ANNAÏK LOU PITTELOUD
White Between the Darlings
28 August – 05 October, 2014
“Description”
About disappearing displays
Forty postcards, framed in sets of two and divided by custom made passe-partouts, are on view in the exhibition White between the Darlings. Each postcard was selected by Annaïk Lou Pitteloud from the personal collection she has been assembling over the last few years. They bear the images of artworks that have specific roots in art history. The linear character of such history, its superficial reliability seemingly guaranteed by the supplemental language of the caption (title, author, date etc.), has been shuffled like a deck of cards allowing the images to move freely, albeit temporarily. By coupling with a passe-partout, held by a frame and individually named with a title, Pitteloud replaces linearity with a personal and apparently deviated reading of the relationship between the images. These twenty titles, plus the exhibition title itself, have a deceiving tongue-in-cheek air to them that seems to want to bypass the origins and weight of the reproduced imagery. By deferring, instead of referring to a certain coherence Pitteloud disrupts their indexical behavior. Literally and figuratively, they simultaneously unhinge and bind back together. Furthermore, the titles suggest an additional path to the complex ʻin-between spaceʼ that is central to this exhibition.
Its overall title, White between the Darlings, appears to indicate the narrow cardboard strip of the passe-partout that divides and encircles each pairing. Yet it also echoes the wall space; the interval between each framed work in the exhibition space and, in doing so, represents the discontinuity of the traditional ʻwhiteʼ display format on more than one scale. Analogous to the seemingly derailing dynamic of the titles, this white strip announces the speculative space where the actual work is to take place. Both the postcard and the exhibition space appear to be part of a continuous blank that can only exist by the equally continuous negotiation of potential content. Both are conditions that merely borrow the material, infrastructure or system through which they can become discernible and active. It is on the back of the postcard where information about the depicted image can be found. With each image displayed in a frame, however, such verification of origin and possible value is largely cancelled out, or at least postponed. One could say that an image, let alone a postcard, does not and cannot allow an inside look without disappearing altogether; it can only be an ʻoutsideʼ. Ironically, disappearing is precisely the postcard’s intended destiny – to disappear from oneʼs view in order to enter the view of another, loaded to carry a more or less personal message. Focusing on this aspect, Pitteloud develops new connections between images through which a new space within the exhibition is gradually installed. A ʻwithinʼ where the viewer is more than welcome since he or she is a necessary party to the negotiations.
The procedure the artist has developed to guide us toward this paradoxical ʻwithinʼ becomes palpable in the printed and folded edition of postcards she has created specifically for the exhibition. The backs of seven postcards, selected from those in the exhibition, have been reproduced as images becoming the traditional front of the postcard. For the back Pitteloud has created a uniform layout and address caption. As such, the images to which the depicted backs previously referred have disappeared into the thin sheet of cardboard that holds the front and back together. Their reappearance can only be speculated upon. These backs, now made into postcards themselves, can be torn out and sent back into the world, not only inversely reiterating the central gesture of the exhibition but also the trajectory the postcard would normally go through – normally, since we cannot really say that the postcards in the exhibition have actually arrived but more as if they have been fixated in mid-air on their way to elsewhere. At first glance the edition resembles an envelope. The area where the address of the sender can normally be found now has the coordinates of the exhibition, its title, duration and author’s name. The sender in this case is not a person but a situation, an event limited and defined by duration and location. Moreover, upon closer inspection, the envelope is not merely a traditional container to be opened and discarded upon arrival: it needs to be folded out to access its content – a set of seven postcards ready to be redistributed. The tear lines, at least temporarily, attach the container to its content making the edition not just an addendum but rather an extension of the exhibition. Only this time the focus lies on the reverse of the postcard, a present but inaccessible feature in the exhibition. By putting the edition to use, the postcards are gradually detached from their so-called container, carrier or, perhaps more precisely, from that narrow strip of cardboard that binds the exhibition together. This strip now only seems to have been in place as a prelude to its repeated moments of disappearance.
