Marc Fichou’s Habitus Video Feedback Art in a Philosophical Context

Stefan Mattessich (bio)
Santa Monica College

French-born artist Marc Fichou has exhibited an intriguing body of work in a string of shows around L.A.: “Contenant Contenu” at the Robert Berman gallery (January–February 2013), “Ouroboros” at the Young Projects gallery (January–April 2014), “Outside-In” at the Chimento Contemporary (June–July 2016), and, most recently, “Uncertainty,” a group show at the Pasadena Arts Center (October 2016–February 2017). Much of Fichou’s work involves video feedback and looped, interactive projections that recall the inter-disciplinary experiments of Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, the video installations of Num June Paik, and other works by Steina and Woody Vasulkas, Peter Weibel, and Peter Campus. While all of these artists focus on the mediation and displacement of the object, the artist, and the viewer alike, the stakes remain a subjectivity that persists through its various attenuations.

Fichou is a very self-effacing artist. We see this in his installation “Plastron,” with a video monitor that shows, by reverse projection, the artist in close-up as he applies plaster of Paris mixed with black paint to his face. He gradually covers his whole head, including the eyes. Mounted just opposite the projection is the impassive, mineral-like cast that will be (or is already) the result of this process. On an interposed double mirror, its reflection combines with the video image, creating an almost holographic superposition of the face and its mask that confounds relations between before and after, inside and outside, subject and object. The artist fashions his own likeness, but he subtracts himself in it, too. He presents his own disappearance. The installation, containing its production in time, is also penetrated by negativity, volatilized by absence.

Fig. 1. Plastron. 2010.

We sense Fichou touching here on a history of art going as far back as Greek sculpture, which strove to find in the human body the coincidence of material substance and soul that made the person essentially what he or she was. This perfect self-identity came about through the development of qualities, faculties, and talents that lay dormant in the person, as natural potentials made actual and explicit, known to the mind. We still take our cues from this Greek tradition—it still informs the ways we think about identity. Few of us, however, have much practical experience with the self-possession it celebrates. Rather, becoming ourselves implies inner conflict and alienation from a nature that is never quite recovered in consciousness. Autonomy depends on technical supports or prostheses (from writing to digital screens) that decenter the “soul” —if they don’t relegate the notion to some metaphysical past.

Fichou’s interest in subjective dispossession nonetheless engages that past; his work, to be sufficiently felt, asks this engagement of us. French philosopher Catherine Malabou provides a useful framework for this history. Her reading of modern subjectivity turns on the figure of kenosis as a self-emptying of the will that occurs when the subject becomes aware of its own limits in a contingent universe. This Copernican shock has typically been narrated as a withdrawal of metaphysical guarantees but in two senses. God abandons the world (and we feel abandoned by him), but God also abandons himself in it. His kenosis (or death) entails not only a fall into time and mortality (in the person of Christ) but the converse spiritualization of a fallen condition. God in his essence “becoming accident,” as Malabou puts it, affords a template for the modern subject’s encounter with finitude, grasped as a struggle to achieve self-understanding through a “divine” alienation—to achieve what Hegel, on whom Malabou relies for her account, calls “absolute knowledge” (71).

This distinctly Protestant internalization of negativity entails a sublimation of social freedom into moral conscience; as such, it affords the formula, as critics from Marx onwards have pointed out, for an abstract universality that sustains, in resigned acceptance, the irrational social conditions of a bourgeois capitalist order.¹ We see Fichou interrogating this sublimation in another of his installations, “Primer.” It involves two rooms. In one, a chair fashioned of gypsum cement faces a large steel representation of the Chartres labyrinth on a wall. Behind the chair is a steel crucifix, and at the center of the cross a small spy camera has been installed. In the other room, a low-slung, stainless steel chair of modern design faces a square black-and-white television, on which we see what the spy camera records: the backs of visitors’ heads as they sit facing the labyrinth. The austere and organic feel of the first room, with its religious symbols, invites a contemplation that, in the second, becomes an object we view this time as spectators. On one level, what we experience is the anachronism of contemplation, if not also its diminishment into spectacle. The camera in the crucifix, however, suggests, on another level, a surveillance that evokes both an internalized agency (like a superego or a Big Other) and a derivation of spectacle from the Christian symbol itself (or from the Christian tradition tout court).²

