Boredom as background noise... From one spring to another, between 2009 and 2010, every Sunday, Élodie Merland patiently waited for an hour inside a telephone box located in the French cities of Toulon or Dunkirk, and their vicinities. She waited for calls from people whom she had invited to listen to her. To those who indeed called, she depicted her immediate surroundings. Using the four cardinal points, and over the span of ten minutes, the low of her voice revealed the adjacent landscape; a landscape invisible to the listener, far from where her actual presence took root (One hour galleries). Devoid of interpretation or feeling, these descriptions simply exposed what the artist could see from her temporary, improvised galleries: “I am looking North, cars are parked on a small lot.”, “To the South, I see a beige coloured building that has four stories, red and pink geraniums are on a balcony.”, “The sky is cloudy.”, “I see an advertisement for makeup, Julia Roberts is pictured.”, “The ground has turned a bit green by some moss.”, “A microscopic insect is flying around me.”, “A telephone box is twenty centimetres from my gallery, a little girl is going in, she’s taking the receiver that’s hanging there and is pretending to talk on the phone.”, “On one of the walls, I can read the name of a street that goes East: ‘Rue des poètes’”... At times her wait ends in a simple “No calls”... These notes are somehow reminiscent of the “perceptive sketches” composed between 1963 and 1968 by Rémy Zaugg for his The making of a painting. Using words laid out in tabular compositions, he strived to “say” his perception of Paul Cezanne’s painting The house of the hanged man (1872-1873): “angle of the ridge, tip: minuscule red spot . . . . bluish grey purplish hills on the clear bluish yellowing sky . . . . large dark purple roof”... Over four seasons, Élodie Merland was attentive to an urban setting that many considered nondescript or trivial. Her factual accounts turned ordinary insignificance into something picturesque all the same. Ordinary or, as Georges Perec wrote in his own words in An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris in 1974, “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance”. Sitting in a cafe at the place Saint-Sulpice, the writer spent three days recording what he observed: “Above the door of no. 1, there’s a triangular pediment. The shop on the left, painted blue, with a hanging torn red awning, is closed.”... Picturesque, i.e. “worthy of being painted”, as Gérard de Lairesse (painter who went blind at the end of his life) phrased it to define the Dutch word “schilderachtig” (Het groot schilderboek, 1707). One hour galleries, however, opened the senses of its listeners not to that which had been painted, but rather to that which could be painted. Moreover, Élodie Merland’s voice allowed the listener to hear, in real time, what is. Further, a compilation of the words she pronounced was published in 2011, providing a rendering of what was. All in all, the work sums up the age-old vision that correlates art with the mystery of presence, disappearance and remembrance, and thus takes on a spectral dimension, as put forth by Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on the topic of teletechnologies (Echographies of television, 1996). Indeed, these technologies blur the clear distinction between being and non-being. A “here” pronounced over the telephone is never apparent. This technical device —the etymology of which implies the expression of a vocal sound (phônê) at a distance (têle)— ensures the double presence of a voice: without continuity nor proximity, it extends beyond the limits of its natural range. As for textual transcription, it brings past existences back to the present.
At the end of the year in which she collected her telephoned paintings, Élodie Merland organised a Concert for 52 phone boxes at the LAAC museum in Dunkirk. Synchronised using a digital stopwatch, fifty-two interpreters, mobile phone in hand, read a partition they were given, which was interspersed with calls to be made within a ten-minute time frame (the same time dedicated to each recipient in the One hour galleries): the interpreters dialled the numbers of the telephone boxes that the lone artist had occupied during her wanderings. As the ringtones rang out in the surrounding areas of the two port cities on opposite sides of France, the listeners who came to the performance could only watch the inaudible. They could observe fifty-two instrumentalists calling and waiting; they could only listen to them listening to the call tones that were ringing at the other end of the public telephone lines.
Foreboding, the liquid crystal screens on four of the devices used during One hour galleries displayed the following warning message: “OUT OF ORDER”... Nearly ten years later, Élodie Merland returned to the places where she narrated her descriptions; not a single telephone box remains since the French public telephone box network was permanently dismantled. The trace of a former box’s location (a mismatched patch of asphalt for instance) is visible in some places, whereas others have completely vanished (renewed pavement, completely overgrown, urban landscape fully refurbished, etc.), without a trace of what was there before. The artist then took a photograph of these spaces freed of their cramped edifices, resulting in the series Out of order (2018-2021). Although her approach somewhat resembles that of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who catalogued industrial buildings, she just as well deviates from it as well. By intentionally taking pictures of the missing boxes, she is not documenting something existing, rather she is referring to a real configuration which no longer exists. Blatantly lacking the intended object, these images are similar, in some ways, to the “empty and lacunary stratigraphic landscapes” (Gilles Deleuze, The time-image, 1985) filmed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. However, the artist’s photographs evoke that which has been erased rather than buried. Moreover, they do not refer to History’s tragic events, but rather to the histories of the billions of non-recorded conversations, deemed unimportant and inenarrable, that were shared through hundreds of thousands of now obsolete telephone boxes.
Beyond a variation of the same theme, One hour galleries, Concert for 52 phone boxes and Out of order have the grandness of a contemporary epic. Whereas the rise and fall of this means of mass communication serve as a backdrop, this narrative alludes more specifically to the abandonment of a wide spread social practice that touched millions of lives; many people used it to escape their solitude. In some groups, much more than death itself, it is death at the social level —disconnection— that signifies irreversible erasure. The primal fear of being set aside leads to a frantic race to create connections. At the start of 2000, the spectres (yūrei) in Kaïro, a film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, sum up their condition within a hyper connected Japanese society, confronted with the powerful surge of the internet and its consequences, including deindividuation and exclusion: “Death is eternal loneliness.” In her quest to interact with others, Élodie Merland did not roam the city streets with a torch, as Bas Jan Ader did in 1973 in his In search of the miraculous (One night in Los Angeles). She sheltered in telephone boxes, transforming inactivity into creative activity, through shared intimacy. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote to one of her friends in 1942: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few spirits to discover that things and beings exist.” She indicates further “that the effort of genuine attention is never lost”. One hour galleries are hereby the testimony of a multitude of trivial miracles, and of one in particular: out of the ordinary reciprocity. There should have been someone to watch the artist who was scrutinising the world around her: “An old woman raised her hand, she asked me for a light.”
Text written by Arnaud Dejeammes. Waiting, attentiveness, in Hors service, 2021, pp. 5-11, Éditions Bruits de fond, Dunkirk.