermines the pathos of Kasimir Malevich’s spiritual approach. He accumulates names to form landscape tableaux. He also orders them according to their scripted image, alphabetically, by permutating abstract colour fields on the basis of their first letters in various languages. The order of things does not follow a unified system. Graumann interrelates different linguistic, visual and spatial principles of order. Visual and linguistic orders come in to play reciprocally as the point of departure for changing surface phenomena. By using signatures, Graumann injects handwriting into the picture and, therefore, the inimitable individual difference from a strictly conventional linguistic sign. Writing something down defines the moment of never-ending distinction from the word. A landscape of signatures on a canvas testifies to the unique presence of a subject in the work of art – “Mme Rossignol was here”, as if written on the wall of a house or scratched into the bark of a tree – while the genre of landscape painting simultaneously extinguishes this subjectivity – who is Mme Rossignol? 

The specific logic of one medium – word, writing, picture, space – opens new perspectives in another medium. Hervé Graumann does not aspire to synaesthesia – not even in the presumably historically unique encounter between transdisciplinary thinking and the technical potential of the computer as a universal medium for calculation, text, picture, moving image, sound and control instrument for their interaction. He inserts specific modes of thinking, as transformers, into other modes. After 20th-century art pioneered the great move towards breaking down boundaries, he now occupies an open medial field. The relationship of this artistic practice to the history of art lies in the very fact that it embraces several media and does not take place within or along the boundaries of the old disciplines. Changes are events. Today they spring from a specifically rooted thinking in a context subject to sudden, abrupt change – and not from thinking that is fixated on change and that follows the market’s permanent demand for innovation. 

Ornaments and Patterns of Meaning as Places of Action

A convoluted line drawing in colour is based on the principle that the colour changes every time one line intersects with another. This clear-cut self-imposed rule yields linear patterns that could never be invented in such fashion in a freehand drawing. The intersections are signs of the process of composition; they enable us to reconstruct the history of the drawing.
Hervé Graumann introduces the artist as author, not with the gesture of inspiration but rather as a discoverer and developer of principles that lead to further discoveries. In that respect he resembles a scientist doing research to define the parameters for his experiments. His self-imposed rules are not a concept of the kind advanced by Lawrence Weiner, according to whom the work need not necessarily be executed and, if executed, anybody can do it. Graumann’s rules are intersubjectively comprehensible, but they are also exhausted through unique or repeated application by the artist himself. He decides on the technique and the degree of execution. Precisely because the practical realisation of a transformer is necessary and not merely one potential mode of being for the work of art, it no longer needs to be repeated after it has once been formulated in the visible world. It makes no sense to know about countless variations of a single set. Curiosity regarding other transformers motivates Hervé Graumann to continue developing his work.

This would seem to be contradicted by Raoul Pictor’s interactive site on the Internet and by the Web-based interactive project for commissioned art for the Neuchâtel Bureau of Statistics. Here, steadily ongoing pictorial production is intrinsic to the work. Every additional picture by Raoul Pictor is like his first one since the random logic of the machine embeds it in the same aura of anonymous production, that curious form of non-reproducibility that springs from a printer kept running without interruption. In his contribution to the Internet project Shrink to Fit (2001/ 02), Hervé Graumann adopted the blackmail strategy of the anonymous letter. Web-site visitors can type a message whose letters look as if they had been cut out of a newspaper. The perpetrator’s traditional strategy of anonymity coincides with the anonymity of pressing the keyboard, thus digitally escaping the telltale fingerprint. However, the message cannot be mailed via the net; it has to be printed out and sent through real space via snail mail. As a result, the printed copy of the blackmail reassumes the status of an original. Once again, Hervé Graumann has established an unexpected, surprising link between two ordinarily separate systems in everyday life. The user can not tap into the programming of the deep structure in this work, which makes it as non-interactive as Raoul Pictor’s. Nonetheless, action must be taken in order to understand the meaning of the work. Many of Graumann’s works link this relationship to an act that viewers can carry out – at least mentally – without belabouring the interactivity much vaunted in art in the wake of new information and communication technologies. 

