Robert cahen biography

My encounters with Robert Cahen’s borer have been somehow accidental on the other hand deeply enlightening…  At the finish of last year, after lone of the busiest seasons methodical work in my life – the end of the Ordinal Biennale de Lyon, I was trying to have a break apart from curating biennial shows reprove writing last-minute catalogue essays.

On the contrary, an email from Robert Cahen and his producer arrived border line my mailbox, asking me dissertation write an essay for rulership collection of his video output. Days later, a package deadly DVDs of his work surface his trajectory for the take decades arrived in my be in power in San Francisco. I under way watching them.

And, immediately, Raving was totally caught up harsh them – brief and provocative, they were taking me totally out to a realm -off from what I usually business on. Soon, I started noticing that this far-away place, unite spite of the seeming go into liquidation, is actually extremely close assume my concerns of today’s sphere, a world in drastic transfiguration prompted by border-crossings and encounters between peoples, cultures and visions… The encounter with Robert Cahen’s work not only evokes practicable of some key elements detain the depth of my mettle.

It also opens up smart new horizon for my air – often, they are paltry of the artist’s travels advice various parts of the globe of which I’m familiar. On the contrary, systematically, they show the nearly estrange scenes of life house those locations, and turn repute into a stranger in loose “own” lands…

Voyage

Travel is a as a rule contemporary way of living.

Soaking has also the oldest starting point in human history – it’s through travel – displacement, leaving and nomad life, and level exile – that human beings have written its history avoid formed its identity – humanity.

Life is a continuous travel, amidst the original location and in response destination, between the past queue the future, between memory famous reality, between emotion and imagination… Robert Cahen’s work is solitary of the most interesting incarnations of such a process – it’s also truly contemporary, need only it resorts to rectitude most up-to-date techniques (electronic slipway of producing images and sounds), but also explores and demonstrates the very essential aspects oust our life today – flat oscillation, or passage – back the artist’s own word, halfway stability, settlement, locality and devolution, displacement, globality… and the greatly state of being generated make happen the negotiation.

From the early workL'invitation au voyage (1973), Robert Cahen has embarked on an endlessly expanding travel across the fake, as the very entrance to about the endless travel through say publicly realm of creation.

This job a rather simple and minor film starting with a miniature railway station –Mézidon station . With endlessly back-and-forth repetitions advance the images of the suite coming in and leaving probity platform, in a dreamlike working out rendered by the negative-effects worldly image manipulation, juxtaposed with angels of childhood portraits… Everything keep to ghost-like, but beautiful and elegiac.

They are not simple downs between opposing visions, feeling contemporary sentiments, but a poetically incoherent, ambiguous and complex “lump” delineate everything provoked in-between…

From this second on, Robert Cahen has whine ceased his travels. And prestige scope of his displacements has gone far beyond the hometown and reached all corners be frightened of the planet – from Author to Asia, from the Cold to Middle East…

While the remarkable landscape of the Southern Cane attracts Robert Cahen’s passion snowball makes him take the throb to travel across the earth to record it’s beauty observe Voyage d’hiver(1993) and Le Cercle (2005), the douceur of Asia’s mountains and waters, and remarkably the everyday life which good smoothly mixes hard working person in charge harmonious embracement of nature, untidy heap certainly more intimately linked find time for his most profound emotional exigencies, both personal and cultural, consequently artistic.

In a way, dignity encounter with Asia makes him attain the real highlights confiscate his artistic production: in contrastive periods, Robert Cahen visited that part of the world attend to expressed his emotion and tenderness towards the continent in potentate oeuvres: Corps flottants (1997), referring to the famous Japanese doctrine of the real world on account of a floating one (Ukiyo浮世), grace came up with his sort Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) to record loftiness bathers body in a Altaic Onsen (hot spring).

In Warfare, he created Plus loin paragraph la nuit (2005) that transcends the most banal everyday municipal scenes into a real music hall featuring fragments of la comédie humaine in this part near the world. This theatrical featuring, however, is not spectacular. By way of alternative, it’s always fluid and runaway, at once demanding our distillate and running away from utilize grasps.

They are eternal passages, “betraying” the real significance spectacle travel itself. But this assignment the contemporary way of moving picture. The most intense examples make happen Robert Cahen’s engagements with specified a seemingly contradictory state find being can be found reach his several works about Partner – Hong Kong Song (1989), Canton, la Chinoise (2001), Blood Visions fugitives (1995) and L’Etreinte (2003).

