LAURENT MONTARON | WILL THERE BE A SEA BATTLE TOMORROW?, 2008

LAURENT MONTARON | WILL THERE BE A SEA BATTLE TOMORROW?, 2008

Room 1

Laurent Montaron

WILL THERE BE A SEA BATTLE TOMORROW?, 2008

EXHIBITION /
JANUARY 14 TO FEBRUARY 20, 2010

As far as I can remember, I’ve always felt that perhaps we have been just sleeping for a billion years. I still ask myself this question about the dream that has awoken me. How is it that this long night is interrupted ?

As we did not decide upon such a hazardous choice; it seems our awakening was meant to happen; one day, as any other.

We see time as a stream that leaks away rather than allowing things to occur. If we would stand here waiting for an immeasurable amount of time all that should happen will happen. 

If this order of occurrences is determined then we could say this is destiny. Isn't this what we like to believe rather than being left to the night ?

The body of the river knows no boundaries; it creates its own path.

The truth becomes relative in the face of what will actually occur.

Will there be a sea battle tomorrow ?

Laurent Montaron

Laurent Montaron questions representational codes in order to explore the relations and conflicts between image, reality and their narratives, thus addressing the issue of interpretation.

The artist explores the conjunctions of image / sound and image / language – language being, as in psychoanalysis, the major interpretative tool. The transcription of time is one of his major themes, where the ‘movement-image’, as analyzed by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, is dissected in the recording process. The illusionist dimension of the motion image is for instance revealed by adding a fan in front of a slide projection. Laurent Montaron seeks to anticipate on the viewer’s perception; he not only produces images but also manipulates their perception.

Interpretation is materialized by numerous clues in his works – which preserve the enigmatic dimension of the whole – such as objects, sentences, obsolete machines, poetic titles and the particular voluptuousness of sound and image. In his films and installations, Laurent Montaron often addresses the question of a predetermined future and the many evocations of divinatory practices, probing the experience of time and memory. This ability to produce images and narratives enables him to wander, in many of his works, between science and belief systems, logic and intuition, the spectator’s gaze and its anxiety. The evocation of extrasensory faculties, destiny or ‘clairvoyance’, intertwine various dimensions in the manner of Lacan’s Borromean knot that ties together the three different threads of life: imagination (our tendency to produce images), the symbolic (our use of language to give meaning) and reality (our experience of the world).

Sources: galerie schleicher+lange, Paris

Will there be a sea battle tomorrow? (2008) is a slow, elliptical narrative alternating temporalities and actions. It relates an experiment on the study of individuals’ extra-sensory faculties, based on research carried out on the subject by various institutes. One such research centre - the Institute for Parapsychology in Freiburg, Germany - used the very machine that appears in the film. The machine, known as the ‘Psi-Recorder’, is a random number generator used in several experiments relating to clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition.

The film’s title is a question of logic that was posed in Ancient Greece, by Diodorus Cronus, who set out the prob- lem of future contingents. When an assertion is true or false in the present, once applied to the future it becomes an insurmountable question of logic. A dual question concerning the ontological status of the future arises: is our future predetermined or not? Does the existence of the future throw into doubt the foundations of logic?

‘Will there be a sea battle tomorrow?’ creates a maze of logical and contradictory assertions that cause the specta- tor to ask fundamental questions, which, although unanswered, poetically put our condition into perspective.