Guillaume Martial
Visual Artist
Guillaume Martial is a French artist, video maker and photographer. After ten years of figure skating in his childhood, he studied film and animated image. In 2009, he directed the making of Jour de Fête’s house, place dedicated for Tati’s film in Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre. Inspired by burlesque cinema, sport or circus’s world, Guillaume MARTIAL constructs visual narratives with the space by interpreting characters with poetry and humor. His work raise the question of the place of the man in his environement. In 2013, he joined the collective project France(s) Territoire Liquide, published by Le Seuil and exhibited in BnF, french national library. In 2015, he received the HSBC award and published the monograph Slap-Stick by Actes Sud. His work is regularly exhibited in galleries, festivals and international institutions. He pursues his personal researches during artist residencies, accepts private and public commissions and teaches with several publics. He lives and works in France.
http://www.guillaumemartial.fr/
Michael Spicher
Philosopher
Based in Boston, Michael R. Spicher, PhD, works as a writer, educator, and philosopher, mainly focused on art and aesthetics. He has published articles on beauty, taste, aesthetic experience, and state support of the arts. Currently, he is working on two book projects: one on aesthetic taste and the other on digital fashion (with two colleagues). He teaches at Boston Architectural College and Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and previously taught at University of South Carolina and Boston University. Along with his own writing projects, he is an editor for the
Leonardo Electronic Almanac (published by MIT Press) as well as the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Committed to advocating and educating for the value and pervasiveness of aesthetics, he founded the
Aesthetics Research Lab.
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Connections made by me
Respectively it is targeted to philosophers and researchers, who are interested in conversing with artists, sharing knowledge and also learning from their artistic practice.It is a lab where visual artists mostly work with philosophers and not exclusively on philosophy. In that respect philosophical texts and wider topics may be in our areas of interest more as a means to explore seeing and thinking rather than the end on which we focus to extract information. It is lab which also aims at creating through experimentation and transfigurations of artefacts material which may raise philosophical questions and discussion.
Abstract
Title: La balance, 13,7x18,5 inch, inkjet print in floating white box, from the series Open Spaces © Guillaume Martial, 2022
Open Spaces is a photographic project put together in prison setting. On a beautiful summer’s day in Burgundy, Guillaume Martial set out to photograph the Varennes-le-Grand prison, on the outskirts of Chalon-sur-Saône in France. Upon reaching the walls of the prison, he set up his equipment and opened the shutter. As if by magic, this action pierced the stone to reveal the first photograph taken in world history by Nicéphore Niépce – Point de vue du Gras, an image dating back to 1827, revealing this very prison site to the world. Wow! In this familiar picture, you can see the prison yard, its architecture and the two watchtowers of the jail. Is it a mystical vision? Or an optical illusion? Has perception merged with reality?
This project was produced at the Varennes-le-Grand prison, in collaboration with the Nicéphore Niépce museum in Chalon-sur-Saône.
Philosopher’s Comment
Guillaume Martial shot his latest photography series ironically titled, Open Spaces, inside and outside of Varennes-le-Grand prison. This particular photo “La Balance” presents the photographer at the corner with the markings of the Vitruvian Man.
His position at an outer corner of the prison demonstrates visually the way the building diminishes incarcerated persons. By placing his face close to the wall, Martial conjures the spirit of how painter Barnett Newman wanted people to view his work: by standing inches from the canvas so that you couldn’t see the edges, thereby inducing the sublime. The sublime, according to Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, provokes a feeling of awe often coupled with terror. Beholders feel their smallness in the universe. The sublime, in a way, puts the beholder in their place, which encourages humility and humanity. In the prison context, tension arises between the confining space and the seemingly endless time someone spends in prison, which squeezes out a person’s humanity. This is captured by Martial’s position in his photograph as each wall points toward an invisible horizon line in the distance. Only the bottom of the wall is in view.
The Virtuvian Man drawing sought to connect the human with nature, according to Leonardo da Vinci’s words. One thing suggested by the specific markings of the circle inside of a square is the human need for variety in lived spaces. Prisons fail in this regard, which can leave formerly incarcerated persons to struggle in various spaces upon release. Francis Hutcheson asserted that “uniformity amidst variety” contains an important aspect of beauty. Too little variety leads to boredom; too much variety leads to chaos. Variety, in Martial’s photo, is suggested subtly by the rectangle and circle, angles and curvature. Spaces that are overly monotonous deflate a person’s humanity; recent studies, for example, evince that a building’s blank facade affects people negatively, compared with a facade with some detail. People need variety to overcome boredom.
Martial adds a triangle below his photograph, which introduces the idea of its title: balance. In aesthetics, balance (or harmony or proportion) often refers to the physical qualities something possesses. And human proportion is suggested by the Vitruvian Man markings. However, I’m drawn to a metaphorical understanding, meaning the practical concerns of balancing the punishment of incarcerated persons with the desire for them to reintegrate into society afterward. Prison reform concerns a multitude of issues, but one that is neglected is aesthetics. The desire for aesthetics is a basic pleasure. Depriving incarcerated persons of this basic pleasure further removes them from what it means to be human. While acknowledging that restrictions and safety are necessary, the prison system ought to consider how aesthetic details could be integrated.
In this complex photograph, Martial visually creates an empathic vision of incarcerated persons. Spaces impact our well-being, so it’s not surprising that the space in prison damages people who are confined within its walls. This photo exemplifies their humanity.