David Legrand’s Transmutatiographe: Transdisciplinary poetics of space
Le Transmutatiographe is an exhibition in the form of a collaborative experience within multiple universes, designed by David Legrand. Through June 30, 2024 at La Chaufferie gallery at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin (HEAR) in Strasbourg, France.
David Legrand has been developing his artistic and digital work as part of a collective for over 30 years. The first time I came across his work, he was giving a workshop for art school students on Hi and Low Tech. He had rented a container for the event, and they worked their magic transmuting texts into images and filming on a green screen into a poetic, gently crazy video. I was struck by this time of exchange and display, because it gave substance to a transdisciplinary and transmedia vision of art by transforming it into poetically projected spaces. They gave a collectively shared form to these liminal worlds between our imaginations and their harsh actualization in images.
Legrand’s work recalls Dick Higgins’s vision of intermedia (1) – a new freedom between pure mediums where we rediscover free fields. However, in the 1960s, certain Fluxus artists, partly echoing the legacy of Duchamp and Cage, began to sketch out an even clearer way out of art, towards everyday life and all the knowledge associated with it. Artists such as George Brecht moved towards a form of transdisciplinary research that was manifested as art. The transdisciplinary thinkers of the 1990s, following in the footsteps of Basarab Nicolescu (2), wanted to create workshops and places in society where the exact sciences and the humanities could intersect. For these thinkers from all horizons, the realities discovered by the logical and scientific disciplines needed to be in harmony with the way they are perceived by humans, in order to avoid the human and ecological risks of which we are just beginning to become aware. Representation and artistic work were largely used to sketch out this awareness. Digital art, particularly as an intersection between a mathematical model and working with images and sound, can be the ideal tool for conveying a transdisciplinary vision. For René Berger, it is this art that gives access to “new types of space, time, identity, duration and availability (3)”. While it’s possible to doubt the value of these machines compared with the power of our own imaginations and inner worlds, David Legrand’s zany, hybrid, indeterminate and even delirious cosmos give concrete and accessible form to these imaginary worlds, both his own and those of all the artists he is drawn to. His work has numerous transdisciplinary dimensions.
A short biography of David Legrand
David Legrand began making music at the Châteauroux experimental school in 1990, playing rock/indus/electronica, an experimental mix of music by the group Pulse, with Henrique Martins Duarte, Bruno Douet, Maxime Touratier, Rainier Lericolais, Fabrice Cotinat, Christophe Alaphilippe and Stéphane Landry. In parallel with this collective project, he began to create hybrid dolls, between humans and animals, which seem to refer to a very personal symbolism, as if they had been contained within him. This early work is also influenced by science fiction, including the Star Wars figurines of his childhood, but their presence as inanimate beings is disquieting, almost imperceptibly strange.
During his performances, he whispers poetry in their ears, or words in a language that we can barely understand. He calls it plastic language. As a stutterer, David is trying to find a way to re-engage with language, in words between himself and others. He creates a word that both distances him and brings him paradoxically closer to the world, between human and inhuman. These beings are also in the image of the Berric spell dolls: inanimate beings to whom he entrusts his words that make the language of communication stutter, to utter spells or things that aren’t said to everyone. These dolls also represent parts of him, extensions of what he could not say to the world. He creates this universe to which he speaks and which represents him as it represents us in return, through a liminal association with the hybrid yet humanoid forms of these figures.
The artist continued his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes until 1997. After that, he worked on a number of collective video projects, before moving on to recreating imaginary worlds in VR. In 1999, he began working with Fabrice Cotinat and Henrique Martins-Duarte on a video installation called La galerie du cartable, which could be installed almost anywhere. Using just a video camera, a small screen and a battery contained inside a schoolbag, this device made it possible to show video experiments everywhere and to everyone: in bars, on the streets, in churches… preferably in everyday life. As such, art became a means for indiscriminate education and dissemination, without the need for conventional channels.
In the 2000s, with his two accomplices and Phillipe Zunino, he created fictional dialogues between two historical figures. These included exchanges between Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolas Poussin, Roland Barthes and Marguerite Duras, Le Corbusier and Albrecht Durer, Robert Filliou, and even a psychoanalysis session of Guy Debord by Sigmund Freud. Each of these videos created a fictional relationship between two historical figures and echoed contemporary media or artistic issues. They reinvented a world where stories from the past are told today, where imagination and dreams echo what we experience every day and the situation of contemporary society.
