Catherine Raynal’s “installations” on memory, by Max Torregrossa, May 2008

It usually makes me feel a bit wary when an artist proposes an “installation” as a means of expression. The idea of movement, of, etymologically speaking, “putting something into a stall”, that this word conjures up rubs me the wrong way and brings to mind the idea of an “event” that consequently limits the aesthetic perception in time.

Of course, the long-swirling controversy over whether the art work is an object or an event can be fathomless, but as somebody standing on the sidelines of this debate, I remain convinced that the roots of the feelings the work elicits must be known in order to fully appreciate it.
Not identifying “why” one feels joy, exaltation, uneasiness, anxiety or even indifference looking at a work seems sort of like giving up halfway. Looking at a work of art that uses roundabout means to achieve its ends requires patience and introspection.

In the case of Catherine Raynal’s installations, with their plethora of assembled materials, in order to develop an aesthetic feeling we have no choice but to let our perceptions travel through the destinations those components propose. The objects, removed from their original context, broken up and put back together, do not make the emotional trajectory easier. Generally, that can be deliberate, but it may multiply the aesthetic proposals, with the result that the onlooker’s and the artist’s gaze drift apart from each other.
The more combinations of mental representations there are, the more it seems necessary to propose a pathway to the work in order to grasp its essence.
What’s more, the perturbations of the proto-concepts and judgments of affordance tend to limit direct access to what the artist is trying to say.
By proto-concepts I mean everything that, in one way or another, guides the onlooker’s expectations, and by judgment of affordance the idea, partly based on Gibson’s and Ockham’s theories of perception, that processes lead to the formation of certain judgments without the intermediary of reason.
For example, if the black installation’s 85 pieces were lying on a table, our instinctive approach to them would not be the same as it would be if they were hanging on a wall. In this instance, it would be no use picking one of them up to evaluate it, each being part of a whole proposed to afford a view rather than to touch.
More plainly put, it is easier for us to recognize the artistic quality of a painting on a gallery wall than on a street corner.

However, the problem does not end there because Catherine Raynal offers us her work with a subtitle: memory. It is clear, then, that she does not intend to completely leave the onlooker total freedom of access to her work. Like Magritte, who wrote “this is not a pipe” on one of his paintings, telling viewers what they must not see, Catherine Raynal, tells us what we must: memory.

Memory, not memories: the artist is not asking us to come along on a journey. These objects hanging on the wall next to each other do not offer a visual recreation of the past but the making of the present. If we agree with the idea that memory is the persistence of past images mingling with our present perceptions, or that the eye is what enables us to assuage our passion for knowing and therefore for building our memory, experience and consciousness, we must accept that time plays a role in the perception of the image here.

Image and time

Some people might object to using the word “image” in reference to Catherine Raynal’s installations because the third dimension is still very present. But they must admit that the installations have neither “front” nor “back” and although sometimes a utensil can be identified as one of their components the artist has emphasized apraxia, the loss of the understanding of how things are used. None of the pieces is identifiable as a “useful” object. Consequently, no “driving force”, Bewegungsantriebe, is conceivable. Only the gaze is useful. Therefore we can consider that these installations “work” like images.

Now that that has been settled, let us recall how man-made images can instruct or protect.
The history of art, and of sacred art in particular, is very clear on this point. The “Ways of the Cross” instructed onlookers about the final moments of Christ’s earthly life. Icons or acheropita — images depicting the face of Jesus “not made by the human hand” miraculously appearing on a piece of cloth —are, on the contrary, images that protect. Icons and mandilyons are images that act. Even most votive images should fall into this category because they commemorate the granting of a wish.

In any case, what matters most is that these images were and are still not meant to show a likeness but to signify an intention: mimesis rather than homoiosis. The difference is significant if one considers the historical consequences of the eighth-century iconoclastic crisis.

Today the concept remains valid for British postage stamps: the queen’s profile is not there to show what she really looks like but to signify her authority. In a sense, somebody who sticks a stamp on an envelope in London today is not so different from the citizen of ancient Rome who carried a denarius with the emperor’s profile on it. This elementary, primordial image made the object sacred. The emperor’s power held sway wherever his coins were legal tender.

