Bertrand Lavier, the Commonplace, and the Intimate

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This paper focuses on Bertrand Lavier’s series entitled Plinthed Objects, a group of works in which the artist puts everyday, previously used objects on pedestals with the help of a professional craftsman. Inspired by a practice used mostly by ethnographic museums and exotic art collectors, this device allows the artist to put in perspective objects so common that we have become indifferent to them. Here, the teddy bear, the hedge trimmer, the skateboard, the cinder-block, the construction cone, or the refrigerator door take on a new dimension. Placed on a pedestal, they force viewers to reevaluate their relationships with them. In particular, this paper focuses on Teddy the bear and Chuck McTruck the skate, two generational symbols and objects marked by their former years of use. Summoned for their personal history as well as their universal nature, they are the locus of the hijacking of the ethnographic process by the artist, no longer exotic fetishes but our own intimate totems.