In these fictitious dialogues, the characters’ features were often forced. Humor tended to be crude, while the tricks of video production were always visible, reminiscent of farce. The coarseness was a pretext for symbolically transgressing the servitude of art. Nothing was left alone. All the hierarchies, preconceived ideas and fixed forms of art were dashed. In these videos, we witnessed a kind of carnival, a popular game of infringement upon the implicit norms of the intellectual and artistic world. But through this transgression, the grotesque and mockery also served to convey the ideas of the characters represented. Behind the laughter still lurks the power of these dead people’s ideas.
David Legrand began giving workshops in art schools in the 2010s, notably around the Bourges art school, but he slowly moved away from them to create what he calls Hall Noir, with the Bandits-Mages association, now Antre Peaux, most notably in the Château d’eau – Château d’art in Bourges. The idea behind this structure was to bypass conventional networks for distributing and learning about art. It was a base for exchange between artists and students, who decided on a work and then produced it. By creating an artwork together, they believed that knowledge would emerge and the result would exceed expectations. Antre Peaux is an independently funded entity, which also uses the human and sometimes technical resources of art schools to experiment with teaching the “ignorant master” model (4) and collectively creating infinite worlds. In 2019, he met Léo Sallanon and Etienne Muller, who have both worked in crafts before turning their skills to 3D art. They showed him the power of VR headsets as a tool for creating transformations.
In his current exhibition at La Chaufferie in Strasbourg, Legrand attempts to merge all these previous works in a space that can be explored with a VR headset.
Experiencing the exhibition
David Legrand placed five of the hybrid dolls he created in Châteauroux in the gallery space. He enclosed them in display cases, with glass protuberances blown by the young artist Maguerite Kalt to allow electronic cables to pass through and link the five pieces together. In the center of the room, a very large doll, made of strings, wires and cables, links the different figures. It seems to raise its arms in the air, giving the whole a religious, even Christ-like aspect. This main doll is the neutral intermediary between these hybrid figures of relative humanity.
The various dolls are components of a great machine. This brings to mind Duchamp’s symbolism of the great machines of desire. In particular, La Mariée, one of the first paintings to inspire Le Grand verre: “Less than an abstraction, it is a transmuted anatomy, at once an insect, a machine and female organs” (5). In Legrand’s work, machine-beings are present in the exhibition space, evoking the imagination in order to transmute La Chaufferie’s exhibition room into a space of superimposed reality, introducing a new perspective. These beings from a reality other than our own, with different rules, seem to be produced by this enormous Christ-like doll. Made of leg-wire, it is once again a liminal space between the trivial and the celestial. In this space, our gaze is almost alchemically transmuted. The piece offers us the chance to transcend our usual way of seeing, and therefore of looking at the gallery space. But to do that, we must first explore the hidden, digitally constructed face of the space.
The rest of the adventure is experienced through a virtual reality headset. The worlds represented are manifested in a virtual form that adds to our perception of the world. David calls them clairvoyance tools, because they allow us to find ourselves projected into visions, into imaginary worlds that do not come from ourselves. The spaces visible in these devices are simulations, even simulacra, but they allow us to feel this with a force that pulls us out of ourselves. Here, the virtual is not a directly alchemical work or a path to transcendence. Rather, it is an indicator of possible endless worlds on the border between the physical, the virtual and the imaginary. These tend to visualize transcendences of a simple materialistic vision of being. Pierre Levy’s theory (6) states that virtual is not opposed to real but to actual. Virtualization is the operation that creates potential from what is concrete. It invents new problems and new ways of understanding what is physically here. In this way, virtual reality can exist, but it is always open to criticism in the sense that it wants to “make reality”. VR headsets are audiovisual systems; they simulate a virtual space that attempts to be like this. In this case, perhaps it would be better to speak of an audio-visually manifested imaginary world.
Legrand talks about superimposed reality, because Léo Sallanon helped him to find ways of scanning and modeling concrete spaces, before bringing them back into play through digital projection. He calls this operation “Physicking” the exhibition space into projection locations. The different worlds will feature dolls designed by Legrand, each with hybrid characteristics somewhere between human and inhuman:
• The Sheep Boy is a human/sheep hybrid. He uses a different language, a bleating language. Is he referring to the figure of the pack-saddled donkey? In any case, he is a being who speaks to us, but in a way that is unusual.