Catherine Raynal’s installations work in much the same way, by reifying memory. Objects become image supports that offer something more than a mere visual proposal. To drive the point home, just notice how easy it is to linger before each object in these installations, almost hypnotized by their diversity and singularity. Yet, oddly, no sooner do you take your eyes off them than you remember nothing.
If there is no lingering image, it is because Catherine Raynal’s installations do not manufacture memories, but generate an immediate perception of consciousness, otherwise called “immediacy”. But what is memory if not a perception in the present?

So much for the idea of how these installations work. What about the idea of creation?

Exploring or approaching this idea is all the harder in that an art work usually offers no preface and rejects doubt: it simply is. That is why artists often have trouble talking about their work, which seems obvious to them. Unless they toiled on it for a long time, in theory it is hard for them to verbally bring us into their inner world, if they can at all.

Catherine Raynal is no exception because her creative process does not really seem subordinated to a conceptual mind.
In the black installation, she has decided to cover the wooden blocks with pages from the telephone book: it is easy for us to imagine that gesture to be a thoughtfully pondered rather than an instinctive act likening the lines of names and numbers to a sort of “memory”.
But the artist has inked the pages over, blackening without really hiding them. Likewise, she has covered the other objects of both installations – with medical gauze, screen and plaster — and wrapped wire around them. In short, she has acted with a desire to preserve, protect or even restore or repair. It is therefore a real act instead of just a proposal to see. Regarding the phone book pages for example, it can also be said that she has not sought to present what could be a memory, but to preserve a certain memory.

Here’s another example: one of the pieces in the white installation comprises a kind of glass test tube two-thirds filled with a white powder and stopped with a cotton ball, all inside the medullary canal of a fragment of an animal’s femur.
Knowing Catherine Raynal, it would seem highly doubtful that this montage was thought-out and calculated in advance. I think that she instinctively put a fragile man-made object — a glass tube for studying or preserving some kind of powder residue — in the middle of an organic element — a piece of bone whose purpose is to protect the body and marrow, the last thing left after the other organic components decay into nothingness.
Natural or man-made items designed to protect or preserve are combined with each other but leave the eye the possibility of noticing what is or was. Again, this is close to the idea of memory.
Even the black installation’s peeling truck, a toy in an upside-down vertical position, shows a little more than a past childhood. It is a cattle truck and its side door is lowered so that you can go inside. The roof is partly open. It looks like an ark ready to welcome and preserve the different species of memory.

Black, white, long and circular

The last thing to consider is the installations’ overall layout, shape and color.
One is a five-meter-long oval, pointed at both ends and inflated in the middle; a single object “starts” and “ends” it.
The other is perfectly circular and measures two meters in diameter: the amplitude of Catherine Raynal’s arms. The artist likes to explain that she based the installation’s dimensions on turning herself into Vitruvius’ woman.
The black installation’s length and oblong shape emphasize a certain dynamic. There is a beginning and an end, inflation and deflation. Naturally, it is read from left to right but the shape allows reflexivity.
With the exception of the item that “starts” the installation and was created first, it makes no difference where all the other objects are placed. What matters is not their location but the relationships between them.
Moreover, the artist says there is no particular sequence and that the viewer’s eye can move from top to bottom, left to right and vice versa. She does not seek, she says, to represent the length or passage of time. However, our instinctive perception invalidates that statement. The length and oval shape are too significant. The pieces’ arrangement effectively punctuates the unfolding of the installation’s temporal sequence and the fragments of partly hidden mirrors placed here and there recalling the “viewer’s time” act just in time to collect the viewer’s memory.

Metal — often rusty — rubber, wire, a taut spring that never unwinds, variously-shaped stones, screws, nails, a screen enclosing marbles and dominoes and all kinds of other things are the main materials making up the black installation.
If the metal is rusty, perhaps it is because time has passed, but I also think that oxidation, by covering the initial object, has enabled a certain continuity to take place in another form. Memory sometimes works that way.

