Les Avatars de Vénus

THE FILMS
Les Avatars de Vénus de Jean-Jacques Lebel, 2007, video, 40min
Le Cow-boy et l’indien de Alain Fleischer, 1993, video, 58min
Day Nine de Jonas Mekas, 2007, video, 8min
Monument à Félix Guattari  de François Pain, 1994, video, 90min
Le Visiteur de Alain Fleischer, 1998, video, 45’

 The process leading to the making of the film-installation Les Avatars de Vénus goes back thirty years to the thousands of images I began picking up – from news stands, bookshops, libraries, museums, flea markets as I travelled around the world, drawing, photographing, analyzing, filming and remembering what I saw. Finally, I collected a giant image–bank of different incarnations of Venus spreading across time and space, coming from all continents, all civilizations, all epochs, respecting the logic of each one of them, regardless of the arbitrary ideological hierarchy established by academicians between High Art and Low Art. I chose to mix art history and popular imagery, Renaissance iconography and commercial advertisements, religious propaganda and common pornographic icons, movie stars and classical as well as non-occidental sculpture, all fetishes being complementary.
- Jean-Jacques Lebel