• The same could be said for Pig Boy, a little boy with a pig’s head. Through these human/animal hybrids, aided by Philippe Zunino’s voices, Legrand takes on dirty, vile figures such as sheep and pigs. There’s a Rabelaisian dimension to his work. The gag, the filthy, even the abject is never far away. While he explores the world of beings, of dolls that are inhuman, sometimes almost spiritual, they always have this dual role of being both very mundane and transcendental, similar to how Buddhist masters can say that Buddha is a shit stick (7).
• Ahmad pays tribute to the film Where is My Friend’s House? by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. This little boy, the main character in the film, goes on a long adventure to find his friend and prevent him from being sent back. He is a figure of otherness and the transcendence of borders. Legrand, as a native of Berric in Brittany, is trying to understand how an Iranian lived, particularly during the Iran-Iraq war, during which France supplied arms to both belligerents, reaping enormous profits. This figure also represents a desire to understand the different relationship with time that we sense in Kiarostami’s cinema, to understand the world from a child’s point of view. Going to the East also means appealing to a spiritual dimension through traditional symbolism.
• Engineer Warthog has long been a character in David’s imagination, born from his fascination with Star Wars. He’s also an opportunity for some particularly daring fart jokes and mouth noises. It’s as if he represents the artist’s slightly slob side, if not a self-deprecating avatar of himself.
• Mademoiselle Imagination is represented by a little girl. She speaks to us of the artist’s imaginative and feminine sides. She is also a tribute to the women in his personal ancestry (his great-grandmother, his grandmother) who have passed on to him a relationship with the world that is both spiritual and imaginary, something that is particularly present in his VR work.
• The Three Little Pigs are three secondary characters that we meet in different worlds. They talk to each other, but we don’t understand what they are saying. As with the previous characters, they are an in-between, a boundary between what we are and worlds that David finds hard to call non-human, given the publicity the term has received in recent years.
Hybrid beings are creatures of all sorts, genderless, degenerate, disturbed and disturbing. They could also be seen as a way of confronting Donna Harraway’s ideas of the cyborg and disorder (8). But both the worlds and the beings represented by this virtual creation go beyond the point of view of “gender trouble” (9) or trouble between human and non-human. In these audiovisual worlds that can be explored in three dimensions, there are no fixed boundaries between genders, racializations, species and all forms of visible or audible difference. The beings created by the artist and his acolytes are hybrids, monsters, in-betweens and not-quite-things that challenge our dualities. Legrand is always fighting against fixity and prejudice. Theoretical modes are not enough to confine his imaginary characters. They are really about a vision of a beyond, a disturbance between all the fixed categories and an iconoclastic vision of what is always trying to make an identity.
If we go back to the ideas developed by Basarab Nicolescu, who bases his theory on Stéphane Lupasco’s notion of the third party (10), it becomes clear that David Legrand’s Transmutatiographe is in line with transdisciplinary digital art. Indeed, when we think of the hybrid beings with whom we have come into contact, we think that they embody a transcendence of the limits to which our fixity and our attachment to a level of perception of the pre-atomic world, in which A and non-A are mutually exclusive, remain stuck. Legrand’s unbridled imagination, which we can visit at our leisure using VR headsets, allows us to enter squarely into this non-dualistic logic and tackle the transition from a dual humanity to spiritual spaces and their n-dimensional logic.
The sound work by Philippe Zunino, a lifelong companion in adventure, is also noteworthy, creating yet another shimmering, liminal sound and musical ambience to draw us into these unfamiliar worlds. Of particular note is the beautiful introductory theme, which uses saxophone sounds to punctuate the adventure with “pocs” and trembling notes. This musical soundscape continues to haunt us even after the adventure is done, taking us back to the madness that we witnessed. Together, David and Philippe return to their habit of delirious voices, already seen in the Fictional Dialogues, which embody the characters of the Transmutatiographe. In some of the voices lies an audible mastery of the art of farce, such as the bleating languages, or the incongruous noises of the warthog.
Worlds presented in superimposed reality
Returning to the digital visual space, David is “physicked” in collaboration with all the artists present. In particular, Léo Sallanon developed most of the VR worlds in this exhibition and in David’s 3D works in general, using his knowledge of the tool to make the worlds work together, creatively sculpting the digital space.
