Ouvrage

How the pieces in this series, gathered under the cleverly titled Le meilleur de HIT [The Best of HIT] (2009–20), were assembled exemplifies Bujold’s approach to her practice. Aside from audio tempo and animation, her video works stand out for their meticulous play on deconstruction and reconstruction. Her surgically precise editing is based not only on obvious attention to detail but also on an unusual narrative intuition, which emerges from a short look back at her career. 

The Weft Thread

Bujold imbues her videos with a narrative weft. Cutting reality – or, at least, its evidence – into motifs, she then rearranges them in a new and fanciful narrative structure that subverts normalcy, diverts the habitual, and magnifies the ordinary into a sort of flirtation with nonconformity. The video work Emporium (1999) offers an eloquent example: Bujold performs a sequence of vignettes involving different parts of her body. Her inventive mapping of corporeal behaviours offers a playful perspective on daily activities. Even as she highlights the artfulness of her subjects by centring our attention on them, she reveals their absurdity. The obvious humour of Emporium resides in the gap among degrees of appreciation, as well as in the ridiculousness behind portrayals of the self in unproductive action. The succession of short sketches evokes the work of Christian Boltanski who, in 1974, created a fictional history of “petit Christian” in pastels on photographs. Boltanski’s Saynètes comiques and Bujold’s Emporium share an ironic gaze at the presumed grandiloquence of the artist’s life, as the legend of self-representation is undercut by a deliberately ordinary mise en scène. The recurrent format of the scenes amplifies the narrative ambivalence; spectators eagerly await the beginning of each vignette, for the pure pleasure of its meaninglessness.

This floating, detached quality of expression is notable also in Onelie de l’Onelie (2000). Against a background of feminine affects, Bujold presents a self-reflective work featuring her formal chromatic and rhythmic explorations of the video medium. The off-the-wall narrative inspired by historical art-video currents bends to the structured chaos of an almost metronomic edit and a staging inspired by the colour bars on old CRT screens. The tight knitting together of images, gestures, and video demonstrates a holistic mastery of the image in movement – its history, its materiality, and its technical and cultural properties. 

The Warp Thread

The warp thread runs the entire length of a piece of fabric; here, it defines how Bujold’s style unfolds. Images are cut up and dismantled, accelerated and slowed; Bujold manipulates video like others sculpt matter. Works such as La Montagne Ste-Victoire (2005) and Comptes à rebours (2002) demonstrate her careful treatment of time, space, and their substance in a way that affirms the video as object. The subject of the image becomes the object of her work. In fact, the mutability of subjects, through her editing and construction, reveals the alterity of the document. Even the crudest and most direct video capture loses evidentiary value in favour of visual matter.

Bujold exposes video not only as a material but as a concept. Indeed, her capture, manipulation, and editing processes are inspired by art history and the image in movement. Her radical exploration and rebellious aesthetic evoke the eclectic and quirky spirit of historical avant-gardes, without sacrificing the accessibility of her work; playful, even light-hearted works such as Bonjour (2003) are reminiscent of early art videos centred on play and the desire for democratization of a quickly spreading medium. Finally, the gradual integration of digital technology into Bujold’s practice triggered her baroque treatment of the image in an original interpretation of the Plasticiens’ graphic and systematic style. The geometric refinement of Textile de cordes (2013) and Merci (2013) foreshadows her later Hits while formally conveying the narrative format in sketches. Like puzzle pieces, these works, with their compartmentalized, multiplied images, become segments and pixels of the broader composition of Bujold’s signature.

The Fabric

Our retrospective exercise involves a shift of perspectives and proportions inspired by All the Good Things (2008), in which we follow the adventures of ants on a plate of fruit. This busy group’s detailed examination of the produce and the occasional shots of an idle insect reclining in some crumbs, lazily waving an antenna, summarize the subtlety of Bujold’s body of work, in which the simplicity is herculean. Nothing – or very little – ever happens. We merely have to watch Permanent Smile (2008) to grasp how much seeing is an art to which nothing can be compared except knowing how to look and letting oneself be surprised.