eSSAY

Guillame Pilet: Dream A Little Drama

Commissioned and published by Primary on the occasion of Guillame Pilet’s exhibition, Dream A Little Drama, July 2017

Primary, Nottingham

‘Something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation; a something both animated and inhabitable’ writes Kathleen Stewart in her eminently peculiar and increasingly relevant book Ordinary Affects (2007). For Stewart, writing as a lyrical anthropologist, untangling the complexity of a politically vulnerable present is an exercise that can find only partial clarity in the totalising narratives implied by the terms ‘advanced capitalism’, ‘globalisation’ or ‘neoliberalism’. Considering instead the affective forces of the everyday, she suggests recalibrating our focus on the intimate, the momentary and the particular. It’s an approach that attempts to bring the effects of broader systemic conditions into view as scenes of ‘imminent force’. Rather than simply figuring them as processes foisted upon a benign and receptive world, Stewart seeks to ask: what intensities come into focus when we take a closer look at the apparently inconsequential, minor and impermanent influences that shape our lives?

I’m inclined to suggest that Guillaume Pilet’s Dream A Little Drama (2017) gestures toward something comparable, inviting the viewer as it does to inhabit a temporary locale animated by enticingly diffuse and transitory ‘events’ and ‘sensations’. Pilet’s strange environment, a kind of living sculpture, is occupied comfortably by both a psychedelic nymph-like performer and an odd array of weirdly performing objects. Once in a while, the performer will engage the artefacts, animating them with idiosyncratic gestures that would lead one to believe they were witnessing the experimentations of a liminal laboratory, one tasked with refiguring its analyses of the quotidian as miraculous exchanges, subtle actions charged with ponderous potential. In a present that sees much contemporary art practice - and, undoubtedly, the interpretative writing that accompanies it - so keen to perform diagnostically while unabashedly tacking its postulations onto the broader stories that apparently define our age, Pilet’s enigmatic and introspective world gives us pause for a different kind of reflection; one that is not necessarily thought so much as it is felt.

But what kind of world is this? Bordered along one flank by a tumbledown wall of lurid cartoon-like red bricks, and on another by a vast celestial firework display that bleeds vivid pigments through the thick fabric of a large black theatrical curtain, Pilet’s strange ‘set’ is a curious habitat reminiscent of both the didactic play-zones of Sesame Street (1969-) and the new-age and thoroughly tie-dyed enclosures of gong baths and festival chill-out zones. Bizarrely furnished with a dilapidated ceramic gourd, an uncanny and precarious toilet-paper-wrapped mummy, drawing materials, painter’s palette and more red apples than you’d want to eat in a single sitting, this brightly coloured assemblage feels like a museum display composed to the disorienting logic of a de Chirico painting.

As viewers we’re welcomed into to this privately coded personal space, the contents of which have been determined by the artist’s own biography. Whilst there, we witness a series of comic interactions as the meticulously painted performer sets about using the props at his disposal. Prompted by discreet cue cards, we see him adopt strenuous choreographed positions, munch through countless apples, paint still-life pictures of the withered pumpkin, wrap additional layers of paper around the mummy, and most humorously, lock eyes with a surprised member of the audience whose likeness he attempts to draw without looking at the marks his own hand is making.

Such ‘de-schooling’ practices and their unrefined offspring are the joyful if embarrassing staples of art education, and it is perhaps fitting that their resonances in this work unfold within the distinctive gallery at Primary, a converted school that still bears the architectural traces of pedagogical structure. In Dream A Little Drama objects and actor appear to co-perform in strange states of trance-like reminiscence. To borrow a concept from the artist Mike Kelley, they seem to be recuperating the ‘missing time’ between the artist’s formative aesthetic experiences and his contemporary practice. We might describe this as a performative aide-memoire, or more appropriately, as a kind of ‘mnemonic sculpture’. 

Addressing the sculpture of the postmodern period in her now canonical essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, the art historian Rosalind E. Krauss saw the medium’s rejection of the plinth and its dispersal into environment or habitat as a conduit to thinking sculpture in broader terms, not necessarily through ‘material’ or ‘form’, but through a range of productive and ambiguous oppositions, for example ‘landscape’ as opposed to ‘architecture’. Dream A Little Drama suggests that memory - its material indexes, performative evocations and empathic capacities – might provide a spatiotemporal annexe to any idea of sculpture we held previously.

Pilet’s redolent objects - his apples, pumpkin, paints and mummified body - have autobiographical values that are not immediately known to us but become vaguely apparent through epicurean animation. They perform like the scavenged ‘treasures’ of childhood defined by the writer Roger Callois as ‘coin of another realm’. In this instance, their currency is an absurd capacity for the invocation of peculiar sensualities, ones that we empathically experience as we watch their strange dramaturgy unfold. These objects hold weight in the space circumscribed by the performance just as potently as the performer does, because according to the artist’s playful illogic, this space is one that holds open the childlike expectation of animism; the belief that all matter possesses a living spirit. Don’t believe me? Watch out for the pumpkin that positively smokes with embarrassment when its naked form is described in paint, or check out your own anxious anticipation of that mummy finally coming to life through some diabolical practice of reanimation! Pilet’s performer is an everyday trickster, and as the visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has written, the trick ‘seduces and cajoles’, it ‘knows and enjoys the leap beyond the thingness of things’.

‘Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,’ writes Stewart, attempting to define the ephemeral and elusive factors that temper our lived experiences. By approaching Pilet’s work without the expectation of any logical, semantic or symbolic meaning, we encounter sculptural gestures that are ‘immanent, obtuse and erratic’, locating affective potencies in the strange economies of habitual gesture.