Steve Van den Bosch, Antwerp, 2014
Forty postcards, framed in sets of two and divided by custom made passe-partouts, are on view in the exhibition White between the Darlings. Each postcard was selected by Annaïk Lou Pitteloud from the personal collection she has been assembling over the last few years. They bear the images of artworks that have specific roots in art history. The linear character of such history, its superficial reliability seemingly guaranteed by the supplemental language of the caption (title, author, date etc.), has been shuffled like a deck of cards allowing the images to move freely, albeit temporarily. By coupling with a passe-partout, held by a frame and individually named with a title, Pitteloud replaces linearity with a personal and apparently deviated reading of the relationship between the images. These twenty titles, plus the exhibition title itself, have a deceiving tongue-in-cheek air to them that seems to want to bypass the origins and weight of the reproduced imagery. By deferring, instead of referring to a certain coherence Pitteloud disrupts their indexical behavior. Literally and figuratively, they simultaneously unhinge and bind back together. Furthermore, the titles suggest an additional path to the complex ʻin-between spaceʼ that is central to this exhibition.
Its overall title, White between the Darlings, appears to indicate the narrow cardboard strip of the passe-partout that divides and encircles each pairing. Yet it also echoes the wall space; the interval between each framed work in the exhibition space and, in doing so, represents the discontinuity of the traditional ʻwhiteʼ display format on more than one scale. Analogous to the seemingly derailing dynamic of the titles, this white strip announces the speculative space where the actual work is to take place. Both the postcard and the exhibition space appear to be part of a continuous blank that can only exist by the equally continuous negotiation of potential content. Both are conditions that merely borrow the material, infrastructure or system through which they can become discernible and active. It is on the back of the postcard where information about the depicted image can be found. With each image displayed in a frame, however, such verification of origin and possible value is largely cancelled out, or at least postponed. One could say that an image, let alone a postcard, does not and cannot allow an inside look without disappearing altogether; it can only be an ʻoutsideʼ. Ironically, disappearing is precisely the postcard’s intended destiny – to disappear from oneʼs view in order to enter the view of another, loaded to carry a more or less personal message. Focusing on this aspect, Pitteloud develops new connections between images through which a new space within the exhibition is gradually installed. A ʻwithinʼ where the viewer is more than welcome since he or she is a necessary party to the negotiations.
The procedure the artist has developed to guide us toward this paradoxical ʻwithinʼ becomes palpable in the printed and folded edition of postcards she has created specifically for the exhibition. The backs of seven postcards, selected from those in the exhibition, have been reproduced as images becoming the traditional front of the postcard. For the back Pitteloud has created a uniform layout and address caption. As such, the images to which the depicted backs previously referred have disappeared into the thin sheet of cardboard that holds the front and back together. Their reappearance can only be speculated upon. These backs, now made into postcards themselves, can be torn out and sent back into the world, not only inversely reiterating the central gesture of the exhibition but also the trajectory the postcard would normally go through – normally, since we cannot really say that the postcards in the exhibition have actually arrived but more as if they have been fixated in mid-air on their way to elsewhere. At first glance the edition resembles an envelope. The area where the address of the sender can normally be found now has the coordinates of the exhibition, its title, duration and author’s name. The sender in this case is not a person but a situation, an event limited and defined by duration and location. Moreover, upon closer inspection, the envelope is not merely a traditional container to be opened and discarded upon arrival: it needs to be folded out to access its content – a set of seven postcards ready to be redistributed. The tear lines, at least temporarily, attach the container to its content making the edition not just an addendum but rather an extension of the exhibition. Only this time the focus lies on the reverse of the postcard, a present but inaccessible feature in the exhibition. By putting the edition to use, the postcards are gradually detached from their so-called container, carrier or, perhaps more precisely, from that narrow strip of cardboard that binds the exhibition together. This strip now only seems to have been in place as a prelude to its repeated moments of disappearance.
Steve Van den Bosch, Antwerp, 2014
