Gravity Greater than Velocity – Vincent Lamouroux's Asymptote
Arnauld Pierre
(excerpt, p. 17-20)

“A mobile element moving and driven by sufficient speed rises up and glides, its adherence to the ground being suppressed by speed. Even if it may fall back down if not equipped with organs that can propel without a solid support.”
Alfred Jarry, Le Surmâle (roman moderne, 1902), 1902.

With The Wheel and the Way (2005), Vincent Lamouroux has created a work that offers a synoptic perspective on the imaginary world and references brought into play with remarkable coherence in his creative explorations. The piece in question is a kind of statement in the form of a mural painting that can be adapted to the dimensions of the exhibition space. With vinyl letters arranged along the radii of a circular motif, like a wheel or the dial of a clock, it spins out a dozen words and sayings whose meanings are closely related to the spatial situation that they construct: station and acceleration stand in semantic and visual opposition, one at twelve and the other at six; following around in a clockwise direction, we read potential energy, gravitation, free fall, velocity, projectile motion, centripede acceleration, friction, acceleration stress, centrifugal force and kinetic energy. The vocabulary and concepts are those of the physics of movement, of kinetics and dynamics, which are systematically spelled out. They are laid out in such a way, from the centre to the periphery, that they organise a kind of remote projection of the gaze and entrain vision in such a way that the observatory becomes one with the object evoked, taking part in the world of mobile phenomena thus described. If The Wheel and the Way is par excellence a work about the work, a work within a work, that is because most of Lamouroux's output since he came onto the art scene in the early 2000s has been dedicated to the invention of objects, installations and environments that are presented as so many speed structures that induce movement in the beholder. To date, Scape (2005-2006) is one of the best illustrations of this.

As first installed at MAMCO, Geneva, in 2005, Scape was a hanging structure made of steel tubes whose serpentine trajectory drew beholders after it around all the rooms on the first floor, making them “visit their own exhibition,” while transporting them “beyond their own bodies as passers-by.” (1) Reinstalled the following year at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris for the exhibition Cinq milliards d'années, the metal structure snaked back on itself and in places even went through the walls, sketching out the figure of a gigantic eight – the sign of infinity but also the “grand huit” (scenic railway) of amusement parks and rollercoaster tracks, which is one of the overt references in this work, along with the tubular runners guiding the steel ball on a pinball machine ramp. But there is no ball or rollercoaster car on Lamouroux's rails, for here it is the eye that plays the role of the mobile element, and it is the gaze that is accelerated by the perceptual forces of the work, to the extent that they ideally enable it to attain an emancipating speed – here, the word “scape” is to be read as the old, abbreviated form of escape. Looking at these rails for vision, one found oneself slipping into modes of behaviour that evoked others: those, for example, of the more playful members of the public edging along the sides of the latest monumental sculptures in rippling steel by Richard Serra, taking the tangent of the curves and using them as a kind of bobsleigh track, skateboard ramp or frozen wave for surfing, allowing the gaze to slide along it and seek out, in the suggestive energy of the lines, the impulse that, following the gaze, propels the body. Similar strategies of displacement make Scape, in the artist's words, a kind of “fairground attraction, very light and dynamic, for sliding, speed, the intense sensation of movement,” or again, “a trigger of the imagination that projects the visitor into the world of contemporary bachelor games and sports in which the speed and sensuality of the movement take the body to the brink of weightlessness.” This is also a way of stating that Lamouroux's works never forget to integrate the perceptual dimension of their models, whether they derived from fairground attractions, special effects in cinema or the visual culture of the avantgardes and its technological utopias. Similarly, they always recreate the impact of the sensorial surprises of which they were both the symptom and the occasion.

So it is that visual studies have recently raised the rollercoaster from the status of simple purveyor of strong sensations for punters with little interest in the subtlety of the device, to that of an emblem of a kind of perceptual appetite association with the transformations of the gaze in the modern age, in which kinaesthetic immersion and proprioceptive engagement would appear to have countered the dominant ocular orientation of tasks and behaviours required by the rational organisation of work and by an increasingly mechanised urban environment. Rollercoasters, big dippers, merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels – to which the rotating movement of The Wheel and the Way may have been an allusion – could thus be seen to constitute an appropriation of the dominant technologies of movement and impulsion of motion, in favour of a return to the body in activities of pleasure where speed is no longer just what challenges the ordinary capacities of the gaze, but that which enables us to experience, through an often paroxystic action that may extend as far as visceral discomfort, full consciousness of our corporeal being. The slide is another of these vectors of kinetic immersion that this history should in fact take into account, as Carsten Höller did recently with Test Site, an installation of three helix-shaped tubular slides in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern from October 2006 to April 2007. These were about both the sight of their users and the corporeal experience enjoyed by the latter, with that moment of inner panic that grips minds suddenly overcome by the intensity of their physical perceptions. This analysis of popular amusement and the sensorial needs they cater to is what allowed Scott Bukatman to emend the theses of Jonathan Crary on the loss of corporeity afflicting the experience of modern man, on the schism of sensoriality between the act of seeing and the observer's body, on the hiatus between the kinesis of the machine age and haptic space. On the grounds that the historical role of popular entertainments was, on the contrary, to solicit once again, “heightened, even exaggerated bodily awareness in relation to highly technologized environments.” (2) It is not enough to recall, in relation to this discussion, that Lamouroux is a great connoisseur of the objects it takes into consideration – and of their long history, leading from the ice slides of Imperial Russia (hence the French name “montagnes russes”) to the ever more gigantic and technologically accomplished offerings of modern amusement parks, via the fearless efforts of the first promoters of scenic railways and rollercoasters who, in Europe and the United States, followed in the wake of the progress made by railways and industrialisation. (3) In one of his occasional photographic surveys, the artist has also studied the way in which this popular entertainment made a deep and long-lived impression on the urban fabric, where the pattern of residential development was conducive to the creation of private rollercoasters in gardens and yards, on varying scales and with varying degrees of technological ambition. The images he captured thus document the later stage of appropriation by the middle and working classes of these vectors of bachelor, compensatory movement, devoid of practical purpose – of these outlets for the expression of pure sensorial joy.

(...)