Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger have been the metteurs-en-scène of a form of ‘machine of representation’ for over a decade, creating video installations in which the audience often has a special significance.
Theater, film and performance play a prominent role in their approach to making these video installations, an aspect that undoubtedly germinated during the artists’ time spent working together in the late ’80s and early ’90s as co-directors of L‘ Atelier Ici et Maintenant, an independent theater company based in Lausanne.
In 2003, Moser & Schwinger created Capitulation Project, a 21 minute black-and-white film, the starting point for which was Commune, a theatrical piece by the Performance Group (New York) from 1971 that addressed the massacre of My Lai, an atrocity committed during the Vietnam War. The artists recreated the original scenery and wrote an additional scene of their own, which was performed by a group of actors and subsequently filmed. When presented in the gallery context, the stage constructed for the performance becomes the seating area for viewing the film of the play, with the audience now seated in the physical space that the actors previously occupied.
Following Capitulation Project, in 2004 the artists created Unexpected Rules, a 16 minute film that again involved the filming of a play, this time based on the Monica Lewinsky affair with Bill Clinton. The set took the form of a ‘lightbox,’ comprising colored lights and walls covered with rows of light bulbs. Developing their ideas of presentation in the gallery context, the film is screened on the back wall of the lightbox in which the performance was made. Viewers of the project enter the stage and set in order to watch the film of the play. The cogs of the machine of representation begin to turn.

Gea Politi: What are your influences in terms of cinema?
Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger: Are you familiar with the synthetic experience theory proposed by David Robbins? We are constantly surrounded by images - images fabricated by others -through which we construct ourselves. In this sense, we are in constant dialogue with an innumerable quantity of films.

GP: John Cassavetes was an inveterate leg-puller, never averse to hyperbole and garnishing the truth when he felt it was necessary. What do you think you have in common with Cassavetes?
FM & PS: Cassavetes has the ability to make us live the intensity of that which is cliché when we simply say: love generates all things. Faced with current norms, we wish to share Cassavetes’ independence of spirit and his thirst for creative freedom.

GP: One characteristic qf your videos is that they contain many layers. What is it you are looking for - the truth or something else that looks like the truth?
FM & PS: We present pretences to truth and the mechanisms underlying them in a contradictory manner. The ambitions of our protagonists are constantly sidetracked by other propositions and this entails a certain dynamic. It’s like the murder in a detective novel: it serves to propel the action along.

GP: In the words of Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panthers, “ifyou are not part of the solution, you ure part qf the problem.” Do you think that this statement applies to you?
FM & PS: These words describe how the world is divided and we subscribe to them when they are expressed by a minority, but they can quickly be used by the opposing camp. Ultimately, these words describe the power that is in the hands of those who decide upon the questions because they are the ones who have the means of channeling the responses. This is as true for politics as it is for journalism. In our projects, we attempt to go beyond the binary (bipolar?) division of the world by showing, for example, that in the United States during the Vietnam War there existed a real capacity to produce auto-criticism.

GP: Why did you choose the Lewinsky-Clinton affair? Was this because there were so many “truths” involved in it?
FM & PS: The Lewinsky affair is equivalent to the Trojan horse. It was an attempt at overthrowing a power (there are others). This botched coup &&at seemed a pertinent topic to deal with because it is saturated with base strategies and morals; it prefigures current normative regression.

GP: Are you aware of the revision theory of truth [an attempt to show that commonsense notions of truth are inconsistent] that was developed independently by both Ani1 Gupta and Hans Herzberger in 1982, or other modern philosophical theories concerning this problem?
FM & PS: Yes, these theories interest us because they offer a fresh perspective on what appears to be evident in language. They allow expired conventions and automatisms to emerge. We have approached the Lewinsky affair by means of paraconsistent logic [a logic that permits reason in the presence of contradictions], linking discourses to contexts that, in reality, reject one another.

GP: What are your intentions in making these videos?
FM & PS: We are perhaps searching for that which Alain Badiou wishes for the future of art: that it be as solid as (mathematical) proof, as surprising as a nocturnal attack and as elevated as a star.

GP: Since the two most common element in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity, do you think that truth is necessary, like hydrogen, or completely unnecessary, like stupidity?
FM & PS: We will one day discover that stupidity is an integral part of hydrogen and that it is impossible to disassociate it from the air that we breathe. If we suppress it, we die asphyxiated. Truth plays a secondary role in all of this.

GP: Do you think thut the above statement is the liar’s paradox?
FM & PS: Rationality has reached a certain level of sophistication, permitting us to reason with non-sense and paradoxes, but we prefer to broaden our research because these theories reduce language to a far too technical level. Other parameters come into play to influence a discussion. There is intonation of the voice, a play of glances, the imperceptible movements of the body. It is also with these details that we work.

GP: What kind of world do we live in? What kind of world do we live in in your videos?
FM & PS: Basing ourselves upon a fact, a film, a theory, we then imagine a series of ramifications, invent a system whereby these bonds unfold and call upon actors to incarnate these currents and contradictions. This in fact constitutes a world, autonomous, arbitrary, but nonetheless verisimilar. We make it come to life, to demonstrate that there are as many worlds as there are models...

Gea Politi is London-based contributing editor for Flash Art.

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