Luc Courchesne : Wien Chiaroscuro — Excerpts

Wien Chiaroscuro — Excerpts

An immersive stroll through Vienna’s rich history, by Luc Courchesnes 

Vienna. To wander through it, to get lost in it; to meet its inhabitants, slip into their neighbourhoods, find passageways into hidden dimensions of reality… until we understand why we came. Wien Chiaroscuro — Excerpts brings together recent works by Luc Courchesne, created following his stays in Vienna in 2021 and 2022. Through an installation of stained-glass screen panels, prints on glass, and a virtual work, among others, Vienna’s rich history becomes the backdrop for a deep dive into the experience of being.

The series of stained-glass-like screen panels that form a labyrinth was drawn from Wien Chiaroscuro, an immersive virtual world created by Courchesne. As in the version using a virtual reality, this installation offers the wandering visitor a multilayered collage that seeks to dissolve the boundaries between physical and virtual worlds and to unfold the complex reality in which our lives take shape.

 satellite program of  MOMENTA Biennale d'art contemporain.

Alongside this exhibition, Courchesne will present an Courchesne immersive performance in the Satosphere, the large dome at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), from September 30 to October 2. In this immersive performance within a 3D environment, Courchesne takes us through his Viennese adventure while unveiling the creative processes and strategies he uses to transform the spectator into a wandering visitor.

Wien Chiaroscuro  - A text by Anaïs Auger-Mathurin, translated by Jo-Anne Balcaen

At the uncertain hour of twilight, a spy slips into the streets of Vienna. With a strange gadget in hand—a camera with an anamorphic lens—he focuses intently on his mission: climb to the top of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, gather clues from locals—Margo, Lissie, Kevin and Manuel—go to Café Central, and confer with his accomplice, Paule, at the Café Museum. Combing the streets, he observes and archives it in his mind, searching for links between his personal history and the city’s own, much grander one. But the spy’s mission is nebulous, and for good reason: he has little to guide him except the drive to understand what growing force—need, desire, serendipity?—is summoning him to the top of St. Stephen’s, before Margo, Lissie, Kevin and Manuel, and to the inside of these cafés. In Vienna, the spy knows less than he thinks, and that’s probably what he likes the most. More means than end, his infiltrations are an excuse to be out in the world. 

            Vienna was inevitable: like Ōgaki, Venice, Paris, Beijing, or Isle-aux-Grues, the Austrian capital was now a wanderer’s playground, the perfect place to photograph and archive as part of Luc Courchesne’s personal quest. It is here, under the artist’s lens and his meandering pace, that Wien Chiaroscuro was born.

            Before its incarnation as glass panels—currently on view at Pierre-François Ouelette art contemporain—Wien Chiaroscuro began in the hyper-world of the virtual. Initiated in Vienna in the fall of 2021, a “technological” version of the project invited viewers to embark on a fully immersive experience of the city through a virtual reality headset or other compatible immersive device. 

            Strap on your VR headset. Like Nu au Paradis (2018) or Ontologies éphémères (2019), Wien Chiaroscuro pulls us into a swarm of floating images, like a fragmented, multiplied Vienna. These images—old portraits, archives, landscapes and architectural snippets—are lumped together, layered, or collide into each other. Many of them were shot by Courchesne during his random walks through the city, far from the well-worn, bustling areas. Together they form a captivating collage, the travel log of a topophile who is curious about Vienna and the virtual world. As if weightless, you float through a void, a personal space where opposite sensitivities—withdrawal (cocooning) and expansion—are in dialectical tension.[1] Inside this imploded hyper-world the physics of reality are distorted: video game enthusiasts refer to this as no-clipping, the strange moment when a player falls “beyond” the game’s map, beyond its playable areas, and potentially into the backrooms of hyperreality. Now you must choose a floating image, examine it, and click on it: it will open like a portal. Amidst these memories and moments floating all around you, you become the flâneur—or perhaps the spy—of Vienna.

            Luc Courchesne is a generous artist. Far from inward-looking, his experiences—in this case, his infiltrations through Vienna—aren’t just solitary moments. Whenever he can, he embraces technological advances and reaches out to others to invite them to cross the threshold of reality into virtuality. That’s where his “being-in-the-world” can be shared and augmented by those who join him. This almost effortless dissemination of an intimate and located experience, which technology affords, is the materialization of Paul Valéry’s anticipatory vision of the future of art. As early as 1929, Valéry wrote: “Neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”[2]  He continues: “It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. … They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. … So we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” Nearly a century later, Wien Chiaroscuro embodies this “system of stimuli” in which we can experience, at all times and at every moment, the possibility of removing ourselves from reality to witness what Valéry was already referring to as a “home delivery of Sensory Reality.”[3]

***

Remove your VR headset. In Wien Chiaroscuro, Luc Courchesne introduces a never-before-seen element in his work. Deep within his virtual Vienna, he has selected views of its immersive experience and reproduced them on glass panels. These random juxtapositions, generated solely through the eyes of the viewer, are now frozen. Courchesne crystallizes the virtual, his virtual. Playing with the natural transparency of glass, the images bring to mind windows that look out not so much onto the Austrian capital, but rather into the artist’s journal of the city. Like their virtual counterparts, the glass screens float in the gallery space, delineating a path that viewers and flâneurs alike can follow as they move through the images. 