For Malabou, “absolute knowledge,” notwithstanding its theological overtones, continues to offer the resource of a transcendental limit for a self-critical consciousness. It does this in that Copernican shock driving the subject defensively into itself, into a pure subjective freedom or “inner being” that is also ineffable and opaque, like a point without dimension. So reduced, the subject finds itself absorbed in an order of objective necessity and governed by inertia and habit; this experience, however, also forces it to reflect upon its own status as an object and to acknowledge its own nothingness. In the process, it contacts something else in itself (the one reflecting) that disturbs a naturalized fear and passivity, thus precipitating a shift from habit-forming to habit-changing practices. In Malabou’s view, this moment of Hegelian sublation signifies less the accomplishment of a substantial being (in its abstract universality) than a specific transformation of human habitus. The subject becomes more itself not by ceasing to be the object it reflects or is in the object world—rather, the object is sustained in that reflection, and the object world persists as a condition through the gain in self-consciousness. The subject of this discourse, for Malabou, discloses a “structure of presence-absence” that puts the “soul” neither within nor outside it: “Moving between the inside and the outside between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior,’ the soul establishes its ‘rational liberation’” (70).

Fichou suggests something of Malabou’s structure, in “Plastron” by including the disappearance of the artist in the artifact, the face in the mask, and in “Primer” by shifting consciousness into its habitus, extended to include a whole tele-technological apparatus and form of life. Fichou thus stages a kind of sublation, which involves, to cite Malabou once more, “the relation the subject forms with itself through the mediation of its other” (119).³ The locus of this self-relation is, again, that mobile point between inside and outside, blurring as much as drawing their separation and signaling a reflexivity Malabou characterizes as “plastic” in two senses of the word: it forms or informs itself, and it receives form from without. It is both creative and receptive to change, active and passive at once.

Fichou’s art turns insistently on the habits of just such a “plastic” consciousness. In “Origami Cube” (one of a series showcased in the exhibition “Contenant Contenu”), he fashions an object from paper, photographs it, and then unfolds it again for the eventual print.

Fig. 2. Origami Cube. 2012.

The cube we see, literally its own support, suggests that it exists inside itself. At the same time, the image of this inside is outside what it depicts, producing cognitive disorientation in us as viewers. Especially if we imagine the cube as empty, and this emptiness as what the image shows us, then its emptiness raises the question not just of what we are looking at but also what we are doing when we look.

In other work, Fichou pushes this “plastic” consciousness even farther towards its own effacement. The “being” it implies is closer to what Hegel might have called a “System” operating the self-determination of its substance outside the will. Malabou sees in such a displaced habitus, not the totalizing drive for which Hegel’s “dialectical machine” has long been reproached, but that drive’s inherent negativity, which, turning back upon itself, or turning itself inside out, opens up in identity (or for a self-identical subject) a “space-between” opposites where differences (and limits) can be held in “reciprocal tension,” neither externalized nor elided (165).

Fichou engages this “space-between” with his video feedback machine, drily called “The Artist.”

Fig. 3. The Artist. 2013. Installation view at Young Projects. 2015.

Consisting of a camera that faces a monitor, it records the empty screen (and whatever light it emits, along with any incident light), then sends this (non)image back to be projected and recorded again, and so on in a loop. The overlay of successive (non)images generates luminous abstract patterns that can be varied with slight adjustments in the camera’s focal point and angle of view. No one exactly produces these patterns—no human hand is involved (at least directly), no representation either. Without a referent in the world, they don’t copy anything, though they derive only from the process of their own reduplication. Nor do they stand as original artifacts, though they are unpredictable and unrepeatable. They suggest purely virtual self-organizing events without depth, substance, or “filiation”—which is why Fichou calls them “Orphan Images.”

Unlike with “Plastron” and “Primer,” there is little existential anxiety in this work. If the feedback system resembles a coffin, its glass panels suggest also a greenhouse, and the alienated impersonality that remains no less a subtext of its operation, combining death and life, points more to the possibilities of a displaced habitus. We feel its “space-between” in the “Orphan Images” when they are projected as separate installations, their status as objects offset by a shimmer that just hints at static. We feel it again in work Fichou calls “Spirals.”

Fig. 4. Spirals. 2015.

