Move over Woody Allen. An empathy machine, pictured above, trumps the filmmaker's celebrated Banana's orgasmatron, at least as an opening image for Simon Fujiwara’s Revolution installations at Lafayette Anticipations’ new spaces in the Marais, which run until the first week of January 2019. Fujiwara's machine, actually called Empathy1 simulator, and installed on the ground floor of the building, is complementary to three installations on two upper floors.
Each installation points and questions the volume and ubiquity of images and image technology and the representation of self. All are esthetic and emotional successes. Such success is certainly owing to Fujiwara’s effective execution of his concepts and intentions but also I think to the very skillful configuration of the building’s modular space: there is an extra-fine touch at work in light and surface, in empty and full, in distance, dimension and position.
Revolution is a first solo show in France for Fujiwara - a multidisciplinary artist who has worked at the Tate and MOMA, as well as in Berlin & Tokyo - and follows on an earlier collaboration with the foundation and Centre Pompidou.
Empathy 1, constructed by a simulation-equipment manufacturer on the artist’s concept, is a real sit-down-strap-in experience that uses YouTube footage, amusement park ride-like movement, strobe, rushing air and splashing water to create a simulation of life that is “truer than Disney”, I heard Fujiwara say, and which he describes as a “sculptural experience”: riders find it fun.
The installations upstairs include a Happiness Museum, which breaks down happiness to data and artefacts, a still and film presentation of a certain Joanne Salley, and, on the top floor, a wax figure representing Anne Frank. Salley is a former art teacher of Fujiwara whose career was ruined when some British tabloid published pictures of her with her breasts exposed; Anne Frank is of course one of the most moving symbols of the horror of the Shoah.
Fashionista-style photo posters fixed to a sort of raised platform or plinth hide as much as they reveal the energetic, classy, athletic, lovely, lively, cool, etc., etc., etc. Joanne Salley they depict. Embedded behind this… monument(?) … is a screen showing a continuous loop documentary, featuring Salley, of Salley’s effort to regain control of Salley’s image, an image that came to control Salley; no victim, Salley’s determined to recapture the “Salley brand”. The documentary’s story line carries you through this latter irony and pushes you on to the uncomfortable realization that indiscreet breast handling in the 21st century will get an unwary female punished, severely (and didn’t it recently happen to a competitor at a world-level tennis match?). The narrative then pulls you beyond that uncomfortable realization to a distressing one: in trying to get control of her own image, Salley might be courageous but she believes in the same system as the yahoos who stole her image, milked and wrecked it.
The Anne Frank wax dummy installation produces a similar if not the same distressing effect of irony to the Salley one.
In itself, a wax dummy – literally, a golem – is creepy: the lifelike image has the form, texture and allure of a corpse; unlike a golem, any life produced in it is a projection of the onlooker. Fujiwara has perched the thing up high on an all-white platform, where a spectator can’t get it but through the giant split screen images projected in the void above the motionless dummy by a robot camera programmed to continuously hover over it, to seem to lick at it.
Aside from incongruously providing the only real movement, the robot camera furnishes the banal “body emotion-study” camera work familiar from TV and film: the somehow emotive eyes, the somehow touching smile, the somehow darling fingers somehow earnestly holding the pen. All this is from a dead thing of wax, of course. Disturbing irony, surely.
Even so, there is distressing irony in this iconic installation. It is this: the Anne Frank image has been crafted to stimulate… empathy! And the more I contemplate the image, the more I find that the image kills empathy…
Back to the ground floor.
Maybe I should try the Empathy 1 simulator. Or maybe the orgasmatron?
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