1. via ethnographic themes based on research that delves into the dept-hs
of the cosmos. Like an epistemological hunter-gatherer, she leaves
no stone unturned, disregarding boundaries and intelligible limits.
Her perspective favours things in motion and is the reason why she
pursued studies in animated film, combining her love of drawing –
her “daily gym” and “starting point” – with fluid stories. Henrot
affirms: “Everything works like a fluxus for me, with echoes like
vibrations. I noticed when I was in art school it was very difficult for
me to draw something that wasn’t moving. It was very different with
the other students. They were always more comfortable with some-one
posing for them. I was always more comfortable with someone
moving.”
“I was always jealous of the cinema and its capacity to provide an
experience that is very similar to the experience of the dream”, she
continues, “which is why I started making films. And the more I was
doing films, the more I was attracted to making objects.” Her film Grosse
Fatigue, which was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale,
has been lauded as a pinnacle in her ongoing analysis. With this
work, a bombastic assault of imagery staged on a computer-desktop
background confronted viewers – very ambitiously – with a ‘greatest
hits’ of the history of the universe via Google searches and material
sourced from the Smithsonian Institution. By identifying common
human desires, Henrot adroitly generated synaptic connections in this
work, pairing cultural development with immersive experience. Set
to a sonorous audio reportage, this all-encompassing engrossment
of impossible proportions resulted in a frenetic, confrontational and
unsettling window onto ourselves: a ‘madness of vision’.4
The Pale Fox is an extension and companion to Grosse Fatigue –
redolent of a stage set for the film. The prodigious and neurotic
fixation on encapsulating human development that gave rise in
Grosse Fatigue to a commentary on the pernicious effects of techno-logy,
consumer society, colonisation and disconnection from arcane
impulses, is translated into an almost soothing meditation in the
exhibition. Henrot states: “This exhibition is really some kind of per-sonal
success. I feel I’ve been able to gather together these different
desires that I have as an artist to produce and to make beautiful objects
while at the same time building immersive narratives.”
As is inherent in the choice of the exhibition’s title, Henrot chose to
frame her presentation within an ethnographic lens. Intertwining a
loose, almost moralistic narrative, she utilises the character of Ogo
– derived from West African Dogon mythology5 – who was trans-formed
into The Pale Fox, to stage an elaborate journey through
the universe. The Pale Fox represents an impatient, insatiable and
tireless disruptive force that upsets the dualities within the universe
and is ultimately punished, and here acts as a conduit for greater
ideas concerning existence and equilibrium. Henrot’s sculpture
The Transformation of Ogo into a Fox (série Desktop), which forms
the striking centrepiece of the space, is based on original sketches
from the Dogon tribe research trip notes, depicting the moment
when Ogo is transformed into The Pale Fox. Henrot’s other distincti-ve
self-made sculptures within the installation also exemplify change
and metamorphosis. One work entitled A Clinging Type is suggestive
of tribal art, yet also acts functionally as a banal household stationery
item: a scotch-tape dispenser.
A linear central aluminium structure wraps around the room, its
metal curves directing the visitor through the space in a chrono-logical
fashion, acting as timeline, shelf and unofficial navigation
tool. Further adding to the exhibition structure, the four walls of
the room are conceived around the classical four elements: Earth,
Water, Air and Fire, underpinned by the four cardinal points of the
compass and four philosophical principles of Leibniz: ‘the principle
of being’, ‘the law of continuity’, ‘the principle of sufficient reason’
and ‘the principle of the identity of indiscernibles’. Moving in an
anti-clockwise direction, viewers take in themes of birth and child-hood,
growth and teenagehood, adulthood and old age.
Approaching the end of the cycle, visitors are confronted with no-tions
of human limitation, disorder and decline. A display of blank
pages represents emptiness. A photograph of a Ferris wheel from
the 1900 Paris World Fair is included alongside images of volcanoes
and flames. Exhaustion sets in. Detached seat headrests and herbal
stress-relief tea-bag wrappers further re-iterate these themes. An image
of Henrot herself, naked and floating in water, echoes a sense of
surrender to the afterlife.
Voicing critical questions that nag the subconscious, Henrot illustrates
the human need for stories, but also, “the articulation between the
specific and the general and how diverse and at the same time how
repetitive human culture is”. The Pale Fox – an apotheosis in her in-vestigation
of human behaviour – reminds us that we exist as entities
adapting, creating and reacting to our self-constructed systems and
environments. The coughing fit continues.
HAUNTED BY CURIOSITY
Rachael Vance interviews Camille Henrot on her exhibition The Pale Fox.
Today, through technological advances and an intensifying and acce-lerated
interconnectedness, we are confronted with our own exis-tence
more than ever before. New ways of knowing and a deepened
understanding of the human experience are thus able to be concep-tualised.
