Disguising, distorting, fudging, hiding and concealing, firing, shooting, investigating, feigning, making-up, pretending—all activities in Alain Declercq’s repertory.  Yet what is definitely pivotal in his work is still the (photographic) shot (prise de vue), and the act of taking it. This should not be understood just in its usual sense, but much more like a hold (prise) in judo, or better still, aikido: how to use power by reversing it, by using the force of the other to play with it, turn it inside out, or merely expose it, precisely where it does not want to be displayed? Henceforth, this shot is no longer focused on the split second of the shutter release, but rather on the conditions underlying what will permit this action and operation.

For anyone who has been following Alain Declercq’s work for many years, he has built it up both with and against photography. To begin with, in the early 1990s, the artist, not unlike a documentary maker, seemed to be seeking out the honest relationship to the other, as is only fitting, so as not to reduce that other to a subject—the subject of the image. A decade later, going against these good manners, Alain Declercq produced photographs depicting people snapped from behind—like the policemen for the Security series—or taken without even looking at them, using a kind of framing that was as disdainful as it was risky, wielding the camera at arm’s length, for the homeless people in the Shut series. These photographic series show—were any such demonstration necessary—a radical change, not to say a reversal, in Alain Declercq’s relation to the shot, or picture. And if he is still producing images, this is not his only concern. More than the medium and the form of the result—which seems to claim all his attention—it is the conditions of the situation at the time of the shooting and the event which go to make the imagery and the staging and set ups needed for this.

Well removed from the photographic medium, let us think, for example, of the installation involving two works produced in 2003 at the VKS gallery in Toulouse. A model of a large industrial shed is overhung with an old metal “Total Fina Elf” sign, the last part of which is missing, ripped off, thus giving a new reading of this brand name: Total Fin. This is the title given to this panel and, simply, Fin/End, to the maquette onto which, on the evening of the opening, a large neon ceiling light collapsed. This neon destroyed much of the maquette, and represented an event and then a desolate landscape with sad echoes for that city, Toulouse, shocked by a huge and lethal explosion in a factory belonging to that same group. As the result of a particular calculation, that “performance-installation” was, in the end, the outcome of a “freeze frame”. Seen through the prism of a photographic approach, it is as if that presentation froze itself rather than waiting, in the end, to be frozen by the image.

In adopting a similar logic, but this time for the photograph, You’re under arrest plays with the duplication between medium and subject: how to freeze through the image a subject which, itself, is forced to a standstill?   Thus is organized the liaison—the “hold” of one over the other, we might say—between a representational operation and a physical one. Welcome Home Boss is a good example of this approach, combining more and more representational mode and operational mode, in the sense that we might use the term for a commando unit. By night, Alain Declercq drives through the well-off suburbs of Montreal in a vehicle towing powerful white projectors; he parks in front of some large middle-class homes, trains the bright light on them, and takes a photograph, at once surreptitiously and unhurriedly: with a 6x6 camera and equipment that has more to do with a studio than a reporter. The exterior is treated like an interior, the public place is mixed with private life, the comfortable retreat is exposed, not to say over-exposed. In showing the contrast between the dark night all around and the halo of light, the framing also makes the projection system visible. The field of light duplicates the photographic field. The shot is as much a capture as a projection: it asserts its action and its material nature—its process. And this latter is also symbolic; it is placed face-to-face, challenging a population little inclined to being so directly, condescendingly and violently recorded: between questioning, police swoop and, more broadly, revelation. The image prompts us to go back over the course of the operation that permitted it, and describe this same operation: What action? What attitude? What danger? What authorizations? How was it done? What does this operation represent?

So like Welcome Home Boss, just as much as Fin/End and You’re under arrest, for Alain Declercq the shot results from a threefold approach encompassing symbolism, representational modes, and operating modes:

1 what is represented in the image?

2 what method is used to make this representation?

3 what is represented by the operation carried out by the artist to make this representation?

The shot is to be understood in relation to these three registers, and definitely in this order: it is a performance for the image, an action that is as operational as it is symbolic, obliterated by its capacity to make an image.

