Loris Gréaud
Work: Collaborative (with architects, engineers, musicians etc)
Exhibitions: ‘Les Résidents (1 and 2)’ (2005) Used an old apartment in Paris but reconfigured the space with help of magnetic field experts to inspire ‘ physical anxiety in volunteers who opted to spend time there’, they spread the rumour that the flat was haunted. Part 2 the layout was recreated in a gallery used partitions of cold air, Visitors walked through the walls becoming ghosts themselves.
‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ (2006) used scientists to produce miniscule nanosculptures, invisible to the naked eye, needed powerful microscopes inside black cabinets to see them.
‘Frequency of an Image (M46 EDIT)’ (2007) uses various technologies: pulses of light emitted from two suspended lightbulbs which was a translation of a brain scan taken while the artist was working on the project. Other works used a floor that vibrated to the rhythms of the artists mind.
‘Cellar Door’ (2008) was a specially commissioned opera using ‘spore speakers’ that pulsate light and emit resinous goo and sound. ‘Relates the story of a studio in which all creative potential is concentrated...a vast workshop distended in time and space’
The work's simultaneous production (in Paris' Palais de Tokyo and London's ICA) revealed the full extent of Gréaud's baroque imagination.
Identical triplets served black champagne; in London, sliding doors connected a mise-en-abîme of near identical rooms, while in Paris, 'bubbles' contained a series of discrete though concomittant works.
These ranged from a movie that stopped playing whenever would-be spectators approached, to La Bulle Forêt de poudre à canon (The Gunpowder Forest Bubble): trees coated with explosives and located perilously close to propane gas-filled fluorescent tubes (top, left).
Gréaud's vision of a vision, "not so much a 'Dream Factory' as a 'Dreaming Factory'", certainly counts as one of the most spectacular of recent art events.
There's a point, however, at which such work becomes overweening, too reliant on vast budgets and technological wizardry.
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