Deadpan

Reminiscent of a typcial Buster Keaton mise-en-scène, Steve McQueen stages a deadpan humourous scene, where the house front collapses but leaves the figure mysteriously intact by leaving the door open.

The word “deadpan” originally described a game, then a person with an impassive wit and irony. The reference to Buster Keaton partly explains this term, because, in this installation, Steve McQueen draws inspiration from and uses part of the storm sequence in Steamboat Bill Jr., (1928) in which the façade of a wooden house falls onto the actor who is “miraculously” saved by the aperture of a window that happens to be open. The video is projected onto a vast screen measuring 3 × 4 metres, filling the entire wall of a darkened room, where the shiny floor reflects the image, thus creating a symmetrical fold. As is often the case in Steve McQueen’s work, the viewer is literally made to walk into the image and become immersed in it. A dozen shots with different merits and angles are edited using a cinematographic aesthetic (black-and-white, light, rigorous construction of image and frame) and a cinematographic rhetoric, alternating establishing shots, waist shots and close-ups of the motionless artist, subjected to the repeated collapse of the expanse of wood with the hole made by the window which he fits into. The head-on face, where the eyes stare into the viewer’s eyes, remains impassive, but is permeated by a slight fl inch when the façade violently frames it. The gag of the original is swiftly defused and diverted; the reference to silent movies and entertainment films (often found in McQueen’s work, for he also has film training under his belt) is duplicated by a reference to the anthropometric portrait conjured up by the close-up of the face and its specific lighting, reinforced by the streaked lighting of the background. Steve McQueen’s black male body, reframed in relation to Buster Keaton’s white male body, relates back to depictions of black identity, which are often not included in prevailing models. So the issue is raised thus: at what risk can one be in the frame and, above all, remain in it? At the risk of elimination, exclusion and disappearance. Other pieces by Steve McQueen make use of this motif of off-centering in similar ways: Just Above My Head (1996), where the artist’s head, filmed while walking, is invariably placed at the edge of the frame, and sometimes escapes from it; Catch (1997), which presents a play of temporary centering and off-centering of his own face and his sister’s face. In Steve McQueen’s work, the frame defines the space of the body, the space of private life, the space of social representation and thereby the place of identity. It is never a foregone conclusion. The last shot shows the wooden wall falling onto the screen and making it completely dark; it gives the impression of burying onlookers in their own space, which is also the space of the image’s reflection. The screen wall of the exhibition room thus merges with the wall in the fiction film. The installation’s arrangement here enjoys its full ironical sense, by directly involving the viewer in the representation. —Françoise Parfait