Miscellanees - Alexandra Guillot

Alexandra is a nomadic artist. That is not quite correct. Alexandra is a nomadic woman, and when she makes art, her nomadism as a woman comes and squats in her art as an artist. For example, look at this photograph she took in China (entitled Déraciné [Uprooted] by her) where a weeping willow lying among its standing fellows has an exotic boat extending from its near edge, sailing along further back on the river: a figurative uprooting underlining real exile. It is true that it is easier for me, knowing something of Alexandra’s life, to decipher this kind of pointer; a few years ago I used to receive regular reports from her in China, and in her descriptions I was concerned to read the pure will for a change of scene that guided her at that time. Truth to tell, Alexandra is not a nomadic woman, but a person in whom the act of dwelling forms a hypersensitive faculty. While the rest of us quite crudely and openly inhabit our dwellings, it is as if Alexandra has remained aloof from the order of dwelling places (= domestic ideology), so that she perceives all kinds of installations with an uneasy and dreamy acuteness. Therefore it is a happy coincidence that La Maison has commissioned a solo exhibition from her, for it gives the artist a fine opportunity to counter-inhabit that space, which has always subordinated the exhibitions it hosted to its original function (lavatories and bathrooms included). Counter-inhabiting it will entail going through paradoxical forms of dwelling, playing on the “picture function” by which the inhabitable nature of a place is usually symbolized, as well as on the kind of installation, which embraces all the real space of a room or a complex interior space. Thus in the empty living-room pansies are flowering that are so obviously cultivated that it is impossible for them not to inspire the thought wild as we see them turn yellow under the bulb…

MARIGOLDS	version francaise
Alexandra is a nomadic artist. That is not quite correct. Alexandra is a nomadic woman, and when she makes art, her nomadism as a woman comes and squats in her art as an artist. For example, look at this photograph she took in China (entitled Déraciné [Uprooted] by her) where a weeping willow lying among its standing fellows has an exotic boat extending from its near edge, sailing along further back on the river: a figurative uprooting underlining real exile. It is true that it is easier for me, knowing something of Alexandra’s life, to decipher this kind of pointer; a few years ago I used to receive regular reports from her in China, and in her descriptions I was concerned to read the pure will for a change of scene that guided her at that time. Truth to tell, Alexandra is not a nomadic woman, but a person in whom the act of dwelling forms a hypersensitive faculty. While the rest of us quite crudely and openly inhabit our dwellings, it is as if Alexandra has remained aloof from the order of dwelling places (= domestic ideology), so that she perceives all kinds of installations with an uneasy and dreamy acuteness. Therefore it is a happy coincidence that La Maison has commissioned a solo exhibition from her, for it gives the artist a fine opportunity to counter-inhabit that space, which has always subordinated the exhibitions it hosted to its original function (lavatories and bathrooms included). Counter-inhabiting it will entail going through paradoxical forms of dwelling, playing on the “picture function” by which the inhabitable nature of a place is usually symbolized, as well as on the kind of installation, which embraces all the real space of a room or a complex interior space. Thus in the empty living-room pansies are flowering that are so obviously cultivated that it is impossible for them not to inspire the thought wild as we see them turn yellow under the bulb…
Joseph Mouton(Translated by Judith Hayward)

	Alexandra GUILLOT
	"Miscellanées" 05.12.2009 > 05.02.2010