"'Timidity is not an issue,' says video artist Pierre Yves Clouin. Part exhibitionist, part auteur, Clouin is not afraid to show a little skin in his little videos (none are more than 5 minutes long). And is not afraid to share an opinion either: 'Full frontal nudity is curiously flat.'
"As both director and star of his growing body of work, Clouin focuses his lens on parts of the male body that don't often make gay top-ten lists, like armpits and shoulders, the small of the back and the top of the head. Clouin works like a video Venus Flytrap, seducing audiences with intimate close-ups of curves and orifices on his own well-sculpted body. Just when you think you recognize what's on screen, the body unfolds and you realize you just got turned on shoulder cleavage (The Little Big, 2000) or by a particularly sexy earlobe (I've Got Mouths All Over, 1999).
"Earlier this year he screened a tape at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. This fall he has a few venues lined up including the MIX Festival in Manhattan, where Clouin once premiered The Bleating Calf and caused a sensation with animal rights activists until it was explained that what looked like a lamb about to be slaughtered was actually Clouin himself, naked and moaning.
"Clouin travels quite a bit these days, leaving his boyfriend at home in Paris. Exquisitely formed and clearly at ease with exposing himself to the critical masses, Clouin has some sexy advice for the body-obsessed among us: 'Accept pleasure whatever it may be and whenever it strikes.'"
The Venus Flytrap
by Rajendra Roy
The first time I saw Pierre-Yves Clouin’s video work, I remember feeling a little naughty. I was looking at what I thought was a dying calf, weak and vulnerable, and yet it was a scintillating experience. The image was a bit out of focus; just enough to invite imagination, but not so much as to dissuade belief. When my eyes finally focused on what was actually taking place on the screen, and I realized that bare skin and labored moans belonged not to a weak calf, but rather to a wily Frenchman, I was enamored. It is perhaps the naked vulnerability of Clouin’s subject/self that makes his careful mastery of the video trompe l’oeil so beguiling. In each of the minute-or-so long works he produces, the viewer is presented with soft crevices on sculpted male bodies, hush moans and false orifices via voyeuristic electronic glances. In the end, it is always the viewer who is left exposed. Exposed that is, to the invented reality of the recorded image. At once anti-documentarian and a redefining of the visual autobiography, Clouin’s work succeeds precisely because he fully expects us to trust the camera: “Seeing is Believing.” Melding a Venus flytrap’s knack for seduction with a contortionist’s sense of mise-en-scène, Pierre-Yves Clouin is the quintessential video “top.”
Rajendra Roy
L’attrape-mouche
par Rajendra Roy
La première fois que j’ai vu le travail vidéo de Pierre Yves Clouin, je me souviens de m’être senti un peu coupable. Je regardais ce qui me semblait être un veau en train de mourir, faible et vulnérable, et c’était pourtant une étincelante expérience. L’image était un peu floue ; juste assez pour inviter à l’imagination, mais pas suffisamment pour nous dissuader d’y croire. Quand, finalement, mes yeux se concentrèrent sur ce qu’en fait il y avait à l’écran, et que je réalisais que cette peau dénudée et que ces difficiles gémissements n’étaient pas ceux d'un veau sans défense, mais plutôt d'un astucieux français, j'ai été épris.
C’est peut-être la vulnérabilité nue du sujet-moi de Clouin qui rend sa soigneuse maîtrise de la vidéo trompe-l’œil si captivante. Dans chacun de ses travaux d’une minute, ou des plus longs, qu’il a produit, le spectateur se trouve devant de douces fentes sur des corps masculins sculptés, de secrets gémissements et de faux orifices via de voyeuristes coups d’œil électroniques. À la fin, c’est toujours le spectateur qui reste mis à nu, exposé en fait à la réalité inventée de l’image enregistrée.
À la fois anti-documentaire et redéfinition de l’autobiographie visuelle, le travail de Clouin réussit précisément parce qu’il attend entièrement de nous, d’avoir confiance en la caméra : "Voir, c’est croire".
En fusionnant la stratégie de séduction de l’attrape-mouche de Vénus et un sens contorsionniste de la mise en scène, Clouin est le "top" quintessenciel de la vidéo.
Rajendra Roy
Chief curator, Department of Film, Museum of Modern Art;
Competition Selection Committee, Berlinale Internationale
Filmfestspiele Berlin; Formerly, programmer, artistic director,
Hamptons International Film Festival; executive director, MIX
Gay/Lesbian Film Festival; Film and Media Arts Program Manager, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Education: BA, University of California, San Diego
Co-founder: Rising Stars program
Publications include: "Making Choices," Moving Pictures; "The New
'Old' World," IndieWIRE; "Naked Eye: Pierre-Yves Clouin," Empire,
no. 7; "The Knickian Doctrine: A Metaphor for the Future of the Media
Arts," MAIN; "The Truth and the Need: Jim Hubbard as Curator" in
Jim Hubbard, Filmmaker, exh. cat. Brooklyn: Dumba Arts Center;
"Films and Videos for a Synthetic Society" with Anie Stanley, in Next
Sex; "L'Attrape Mouche (Venus Flytrap)" in Turbulences Video #29.