Postcards from the Edge comprises new additions to the cult series Body Double, with the artist reworking sequences from art and mainstream movies to create already fantasised scenes that lend themselves to further fantasising. Memory effect has an immediate impact on each of these scenes, the most frequent feature of the Body Double works being the playing of all the parts by the same actor transformed into an actress. The re-enacted scenes are anticipated mises en abyme of the artist's strategy: the sexual ambiguity of the main character (BD 27), the presence of the main character and his/her body double (BD 29), the reflexive construction of the scene (BD 30), a plot hinging on a montage of sequences (BD 28), and sometimes stills the artist brings back to life with the sheer force of legend they embody (BD 26). What the viewer is witnessing in this use of reprise and recursiveness is nothing less than the infinite multiplication of forms of desire confronting its object, and this in its purest state: a projection.
Beginning with Fassbinder's In a Year with 13 Moons (1978), Dellsperger multiplies the scene showing the main character, the transsexual Elvira, sobbing in an amusement arcade: using three screenings and 24 characters, Body Double 27 tests out the solitary, shameless aspect of the original.
In Body Double 28 the artist takes a scene from the pilot of the TV series Miami Vice (1984), whose action – a pursuit filmed in poor light – hinges solely on a classic camera movement; reduplicated in reverse here, it is enriched via a very simple stratagem.
With Body Double 30 (2013, new work), the artist replays the scene from Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980) that precedes the one he used for Body Double 15 (2001). In the latter, the pursuit through the Metropolitan Museum in New York is re-enacted in the Wiesbaden Museum. More than ten years later Body Double 30 recasts the psychoanalysis session, reproduced in the exhibition space with mirror effects that include the viewer in the scene.
In Body Double 29, also featuring Natacha Lesueur and based on Postcards from the Edge (1990), a painful (and hilarious!) dubbing scene is run through twice in a row, as the actors swap parts back and forth between understudy and main character and thoroughly blur the distinction in the process. As for BD 28, the filming took place at Le Transpalette, the art centre in Bourges, whose facade is backprojected here to create an illusion of depth.
Body Double 26, 2011, 6’08’’
Body Double 26 gives a new lease of life to fallen screen stars whose calamitous destinies were recounted by Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon 1. Whether borrowing portraits from Anger's compilation of rumours and its subversion of the Hollywood myth, or exposing the latter's underlying fantasy (truer, perhaps, than the actual story), the artist revives the images of actresses whose careers ended in disaster. Projected, like BD 29, on a front/rear projection screen the viewer can watch both from inside and outside the gallery, the film paradoxically seems free of all referents.
1- The Brice Dellsperger monograph published by Toastink reuses the book's mythic layout: Posture et Talons Hauts, Paris, 2011, distributed by Les Presses du Réel
© Photos Marc Domage