The first universe to be explored takes up the gallery space quite simply, which is disconcertingly white, but with an open roof. Above us fly grey spheres that resemble the Death Star from Star Wars. Our avatar has been extrapolated from Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s dolls by Colombe Delacoste. We see screens topped by spheres (an eye watching us, a camera, or simply lighting, as on advertising boards?), and the dolls from our story. The Engineer Warthog is in the space and lectures a long introduction to our experience. He tells us that the Transmutatiographe is not just another high-tech entertainment gizmo, but a truly artistic and poetic experience. On the right, Ahmad, strangely grown-up and resembling David Legrand himself, asks us why we are looking at him, why we insist on looking at him. It’s a visible difference, a boundary between what we consider to be ourselves and what we consider to be otherness. Ahmad, a small Iranian child who has become an adult, brings us back to this difference.
The second world was designed in collaboration with students from the Narraction group in Strasbourg, greatly assisted by Oh-Eun Lee, the teacher who accompanied them throughout the process. This world is much darker. It presents strange forms of life (in the full sense of estrange, extra, that which is outside us), including unknown plant and fungal forms. There are also toads, as well as little two-legged creatures that cross the ground, black with red eyes, all created by Filémon Aufort. Floating bodies seem to move or dance in the sky, and in the distance you can see shadows walking. They have been created from a drawing and movements by Maylis Cominetti. The sounds and music are a collaboration between Corentin Boubay and Olivier Duverger Houpert, whose saxophone and its squeaks bring to life the sound of this in-between world. We don’t quite understand whether they are concrete sounds, organic squeaks, musical or not. For the narration, a centaur-like being created by Vincent Aguilera enters our field of vision. It is made up of two human beings linked together, one of them a large hound with a Hello Kitty tattoo and the other a smaller being on top, wearing a traffic cone and holding a stick made up of an exhaust pipe with cans of the Monster energy drink. The monster is the one who shows his difference – that otherness, with this form of life that understands itself without us. It crosses the map, telling us how they are fleeing the upcoming end of the world. They talk to each other, but we can’t hear the four-legged being. Only the centaur’s “rider” tells the other that he has a special way of summarizing complex concepts in terse language. These passers-by are followed by a commotion in the shadows close to the horizon. A very large white and red wave slowly rises, eventually invading the entire map. The map becomes flat and white. Everything has disappeared, except for the few bipedal creatures that have turned white. We can’t help but notice that these young creators seem to be tackling issues of the end of the world and the apocalypse, close to those of Jérôme Bosch. Coming from a Western world of materialistic triumph, it seems that, in their narration, the starting again, the Kali Yuga of Hindu spirituality (11), borders the collapsologist theory to give us an entryway into the collective unconscious of our time.
The next world again gives the floor to the Engineer Warthog to tell us about the infinite possibilities of these virtual worlds refracted into multitudes. We see hybrids of Sheep Boy, War Boy, Pig Boy, Ahmad, etc. rise and fall towards a bottomless void beneath our feet. Next, a recreation of the Aubette’s cellar-dancing, with spectral organic forms dancing to Philippe Zunino’s slightly twisted 1920s music. Etienne Muller was able to recreate the Aubette cellar-dancing room from the only three photos that still exist. As a stonemason, he has a keen physical understanding of geometry and space. As a result, he could easily handle photogrammetry. He also created the spectres of the site using an algorithm that constantly changes their shapes, resulting in beings that are in permanent transformation. Outside the dance hall itself, a fungal world takes shape in which species of fungi attack or invade this creation by Hans Arp, which represents the very type of modernist purity. As you approach the walls, you hear a composition mixing swing and rave by Corentin Boubay and Olivier Duverger Houpert, which disturbs the lightness of the previous Roaring Twenties music. They have also created a different sound for each spectrum.
Next, a world seems to be dedicated to Mademoiselle Imagination, into which she welcomes us. A world “where the tangible merges with the real (…). I am a form of life that does not fit into an economic calculation”. But the face we see speaking to us is a hybrid between David and a young girl. In this transmuted world, David’s imagination allows him to become each of these hybrid characters and mix them together. We also see Ahmad and the Sheep Boy, who are similarly buggy and glitchy transitions between David’s appearance and that of these beings. We discover a machine that hybridizes dolls into new forms of otherness. Next to us, the three little pigs speak a language we don’t understand. This final world nails it home for us: we are caught up in David’s unique imagination, into which he invites us to enter so that these updated images become part of our own, and give us the desire to continue this work of shaping the imaginary ourselves.
