Erika Kierulf: Retiens mon Souffle

To anyone preoccupied with the aftermath of Minimalism in ­contemporary art, Erika Kierulf’s recent exhibition Retiens mon souffle (La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, 10–12 October 2007) will be a breath of fresh air. I contend that by means of two video installation works, Kierulf reconsiders the now historical critical debate surrounding Minimalist art by framing its two antagonistic positions—namely, Michael Fried’s brand of modernism versus what he calls postmodern “theatre”—in a highly sophisticated and enlightening manner. In fact, Kierulf’s work is a prism through which one can make sense of a widespread retro trend in recent contemporary art (which casts a backward glance particularly at the 1960s and 1970s); ultimately, it affords one a critical re-assessment of the stakes of Minimalism in our contemporary context, especially as these stakes are now being played out in the hands of a new generation of artists.

As one enters La Centrale, the first work on display, Breathe (2007), is experienced almost like a wall that impedes further entry, be it visual or bodily, into the space at hand. Breathe is a video installation comprised of three equidistant rectangular video screens built into a large white polyhedron (a rectangular parallelepiped or cuboid to be precise). This fact alone suffices to understand the work as an explicit reference to the geometrical universe of Minimalism’s “specific objects.” However, as opposed to the aesthetic parameters of Minimalism (in which the sheer presence of objects is in the service of an anti-illusionistic agenda), a representational element is included in Kierulf’s sculptural entity: from the screens emanate the images of three “spaces” delimited solely by a frontally framed wall. These unevenly lit walls each bear—given their video translations—slightly different tints (one is bluish, another tends towards the violet, whereas the last one appears to be grey). Thus, these images of placelessness evoke both the Trinity (and the Christian motifs in this exhibition abound) as well as the serial repetitions associated with the art of Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin. The images ­appearing on these three screens are coordinated in such a way as to relay the actions that are shown on the outermost left and right screens to the central monitor, thereby underscoring the fact that these three, separate images really comprise a single, albeit dismembered, entity. Much like a Minimalist “sculpture,” whose totality can never be experienced if only because a finite spectator is in time and must apprehend each face of the sculpture independently and then synthesize them in one’s imagination, the projected image in Kierulf’s work displays three independent “faces” of a given scene in three formally distinct manners (if only slightly so).