Michel Auder (born 1944 in Soissons, France) is a filmmaker who has been creating experimental movies and video art since the late 1960s. Auder is a poet of visual observation— his films bear an affinity to literary forms and can best be described as filmic poetry. He is known for his non-linear and non-narrative style, capturing his life and the lives of those around him in an intimate and fragmented manner.
Auder's work often blurs the lines between art, documentation, and personal narrative, the diaristic and oneiric. Throughout his career, he has produced a significant body of work ranging from fictional narratives to personal documentaries. Auder's early adoption of the portable video camera allowed him to document the everyday phenomena of his own private experiences, with a directness that was revolutionary at the time and that is still radical after many decades.
In New York he was involved with Andy Warhol's Factory and became a participant-observer of the New York social scene, capturing footage of many of the personalities and events associated with it. This connection led to a video archive of thousands of hours that offers a unique perspective on this period of American art history.
Over the decades, Auder has continued to work consistently exploring the potential of video as a medium. Through his works, Auder builds a connection between the personal and the universal. He allows viewers to see the world through his eyes, sharing experiences that range from banal to extraordinary. Through the intimate use of the filmic medium, Auder questions the nature of time and memory, juxtaposing real and fictional, perception and representation, intimate and exposed.
The selection of works presented in Bangkok Kunsthalle, unfolds along two interwoven trajectories: five works on Nature and nine works on the evolution of Auder’s oeuvre through different genres.
In the first group of works, Michel Auder often describes his relationship to Nature in terms of time. He explains how the representation of Nature necessitated the invention of a specific editing technique in order to accommodate the nuanced temporality of natural phenomena. In his seminal film ‘Voyage to the Centre of the Phone Lines’, (1993), Michel Auder juxtaposes covert recordings of anonymous mobile-phone conversations with a seascape— sand, water, the sun, the moon, wandering birds, not a human in sight. The images evoke an accepted universality of the timeless natural world, while the audio evokes a sense of mundanity and futility, a Joycean smattering of human drama and banality. People fret obsessively to one another about their personal lives, their frailties, the anxiety in their voices revealing their inchoate sense of mortality. ‘Domaine de la Nature’ (2023) is a collage of natural scenery employing extensive long pans and a slow rhythm. ‘I am So Jealous of Birds II’ (2011) is a ‘video haiku’ of New York City birds. Finally, ‘Flowers of Thailand’ (2023) is a two-screen installation, produced in Bangkok, which evokes an epistolary correspondence between form and colour.
In the second group of works, a selection of chronicles, travelogues, diaries, video portraits, video poems and intimate recollections reveal Michel Auder’s predilection for modes of editing and filming that enable multiple narratives to emerge. ‘Bangkok Yaowarat’ (2023) depicts a daily scene of Bangkok streetlife, a voluntary choreography of people and commodities that are perfectly synchronized. Video portraits of artists such as ‘Cindy Sherman’ (1988), ‘Florence’ (1975) and ‘Alice Neel Painting Margaret’ (1978 ed.2009) constitute extraordinary poetic documentations of the creative process of artists in their studios.
Auder’s videos often take the form of intimate correspondences to impossible interlocutors such as ‘Heads of Town’ (2009). At times, his works take the form of collages, adopting the rhythmic structure of music and poetry such as ‘Van Gogh’ (2023), ‘Gemälde 2’ (2011, ed. 2019) or ‘Bangkok City’ (2023). ‘DAUGHTERS’ (2023) is an installation which is shown for the first time. It combines two videos: ‘Talking Head’ (1976) an intimate documentation of the artist’s daughter talking to herself, and ‘DAUGHTERS’ (2023) a work which subtly inverts the relationship between foreground and background while the voiceover and words by Natalie Brück assigns a simultaneously menacing and seductive sonic element to it.
Michel Auder’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including solo shows and retrospectives in Moma PS1 (New York, USA), documenta 14 (Kassel, Athens), 2014 Whitney Biennial (New York, USA), Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem, The Netherlands), Fondation Vincent Van Gogh (Arles, France), documenta 13 (Kassel, Germany), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany) and Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland). His work is represented in public collections internationally, including Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur (Marseille, France), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, France) and Muhka (Antwerp, Germany), ICA (Miami, USA) amongst others.
Curator Statement
Recording, Replaying, Recollecting:
A journey through the works of Michel Auder
By Stefano Rabolli Pansera
“Thus let your Streams o’reflow your Springs,
Till Eyes and Tears be the same things:
And each the other’s difference bears;
These weeping Eyes, those seeing Tears.”
Eyes and Tears by Andrew Marvell
Michel Auder sees life. He sees the world, observes the people, stares at the countless events of the everyday. His intense gaze spots details that generally pass unnoticed: the witty expression of a passerby, the texture of the petals of the flowers, the unconscious choreography of metropolitan life, the slow movement of the clouds, the flickering images on a TV screen.
