D
sacco et mannequin en résine, vêtements et accessoires, 2006
Courtesy Galerie Loevenbruck

On June 3rd 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol with three bullets painted silver to match the décor of the Factory. After trying to shoot the impresario and the art critic who were with her primary target, she fled using the Factory elevator, almost immediately turned herself in to the police, and pleaded guilty at her trial. As a result of his wounds, Warhol was forced to wear a corset - ironically a fashion accessory decried by feminists - for the rest of his life. He refused however to testify against Solanas, who spent three years in prison, began to harass Warhol again, was again arrested, and then spent time in several psychiatric hospitals before finishing out her days in California exactly as she had begun: prostituting herself to support her heroin habit.

This story brings together all the elements of a folktale of the hipster era, and it ends like one in the middle of the 80's: decline and fall for one of the protagonists, and long-term trauma for the other. It is also rife with some of the constitutive elements of the décor which Virginia Barré has created for her work: pop, feminism, attempted murder, real fake bullets, vampire blood (Solanas' nickname for Warhol), public fright and media shockwaves. But it is foremost the tragic farce aspect of the affair, its deranged equilibrium between regressive childishness and symbolic ultra-violence, which best synthesizes the artist's procedures and their underlying obsessions.

If the generation of feminist and appropriationist artists of the 80's was the contrarian heir of the pop and conceptual art of the preceding decade, then Virginie Barré is an heiress of appropriationism, which she extends rather than contests in the manner of many artists of her generation, for whom it is less a question of distancing themselves from their predecessors than replaying former conceptual strategies in an almost utilitarian manner. This questioning, which consists of appropriating the intellectual mechanisms of appropriation, leads Barré less to a standard critique of originality than to a revelatory process which goes against the identity of the artist. Employing a profusion of more or less persistent found images, known persons and told stories, Virginie Barré negotiates first of all with her own unconscious as a spectator and with the intimate and unmentionable chaos of contemporary memory which brings together Claude Cahun and Agatha Christie, Fantômette and Virginia Woolf, Daria and Simone de Beauvoir. The systematic outcome of the scenes she orchestrates - violent death - glaringly reveals a personal obsession, albeit a rather widely shared one. This constant inverts - with a dose of humor - the principle of the "death of the author". Virginie Barré: "Author of Death", which she has made the recurring motif of her work, reveals a little more of her intimate identity with each homicidal opus, while these sinisterly democratic subjects progressively build the conditions for a wider audience. She produces a body of work like an obsessive soap-opera writer who does not work with an eye to the end or the completion of a series, but rather to its dogged recurrence. "Only fragments are possible…To put it clearly, the standards which apply here are different from those of "high culture". A work is good not because it is complete and finished, but because another type of truth regarding human nature, another experience of what is human - in sum, another valid and credible sensibility - is revealed."

This death-dealing subject and its inoculation techniques plead in favor of the radical accessibility of Virginie Barré's art. But so do its borrowed sub-cultural media, the arrogant poverty of its materials and accessories, and the swank baseness of the aesthetic upon which it relies. Rather than using a refined and facetious language, deftly reversing the clichés of popular culture and art history in the safe and hermetic field of artsy subversion, this art firmly demands its share of regression.