The blackmail office, 2001 – projet Internet / Internet project

The impression of digital pictorial production is inevitably evoked in the large patterns installed on the floor. In this case, the transformative principle of addition, the efficient repetitive gesture of copy and paste, would be within grasp were it not for the hands-off effect of the fragile engineering of the artist’s complex installations. The three-dimensional ornament, although spread out at our feet, cannot be seen all at once. In contrast to a pattern on a surface, the spatial structure changes with every change in vantage point. Every view of the installation, every static perception reveals new contiguities and therefore new semantic relations and insights. The pattern can be animated with a single gaze although it does not move. The act of seeing is in itself indeed an act. Skull, needle, egg and nail, cookie and CD-ROM accumulate on cardboard plates, in plastic cups and on placemats in extensive repetition of the same things, becoming not a surreal but rather a trans-real scenario. Looking, we traverse mental landscapes revealed in constantly changing panoramas. 

Thought-Rooms: Lost in Space

Human thought is increasingly interpreted in terms of mechanistic logic and as a metaphor of operating systems and program applications – at least in popular science. In 2002, Hervé Graumann spent several months as
artist-in-residence at the “Département des Neurosciences Cliniques et Dermatologie (Neuclid)“ of the medical faculty at the “Hôpitaux universitaires de Genève”. Inviting an artist to join a medical research facility contradicts the stereotype. Studying the physiological foundations of thought and daily life in a clinic, even watching brain surgery, was a logical consequence of Graumann’s analytic approach to his own thinking, the ceaseless experimentation that determines his artistic practice. Neuclid Team Spirit, the work he created for the hospital, consists of a mobile of Rubin Vases cut out of chrome-plated sheet metal. The perception of figure and ground in this object is reversible, alternating between the vase and two identical profiles as frontally opposed negative mirror images of each other, which demonstrate that the seeing of seeing is a productive process. By using the facial features of the senior physicians for his rendition of this familiar optical illusion, the artist has produced a volatile group portrait and broken up the anonymity of the clinic. In studying thought processes, even scientifically objective researchers cannot escape the reality that they themselves are also both object and subject of their research. Team spirit and social competence are decisive in a team of “spirits”, who keep finding themselves sitting at the table with themselves in the course of their scientific investigations. Only by looking at the mirror can they manage to arrest the phenomenon for a second or two. 

Through the invention of rules and experimental specifications for the discovery of pictures, Graumann’s work resembles that of a scientist. He remains detached; his own presence does not figure in his work; he concentrates on the choice of basic structures and methods of transformation. In that respect, his work shows an affinity with that of Keith Tyson, who also resorts to the natural sciences in boldly addressing the question of a worldview. Tyson, like Graumann, is certain of only one premise: there is no such thing as a coherent, self-contained world view; there are only many simultaneous worlds and insight will always only be partially revealed through methodical interventions. Tyson develops “Artmachine iterations” (a means of approaching different worlds through the construction of machines for art production) and “Teleological Accelerators”. Graumann exploits the logic of machines and language, and allows us a brief moment of consciousness by abruptly pulling us out of the acceleration of our daily lives. His worldviews do not provide us with legible tableaux but rather elicit unexpected flashes of astonishment that come with studying his work. The views of the world unearthed by Hervé Graumann no longer rest on fixed constants but rather on insight into rules that invest existing connections with an unexpected degree of freedom. The “resampling” of a chest of drawers contains no fixed drawers. The place to store things no longer has a fixed place of its own even though a self-contained corpus still stands before us. We could so easily see it differently.

Hervé Graumann moves unimpeded through virtual spaces and Euclidean space. The conditions of specific dimensions are not givens but rather the subject matter of his art. This inevitably leads to contradictory movement between unlimited extension and contraction, addition and deletion. The principle upon which an object by Graumann is constructed dissolves in the space in which it is articulated: the pixel grid that covers his resampled things is a principle of both integration and disintegration. 

The work L.O.S.T. for documenta X in 1997 presents this contradiction in the form of a small narrative. In the Web’s unlimited, immoderate extension in countless dimensions, in the “dark” space of the World Wide Web, the circular beam of a torch reveals the traces of someone lost – someone who recedes, who becomes increasingly lost, pulling us into the darkness as well, the harder we look and seek. Graumann’s worldview unites the unchartability of spaces in the worldwide computer network with the real experience of uncanny, sinister spaces familiar to us from childhood. We can chart only the tiniest pieces of the infinitely vast world of the Web, like illuminating outerspace with the light of a torch. Nothing more is revealed, no matter how much effort the explorer makes. On the contrary, in a process of constant deletion, we are progressively deprived of space until all that is left, as we grope in the net space of L.O.S.T., is a cryptic e-mail address. In the lightest spot of this sinister space lurks a menacing black hole from which no message can escape to the world outside. 

