Pierre Leguillon's ideal visitor is quite similar to himself, who, when visiting a museum with a copy of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel in its collection, has fun spinning the object (Spinning the Wheel, since 1999) and sends a postcard to attest to this micro-performance. For Duchamp, the bicycle wheel was an object whose movement was conducive to meditation. Consequently, to activate an object is to activate a thought. Keeping things in a state of activity could be the paradigm that presides over Leguillon's work. However, this is not interactive art, still less the kind of event-based practice that Nicolas Bourriaud has grouped together under the term Relational Aesthetics. What the artist is aiming for above all is for an aesthetic experience to have an effect on everyday life. This often involves acting on what might mistakenly be considered secondary. This sideways step, and the many side roads taken, certainly explain why this work has only enjoyed a certain visibility relatively recently. Yet it was in the early '90s that the main thrust of his work was established through a series of exhibitions in a maid's room, a publication entitled Sommaire and the creation of the Diaporama. This practice, which blithely crosses the red line separating the fields of art and criticism, required the arrival of a generation more tolerant of these deterritorializations to be fully recognized and analyzed. We then discovered that this work built around images was also astonishing in the precision it brought to the conditions of its appearance.

The only thing to do is to give listeners, who will take into account the speaker's limitations, prejudices and idiosyncrasies, the opportunity to draw their own conclusions. Chances are, fiction here contains more truth than mere reality.


Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

This attention to context is the prerequisite for Leguillon's interventions to be as effective as possible. There's no detail that doesn't matter. This explains why the exhibitions in which he participates are sometimes the occasion for a struggle against the standardization of procedures that the infinite succession of events within an institution inevitably entails. This way of thwarting the rules involves taking charge of everything that usually constitutes the work's paratext (labels, transport crates, invitation cards, titles, program grids, etc.). Leguillon's way of working is centripetal, moving from the periphery to the center. First, a frame must be defined, then all the elements it delimits must be ensured from the margins to the center. In this way, we could say that Leguillon's work opens up time-spaces of attention designed to renew the gaze. In this respect, his interventions resemble reading rooms: places conducive to the exercise of a reading gaze. What is exhibited can never be exhibited by default, which is why the protocols the artist puts in place are so important. It's because no detail is left to chance that the viewer can exercise his or her gaze in complete confidence. Paratextuels , Sommaire, Diaporama and Promesse de l'écran give no clues as to their content. What these titles designate are framing devices: the Sommaire organizes reading, the Diaporama orders a succession of projected images, and the écran delimits a projection surface.

Does this insistence on what's on the edge suggest a Brechtian distancing process? No, because the aim is not to remind viewers that they are hostages to spectacular processes, but to create the best conditions for them to exercise their free will. It is in this respect that Leguillon's work is ultimately more “curatorial” than curatorial: it “cares” rather than “governs”. In fact, it was with a series of exhibitions in a maid's room that Leguillon distinguished himself after completing his studies in visual arts. Des hauts et des bas offers a mnemonic experience for the assiduous visitor who has climbed all seven floors. What remains of the memory of the works arranged in the cramped space of the maid's room, which a single glance encompasses in its entirety when the door is pushed open a second time? Coinciding with these exhibitions, Leguillon launched the magazine Sommaire in 1991. Printed on one A4 page and distributed in galleries, it was intended above all as a self-produced critical space. Artists (Leni Hoffmann, Roman Signer, Thomas Hirschhorn, Luc Delahaye) and critics (Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Catherine Francblin) were invited to contribute to the magazine's 35 issues before it was discontinued.

It was clear that crossing the wood had cost us the floor.


Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies

On March 23, 1993, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the first session of Par monts et par vaux, a generic title used for the first Diaporamas, took place. Originally, the Diaporama was intended to be a form of critique in action, in which photographs of exhibition views, documents or performances are projected and commented on. These images, which are above all the photographs of an exhibition viewer, are all taken by the artist using a medium-format camera (4.5x6). Certain slide sequences recur from one projection to the next, but the Slide Show is modified empirically according to the context in which Leguillon is invited to intervene. As a discursive process, the audience is invited to ask questions at the end of the session. By 1994, however, the artist had stopped talking about the images, and the Diaporama became what Claude Closky calls “a history of contemporary art that speaks for itself”. The coherence of this succession of photographs can be organized according to a historical or event-related sequence, but it can also depend on the formal repetition of the same motif or a biographical anecdote. As a deliberately open-ended form, the interest of the Diaporama does not depend on the viewer deciphering the exact link between the images. The images are brought together by and for the event of their projection, and each viewer can interpret their sequence according to his or her own experience. As Leguillon points out, “Isn't the important thing, in the end, that we share the same ignorance? Not the same knowledge, but the same ignorance. The Diaporama is about that. In other words, it's as much about what I know as about what I don't know. So it's based on a lack.

