Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, who both won Oscars with Charlie Kaufman for their Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenplay, collaborate again on this Cosmic Galerie exhibition. The All Seeing Eye opened 8 October 2005, and ran from 12 October to 3 December at the Galerie in Paris.
From the press release:
The All Seeing Eye once again explores, this time in the visual arts field, the ideas commonly interesting the two artists, amongst which a taste for plays on language and perception, knowledge and meaning.
This video is based on a technique already used by Bismuth in the art video Link (1998) and by Gondry in the Kylie Minogue music video Come Into My World (2002). The image was recorded by a revolving camera. But whereas in Link, where the set would change on each turn, and in Come Into My World, where each turn doubles some elements of reality, here the concept refers to Eternal Sunshine and the idea of memory erasure.
A bourgeois appartment is gradually constructed and deconstructed before our eyes in successive swipes of a revolving camera. What begins as a circling motion quickly becomes more of a spiral, as Eames armchairs, house plants, chimneys, Brillo boxes, mirrors, and a dining table with multiplying place settings appear only to successively vanish until finally the room is stripped bare.
At the end of this subtractive process the spectator is left alone, confronted with the emptiness of an 'eye' that is both 'all seeing' and yet sees 'nothing' - a final solitude reminiscent of the Cartesian mind's bid to achieve self-certainty by emptying itself of concrete contents. In a further irony, the panoptic pretensions of the camera are undermined by our awareness of a crucial blind-spot: what is not shown by the kino-eye is precisely the off-screen manipulations that account for the scenery changes, an example of Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry's shared fondness for special effects created by low-tech or non-digital means.
The presentation of the video doubles the camera's rotary motion as it is projected spinning around the exhibition space, thus transforming the traditional static screen of the video into more of a traveling spotlight.
The theme of erasure links the new video work with Eternal Sunshine, a connection that is underlined by a television in the room playing a scene from the film throughout the piece.
frieze has published a review and analysis of the installation.