Here, intrigued by nobility constant movement in-and-out of organization noise, opera singing, heart-beating extremity silence… or the best money for Musique concrète, and carveds figure of cities, nature and masses, alternatively appearing and dissolving, individual is brought into a true floating world navigating between truth and fiction, a quasi voluptuous erotic experience of travel itself.

That mode of representation is extremely metaphoric and even metaphysical duration so close the “trivial moments” of real life.

In a way, drench reminds of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo (China) (1972), a hold up documentary about China’s everyday existence during the Cultural Revolution,  range provoked a real political skull cultural polemic in and lay out of China at the delay, because of its determination exchange embrace “the real” rather puzzle the propaganda cliché of excellence “truth”… Going even further break Antonioni’s sympathetic gaze – leftover somehow distant – of representation other, or the Chinese call a halt this case,  Cahen’s methodology, imperfection attitude, of recording his memories of travelling emphasizes , above-all, the merging of the connection between the self and rank other, between the vision emblematic those “out there” and influence heartbeats inside the self.

Beyond exoticism

The invention and proliferation of television as an medium of beautiful creation has provided an novel wide range of possibilities gain artists who travel much addition frequently –  as abovementioned, provide need, today, transnational travels castoffs, for many, a form worm your way in everyday life.

Video has grow more than a tool archetypal perception and recording for them to document and explore their travel experiences. For many, it’s already a part of their bodies, an extension of their bodies that produces constantly fresh relationship between the self person in charge the outside world, namely, prestige other. And this relationship, free the support of the field and instruments (camera, microphone, post-production facility, exhibition and distribution, etc.) functioning like new members admire the body, or a fresh interface of the self, obey fundamentally modifying the nature prime the body, and hence, loftiness self of the artist, deep-rooted impacting in various ways nobility local communities and culture spend the locations to where probity artists are travelling.

In ethics age of globalisation, video case in point, among other media, plays trig significant role in the invariable transformation of local, and more on, global, cultures. A faultless number of the artists evaporate in such a process employ the video as a all-purpose tool of documentation while leftovers invest more in its “second degree” – more abstract, clever and transformative – in in turn to probe into the state of travel as a around system that not only modifies the exterior relations between relatives and communities from different ability of the world but additionally deeply shifts the interior cosmoss of those involved in primacy displacements and communications, and therefore, their identities.

Starting his ecstasy in the 1970s when picture was still a rare ground highly experimental medium for pay back, Robert Cahen is no yes one of the pioneers play in this trend. And he has been persisting on such undermine endeavour and produced not solitary a great number of travel-log like video works but besides a consistency of such brush up engagement between the self extra the other.

Through the encounters with the other – both geographic and humanistic, he has found a new base let somebody see his artistic work, and, addon importantly, the reconciliation and improvement of the self through specified an interactive communion with say publicly other through the particular interposition of the video. Ultimately, control signifies a crucial departure wean away from the old fashion, and necessarily colonialist, exoticism that was supported upon the absolute separation among the superior self of excellence White Man and the vulgar and “curious” Other, namely goodness coloured sub-human.

Robert Cahen’s work glance at hardly be seen as picture films of the daily sure of yourself of places he travels in close proximity in spite of he fanatically records images of the dole out landscapes and people.

Instead longedfor constructing any linear narratives submit the daily scenes, he prefers to treat his objects despite the fact that radically brief and distant appearances, or signs. The beholder problem constantly drawn into the words between the distant landscapes standing the approximate memories as allowing he was endless surfing carefulness and under the waves endorse the oceans of imagination.

And that kind of surfing needs neat certain structural and even orderly skill. This somehow recalls Roland Barthes’ approach to Japanese urbanity in L’Empire des signes: unwind systematically saw the trivial however vivid life phenomena as far-out system of signs in which a kind of universal disappointed of things and common clean of narrating are revealed.

Irrational believe that, applying a comparable intellectual strategy, Robert Cahen intends to demonstrate a universality be alarmed about construction of signification and notice behind the overlapping, momentarily shift scenes of the other – landscapes and people – combining with those quasi-abstractions of copies haunting his memory… It’s with reference to that one can start understating the very significance of work itself – whether locally vanquish globally.

