Laurent Grasso
17 Jun - 14 Sep 2009
LAURENT GRASSO
The Horn Perspective / Marcel Duchamp Prize 2008
June 17 2009 - September 14 2009
11h00 - 21h00
Espace 315
The Laurent Grasso exhibition transforms the Espace 315 into a place where everything seems possible. With his films, sounds and apparatus, the artist presents a work which challenges everything the spectators hold true.
In 1964, two American radio astronomers use the Horn antenna in order to measure the power of the radio waves emitted by our galaxy. They pick up a background noise which they can't explain and which actually turns out to be the (sonorous) fossil of the Big Bang which gave birth to the universe some ten billion years ago.
Laurent Grasso made a sculpture of this antenna, disposed at the other end of the Espace 315, just as he made a replica of an antenna by Tesla, the great master of electricity transmission, the inventor of the radio, the first theoretician on directed-energy weapons, and the foreshadower of research on ionospheric energy. In 1899, the antenna which he had installed in Colorado Springs was perhaps the first to pick up radio waves from space.
In the background, a double screen on which is cast a strange travelling that seems to panic the neighbouring presence of the two antennae. On the walls, the acoustic speakers of intriguing, archaic and modern design, diffuse a background noise which is almost as mysterious as that picked up by the Horn Antenna. Of which phenomenon(a) is it the obscure testimony? Of which scenario are we hearing the soundtrack?
Science or the paranormal are not at all the end for Laurent Grasso, but the means, thanks to which his art sought to bring about a significant aesthetic shift: the end of the modernist paradigm of transparency. So, as he knows how to do so well, Laurent Grasso, with this film, sounds and apparatus, will keep you immersed in a sensation which you will never really reach. He conspires a mood, plots a space where the attempts to reimpose sense are warded off, parasitical and redundant.
The Horn Perspective / Marcel Duchamp Prize 2008
June 17 2009 - September 14 2009
11h00 - 21h00
Espace 315
The Laurent Grasso exhibition transforms the Espace 315 into a place where everything seems possible. With his films, sounds and apparatus, the artist presents a work which challenges everything the spectators hold true.
In 1964, two American radio astronomers use the Horn antenna in order to measure the power of the radio waves emitted by our galaxy. They pick up a background noise which they can't explain and which actually turns out to be the (sonorous) fossil of the Big Bang which gave birth to the universe some ten billion years ago.
Laurent Grasso made a sculpture of this antenna, disposed at the other end of the Espace 315, just as he made a replica of an antenna by Tesla, the great master of electricity transmission, the inventor of the radio, the first theoretician on directed-energy weapons, and the foreshadower of research on ionospheric energy. In 1899, the antenna which he had installed in Colorado Springs was perhaps the first to pick up radio waves from space.
In the background, a double screen on which is cast a strange travelling that seems to panic the neighbouring presence of the two antennae. On the walls, the acoustic speakers of intriguing, archaic and modern design, diffuse a background noise which is almost as mysterious as that picked up by the Horn Antenna. Of which phenomenon(a) is it the obscure testimony? Of which scenario are we hearing the soundtrack?
Science or the paranormal are not at all the end for Laurent Grasso, but the means, thanks to which his art sought to bring about a significant aesthetic shift: the end of the modernist paradigm of transparency. So, as he knows how to do so well, Laurent Grasso, with this film, sounds and apparatus, will keep you immersed in a sensation which you will never really reach. He conspires a mood, plots a space where the attempts to reimpose sense are warded off, parasitical and redundant.