Pierre Beaudoin à Produit Rien 2, 3 et 4 novembre 2023

“Regarder le temps passer”

I have this thing about the idea of ‘redemption’ through ‘offering’. A friend of mine told me that all art is offering, so mine was not different from others, hence not a very original concept to hang on to. Still, I like the idea as a conduit to talk about art. I don’t think Pierre is looking for redemption, but still as we all sat with him, being Saturday there seemed to be more of ‘us’; I did feel his offering to us. It felt heavy, but it also felt like a release.
He had limited ‘his’ space with chalk on the floor, creating a path around the large screen with a digital clock, in front of it a chair and in between a rock on the floor. A beautiful stone, pink and oval it looked soft and heavy.
So, ‘we’ felt time passing and we could see it too on the clock. Pierre performed some activities. He walked around on his path; he stood in front of a wall, that had nails placed in a round shape. I think there were nails, there was a hammer on the floor; probably an activity that took place one of the other two days of the performance.
We also saw him take a bag of yellow pencils and placed them on the concrete wall, on specific holes. Were the holes on the wasll from before? Or did he create these holes previously? Suddenly the pencils became arrows, at least to me they seemed to transform.
At another time he took a wooden dowel, he stood placing it on the floor and put it on his mouth, holding the dowel with only his mouth and stood leaning into the object. Eventually, spit starting to fall along the dowel, and it pooled on the floor. It was a way, for me, to show his humanity. I believe bodily fluids, spit, blood, etc. express our humanity. After a few minutes he stopped, and the spit remained in place.
And time passed, and I thought of a wonderful novel by Martin Amis called Time’s Arrow. It is a book that narrates the story of a man, going backwards. In the novel we move from America to Nazi Germany, and everything is narrated backwards where the narrator and the protagonist of the story are not the same.
As we sat with Pierre, time went forward and time and space expanded. I felt I was seeing Pierre sitting further from me, from the beginning of my visit. I had not moved from the same chair. Perception is a tricky thing. As humans, our dilemma is that we can’t go backwards in time, only forward, and that is how we age and move towards our own extinction.
After an hour and a half, I left. The performance was less about redemption and more about offering. The nails and the pencils/arrows on the walls were more about sacrifice. However, he showed us literally time’s texture, and we shared with him, its softness and its inevitability.