The Diaporama encourages us all to take hold of our own history, in the same way that the artist took hold of his own, with the help of this device that transmitted both his family history and the history of art. Since Leguillon stopped making medium-format photographs several years ago, the Diaporamas now constitute a stock of images from which he does not hesitate to draw. Removed from their context, these images are then presented in other forms. The Diaporama exploitation prints, photographs crossed out with the proper name of the person who serves as the entry point to the slide classification system (artist, architect, designer...) and underlined by a brief comment in the first person plural, are a case in point. Here, the name literally screens the reading of the works, and the presence of the text “theoretically” exempts these images from having to be accompanied by a label. To Walter Benjamin's question whether “the caption will not become the most essential element of the cliché”, Tirages d'exploitation responds with a form in which the text/image link is inseparable.

I could never know to what extent I myself was the author of the combinations that were taking place around me, ah, you soon feel guilty!


Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos

Another use of the SlideShow images is to print them as posters, laid flat and side-by-side in the exhibition space. The artist then deploys them one by one in the cut-out of a projector, facing an audience (A Silent Screening, 2010). Finally, there is a whole series of Diaporama by-products (a beach ball, a graduated pencil, an embossed tile, a silkscreened tray of a slide carousel, a coat hanger...) made especially for certain projections. These objects, which are both supports and souvenirs of the event, also function as tools: functional objects that can be reintegrated into the personal history of each spectator. When Diaporama/Vestiaire was last shown in May 2009 in the auditorium of the Musée du Louvre, it was accompanied by Récitations by Georges Aperghis, performed by Donatienne Michel-Dansac. This virtuoso combination of phonemes, which functioned as a kind of pre-language, took the place of the commentary that used to accompany the projection, bringing the Diaporama full circle as it had sixteen years earlier.

While still images occupy a dominant place in Leguillon's work, to the extent that their omnipresence has led us to associate him with the category of “astronomical iconographer” artists, moving images are not absent from his oeuvre. Indeed, the relationship between Diaporama and cinema goes beyond the simple presence of film images in the projections, or Bernadette Lafont's role as narrator. Indeed, the staging of the event, its protocol and its credits are often compared to a cinematographic or even pre-cinematographic device. Specifically dedicated to video, since 2007 La Promesse de l'écran has offered a rendezvous where films or excerpts are projected onto a 4:3 screen that flips over during intermissions, revealing a 16:9 bar behind which the artist offers wine in glasses he has had silk-screened. Viewing time is followed by a moment for discussion, until the screen is lowered again. As was already the case for Sommaire and Diaporama, the artist is not alone in charge of the programming: various people from the art world are invited, and these invitations are an opportunity to test the device in new configurations.

Nous n’avons aucun droit, sache-le « Reproduction interdite », qu’on peut traduire autrement : pas d’enfant, interdit d’héritage, filiation interrompue, les accoucheurs stériles.


Jacques Derrida, La carte postale

Unlike the Mobile Bar, ancestor of Promise, the discussion that follows the projections is not an imposed moment. But, let's emphasize once again, this is by no means a situation similar to that found in some of Rirkrit Tiravanija's projects: the people chatting and paying for their drinks in this speakeasy are not the work, they remain active subjects rather than the subject of Promesse. The aim here is to renew the way we look at the films programmed, or to emphasize the relationship between these films and the place where they are shown, since Promesse is equipped with franchises that make it mobile. For the Promesse de l'architecture, which took place in the house built by Rem Koolhaas in Floirac, near Bordeaux, the three screenings consisted solely of extracts from films with a connection to modern and contemporary architecture as subject or setting.

