Letter of Protest:In May of 2002, Christophe (Paris resident and creator of his own web site www.ParisDirect.net) wrote a letter to Vincente Espagne, Director of Culture of Romainville and curator of the "Memories and Identities" exhibit. Christophe's letter was protesting the inclusion of artist Mark Allen (of www.MarkAllenCam.com) in the exhibit. The following correspondence, which was posted publicly on Mark Allen's web site message board, starts with Vincente Espagne's initial response to Christophe's letter (which was not posted publicly). The translation from English to French may be a bit fuzzy:
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Dear Christophe,
I am the one who invited Mark to come to Paris. The experiment is rather simple; before being a "webcamer", Mark is an artist who's work is primarily visible, readable and audible in cyberspace.
Organizing an exhibition "Memory and Identities" and deciding to associate several media with it, I invited Mark to present his photographs which represented a "memory of the event".
We printed the images, which he took on September 11 (about sixty). It seemed to me interesting to observe how images intended for cyberspace behave when one freezes (solidifies) them on a still exhibition panel or wall. The result is rather interesting.
On the one hand, numerical, digital arrangements on paper are frozen: the effect of freezing is reinforced with it and these images take part indeed in the act of what we experience as memory. In addition, the glance of the witness or observer is very exact. A web page is read quickly, a little like a magazine is divided into sheets. The user stops only on those images or words that they select until they move to the next page. Marks images are extracted from the web page and hung, and thus are looked at with much more attention, each one independent from/to each other. But, the subject of the image is somehow reinforced even more by doing this.
Here, the fact of re-examining images of September 11 with distance causes relevant reactions, not only to the event itself but also to the work made by the artist. Mark, in this series, translated a feeling which he has now divided with many others living far from him.
What I wished initially, it is to give Mark the possibility of sharing this feeling with people, who not only do not live in NY, but especially, are not familiar with the web cam world.
In addition, we are ordering from Mark a series of digital photo images which he took of the city of Romainville. Is it relevant to invite young people from NYC to make images of a small community? Is it relevant to use a light medium (here a digital apparatus) and the minimum of constraints, technical and sociological, for such a project? We will see the result.
Lastly, with this experiment, I put this question to Mark, not just as a "webcammer" but as a whole artist.
How does he see his art? Is his work registered in the artistic and cultural arena? I think yes, and thus I seek a possible footbridge between cyberspace and the medium of urban and contemporary art.
Also, this experiment allows us, through Mark, the artist and with myself the art lover and director of the exhibition, of going further...
If you wish to take part or contribute to this experiment, simply announce to me webcammers of whom you consider their work (even completely narcissistic) can occur in a network much vaster than the small medium of webcammers.
Here, by leading this experiment with Mark, I perhaps broke the fantastic side of the cyber artist a little, untouchable, inaccessible if not by an inter-connected mall. Mark is like everyone: a very simple human being with a pretty look, which he poses with much tenderness and humor on his contemporaries.
Vincent Espagne
Direction of Culture
Town Hall of Romainville
Romainville, France------------------
Dear Mr. Espagne,:
I do not doubt it... as I have had a web cam for 4 years... and having met many webcammers and web voyeurs... I do not really want to look at "untouchable" people. And I do not think either of myself as being the same "inaccessible" that you speak of. I rather often meet and volunteer people who come on my site. Last month, for example, I received for several days a guy from Dallas...
Mark Allen is not, for me (contrary to what you think), an icon. As for the concept of him as a cyber artist? He was a go go boy in New York City... which in the final analysis means that he shows his ass on the net in order to sell massage sessions at 100 dollars an hour. But it is true that today everyone is "an artist" and anyone can be a "star"... but the thing becomes sad when it is promoted by public money.
I recommend to you the reading of the book of Jacques Darmonís "Les Infortunes de la Pense Magique".
Good night...
Christophe/ www.ParisDirect.net
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Dear Christophe,
I appreciate your reaction to my message. If I understand you, webcamers and web voyeurs eventually meet... if they want. This system reminds me of the hours of glory of Minitel (French ancestor of internet), plus the pictures....
Mark is not an icon. His process is close to American artist Cindy Sherman's process, or to French Chritian Boltansky's. In a certain sense, the webcamer stages himself. Concerning some of them, beyond the fact they completely accept their narcissism, we can find a specific plastic search. Mark works his reflection, the pictures he products, and he mixes up texts, pictures and sounds. I have considered his work as a whole .
And I do not see why a former go-go dancer should not try the adventure of plastic and poetic creations. Not everybody is an artist, but everyone can become an artist... even in a sporadic way.
I have looked at many webcamers' web sites. Finally to see that it is like photography: there are millions of amateurs, sometimes with a very uncertain aesthetic sense. And there are someone's who try something different, especially if they have a graphic training. Which is Marks case.
I am in charge of observing the evolution of medias and arts, of selecting creators. I decided to invite somebody who represents a completely new means of expression. Mark, and other ones, are in the beginning.. And I think it's worth persuing on for me. It is not a question of masturbation.. I am not so turned upside down by Marks physique... Neither is it an "intellectual masturbation"... I am in charge of reporting the apparition of this expression which basically fits in with what it is called "urban culture".
Public money is for public service. And public service, more and more often, tends to select creators in accordance with criterions of profitability, quotas, exemplary (middle-class morals still stand fast). I belong to the men and women who think that not only has public service to be , especially in culture, non-excluding or exclusive, but it has also to impel all contemporary ways of expression...
Voila (That is all). Sorry to have intellectualized which is initially a play activity...
Vincent Espagne
Direction of Culture
Town Hall of Romainville
Romainville, France------------------
Dear Mr. Espagne,
Mark is a single, gay and New-Yorker guy who has got a PC, a DSL line and a web cam, he connects the whole thing and push the "ON" button...and then in front of his $80 web cam he plays silly things, mostly alone, (New-York is the city of all loneliness, of individualism and liberalism) and sometimes with some friends... like old schoolboys... It is really a weird thing to think that behind that there is an artistic process.. I see no "specific plastic search" in Mark Allen's site... His web site is even "badly put together". His only original aspect: he has a beautiful ass, sure, but between saying that, and considering his fake vomits and his scatologicals-McDonald's plays as poetic productions, it's a big difference...Maybe, I have to be a French-culture-ish-professional (and therefore gay) state servant to see the truth in that? I think we have to look in Freud's works: is it no true that Marks narcissism, maybe accepted but particularly exacerbated, can only be explained by the fact that he is in physical and psychical impossibility to love an to be loved?
I am not sure that the people who live in Romainville would agree with their public service if they knew that their public money is used to invite an American (go-go dancer) in Paris...
By dint of deceiving citizens by spending their money in -in this case- useless and futile manifestations, lauding the freeing of morals that they do not agree with and in what they do not understand anything, they finally vote for an extreme party..
Be careful: when, without a democratic control, an influential minority wants to impose his law and his community and "artistic" viewpoint to the silent majority, sooner or later, it ends very badly...
Christophe/ www.ParisDirect.net