The sense of seeing time change something — wear, abrasion, decay — usually arouses the desire to mentally recreate its original condition, which necessarily implies a restoration of the past. Here, that is not possible because the objects are sometimes hard to identify and often confusingly combined with other things. One can only see what is. Moreover, some mobiles made of marbles or stones hanging by twisted wire jutting out into the emptiness by fastening a mass ensure, sometimes in a complex way, that the whole is subject to the laws of gravity. A considerable sense of overall balance then emanates from the installation and further underscores the present instant felt, disposing of the past and the future with a single stroke precisely because the balance acts between the two.

In conclusion, the black installation, by its size, shape and components, forces the gaze to approach it, to observe a state. What the viewer sees is damaged, worn out, rusty, bent, dulled or corroded; the items have a mechanical or industrial past yet they are useless. It is wounded memory in a space where time once had its place but that belongs neither to the past nor future.

The white installation pushes the viewer away. White reflects light and repels the eye. One is compelled to look at the whole rather than the details and to take in the circular world the artist created with the same dimensions as her arms. It has concretely become the measure of the world.
Chronologically, this installation comes after the first. Catherine Raynal herself says that “white” follows “black” because the former would not exist without the latter. It is very easy to understand what the artist means because in this circle she has clearly repaired what the oval evoked.
To do that, she has extinguished time and movement. Even gravity no longer works. The three mobile balls suspended from strings are too big and rest on the support. Although the hanging mannequin is jointed, it is no longer alive and only the external hand of a demiurge can make it move again.
This object holds our interest because it is one of the installations’ few representations of humans. It is a jointed wooden mannequin, probably a toy, covered with a thin coat of white paint so transparent that the original color shows through underneath.
When asked why she put a hanged doll in this installation, Catherine Raynal replies that there isn’t one. She wanted the toy to remain jointed, mobile, and could therefore neither nail nor glue it. So she suspended it by the neck in a sort of white tray a little bigger than it is. But what I see is a child’s coffin with a hanged figure.
The other representation of a human — a doll’s face glued to a piece of wood — is equally disturbing. Actually, it is not a doll’s face but a cast of one, covered with gauze and a plastered strip. The eyes vanish in the same way that they do in a death mask and, frankly, this looks just like one.

Metal has almost disappeared from this installation, with stone replacing it in equal proportion. A partly painted piece of flint’s shape surprisingly recalls the graceful movement of an ancient statue that time seems to have altered. Only the wire holding the stone in place so that it looks as though it girds the figure’s waist suggests the shape.
It is impossible to imagine the Venus de Milo with her arms or the Winged Victory with her head, hard to conceive that ancient art did not start out looking like what we see in museums today. Alma-Tadema’s work showing Phidias painting the colorful Parthenon frieze is historically acceptable, but came as a shock to 1860 England, accustomed as it was to white marbles and statues.
So where does the truth about Greek art lie: are all those gods, athletes and monuments pale or intensely colored?
Without being able to answer, one must admit that time has frozen the excellence of an art of which only the memory is left to us in white marble.

Catherine Raynal makes that same white from paint, gauze, plaster strips and wax, which serves to set the stone or takes the form of candles — used, of course. Some are kept in a box behind glass made opaque with white, like a reliquary. There is something about this installation that brings cemeteries to mind, and the Catholic religion, which was very important to the artist’s family, is strangely presented here.

Two crosses can be seen in the installations, one in the black and the other in the white, but neither is really a crucifix. One consists of rusty scrap metal that served to hold the stones of a wall in place. The other is made of bars, also rusty but painted, used in reinforced concrete. The most surprising thing is that the black installation’s cross has a hook like a butcher’s hook. The symbol is dreadful. The upright part of the other cross is “crowned” with a piece of a femur.

In the end, the white installation seems to repair what was suggested in the black one. It brings the process of mourning to an end. If memories can die, perhaps building monuments is a way of recognizing that they no longer really exist on their own.
Catherine Raynal has not built that kind of monument. Instead, she has created a sort of generator that starts working as soon as a human looks at it. The gaze, knowledge, consciousness and memory, then, are necessary to switch it on.