Fundamentally, Michel Auder is an assiduous visual chronicler who has documented and shared his life and observations through the medium of video.
“I'm not really keeping a diary, rather I use the diaristic form and the documentary form, but I manipulate them." Auder insists.
As a matter of fact, the manipulation and examination of these forms engage two of video’s inherent properties: intimacy and time.
Seeing is the main expression of Auder’s practice. In his oeuvre, seeing is both the act of observing and the act of recording. In this sense, his gaze is oblique and persistent.
‘Oblique’ in the sense that he turns his attention to the details that are at the very margins of the action, indulging the peripheral aspects often neglected. Such a radical displacement of the focus from the object to the background allows accessing life in a very intimate way, as if the artist is enchanted by the very existence of things: a sort of artistic animism.
‘Persistent’ because Michel Auder lives with his camera and obsessively records most of the moments of his life, he films and then watches and re-watches the clips, refines his gaze, works on the sequences, edits the reels, crops the frames and manipulates the cuts. As Jonas Mekas, one of Michel’s long-lasting supporters and friends, recalls "When I used to go visit Michel at the Chelsea hotel, around 1970, the video camera was always there, always going, a part of the house, a part of his life, eyes, hands. It still is. A most magnificent love affair– no, not an affair: a life’s obsession."
As the title of one of his early works, ‘Keeping Busy’ (1969) suggests, his art creates a cohesive structure out of a flurry of uncomposed moments, out of the disorder of time, out of all of the things that dissolve when we are busy making plans.
The intensity of his gaze offers an intimate encounter with what he reveals. There is no distance from what he discloses, but proximity, bordering on physical contact with the subjects that he films.
Michel Auder is an observer of life in its splendour and squalor. In quantum physics, the observation becomes indistinguishable from what is being perceived, as there is no ‘total’ or ‘impartial’ observer. Far from being an impartial observer, Michel Auder is complicit with the life that it represents, he is deeply entangled in its dynamics and in its destiny.
This is the reason why Auder’s films are inextricably bound up with his own life: he is a rebel, and his gaze is itself a subversive act.
At once poetic and critical, cruel and confessional, Michel Auder’s casually virtuosic videos have for over five decades disrupted traditional perceptual habits of moviegoers and art audiences alike, subverting notions of filmic narrative and processes. Employing new video formats as they become available (from analogue film to mobile phone), Auder has produced short and feature films, video installations and photography that transgress genres, borrowing from art history, literature, commercial television, and experimental cinema.
Born in Soissons in the north of France in 1944, where he spent his solitary childhood, Auder moved to Paris in the late fifties where he trained as a commercial fashion photographer and began making films in the early 1960s.
In 1963, he was drafted to the French Army and was sent to Algeria as a combat photographer. A true rebel, Auder spent three months of his conscription in a military jail for refusing his duties.
Upon his return to Paris, Auder found inspiration in the films of Jean Luc Godard and garnered support as a filmmaker from the leftist film collective Zanzibar Group. Thus marked the beginnings of his long running career as a video artist.
After having purchased a Sony Portapak, the first portable video camera, he discovered a way of filmmaking without scripts and sets, he simply carried his camera around with him, adopting the ethos of ‘the world as my set and people as my actors’.
At the end of the 1960s and for most of the 1970s he lived in Chelsea Hotel in New York City. A chance encounter with Andy Warhol emboldened his own self-taught approach to multimedia art and acquainted him with Warhol’s network of artists, models, actors including Susan Hoffmann, known to him and most others as ‘Viva’, the name that Andy Warhol had given her, and whom Auder married in Las Vegas soon after.
Auder’s early films already contain most of the traits of his mature style: they are fragmented, layered videos that document everyday existence. The films are non-narrative and non-sequential as they are cut between various locations and combine different scenes that appear unrelated. The artist began letting his camera roll on friends, family, strangers, and his environment and soon developed a practice of near-constant filming.
The resulting thousands of hours of footage—shot on devices ranging from the first portable recorders to mobile phone cameras—include biographical portraits, travelogues, and images shot directly from television screens.
In his only feature film, ‘Cleopatra’ (1970), filmed on 16mm and 35mm film and extravagantly ambitious in scale, Auder foreshadowed his future decades of making art out of his own lived experience. In fact, the production ended up catastrophically as the producer cut the financial support and a copy of the film, screened at Cannes Film Festival, was withdrawn from public distribution. Michel Auder soon realised that he had to reject the standard structures of production and distribution of the film industry to pursue his own rigorous, personal language based on personal intuition and improvisation.
Since moving to New York and becoming part of the scene which centred on Andy Warhol’s Factory, Auder focused on his life’s obsession: recording life on video.
