Sabine Mai
Private Property
1999
In Private Property, Sabine Mai lays out her night table with familiar objects that happen to be there, as she says, of their own accord: "some stuff decided to live with me." The visitor is thus afforded a view of the whole table, next to the bed, which we see only partially, but sufficiently to guess that, as far as we can imagine, at least, it is in the artist's own room. As visitors, we find ourselves more or less consenting voyeurs — rather more than less, judging by the title, "Private Property," suggestive of the often displayed warning against intrusion… Here, there's a paradox, however, since the title is shown on a Web site, open to all comers, and is also a "work of art," which, by definition, is open to contemplation by all: we are then drawn to sidestep the title's warning, warnings of this type always creating a temptation, a trangressive desire to go beyond "anyway" — the forbidden having always, and at all times, been more interesting to catch sight of. Sabine Mai obviously and knowingly plays with one of the most pressing tensions of the Web: the relationship between the public and the private, the intimate and the exterior.

 On the right side of the page, a list of the things strewn over the table invites us to click on particular objects and, thanks to Flash technology, to see it literally expand before our eyes. We are thus offered the "opportunity" for a more salient intrusion — an intrusion emphasized still further by the sight of this very movement animating the selection and enlargement: for, instead of simply accessing enlargements of preexistent photos, the animation allows us to view the movement of the intrusion in real time, thus establishing a sense of temporality. The work then "occurs" at the moment and from the moment that we click, that we establish a relationship and make our space, our field of vision meet and intersect with the space of the work that appears on our screen. Finally, the sight of the haphazardly assembled objects, the possibility of our selecting each in turn, and especially of contemplating them in their "real-life" situation, clumped together, for instance, in a certain way, mostly close to other objects that are not listed (thus, the wine glass, empty, is placed on a train ticket, the chalk next to a drawing they surely served to create, etc.), all this inevitably suggests the idea of a story, or several, of which the objects would constitute fragments, testimonies, residues, and which they may serve to help us imagine, invent, short of our knowing the details. For the artist herself admits (or pretends) to not remember them, claiming, as we've seen, that it is these objects that have "chosen" to be there.

 Sabine Mai's work thus reminds us of the fragility of our sense of "private property," of the possession of our private world that, nevertheless, constantly escapes us and that we often grasp only through others' gaze. It is here that the Web, in providing possibilities of digital memory and of intersubjective interaction — both practically limitless — appears to be a privileged agency for re-conquest — precisely what Sabine tells us in the short introductory text that precedes her work.
A.M.B. 

Reviews by Anne-Marie Boisvert and Sylvie Parent

Translation: Ron Ross