The gold-plated caddy placed on a shimmering podium by Sylvie Fleury immediately sets the scene. Welcome to the “Supermarché des images”. An amazing journey through our world saturated with pixels, videos, representations of reality, consumables and disposables. This clinical demonstration, articulated coldly, marked, on the ground, by fluorescent signage, is flagrantly correct. Store, consume, throw away. And sometimes recycle. Here is the vicious circle of the all-image that governs us, from the mobile phone to surveillance cameras. The extremely precise choice of works, over the course of the chapter, adds to the fascination as much as the awareness of the saturation of the visual field. The very large format of Andreas Gursky who planted his lens in the Amazon warehouse, where "commodity culture" is stored, shows thousands of books piled up waiting to be delivered. Exactly like the photos that accumulate in our digital memories and that we may never look at again. It overflows everywhere, like the cascade of 22,000 negatives staged by Ana Vitoria Mussi.
A visual world in the making
The more you click, the less you see. It is the fresco of Evan Roth which covers from floor to ceiling millions of images accumulated in his web cache, for three years. No selection or hierarchy. Further on, the testimonies of click workers, in voice over from a video by Martin Le Chevallier, are chilling. In these empty interior images, anonymous employees of the web giants make a living by placing tags and likes on serial images. In this flood of contemporary works, the curators have cleverly slipped older pieces, heralding a visual world in the making. Like this advertising photomontage by Martha Rosler, Cargo Cult dating from 1966-1972.
»The Supermarket of Images, Jeu de paume, 1, place de la Concorde (8th). Tel .: 01 47 03 12 50. Hours: Tuesday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Wednesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., until June 7. Catalog: Gallimard / Jeu de Paume, € 39.
