Purple Television

[January 30 2014] : art

Lucid TV: You Can Find Beautiful Things Without Consciousness I / Comme des Garcons by Katerina Jebb

We Can Find Beautiful Things Without Consciousness materializes from Katerina Jebb’s video series, Simulacrum and Hyperbole. In this work, Jebb sees the boundaries between actuality and satire confused and disrupted. In creating an imaginary TV channel Lucid TV, the viewer is offered parody endorsements such as Tilda Swinton’s Hot Dollar, Marisa Berenson’s Hapax Legomenon and Kristin Scott Thomas’s Je Reviens The artist grasps the medium of television advertising and feeds it back in to itself within the context of reality. This is heightened in the case of We Can Find Beautiful Things Without Consciousness, for what is presented is an actual perfume created by Comme des Garcons. The result is an indicative exploitation of the crisis of identity, awareness, and authenticity that surrounds the complex layer cake of psychological interplay underpinning commercial advertising. Often in Jebb’s work, the realisation of numerous incongruities creates a tension within the line of humour. The work is a declaration of lavish juxtapositions: silver with black, ominous serenity with thrashing brutality, high polish aesthetic beauty with contradictory motives. Jebb’s idiomatic vision of the perfume bottle, a translucent globular form, is permeated by the white light of the scanner. The sequential process of the scanner’s flow is harmonious with the tripartitions of the advert. Just as the light emanates to meet the wall of the perfume bottle with fluctuating intensity, the hyperbole of Jebb’s mantras oscillate, further blurring the distinction between farce and sincerity.

Here is the transcript of film:

This is not a psychotic episode, it is a cleansing moment of clarity. It is a shattering and beautiful sensation, it is the exulted flow of the space-time continuum save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness. I feel on the verge of some great universal truth.

My husband ran off with his boyfriend There is no America, there is no democracy, there is only IBM and ITT and AT and T, and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exon.

Those are the nations of the world today.

They tell me you’re a mad man Only desultorily.

How are you now?

I’m as mad as a hatter.

Comme des Garcons Parfum

Directed by Katerina Jebb

Editing by Benjamin Ricart at Premiere Heure, Paris

Assited by Jonathan Fischnaller

Music by Spencer Noble

Excerpts of screenplay from Network by Paddy Chayefsky

Voiceover by Natasha Fraser Cavassoni and Lisa Rovner

Orginally commisioned by Comme des Garcons Parfum Paris