EFFACING THE VISUAL CURRENCY: THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Société Réaliste was a cooperative of two Paris-based artists, the Hungarian artist Ferenc Gróf and the French artist Jean-Baptiste Naudy, founded in 2004 and dissolved a decade later. Empire, State, Building was their first major exhibition, held at Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2011 and then the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, in 2012. The pair's key interest is in the ideological interplay between art and the economy, between the market and institutions. While the pair work in a variety of media, notably installations, their film The Fountainhead (2010) is the centrepiece of this body of work. As the art critic Tristan Trémeau notes, Société Réaliste's work was born from an aborted project to put USSR-style Socialist Realism face to face with the ‘relational aesthetics’ described by Nicolas Bourriaud, which puts into images the network-like relations of human beings today. The work of Société Réaliste thus represents a critical, dissensual art that reflects on the economy and the art world, a work which is often satirical or parodic, for example inventing fictional institutions and agencies.

Société Réaliste's The Fountainhead is a reworking of the film of the same name of 1949 by King Vidor, in which all human traces have been digitally removed. This operation was effectuated using postproduction and special effects software at the Academy Jan Van Eyck in Maastricht. Société Réaliste's version is silent; there is no trace of the Max Steiner score from Vidor's film, nor the dialogues. Even the names of the actors are erased during the credits, which instead shows simply the turning pages of an empty book. In divesting the film of its characters, much of the plot is also evacuated. We are left to attend to the formal properties of the image itself. Where in the Vidor original we would have been absorbed in the narrative, in this version we are left to study empty chairs, the corners of walls and other background details that would perhaps otherwise have been overlooked – indeed, in many cases they would have been eclipsed by the characters, and are now revealed by a digital sleight of hand.