He observes life through thousands of hours of video recordings. Each of these observations are saved to a vast bank of images that are – sometimes much later – reviewed and edited into new films. It’s an ongoing and seemingly continuous project that has in recent years been shaped by Auder’s use of his smartphone as an artistic tool. Again, his art and his life are intimately interwoven.
The archive of footage he has amassed, and continues to collect, provides the source material from which he creates the individual works.
While a few works were formed completely in-camera, most have been edited for years, and sometimes decades, after the original footage was shot. As time passes, certain situations, people, and images are revisited, edited, and released from the archive. His process of recollection is not about retrieval of the past as such, nor it is about refugees of a nostalgic past as much as it is about re-telling the past in new potential narratives.
In doing so, he undermines the processes of memory in the form of creative reappropriation: retrospectively examining events in the past and searching for a visual vocabulary to tell new stories.
Not only is the gaze oblique and persistent, but even the editing process is deferred and nuanced. In fact, Auder describes a very personal approach to traversing his immense video archive: he watches his own footage as if his gaze is turning towards his own vision.
He constantly reconfigures his vast archive of visual information. He further elaborates on this process: "I try not to deal with the material as soon as it’s made. It’s only years later that I deal with the material. I store it up. I wait until I can look at it.” Auder continues: “That’s why I keep all my work, not because I think it’s great but because I had some kind of calling to shoot every minute of it. There’s no reason for me to erase it even if it looks bad. Experience has told me that I can look back twenty years later and find something interesting. I was smart enough to understand that things get older, and the meanings change.”
Such an anachronistic approach to editing provides the artist with the critical distance necessary to edit the footage. Furthermore, it provides the freedom to use the existing recordings for new stories and unexpected narratives. Auder’s method vaguely resembles Freud’s description of ‘afterwardsness’: the retroactive understanding of experiences, impressions, or memory whose traces are altered after the fact because of new experiences.
This concept becomes a method of editing in Michel Auder’s practice. It allows him to produce new, even unexpected effects and meaning out of the same historic footage.
He combines recently filmed video and new edits of previously shown material until the concept of linear time evaporates, and the past coexists with the present.
In his attempt to negotiate between memory and duration, recollection and deferral, the re-presentation of the past is neither nostalgic nor idealised.
The past is simply recorded footage, a “given reel” available to be edited to generate new stories. Auder explains “The past is now. I have no regret; it is simply the available footage that I can use. There is no difference in time between events. The past is past, and memories are just frames on a reel”.
This strategy of overlapping, simultaneity and the overall alteration of syntax creates the powerful sensation of having time and momentum perceptually altered.
During the 1980s, Auder developed several video works that utilize television by appropriating and then reconfiguring footage shot directly from a domestic television screen.
In a world dominated by mass-media, life is ceaselessly televised and processed, and can be accessed through the screen.
Therefore, Michel watches the videos as a source of the life that he recollects.
The works produced in this period demonstrate Auder’s creative and pioneering use of scratch, montage, and experimental sound techniques. Likewise, the focus on broadcasted mass-media extended the artist’s long-running examination of the medium of video and forms of representation.
Being able to control the past may mean being in control of the present self. Yet, Auder’s model privileges the opacity of past, present, and memory. He constantly reminds us of the irremediable breach between experience, recollection and its externalized representation. Experience is always reconstructed in memory, and memories are not pure representations. Considering the filmic strategies and overall style Auder has developed, we can see how he, in fact, highlights the tensions between memory and forgetting, recollection and narration, preservation and erasure.
This tension becomes even more powerful with Auder’s recent works that respond to the new forms of mass voyeurism as exemplified in the explosive proliferation of reality-based digital media.
Auder explains his fascination with more recent developments in film as follows: “By the year 2000, we all became filmmakers, mostly for the worse and in some cases for the better. We all have a digital tool, or two, in our pockets. By using these recording devices new authors have emerged, telling stories like never before; Film Novelists, Film Playwrights, Film Poets, Film Essayists, Film Painters, Film Biographers, Film Columnists, Film Reporters, Film Animators, Film Wordsmiths, Film Scribes, Film Sculptors, Film Scribblers...”
With “Endless Column” (2011) Michel started directly using the pictures recorded on his mobile phone and adopted a new method of paratactic editing, with sequences of still images compiled without hierarchy, with no overlapping nor effects.
These brutally non-mediated and intimate chronicles reveal the contradictions, gaps and paradoxes involved in trying to make film represent real life experience and highlight how the language of moving images suspends us within systems of watching and being watched that are simultaneously intimate and distant, nostalgic and emotionally detached.
Even when confronted with these new modes of seeing and recording, Auder’s gaze focuses on the unexpected gestures, the expressions, the situations and all the unexpected details that fade away while we are busy living our lives.
He grasps these moments that we often forget to pay attention to, when joy is more ephemeral, and melancholy is more intense.
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