Art Metropole

Marie-Ange Guilleminot left Villa Arson with her diploma in 1981 and started an international career with exhibitions in New York and in Israel. She obtained an honourable mention at the Venice Biennial for her demonstration of objects with multiple uses, as part of the Salon de la transformation.

Her work fights against the fixing of forms and searches for an indeterminate medium. She has used various media, like video, sculpture and performance: a work that exists already as an object engenders an action or video, during which she portrays the relationship between her body and these objects. In 1993, she used ‘dolls’ – soft shapes made from nylon, seeds and talk – which she manipulated in her video Mes poupées, or photographed in a series of manipulations by a third party.

Transformation is the process that links all of Marie-Ange Guilleminot’s works: nearly all of them require to be manipulated – like the Chapeau-Vie, an object created in 1995, for “a friend who was always banging his head on things” – or undergo a change of function. For example, the dodecagonal structure of the Paravent becomes a massage parlour, then a beehive and then a space of remembrance. Behind an object with a simple form lies a way of using it to be discovered and rediscovered for each new presentation. CAURISâ„¢, presented in 1997 at the Venice Biennial in the Salon des transformations, passes on the manufacturing method required to transform a pair of nylon tights into a backpack.

Since 1992, she has created a series of dresses, tailor made for her, which feature specific anatomical features – one accurately reproduces all the beauty spots on her body and another has an embroidered false navel. These dresses are created in a precise context and engender an action that places them in a situation and endows them with a specific chosen function.

The dimensions of this garment, which covers everything except the head and the arms, give it the character of a protective envelope.

In June 1994, in her intervention Le mariage de Saint-Maur à Saint-Gallen, she travelled alone by plane, wearing a wedding dress weighted by lead hidden in the lining. She was taken to the airport by one man and met by another when she arrived. She keeps the secret of the story of her act, only the dress, its virginal nature intimately modified, bears witness to “what one person lives and the other person can’t guess at “1.

Marie-Ange Guilleminot’s works call for direct, physical contact. Hands to be held, feet being massaged, ‘dolls’ to be fondled to your heart’s content… each establishes an immediate physical relationship with the consenting spectator. Her work calls on the senses, touch especially, but also the sense of taste, with Le miel du paravent in 1997 – a dodecagonal structure containing a hive, set in a pool of lotus flowers in the botanical gardens of Bordeaux.
In Emotion contenue, a work she presented at the Lyon Biennial in 1995, spectators had to push their heads through a cloth tube to watch a video. This sets up a physical relationship with the work, the spectators plunging into the image. This, over exposed and limited by the circle of the hood, loses its contours and material nature.

In opposition to the tradition of contemplation in western sculpture, Marie-Ange Guilleminot introduces systems of communication with others by the sense of touch. She presented Geste in Israel in 1994: through holes in the screen, she offered her hands, in an attitude between prayer and offering, for spectators to do with as they wanted.

Her works pivot on a three-sided relationship: the I of the artist, the You of the spectator and the transitional object – the object of art. This triangular relationship induces mechanisms of curiosity (pushing spectators to touch the works) and seduction (by the sensual aspect of the propositions), but also of frustration (at not being able to take in all of the other person’s body).