artintelligence

Valérie Jouve’s site-specific work for the Munster Sculpture Project 07 is more of a video installation than a sculpture, but then the concept of sculpture is so deconstructed now that the term can be applied to almost anything that isn’t flat and hung on a wall.

Jouve chose an urban object, a pedestrian underpass, to be a container of her work and the work resonates strongly with its urban frame. Other works that posed as urban ‘interventions’ such as Nairy Baghramian and Annette Wehrmann’s contributions were less successful–the dubiousness of Baghramian and Wehrmann’s creative credentials can be detected from the fact that they were quite similar in conception, but how creative can one be with the Readymade after fifty years and hundreds of artists milking its ‘deconstructive’ potential?

In contrast Jouve avoided the Readymade cul-de-sac in favour of an attempt to interact with the everyday. She filmed actors in an manner that simulates the urban journeys of people who might use the underpass. She then mounted an exhibition of film stills on the entry to the underpass and rigged a projection of her films in its dark underbelly (SEE VIDEO).

Like most good works of art Jouve’s is a simple idea executed in a clean and simple manner. Although the films are banal in themselves they make sense in the context of the underpass and enliven what would otherwise be a barren urban artefact.