A Long Day’s Journey into the Heart of Night
Ute Holl
There are many ways to wander around Didier Mahieu’s work "A Day Elsewhere," Une Journée D’Ailleurs, and each of them will make a different experience, a different story, a different history. As a Journée, a day’s travel, a journey through the mind of a century, this work of many layers is very precise and personal, yet simultaneously it covers the mental and visual topology of an era. It sets out from European history, but its ramifications lead into the suburbs of colonialism and globalization: another stage, a Thirdspace, elsewhere.
The exhibition itself proposes one particular image at the heart of European darkness: a photography of Didier Mahieu’s grandfather in front of ruins and rubble, his house in Belgium, 1942, an image suggesting defeat and resistance at the same time. Both versions are viable to follow Mahieu’s relentless archaelogy of an unknown life that is connected to this image as its invisible counterpart: Mahieu’s grandfather had been a policeman under Nazi occupation in Bruxelles and one day turned a Jewish woman away who had come to report to his office. She never returned. A file card remained empty. This blank page, which could mean both survival or death, an absence signifying nothing yet implying all possible options, is the space Mahieu unfolds in the course of his reconstructions.
Every traveller through Mahieu’s extensive piece of art will immediately enter into a process of remembering and, again, of reconstructing a life from the images and objects spread out–and here we are reminded that travelling is in fact related to the French travailler: to work or to work through. The life which is the object of our travels is as much our own mental topology as it is the life of a stranger or, more precisely, the life of a strange and unknown woman. The most astonishing part of this experience is, probably, that it does not seem to be an active one. We are being guided through this exhibition, seized by certain attractions or stimuli, marks or traces that lead us through our own landscapes of memory, very much like we are seized and captured by images in cinema. And something else recalls the cinematic experience: the objects or installations that are part of the Une Journée D’Ailleurs differ in size and accordingly in the space which they create: some very large objects will confront us as close-ups in cinema would; others, very small and scattered on tables or floors, lift us up to a bird’s point of view. But while in cinema our mental images seem to adjust our bodies to any given filmic reality, the journey through "A Day Elsewhere" makes us shrink and shiver, and then grow, and then feel displaced or at home in identities that are strange or past or lost. Involuntarily we are transformed from aggressor to victim, from domination to submission, from resistance to defeat and back again.
Mahieu does not work in oppositions, however, but in layers. At some point, a large spoon lying across one of the halls transforms us into crawling ants, but looking into its mould we see the projection of a house, far away. In fact, we see doubled and superimposed projections of the house, and eventually we see and feel the distance rather than the house. This distance however interferes with the perceived distance in the space of the spoon. Then, if we raise our eyes, we look at the picture of a man about to take a swim in a lake, caught in the very moment of reluctance, the moment between spaces and times. Caught exactly as we are caught in the ensemble of Mahieu’s installation.
Something similar occurs in a larger space that has a children’s bed at its centre, a gigantic baby’s suit or pajama laid out on its rails, awaiting the child or the nightmare. Below this bed very large rough-grained photographies on very thin paper are spread out, layers of exposed material, a palimpsest of images, strokes of red paint here and there, houses, beds, red marks, traces. Attached, or rather stuck to the wall on the left, are photographic portraits of a woman in black and white and sepia tinted. Further away on the rear wall we see photos of images from a laboratory, measuring devices, pictures of an experimental set-up, "Bulgaria" printed out somewhere. While the gaze of the traveller pans around the room, the meaning of the space, its impact and its athmosphere constantly change. The simple act of looking around turns into practical dreamwork, condensations and displacements. The aesthetical procedures of Didier Mahieu are best revealed in their most insignificant details: the way in which the pictures are attached to the walls becomes as important as the line of the eyeliner on the portrait’s eye and the folds of the pajama, that refer to the haste with which it might have been laid out. Mahieu pushes us into the position of the detective, the investigator, the psychoanalyst.
Several objects in Mahieu’s Journée relate to administration and its insanities, its perversities and its desires. Opposite to a wall of abstract oil paintings, 39 working-passports, printed in Bruxelles in 1883, are stuck to the wall, each of them listing endless blank forms that are supposed to document the continually changing residence and employment of its obviously migrating holders. One citizen’s statement testifies for the other, testifies against the other, is used to control the other. A system of mutual surveillance is displayed.
Le soussigne, demeurant à rue … déclare que le prénommé est entré à mon service le …
Le soussigne, demeurant à rue … déclare que le prénommé est entré à mon service le …
Le soussigne, demeurant à rue … déclare que le prénommé est entré à mon service le …
A series of blank spaces organizes one’s life span and the expectations of a working person. Through a series of blank spaces, infamous lives become significant and controllable. Mahieu has scribbled over these forms, across the books which are attached to the wall to form new patterns. The joy of absentminded drawing blends with an energy of resistance against the act of administrating data to rule over lives.
At the other end of the exhibition, which, in the Chelsea Art Museum, covers more than two large halls, there is a strange equivalent to this part of the work. Here, Didier Mahieu has built a sort of shanty, a white hut, made of plastic in the look of corrugated iron. This hut, too, is doubled and shifted in perspective. The material evokes the idea of camps, of colonies, of too much light and too much heat. Of migrant workers and their portable properties. But also of some kind of excess. Curiosity forces the traveller to enter the hut, walk across the green plastic floor with its Chinese characters, to step over cushions and textiles, crushed sea-shells and dried sea-weed, look at the grained photos on the walls, on the floor, at the white linen dresses hung to the walls. A taste of sexuality enters the scene, the sound of Ophelia. Finally, at the core of the hut, in the center of the den, there is a table and a chair, again, made of plastic, cheap and improvised. By now we are surrounded by more file cards, scattered on the floor, again forms of empty spaces to register, to record, to give an order to. As in other parts of the Journée, chunks of soap are piled all over. Here, we find ourselves at the heart of an abandoned office, in the place of a colonial administrator who surveys his surrounding while he himself wants to remain hidden. We catch ourselves spying on a voyeur. On his table we detect obscure magazines and cookies that seem far too sweet. They are pink. So maybe we are wrong. Maybe this is the refuge of a Pacific princess who has lost her palace and is on the verge of turning all her girlfriends into amazons of some excentric liberation movement, abusing the filing system as playing cards to gamble for strange and unknown identities. Maybe we have finally found the refuge of the unknown woman who has, in other parts of the Journée, left traces of a voyage through Asian countries.
The freefloating stream of associations which Mahieu’s work provokes, is by no means arbitrary. It forces the traveller to move against the resistance of history, of politics, of the self. It forces us look against the grain and beyond it. It takes time. It relates to European travel literature and painting, surrenders to images of foreign beauty and simultaneously it exposes violence at the core of romanticism. Any description of Mahieu’s work will reveal no more than the strange topology of the travellers mind. A proper description would amount to writing another Odyssey. Probably the Odyssey of a woman. Didier Mahieu definitely is the perfect artist in the position of Penelope, weaving his textures, not actually destroying them during the nightly hours, but opening up weft and warp, creating more loose endings. And the Chelsea Art Museum definitely is the appropriate weaving loom. Although the exhibition had originally been curated by Willy van der Bussche for the Museum of Modern Art in Oostende, Belgium, the venue at Chelsea with its frail architecture and light supports the fine rhythm of Mahieu’s work. It has to be mentioned though that "A Day Elsewhere" does not end at the doors of the museum. It haunts and enchants the traveller for many days and many nights and will probably have woven his story or her self into the texture of this infinite art work.