A pull towards authenticity is one result, as primordial
connectedness is analysed anew. Such interests can be found in the
work of French artist-cum-anthropologist Camille Henrot. Primari-ly
concerned with capturing the very essence of the human experien-ce
and culture – past, present and potential future – her practice
continuously critiques, transforms and overturns its own findings,
embodying a kind of ‘hyper-reflection’.1 Attempts to answer funda-mental
questions regarding the construction of knowledge, order,
eschatology and cultural systems are central to her practice.
Henrot’s exhibition The Pale Fox, now on at Bétonsalon – Center
for Art and Research in Paris, contains more than 400 photographs,
sculptures, books and drawings, displayed on a series of shelves
designed by the artist and situated in a specially conceived environ-ment.
² Aiming to present the world in which we live from its begin-nings
to the present, the installation includes unlikely groupings of
artefacts, verbal and remembered histories, arcane stories, rituals
and rites, illuminating the evolution of a culture and its denizens.
The obsessive confrontation with human development is intuitively
executed. Perspicaciously, Henrot confronts the viewer with excess,
sensation, the banal and the sublime in order to project uncons-cious
uncertainties. The process of selection for inclusion in this
3D storyboard was determined by the relationship that each object
builds with each other. Every component included is the result of
the artist’s choices, and quite often, deferral of making choices, in
order to maintain possibilities. Misinterpretation and chance are
encouraged in order to push the viewer into a meditative position.
A deep ultramarine blue carpeted room draws us into Henrot’s uni-verse,
which she tells Objektiv is intended to “provide an experience
that is very similar to the experience of a dream.” Upon entering
the space – limited to twenty visitors at a time – resonant ambi-ent
chords composed by the artist’s collaborator, musician and
DJ Joakim, envelop and suspend the audience in the experiential,
seemingly atemporal environment. A recording of a person experi-encing
a coughing fit punctuates the ostensibly impervious space at
looped intervals, jolting the viewer.
An oversized photo of a baby – bewildered, wide-eyed and open-mouthed
– greets viewers. Once accustomed to the surrounding
humanist jumble, one finds some sort of orchestrated coherence in
the accumulated bounty. The majority of this ephemeral melee is
sourced from fanatical ebay searches, combined with Henrot’s own
work and personal possessions: “Some of the objects have been in
my studio for years”, she explains. A remote-controlled plastic snake
– a recurring motif in Henrot’s practice – mechanically slinks across
the floor, operated by a museum attendant. The snake is just one
example of the artist’s use of origin symbolism. Her fascination with
the spiral and coiled circular imagery represents an energy flow and
movement that is based on her interest in cinematic experiences and
cyclical repetition.
According to the press release, ‘The main focus of The Pale Fox is
obsessive curiosity, the irrepressible desire to affect things, to achieve
goals, to perform actions, and the inevitable consequences.’ Henrot
appears to ridicule the idea of creating a systematic environment,
and thus a finite outline of the human race. In her dissident chro-nological
inquiry, she probes, classifies, identifies, distils and crys-tallises
signifiers, thus shedding light on technological, ideological
and cultural phenomena. Questions are posed and left hanging in a
layered vortex in motion. The creation of life, limits of knowledge
and the phenomena of human relationships are re-interpreted. This
pastiched micro environment, spawned by Henrot’s free association,
draws viewers into a puzzling morass that forces analysis of both the
artist and the viewer’s own personal identity. Often divorcing her
content from its source, Henrot seeks to isolate and weave seemingly
disparate elements into an interconnected web, spreading a conta-gion
of curiosity, arriving in the process at what she refers to as a
‘cataloguing psychosis’.3
For Henrot, following the history of the universe means following
her personal history. Triggered by childhood experiences when tra-velling
to Africa as a tourist, she channels feelings of discomfort and
excitement in her work: “It was the balance between these two
feelings that I was interested in exploring”, she asserts. “I wanted to
understand why. I was haunted by this question of how to behave in
the world and also how to deal with curiosity. The relationship with
the fetishisation of the object and the desire to look at things, but
also the guiltiness connected to it.” Dealing with curiosity is what
this restless modern-day Sophist does, excavating historical narratives
1Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes (Evans-ton
Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 75.
2The Pale Fox is commissioned and produced by Bétonsalon – Center for art and research, Chisenhale Gallery
(London), Kunsthall Charlottenborg (Copenhagen) and by Westfälischer Kunstverein (Münster) where it
will tour in 2015.
3Camille Henrot has often referenced this quote from Benjamin’s original text Books by the Mentally Ill with
regard to her working process. Walter Benjamin in Michael W. Jennings et al, Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, Volume 2: Part 1: 1927-1930 (Harvard University Press, 2005), 124.
4Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes (Evans-ton
Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 75.
5The Pale Fox mythology was discovered on a research expedition of the nomadic African Dogon tribe by
Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen and resulted in an eponymous book in 1965. Henrot was drawn to
the Dogon tribe’s mythology that incorporated belief systems of several different cultures divergent across
science, philosophy and cosmology.

2. All images from:The Pale Fox (détail), 2014, Camille Henrot
Interview | Camille Henrot