For Alain Declercq, representation can only ever be the outcome of a conflict: it records the artist’s confrontation with a societal reality that is, to his taste, excessively imposed. It presents and thwarts the frames, standards and other rules that try to govern our points of view, our way of seeing things, and our behaviour. The shot—and the taking thereof—is a struggle between the artist’s authority and the authority of the powers-that-be: whether police, political, military, judicial, industrial, or even moral. More than the image, it is the operation that will permit it—and even authorize it—which is what matters.

How, with the means at his disposal, can the artist get around, foil, and turn the law around, along with the powers-that-be and the representations that these latter either impose or defend, protect and/or ban? What tactics are to be used in such cases? And how are these activities, these operations and counter-representations, to be put to the test? How, in the negative, can the image represent the action or performance that has permitted it as much as and even more than its subject? By providing answers to these questions, through his deeds and gestures, Alain Declercq gives the example, reveals and even defies the conditions and limits of representation erected by an overarching authority.

The series of camera obscura photographs embarked upon at the trial of Jamel Beghal, then continued with the Hidden Camera series, should also be taken as the expression of a photographic performance: these images are propped up by their subject to refer to the operational principle deployed by the artist to guarantee a forbidden shot. The image is an interface: it incarnates, on the one hand, prohibitions, usually juridical and political and, on the other, the activity of its creator who puts these latter to the test; he does what people should not do. And this juridical-cum-political language which provides order is essentially performance-related: its statement alone is tantamount to accomplishing an action.  It has the power to do and have done, to undo, and forbid doing.

In immediately linking the symbolic and the operational, this language offers an arena, and a perfect counter-arena for Alain Declercq’s performances: operations involving counter-representation and representational deregulation, like his work Make up. As an installation and potentially a performance, this latter consisted in exhibiting a vehicle (a Citroën Evasion) painted with police colours, which the public could borrow and thus put back into circulation, at their own risk.

Alain Declercq draws close to the dynamics of what are traditionally  called the “tactical media”, a term inherited from the thinking of Michel de Certeaux to describe the media one makes oneself in order to counter a dominant line of thinking conveyed by the mass media which are not nearly independent enough of the political and economic powers-that-be. In this sense, this work can be seen in the light of the lurking conflict between media ancient and modern, which make it possible not only to play against, but also to organize new forms of activism.

Here appears a zone of turbulence in the heart of Alain Declercq’s work, a less apparent zone of conflict, and one that is perhaps less conscious, too, than those presented and pictorialized by the artist, but just as revealing of the issues encountered by our methods of contemporary representation. How is one to operate with and by the methods of a medium that essentially takes notes—the medium of photography? For does the media deregulation that is gradually setting in not proceed mainly from this fact?... that the representational modes of the 19th and especially the 20th centuries, based on photography, were above all observational? They aimed at describing and recording reality more than directly changing it. What, briefly, seems to be changing today is a tendency to create and keep a link, a record, between tangible reality and representation, and, where possible, proceed from capture to hold. For if the link is maintained, then representation and tangible reality may give rise to operations by both, and thus to holds, be they to do with cooperation or confrontation.

Between two centuries, between two media systems, Alain Declercq tests these representational modes by involving them in a performative field versus nature. Frozen and disconcerted, representation must be taken against the grain; it summons the process that has put it together to go back over its time: the struggles of the powers in which it has been caught, and is caught. If Alain Declercq calls for acts of awareness, he pinpoints their necessity as much as their insufficiency, for the question he bounces back at us is also practical: how are we to provide hold(s)?  How are we to counter or depart from the hold of a society of the spectacle which tends to renew itself and tally with a booming society of control?

Samuel Bianchini is an artist and associate professor at University of Valenciennes

and EnsadLab, research laboratory of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs

in Paris. His work investigates the impact of technology on our methods of representation,

on our new forms of aesthetic experiences and our socio-political organizations.

He is scientific leader of the research project “Praticables. The Work of Art
as Dispositif: Setting the Stage for Audience Participation” (ANR-08-CREA-063, 2009-2011)

supported by the French Research Agency (ANR).