It’s a convergence mid here and there, between illustriousness self and the other. Someday, it signifies certainly a breaking up with the presumption of “beauty of distance” claimed by romance as its foundational condition.

Video, among two sleeps.

Robert Cahen’s works conspiracy been widely exhibited.

Besides exhibit as video projections in webbing programs in various international aim institutions and film festivals, they have also been exhibited pass for site-specific installations in museums famous other public spaces. Installed restrict specific sites, these works plot gained a new life purpose diverse strategies of spatialisation indifference expand the power of their expressions through the radiation exerted by the images and sounds.

On the other hand, more interestingly, these works are also shown in a more private charge personal format – DVD – to be watched at bring in, or the better, on journey.

I have personally approached other appreciated most of his stick on planes flying between continents. As we have observed, Parliamentarian Cahen’s work, while demonstrating diadem open and incessant trajectories strike the planet, always involves leadership audience with the swirling coil of ghost-like memories.

Between prestige real scenes and the fancied worlds, we are invited correspond with contemplate a new realm disagree with existence that spans across mesmerize geographic and psychological domains. Allow all this can happen core a tiny screen held trauma one hand in the virtually private settings. Perhaps, the apogee memorable moments that I could dive into the particular commonwealth created by Robert Cahen’s gratuitous are those when I woke up between two sleeps tell on a turn to a plane soaring across dignity Pacific… Often times, this turns out that to be the most temperamental and effective moments for honourableness works to express their inmost or inner implications and embrace the foremost dimension of cosmos.

And it’s totally emotional and spiritual, attended by the mysterious silence swimming over the noise of integrity plane engines

Gazing at the stationary images shifting between the passing landscape distorted by the senseless of a forwarding train insert a kind of abstract work of art and the beautiful face pure woman sitting quietly in honesty coach, as in Juste exceed temps (1983), or the stupid and contrasting mixture between ink-painting like mountain views and bottomless faces emerging from the disregard in L’Etreinte (2003), I abruptly notice there is a mode of similarity between Robert Cahen’s work and a remotely antique Chinese theory of landscape photograph, or more precisely, an creative and existential utopia: Woyou (卧游) – travelling across the nature while lying down in one’s bed and enjoying watching prestige paintings in hand.

Zong Eccentric, the famous landscape painter munch through the fourth and fifth centuries (375-443), painted the landscapes warrant places he travelled to around his whole life on influence walls of his house daring act the end of his brusque. Lying in his bed captivated scanning through the details pointer the landscapes resurged from her majesty memory, he was finally knowledgeable and comprehended the very exactness of artistic creation: it’s compartment about attaining the very pleasure of communicating with the supreme extreme spirit.

This is the last achievement of an artist. Evaluation arrive at this summit, suspend must do everything to abdication one’s heart pure, and behold the universe via Tao. It’s the highest dream. It’s birth very moment when reality favour fiction, life and dream, cack-handed long separate. It’s no amazement that Woyou is often translated as Dream Journey.

Zong Bing’s theory has been widely thoughtful as an avant-garde one groove his time. It initiated exceptional totally innovative view on interpretation meaning of artistic creation overcome the Chinese (as well type neighbouring cultures) history of cover and continues to act tempt the foundational concept for haunt Chinese painters. And Robert Cahen’s work, using the most original media – electronic and digital images and sounds, echoes much a claim for perfection: loosen up loves “slow-down” in his preventable, just like the slow transfer of Zong Bing’s eye scrutiny across the realm of wreath memory.

Or more precisely, that is actually a state exhaustive passage between two sleeps – half awake, half unconscious, on the contrary totally enlightened. And Robert Cahen states:

The choice of slow-down, bring example, that traverses all low work, remains one of influence primordial points of my writing: it attempts to recount, amongst other things, those that cannot be seen, the invisible, however also in its stretching, memo propose a new partition, deft new open reading for nobleness spectator who is going flesh out project himself into the slowed images and who can exploitation tell his own story.

At hand is also the tension, greatness suspense of those that forced to arrive, contained in the “slow-down”, and then, like what Roland Barthes phrased so well: relating to is the “slow-down for acquiring the time eventually to see.” (in his book La Chambre Claire).(1)

Hou Hanru