This last work can be seen as a summary: the artist has used the evolution of his work, as well as the networks of friendship and creation that he has developed over the last 30 years, to give us the primary essence of his research. The collective creation is a starting point. What follows is a shift from the exhibition space to places of imagination and unrestrained sharing. The influence of Bachelard’s poetics of space is clear (12), in which physical space responds to mental space, just as the house becomes the transmitter of who we are. By donning these headsets, we transform the gallery space into a superimposed reality in which the boundaries of our physical world appear blurred, allowing us to become seers of another story that David is whispering in our ears. Journeying through these psycho-physical mazes, we take part in utopias of hybrid worlds to come, in which even our limited understanding of the world is erased, and we transmute our view of the world and of how it is possible to make art.
In the end, we leave this adventure in a state of indecision that is fairly representative of these worlds. Have we undergone a genuine alchemical transmutation, changing the matter in our bodies and our way of seeing the world? Or have we just attended a great Berric dolls’ sabbath to become the bearers of a spell, good or bad? And yet, in the end, we have simply been projected into the imaginations of all these different creators and remain who we are. Perhaps this was an entryway, a way of putting David’s and everyone else’s delusions into images? Or simply a cathartic experience in the style of ancient theatre where we could unburden our own beings, the otherness that inhabits our psyche, and thus return to a ‘concrete’ world, feeling more ‘real’? We have undoubtedly seen a new way of exhibiting art that completely escapes the imperatives of the market and institutions. Perhaps, rather than seeing it on an imaginary level, we’ve simply been bombarded with photons that demand re-presentation? The work shown at La Chaufferie is merely an entertaining superimposition, not a particular psychic experience. Perhaps we have only caught a glimpse of a hybrid world between the human and the non-human, a world in which what we call monstrosity no longer exists? A political vision of a utopia to come?
And yet it would be impossible to give the answer between these lines, which, in the final analysis, are nothing more than a poor way of rationalizing and encapsulating in words this experience that transcends them. You must now go apprehend these worlds and this superimposed audiovisual otherness for yourself.
Notes
(1) Higgins (Dick), Intermedia, published in The Something Else Press Newsletter vol.1 n°1, February 1966, translated in Feuillie (Nicolas), dir, Fluxus Dixit, Une anthologie vol.1, Dijon, Les presses du réel, 2002.
(2) Nicolescu (Basarab), La transdisciplinarité: Manifeste, Monaco, Les éditions du Rocher, 1996.
(3) Berger (René), Du transdisciplinaire à la réalité virtuelle, in Cazenave (Michel), Nicolescu (Basarab), eds, L’Homme, la Science et la Nature, Aix-en-Provence, Le Mail, 1994, p. 157.
(4) Rancière (Jacques), Le maître ignorant, Paris, Fayard, 1987. Referring to the 1818 experiment of Joseph Jacotot, who had taught French to Dutch speakers without understanding them, Rancière postulates a way of teaching in which teacher and pupils together seek to find something they do not yet know.
(5) De Loisy (Jean), Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride” (1912) [Radio broadcast], France Culture, 27 September 2014.
(6) “Actualization invents a solution to the problem posed by the virtual. In so doing, it does not simply reconstitute resources, or make a form available to a mechanism of realization. No: actualization invents a form. (…) Finally, virtualization moves from the act – here and now – to the problem, to the knots of constraints and purposes that inspire acts. (…) The creator par excellence, virtualization invents questions, problems, devices that generate acts, lines of process, machines for becoming”, in: LÉVY (Pierre), Qu’est-ce que le virtuel ?, Paris, La Découverte, 1995, p. 137.
(7) “One day, a monk asks Cloud Door (Yunmen,Unmon), “What is the Buddha?” Porte-des-nuées: “A stick for drying bran.”, in: Huikai (Wumen), La passe sans porte [13e siècle], Paris, Points, 2014, p. 126.
(8) Haraway (Donna), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
(9) Butler (Judith), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, 1990.
(10) Lupasco (Stéphane), Du devenir logique et de l’affectivité [1935], Paris, Vrin, 1973.
(11) Reference to Hindu cosmogony and the Kali Yuga “dark age” in which we live: an era in which human beings degenerate spiritually, turning instead to technicist and material values.
(12) Bachelard (Gaston), La poétique de l’espace [1957], Paris, PUF, 1961.