While Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik were experimenting in the early 1960s, in Germany and the United States respectively, with video in the form of installations, it was not until 1968, and in a different context, that video started to be developed in France, with the works produced by Jean-Christophe Averty with the ORTF [the early French broadcasting system], the television activities of Fred Forest, and the post-May '68 tracts of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. Independently of this situation, the assemblage entitled Identité, maintenant vous êtes un Martial Raysse was shown in April-May 1967 in the exhibition “5 tableaux, 1 sculpture” at the Alexandre Iolas Gallery in Paris. Chronologically speaking, this work was one of the fi rst video installations made in France, and definitely the first closed circuit piece. However, if it was thought of as a forerunner, it was in spite of itself – for neither the context for the emergence of video in France nor the problem-sets dealt with in Martial Raysse's work were able to explain it. Identité... is an installation made up of a black plywood structure representing, in a simplified way, the oval shape of a hollowed woman's face standing out against a white background within which a video monitor is embedded. Based on a preparatory sketch made prior to the installation, dated 1965, the work was originally to have been called Tableau à géométrie variable. The presence of the video monitor seems here to be more of an opportunity for the artist to replace the picture by an animated image than develop his film research work embarked upon with Jésus Cola, ou: L' Hygiène de la vision (1966-67) and Portrait électro machin chose (1967), made with the ORTF. In a formal level, the installation is actually more akin to his previous works incorporating a projection screen in the composition, such as Suzanna Suzanna (1964) and A Propos de New York en peinturama (1965). The picture remains, but the representation painted has here vanished, making way for the video image of the viewer. The female oval motif, borrowed from advertising stereotypes, crops up regularly in the works of Martial Raysse of the 1960s and 1970s. Back in 1964 already, in Tableau métallique: portrait à géométrie convexe, the artist had pared down the details of a face, and retained just the outline of the hair, a form which he would use in many works and object-pictures with free forms. Here, though, unlike the colourful environments which borrowed from display cases from the world of consumerism, which hallmarked Martial Raysse's work alongside the “Nouveaux Réalistes”, the artist simplified the forms as much as possible, and kept just an abstract outline, in the logic of vision hygiene. When the visitor gets nearer to Identité..., he finds himself in front of a video monitor which transmits back to him his own image filmed by a surveillance camera, from behind and from a high angle, with a lapse of a few seconds. Unlike the primary function of video – simultaneous recording and transmission of an image – a slightly delayed action is enough, here, to create a time lapse. Identité... is a specific experiment with – and experience of – time and space. As its title indicates, the viewer is projected into the work, him- or herself becoming a Martial Raysse. The device makes him/her an onlooker in the Duchampian (spectatorial) sense of the term (“It's the spectators who make pictures.”). By announcing the artist's subsequent research work dealing with interactivity, the picture is no longer an opaque canvas to be contemplated and looked at, but an interface referring the spectator to his own image, yet without this tallying with his reflection in a mirror. The present image, on the other hand, is a vision from behind and sidelong, capable of making him think about his own role as spectator. In her essay entitled, “Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism”, which was published in the first issue of October in 1976, Rosalind Krauss points out the feeling of frustration experienced by the person viewing a closed circuit video installation, which destabilizes his/her awareness of time and the perception he/she has of him/herself as subject: “...The self is a projected object, whose frustration issues from its own ensnaredness by this object, an object with which he can never really overlap.” By his use of closed circuit and delayed action, typical factors in the earliest video machines, it is in this respect that Identité... can be compared with other installations in the MNAM collection, such as Interface (1972) by Peter Campus, and Present Continuous Past(s) by Dan Graham (1974). But unlike his contemporaries, for whom the video machine was a way of specifically putting into perspective problem-sets likely to go hand in hand with the theoretical debate about identity which was current parlance at the end of the 20th century, this aspect of video seems to be something of an exception with Martial Raysse, who would make a swift return to figurative painting steeped in mythological references.

Marianne Lanavère

Translated by Simon Pleasance