Hervé Graumann does not develop an overview with his art; he does not consolidate a terrain; he does not conserve language. None of his works are a continuation or a repudiation of a preceding one. He is always on the road, charting impenetrable, dark and fleeting territory, always looking for new methods that will yield snapshots of new worldviews. “Dark spaces cannot be possessed; they can only be used.”

Hans Rudolf Reust in Monography HG 

Suspended from the ceiling, a glittering mobile may surprise visitors to the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Dermatology (Neuclid) at the Hopitaux Universitaires de Geneve (HUG). Its shapes echo those of an optical ambiguity – the Rubin vase – which appears in the void resulting from the confrontation of two identical profiles – and is often used by neurologists. The mobile, called “Neuclid Team Spirit” is part of an installation that marks the end of Hervé Graumann’s stay at the Hospital as the artist-in-residence and the seven different profiles are those of the various heads of department – as well as of one younger physician.

In “Dialogues 2”, Hervé Graumann spent several months exploring the Neuclid department:  accompanying Professor de Tribolet into the operating theatre during surgical interventions on the brain; examining optical illusions in Professor Safran’s neuro-ophthalmology department; to concentrate finally on the work of Professor Landis’s neurology department. Here, Graumann followed Doctor Perrig in his everyday activities in the “Epileptology Unit” and also participated as a guinea pig in a series of neurological tests such as multichannel electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance. The artist was therefore not just an observer but had subjected himself to the medical gaze – an experience shared with the patients in the department.

“Neuclid team spirit” ironically subverts the hierarchy of the medical gaze inverting the relation between observer and observed. Having photographed each one of the doctors, Graumann “operated” on them by perfecting every profile on computer before they were cut in brass sheet and chromium plated. As each physician stares at his mirror image and, at the same time, is refracted by those of his colleagues, Graumann playfully questions the nature of the Neuclid “team spirit”. How do these individuals relate to each other – and to the collective? And further – to the patients and to the public beyond? Patients and medical staff can now scrutinise the profiles of the medical authorities, balanced, a little precariously – immaterial presences – in the adjacent space, a contemporary version of the celebratory medical bust.

The relation between individual and collective is a theme in Graumann’s second work. During his residency,  the artist had the opportunity to explore the complex underground labyrinth that links the Centre Mėdical Universitaire to the Hospital. Regularly visiting the hospital shop and the hospital chemist located in this basement area, Graumann began to collect an array of objects ranging from the medical to the domestic- all defined as obsolete and destined to be thrown away. These objects were later assembled into two works entitled “Indefinable patterns”: a floor piece at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (Mamco) and a smaller installation inside a glass table, recalling the idea of the cabinet of curiosities, at the hospital. By associating ordinary household goods with medical implements the artist demystifies the latter of some of their aura. The value assigned to these objects is generated by the viewer’s perception of their relationships. Mimicking the function of a neurological test,  Graumann questions the nature of these affinities and of human perception. Each individual object is recognizable, but, as a whole, the relationships between the objects remain ever changing and indefinable.

Pattern – Vanité 2b, 2003 – installation, objets divers / installation, sundry objects – 400 x 500 cm.

armoire II, 1990 meuble numéroté, découpé, recollé

Hervé Laurent (in cat. 5ème SIV, St-Gervais, Geneva – 1993)