These pieces are made by focusing the camera on a canvas covered with random strokes and drips of paint. With the help of an external projector the same feedback process is initiated. The strokes and drips start to scintillate. By canting the lens, Fichou has them trail across the canvas, leaving their own lustrous traces—“footprints of potentiality,” as he put it in an accompanying text. He then takes pictures of the canvas to print. The results are curiously mixed: abstract paintings without texture, photographs but not of something, (an)organic and (im)material objects that resist easy categorization.

We might think of the diagram in Figure 5 (below) as another version by Fichou of “The Artist.” Consciousness is also a feedback process. It converts a perceived object into a memory that, in turn, invests a subsequent perception of the object, again in a repeated loop.

Fig. 5. Untitled. 2013.

With a nod to the psychology of Henri Bergson, future and past moments are compressed in a “present” of instantaneous “duration” that generates in the mind (or the mind as) another “orphan image” (indicated by the purple mandala-like pattern). If a machine still operates here—despite the artist’s presence in the green “4D emotional space,” he still has a “mechanical captor” for an eye—it is because consciousness for Fichou is constituted by the time of its passing, appearing insofar as it disappears. It is, as he writes along the right edge of his diagram, a “retrospective illusion.”

This image hangs on what Fichou calls his “Walls.” Serving as surfaces on which various objects (his own and others) are juxtaposed, they provide a space for working out philosophical preoccupations with time, habit, nature, and artifice.

Fig. 6. Walls, installation view. 2015.

On them, we see staged a mode of thinking that favors context over content, arrangement over elements. One consequence is that the object loses the privilege it would have if displayed in a gallery or museum. But a “Wall,” displayed as an object in its own right, also makes this demotion the point; and the “Walls,” taken together, become meaningful in a network of associations that includes the gallery or museum where they are shown. Fichou thus draws the spectator into his mode of thinking, which unsettles the relations between objects, their valuation, and their institutional location.

Fig. 7. ‘9’. 2013.

This art is structural in character. It involves the world not just as its frame or support but even quite literally as its material. Another case in point for Fichou is his painted drywall cube, an object made from what contains it. The paradox suggests a “space-between” inside and outside that conjures again a displaced habitus, this time in the specific sense given the term by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He writes, “The body is in the social world, but the social world is in the body…. The very structures of the world are present in the structures (or, to put it better, the cognitive schemes) that agents implement in order to understand it” (152). In this light, we might see the installation as a portrait—of the self-effacing artist but, also, of ourselves as viewers, standing in a space that contains us as it conditions how and what we see. Shrewdly, Fichou makes this conditioning the true object on display.

The aim is, finally, ethical. Fichou works right where interventions are most needed in post-industrial societies like our own, which functionalize affective and aesthetic dimensions, turning us into consumers. He draws us away from passive contemplation into an active, investigative relation to aesthetic experience as also a worldly activity. This shift happens in the self’s relation to itself as mediated through its objects, its “artificial organs,” above all its audiovisual or digital extensions of the sensible, affect, self-consciousness.⁴ If such an “originary prostheticity” still entails displacement, loss, even alienation, for Fichou it also offers new creative possibilities, bound up with the individuation of our technical singularity.

Footnotes

1. For Jacques Derrida, this abstract universality or hidden positivity points to a “mystical foundation of authority” that allies belief with knowledge, with science, with a “technoscientific or tele-technological performance” (57).

2. A video of “Primer” can be seen on YouTube.

3. Malabou’s claim for what is essentially a deconstructive dynamic in Hegel’s thought is, of course, arguable. On this, see Derrida’s introduction to her book, where he concedes the usefulness of rereading Hegel, and German Idealism more broadly, in tension with its later critics. For another argument for this “return” (with a Lacanian twist), see Slavoj Zizek, 18–44; see also, Jean-Luc Nancy’s subtle rereading.

4. I follow here, and below, the thought of philosopher Bernard Stiegler, clearly a kindred spirit for Fichou. See his Symbolic Misery, 10 passim.

Works Cited

• Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge.” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Trans. Samuel Weber. New York: Routledge, 2002. 42–101.
• Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel. Trans. Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith and Stephen Miller. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Symbolic Misery. Trans. Barnaby Norman. London: Polity, 2014.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.