THE INVASION OF THE UNCANNY
One fine day something has become different. Someday, somehow. But it has not happened all of a sudden. It feels as if something has been sneaking its way into the usual order of things. As if something out of the ordinary has been occurring that defies naming, let alone explanation. A body is standing there, lying there: it is there, although there is something slightly unusual about it. It feels as if it had to be that way – like in a, according to the tradition, still life, or an interior. And yet, this person’s strong presence is unsettling, although – or indeed because – she does not seem to impose herself. She is just there. She has become part of the environment – or has the environment become part of her? She is standing there as if being part of a junk shop’s furniture. She is almost disappearing between snow-covered branches and twigs. Dressed in red, she is winding her way like those red hoses covering the floor of a cellar. And she is lying there, under a bed, as if having become one with pillows and bedding.
The staging of the unusual as part of the usual: artist Chantal Michel, 38 has got it down to a fine art. Her basic strategy here is mimicry, this almost mute adapting to an environment she has chosen for herself. She builds a sort of diorama, a sequence of a play in which she plays the parts of stage designer, actress, and, above all, director all in one. And what is more: The staging is that of a picture composed and thought through with a view to every single detail. For all its appearance of immediacy, never is anything left to chance. The props are right to a T. The figure in the shop has been positioned so as to form a horizontal line in the very centre of the shop, the two branches in the snowy forest looking like the letter V frame the woman dressed in white, who is hardly visible. The woman under the bed forms a diagonal line and the woman lying among the snake-like hoses as if indistinguishable from Laokoon embeds herself so perfectly in the bends of the hoses that she becomes inseparable from them. Thus Chantal Michel – with a perfection nothing short of Cindy Sherman’s – combines selfstaging, performance and photographic composition in a way that is unmistakably hers. And over a period of several years she has done it in a surprising multitude of stage sets: the way she discovers and uses situational constellations as a requisite for her art so that her shop, forest, hotel room or murkily damp cellar become aesthetic frames for the most diverse and atmospherically completely disparate worlds, is utterly surprising.
Chantal Michel’s photographs could well be film stills, arrested moments of an action the before and after of which remain unexplained. How did it come to that? What has happened? Her photographs open up spaces for questions – and narratives. Their pivot lies in their enigmatic nature, and their essence is made up of the knotted strands of an unknown story. A lost absence lies in their sensual presence. Thus, before we know it, the scenes are turned into possible scenes of crime – the beautifully composed imagery switches and becomes uncanny, even more so since the course of events, which lies in the dark and remains unknown to us, leaves no traces to guide us further. The keenest investigative reasoning power is floored by the appearance in front of us. This is the “something”, the “some-where”, the “someday”: the uncertain. It is the result of the unusual invading the usual – the way it also happens in the best of Patricia Highsmith’s novels. Or in the fairytale and dark romanticism of someone like E.T.A. Hoffmann. “It” could happen any time, deceiving reality. Konrad Tobler