            Whether your first encounter with Luc Courchesne’s Vienna is virtual or physical is beside the point: in both cases, you are immersed, wrapped in a swarm of ghostly images to decrypt. Both experiences have the ability to captivate our attention from all sides. They complement each other and emerge as attempts to bridge a located “here”—either the gallery or wherever the VR experience occurs—and a previous “there”: Vienna. While exploring Wien Chiaroscuro might make us a flâneur, Courchesne’s Vienna is more than just the city itself. We are very quickly made aware of our position as a flâneur meandering through someone else’s flânerie. We seek, we follow the trail, and we scan more than we innocently wander.

            For the viewer, this meta-flânerie still raises many questions as they move forward in their quest: What am I doing here? Where should I be? Where am I going and why? What am I looking for—or rather, what do I expect to find? Am I looking for a sign, a clue to guide me, like Luc Courchesne searching for a key on Rainer Maria Rilke’s grave? With these existential questions, viewers become not so much beings who know, but beings who wonder: more homo quaerens than sapiens.  Because they seek—the world, who they are—homo quaerens are neither lost, nor have they arrived. They become themselves as they travel routes they have yet to take. Through these virtual or physical meanderings, Courchesne hopes to feed our own existential quest. Vienna is simply a pretext, a rich but instrumental backdrop for serious introspection.

            The challenge that Luc Courchesne’s Viennese homo quaerens has in answering these questions certainly fuels the chiaroscuro part of the experience. Courchesne has had a penchant—or a healthy obsession—with chiaroscuro since the 1980s, as seen in The Center is Dark (1982), or Installation claire-obscure from 1986. He is less interested in its formal properties and more in its effects and the potential of its conditions. Chiaroscuro is present throughout his work as a way of being: to be in chiaroscuro would mean occupying a transitional zone, a strange and undefined space. A mental and sensitive position in which the need for certainty is suspended, a buffer zone where we embrace what appears only at the edges of things. The term clair-obscur, meaning “clear-obscure” or half-light, embodies the very ambivalence it describes, and gives itself “the task of reuniting, in the same space, the uncertain harmony between shadow and light …” [4]Even the link that connects the two words is in clair-obscur, the hyphen that extends between two realities of “clear” and “obscure,” opposites brought together to create a new reality. 

            This dialectic is in fact at the heart of the flâneur’s attitude. Flânerie—something a spy might use as an investigation method—is a resolutely clair-obscur activity. Baudelaire describes this paradoxical position as one that is both inside and outside: “To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.”[5] This distance from the world, all while being immersed in it, is reminiscent of the kind of comfort one finds at home, from behind a window, where one can observe the world without being seen. Perhaps Courchesne’s floating windows are an attempt to elicit the same in-between experience. 

            Nevertheless, these glass experiments provide a new position for the observer-flâneur. Onto these translucent surfaces, Courchesne has transposed his Viennese experience, one that was first lived, then virtualized, into a conscious return to the physical. A slippage from one medium to another that again involves the body and allows it to move, literally, among the images. While walking is the very essence of the flâneur,[6]meandering between the glass panels is much closer to flânerie than it is to virtual errantry. While the virtual brings Vienna to the body—the images bombard the body, which remains immobile—the physical installation of Wien Chiaroscuro does the opposite: it’s the body that moves towards Vienna in slow, forward steps between fragmented images. Within the virtual experience of Wien Chiaroscuro, walking is the gesture that allows one to exit—as the voice-over whispers: “To exit, walk three steps… literally.” In Courchesne’s physical installation, walking—inside the images—doesn’t conclude the experience, it immerses us in it further. 

            From virtual space to physical space, two floating Viennas remain, open and offered as sites to examine. Courchesne transposes his experience from one medium to another. What effects does this transposition have? McLuhan said it first: “The medium is the message.”[7] The way in which a person accesses content has a direct impact on its intelligibility, and influences its meaning and significance. The transition from virtual medium to the medium of glass offers a new physical presence. In response to the existential questions that Courchesne has been exploring for decades, this media mutation seems to offer a new position—for the viewer, but also for the artist himself.

            These glass panels are a first attempt at reifying an experience of flânerie that was previously confined to the virtual. They are most certainly a starting point towards an even more ambitious project that, in time, will fully answer Courchesne’s quest. What if these panels were to open one day, like in a virtual experience, and become portals to enter?

            Back to the clair-obscur, or chiaroscuro. This might be where, in all the vagueness and uncertainty, a more productive position is found: not as something to resolve, but as something to seek. Luc Courchesne is on a quest—quaerens. And this quest never ends. It is, in itself, a way of being. Stated differently: Luc Courchesne’s being-in-the-world might consist of that, of searching, relentlessly, for forms that are ever more capable of containing his quest.