The work of Hervé GRAUMANN (H.G.) runs across the categories which govern our relationship with the world of phenomena with a kind of serene indifference whose effects are, often, not devoid of irony. This remoteness from the existential burden which usually gives weight to the reasons adduced for our judgment, the analyses and the actions which result from it, H.G. owes to the privileged relationship which he has had from the outset with computer logic. This logic, of whose binary nature we are reminded sufficiently often to render any dwelling on it unnecessary, is further distinguished by the fact that it deals with an order of reality which we could describe as homogeneous and granular. Pixel, 0/1, …from the heart of the machine to the flickering light of the screens, the informational universe which the computer manages is formed entirely of identical elements, sorts of fractions whose final configuration can produce an image, a sound, a line of reasoning, the result of a calculation, etc., that is, so many events and figures recalling the web of our daily round. The result is that, deceived by this coincidence, we have become accustomed to attributing to the computer an intentionality directed toward real life, whereas it is the set of operating necessities readable through our user strategies alone which is responsible for such an, in fact, wholly unfounded similarity.
H.G. works in this breaking-up area whose consequences he strives to explore. First, by reducing it to the absurd, by applying the technique of its computerized keyboarding to the object itself. So we have furniture cut-up and glued together again, which we can describe as having been violently pixelized, or, again, part of an object is moved bit by bit into another object, as if the integrity of the wholes from which these parts were extracted were no longer a determining element to be taken into account in the intervention protocol. The copy/glue functions, then, without fear of creating monsters, so true it is that monstrosity is the result of heterogeneity – the centaur is a fine example of this, as are the fabled animals which peopled the medieval imaginary – and that here, once we have accepted that the uniform substance of the computer universe is going to be attributed to reality, this automatic reservation should be ignored. In other words, H.G. confronts qualitative metaphysics with a purely quantitative approach and humorously plays the theory of the grain of sand against that of the sand castle. The text is only possible if we refuse the domination of the texture. The humour innate in several of H.G.’s works lies in that he tries to have both, letting the repetitive structure of the computer grain invade the prose of the world and disrupt it.

…de l’ordre alphabétique des couleurs (dladc base v1.1) – table en 7 langues & 11 couleurs classées par ordre alphabétique

It is the same kind of approach which leads him to work this prose over, not bowing to the narrative or analytical order which it constructs throughout its various segments, but like a multi-entry picture which can be consulted as a database. On a form of selection proper to the tale and not very directly explicit, H.G. superimposes a form of classification with very strictly defined criteria. So taking colour not as a theme but as a general chapter heading, the artist is induced to draw up the list of a town’s telephone subscribers whose names are colours, or else to paint a picture which is neither conceptual nor neo-geo but the consequence of a double-listing; horizontally a series of languages, vertically the names ofsome colours previously chosen and placed in alphabetical order. The coordinates so defined make it possible to compose a set of coloured squares which, when put together, simply make up the picture. The same approach also ends with the painting of a monochrome canvas in the presence of a person whose name indicates the colour used. Mr. RED, Mrs. PINK, are then invited to sign the minutes on the session. Messrs. Damien and Alberto BLANC (WHITE), more obliging, even agreed to be introduced, then to have their photograph taken, the former balancing on the shoulders of the latter for a composition (in black and white…) judiciously entitled “Blanc sur Blanc” (White on White).

Couleur minute, 1990 – ordinateur, écran, logiciel / computer, monitor, software

COULEUR-MINUTE belongs to this group of works constructed around a problem using colour as the pretext. Its simplicity helps give a clear idea of the essence of H.G.’s work. It involves a bottom-of-the range Amiga computer, with a monitor continuously showing a random advertisement on the range of 4096 colours available with this sort of machine. Each minute, a colour chosen at random appears, to the exclusion of any other identifying element such as a menu or icon.
No sound accompanies this presentation. So, then, during a handful of seconds, each one of the colours exists on the screen occupying the entire surface and creating a kind of new and ephemeral monochrome picture which constitutes one moment of a computer-guided exhibition. The edge of the screen becomes the frame indicating the pictorial quality of the colour. In a half-light, the photonics mark out, minute after minute, a trembling band of coloured light, uniform but unstable, with low radiation. Its character as an apparition, whence it draws its specific aura is also the result of the brevity of this presence; we have moved from the grain of sand to the more complex metaphor of the sandglass. What we should understand is, I think, that H.G.’s work, under its obvious poetic quality, is first of all a reflection on the linking of the computer tool, nowadays prolonged by all its media appendices (by virtue of the interface), with our understanding of the world. To conclude, this exhibition coldly professes to be what it is; a series of moments whose duration is calibrated and whose sequential order calculated by a random function. In this respect, we can further say that our relationship was sensitive to the result but provided that we do not forget that its origin lies in the performance of the lines of a programme in which it is never a question of our view and that as a result, unlike the humanist thought of Marcel Duchamp, the viewers no longer make the pictures.

Text by Hervé Laurent (in cat. 5ème SIV, St-Gervais, Geneva – 1993)