Alix Marie for French Fries #4 The Hotel California issue

Words & Interview Matthew Burgos

Alix Marie photographs the states of bodies, not as vessels of knowledge and wisdom, but as mirrors of rebirth to a preferred being, empowering UK Brutalism. From the sweat that peppers the prints of muscular, toned chest of bodybuilders to the laser-red light that beams from a woman’s labia, the French artist provokes the viewers with her body-infested installations and photographs, capitalizing from their reactions that, in turn, fuel her succeeding bodies of work. 

Aside from taking photographs, she crafts them into sculptures that deviate from solely fixating on what pleasures the world. She injects mysticism and mythology, belief systems humans seem to have a reverence for, and as she proceeds, unveils how she looks into what she creates. For French Fries Magazine, Alix walks the readers through her roots and artistic perspectives that infiltrate her body-influenced art practice.

Let us start with the basics. You concentrate on photo-based sculptures and installations. How did you end up being in these mediums and fields? Could we also touch on how your frustration with the flatness of photographs evolved?

 There are a few things here. The first one is photo-based three-dimensional translation is mostly what I do, but I also sometimes just make sculptures. In a sense, I do not feel like a photographer, I generally call myself an artist. As a teenager, I was already sculpting and modeling with clay and also taking pictures of my friends. It was during my studies that I started to look at the two together and how I could mix both practices together. I believe in content and form coming together, and because I was making work about the body and representing the body, I wanted to give a body to the photograph as well.

I did not have the technical skills and the brain of a photographer who plans a shoot far in advance and pays attention to intricate lighting or all that. I was interested in the clinical and sacred aspect of the print when you take a photograph and you print it, then there needs to be no dust or creases for example. When I was experimenting, I realized that if I damaged the print in some way, people would react viscerally to it because it was not just a photograph, but also a body.

So, just the simple act of printing a picture of a torso and putting a scalpel through in the middle made people react intensely, this is how the whole idea sort of came about. On another level, I think it comes from my family and upbringing, which involved watching a lot of films because of my family’s background in and relationship with the cinema industry. I absorbed and was surrounded by these nuances, and these have always been with me, but I was never interested in making or doing films. I just want to enter a set and look around it. If I had to work in film, I would be doing set design, props or prosthetics for special effects.

To mix photography with sculpture and mainly making installations is a way for me to be surrounded by and enter the work - that is body-wise. The experience of a spectator’s body and my own, I pay attention to all the sensors and scale: what do they do to our body? This can also be a reaction to the digital world and how we experience art today. Although I tried to make good pictures of the shows, they do not relate as much as their physical experience.

About this reaction that you are talking about and the intention of creating reactive sculptures and photo-based experimentations, where did this come from?

I have been asked a lot why I work around the body and I always say that if I knew, I would not be doing it. It is part of my subconscious, but then the more I grow up, the more I think about it, about the nuances of personal and intimate reasons. To me, the body is at the center of everything, so this is a subject that I cannot get enough of.

Continuing on how the body is at the center of your works, let us talk about The more he starts to bring that water out, the better he has a tendency to appear (2019) and Héraclès (2018). Do they convey the flaws of the body or lean towards one’s addiction to being healthy based on their terms? 

In all my projects, there is a mixture of autobiography and mythology. I might work around subjects that trigger me, but I always choose those that are universal such as maternity, love, heartbreak, and bodies, to name a few. For The more he starts to bring that water out, the better he has a tendency to appear. The personal autobiography here is that I lived across from this bodybuilder gym that was open 24/7 and I could hear their screams all day and night as they did their exercise routine. Then, in an interview with French film critic Jerome Momcilovic, I got interested in bodybuilders thinking of themselves as sculptors and sculptures at the same time. In  gender stereotypes, if one thinks of a bodybuilder, they may think of Héraclès with his hypermasculinity and virility, but if you closely look at it and go and see bodybuilding competitions, it becomes fragmented, it is not about physical strength but the performance of strength. 

So, this fragmentation of the body and how they display it is quite close to a striptease like a showgirl. For this project, I looked at Schwarzenegger a lot and incorporated this fact that I came across where bodybuilders need to dry out before the competition, so the muscle definition is better, whether it is with coffee, alcohol, or glycerin. I got fascinated with these regimented rituals that are practice-like. I also contacted bodybuilders on Instagram in London to photograph them, which was a whole new adventure in itself. I was just hanging out in different gyms, and some of those I had contacted stood me up because they thought they were not big enough and they were always like, “but next week, I will be better.” Here, it is interesting to see how in their shows, there is this chase for something impossible to be perfect and always get bigger, which contrasts with what is imposed on women on how to be skinnier to be perfect. I remember during the conception of this project how some of my text messages with the bodybuilders were “I will pump up before you arrive” to capture that bodybuilding essence.

