Gina Pane is one of the first artists in France to have used video in her performances, as both a trace of the action and a privileged partner in the elaboration of her Body Art. The body and its expression of pain are at the centre of this language, tirelessly projected as the sensory consciousness of the self and others, of the being in its world.

In this context, Action Little Journey does not immediately reveal this wounded or assaulted body but simply proposes a structure, a series of pauses or sections (10 to be exact, each of which includes two or three shots) which constitute a puzzle of objects, fetishes, bright colours and lines which clash with one another and organise a multiple reading.

Pane gives the images a certain autonomy, a hesitation, a disorder meticulously constructed between simultaneous times (the colourful present of the active body and the photographs which invoke a certain memory) and stratified spaces. Between these embedded times and spaces, the body remains the sole link, theoretical, symbolic and mythical.

In Pane's own words, 'My body in Action is not only in relation but relation itself. It is not a surface encompassing a centre (flat painting) or a pedestal (carrier for something else) but it is the around, the outside, the inside: the very body of the discourse. It achieves a 'proximity' by virtue of its very non-closure. . . 'My body in Action' should be understood not as the skin of a 'painting' enclosing its insides but as a winding/unwinding bringing the core back to the edge of things' ('Gina Pane' exhibition catalogue, Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels, January-February 1978).

Stéphanie Moisdon

Translated by Miriam Rosen