Pierre Leguillon's Diane Arbus: printed retrospective (1960-1971) shows almost all the photographs taken by the American photographer for magazines. Bypassing the constraints of the Diane Arbus estate by relying on the figure of the collector, Leguillon exhibits all the magazines he has patiently gathered via Internet sales sites. A coaster custom-made to the dimensions of each magazine displays the articles illustrated with Arbus's images, showing the context of their layout. The fact of showing these images framed by coasters is not insignificant, as this system is the poor relation of frames, and does not in itself constitute a commercial added value. What's more, the edge of each coaster is made of plywood, which makes it all the more reminiscent of the thickness and leafing through of a magazine. Putting images monopolized for legal reasons back into circulation, the printed retrospective also measures the gap between today's press and that of its golden age, when it still had hope of competing with television. This nostalgia for an ambitious press is reflected in the publishing project entitled les Dix Mille: le journal d'un seul jour printed on a rotary press by (U)L.S. Editions in Marseille. For this project, Leguillon surrounded himself with an editorial team from whom he commissioned a series of articles and news briefs which, after rigorous editing, were all signed collectively. Philippe Millot was responsible for the layout of this image-free daily, which has a circulation of 10,000 and is distributed free of charge. In the spirit of Maintenant, Arthur Cravan's newspaper, in which all articles were written under different aliases, Les Dix Mille is a space opened up by Leguillon to offer an alternative to the daily press.

It's often been said that my work messes up taxonomies and calssements; a real headache for all those institutions and museums that go along with it. But often it hasn't been seen enough - and I've experienced it myself - that it's messed up my work too.


Phillipe Thomas, New York

Bill Bernbach & Beyond, which will be shown in October 2010 at MAMCO in Geneva as part of the Dans libre exhibition, is also based on the magazine page. Having collected all the Volkswagen Beetle ads produced under the direction of Bill Bernbach at the DDB agency, Leguillon photographed each page twice. One slide shows the advertisement illuminated from the front, while the other shows the same page backlit, with its reverse showing through. While the printed retrospective isolated the magazine pages to avoid period advertisements dating the Arbus images, Bill Bernbach & Beyond shows what other images were adjacent to these campaigns by Bernbach, who profoundly altered the codes of the profession. Leguillon's piece underlines the references made to the art of the time by the advertiser, and invents others through teleology. Reproductions of two letters, one written to Volkswagen and the other to DDB, play a dual role: they are both teaching notes and a legal guarantee protecting the artist from the legal consequences of this appropriation. Once again, Leguillon does things by the book, but he also breaks free from the protocols imposed by the venues in which he is exhibited.

The Teatrino/Palermo, which he reactivated at the Centre Georges Pompidou's Nouveau Festival, is an autonomous exhibition space featuring a succession of different speakers, after the artist had inaugurated it with a projection of Marcel Broodthaers' La Pluie (projet pour un texte), which he sounded live. The physical space of the object, a black-and-white copy of which was produced by Clément Rodzielski, will be used in a variety of ways. Flat and raised, it will be a display for Marie-Ange Guilleminot's glove collection; upside down, it will be a stage for Conny Purtill's levitating puppet; it will host both a film projection by Boris Charmatz and a lecture by Patricia Falguières. Leguillon has fun upsetting categories and confusing the issue. Contrary to art history, which smells of excessive taxonomy, the artist does not hesitate to extract a work from a category to make it play roles for which it was not precisely intended.

There's a lot more I could add to this essay, but fortunately I don't think it's absolutely necessary. The thought of daily toil forbids me to overwork myself, and so I say good night to you now.


Robert Walser, The territory of the pencil

The chosen work thus becomes performative. However, if Leguillon feels that the work was already effective in its current state, he can just as easily choose to put it back in place. This is the case with the blue triangle (Blaues Dreieck, 2009), a multiple by Blinky Palermo that the artist repaints over private doors. The aim here is not to transmute a Palermo into a Leguillon through appropriation. The blue triangle does not change its author; it leaves the archives of art history to become available once again. There's no doubt about it: it represents the most autobiographical side of his work (the associations form an autobiographical narrative). However, to overemphasize this iconographic passion is to run the risk of minimizing the importance of the scenarios the artist develops around them. His work is therefore both logical and lyrical. When the artist speaks of his practice as “the only thing I can do”, this phrase must be understood in all its polysemy. It indicates both a kind of romantic necessity for self-expression and a positioning strategy in relation to the art world and its institutions.