For its output, I printed the pictures on glass. This project says something about the subject, sculpture, and photography. The box with water and glycerin relates to the darkroom offering a glimpse of how you process a print, then the light is the stagelight og bodybuilding competitions, and through the heat of the lamp the water evaporates, which makes the photographs sweat, droplets of water appear on their torsos. I think this project is a way to look at stereotypes of gender and the pressure that society puts on us. I got so interested in the practice; it is not a critique. I met amazing people, and you cannot not admire them and their passion. I also looked at the relationship between bodybuilding, cinema, and photography here. It has been interesting, and I could talk about these for hours!

That is awesome! I am always fascinated with how artists like yourself think everything through.

Yes! For example, the fact that bodybuilders think of themselves as living sculptures links back to antiquity; a lot of their poses imitate classical sculptures inspired by the gods of Olympus. 

Then through my research I discovered - which actually started my journey -  that bodybuilding is somehow linked to the birth of cinema. The “father of bodybuilding” was a strong man called Eugen Sandow - no one knows why, but he was photographed and model for both Edison in America and Marey in France. At the time they were developing photography and studying the human movement, they would collect photographs to study the body as a science. Through which they actually invented moving pictures - cinema. So hence why I was really fascinated by it: bodybuilding related to the history of sculpture, cinema, and then everything that I am interested in just surged up! 

I want to relate this with your other work called The Pythia (2018). You mentioned that with bodybuilding, you have these toned and muscular aspects, then it transitioned into this soft, feminine features of an individual and the prowess of feminity over identifying the sex. Could you guide us through this passage? 

Basically, Héraclès and The Pythia were in the same show. It was the beginning of the bodybuilders and that became a whole thing of its own, but this was the first step. I do work on gender stereotypes, and usually, I question common beliefs around them. The Pythia was the High Priestess of Delphi in mythology who would give omens and tell the future in a trance-like state. I wanted to look at that from a perspective where women hold fear-inspired knowledge whether it is the witch or a midwife. The red light here refers to menstrual blood and one of the most famous paintings of the Priestess of Delphi in classical art where she wears this red cloth. The Pythia is called like this as she was supposedly living in a cave built over a nest of giant pythons and today, scientists think that her omens given in a trance-like state were actually because of natural gases emanating from the ground.

I made this fountain with mist machines that were an allusion to the gases and these hands cast with green hoses mimicking snakes. The snakes have been analyzed as the fear of pubic hair and the vagina in psychology as if it were a threatening thing, so I played with all these symbols for Pythia. I positioned the image of the Pythia in a corner, so the spotlight would create a triangle like the three legs stool she sat on, and then the basin with the ‘snakes’ would look like they were coming towards her. 

From these interpretations, I feel as if mythology has inspired some, if not a lot, of your works. Are you planning to dive deeper into the esoteric world?

The last show I did in Switzerland was very much looking at mermaids, witches, and feminine figures of fairy-tales. At the moment I am collaborating with artist and friend Marie Jacotey for a project where I have made this cast of hands and her drawings are included in the palms, so this references palm reading and tarot cards, but we have not yet looked into the future. To look at belief systems and whether it is tales of mythology or the esoteric is part of my research, but it does not mean that I necessarily believe in them or that I have a set opinion about them. I am interested that people believe in them and the whole aura that surrounds these practices. 

Speaking of research, how do you begin looking into your projects?

It starts with broad research. With the bodybuilding, it was more on podcasts, writings, antique sculptures, and history of photography and bodybuilding, but in general, I have these seeds in mind, and they may be from five years ago, or they may spring up immediately. The research also depends on the deadlines and show, and the place where I will exhibit as there is always a connection between my research and the place of the show whether architecturally or geographically .

With the show in Switzerland about mermaids and witchcraft it stemmed from the country being one of the worst places for the genocide of witches, and the fact that Andersen, the author of the Little Mermaid lived in the city of the museum. I would say I am constantly doing research until everything clicks. I do not have a blueprint to work on; my work is very much process-based.

In French Fries Magazine, we have started the series French Fries: Women’s Backstories to narrate the daring stories of female creatives across the globe who are breaking boundaries and cultural norms in the creative industry. As a woman artist, what has been your most striking experience in the industry, so far? What are the politics behind the industry that are hidden from the public?

The art world and how it works mirrors how patriarchal society works. It seems to rely on the precarity of artists and it is of course even worse for women and minorities.

For example I am amazed at how sometimes there is an assumption that the artist will be able to travel or meet last minute deadlines and the likes, when there has never been enquiries about having a chronic illness, or caring responsibilities.