JULIEN BERTHIER -
GAELLE BOUCAND -
VALENTIN CARRON -
JULIEN DISCRIT -
ELISE FLORENTY -
FABIEN GIRAUD
SWETLANA HEGER -
PETER JOSLYN -
PIERRE-YVES MACE -
GENET MAYOR -
ALEXEJ MESCHTSCHANOW -
EMILIE PITOISIE
MAGALI REUS - CLEMENTINE ROY - CLOTILDE VIANNAY and PHILIPPE VASSET - MARIE VOIGNIER - CHRISTOPH WEBER
curated by Gallien Dejean - Caroline Soyez-Petithomme - Mathieu Larnaudie
PRIVATE VIEW: FRIDAY, 9 MAY, 6-9 PM
EXHIBITION DATES: 10 MAY – 1 JUNE 2008
The concept of this exhibition comes from the shared view of the three curators that some aspects of contemporary artistic practice could be analyzed through the analytical prism of writings of the 19th century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843 – 1904).
In The Laws of Imitation (1890), Gabriel Tarde described social logic as an extensive network of imitations, repetitions, and of individual inventions. According to his thesis, social fact is the result of a triple dynamic: imitation, opposition and adaptation. So that art, as well as fashion, ethics, or religion, is a realm governed by imitative flux. Thus, an encounter between two opposites doesn’t necessarily mean a radical confrontation — where one would fail or disappear under the other - on the contrary, this event generates something different, a sort of innovative adaptation.
The subtlety of Tarde’s thought lies in the broad definition of “imitation” which includes invention as well as counter-imitation. Tarde argued differently from the strict scientific understanding of imitation, reincorporating the conscious and unconscious dimensions of imitation, but also the importance of “inter-spiritual” simultaneity (zeitgeist and chance). He claimed that “social facts - as much as they could seem on the surface to be repeating themselves – only become visible because of their damaged and interesting aspect, perpetually updated and infinitely diversified.”
From obvious elements to almost invisible details, this repetition mechanism seems to be a recurrent aspect within the practices of the artists involved in this exhibition. However, this does not negate the physicality of the artwork, its visual appearance, or its status as an object. Instead, it remains fundamental to the potential interpretations of each work, and to the understanding of the exhibition as a whole. This exhibition represents a synthesis of the three curators’ research and integration of different personal interests going back to 2006. Through this triangulation, the working methods of the artists, and the decision to realize the project in London, have all functioned as a process of propagation.
As a response or a consequence of our interest in Tarde’s theory, we have been led to consider the propagation of his ideas into Anglo-Saxon sociology (especially in Everett Rogers’s book Diffusion of Innovations, 1962). As an on-going mechanism we found that through the appropriation in this new realm Tarde’s thoughts have been subversively reified as a basis for marketing and management strategies. From these methods Frank Bass (1926-2006), an American professor in marketing, developed the concept of the “Bass Diffusion Model” which describes how new products get adopted as an interaction between users and potential users. This appeared to us as being relevant with regard to the artworks we were gathering and to the current state of globalisation where the differences between museum, supermarket, club, airport, industrial building, and leisure centre have become confused or blurred. It suggests an exchangeability or an equality of the artwork with any other object produced in our societies. This connection between different realms of research highlights the relation between social mechanism as described by Tarde and the status of the artwork as an anthropological object including its status as a commodity.
Concretely, the process of rumour, fragmentation of information generating various forms of narrative, techniques or technologies taken out of their primary functions are recurrent elements of the artworks and refer directly to propagation of ideas or savoir-faire as described by Tarde. Such as an echo of the marketing strategies influenced by Tarde, the physical and visual experience offered by an exhibition – which consists of gathering objects – call into question the relation to physicality, image and text combined by the artworks.
Artworks formally and conceptually quote art history as well as modern and contemporary art, also occupying several positions simultaneously taking ideas and methods from non-artistic fields. Thus, artworks can be analyzed as cultural markers, as well as commodities. By being put into the art market, the artworks commercial and symbolic value evolves. Therefore the artwork embodies in various ways the concept of propagation. It brings together images and ideas which are constantly renewed, increased, but also fragmented through the logic of displays and circulations. But physically the object remains the same. Here is a similar process to that which marketing strategies such as the “Bass Diffusion Model” attempt to understand and control: the concept, the immateriality which will encourage people to consume one object rather than another one, and thus will reaching new consumers.
As a criteria for valuing artworks, materiality was abandoned a long time ago, which opens the possibility of a common approach between commodity and artwork (certainly where Tarde’s theory and marketing meet in the field of contemporary art). Therefore, an interesting opportunity arises to interrogate the complexity and the fragmentation of the ideas that are generated by the artwork. However, contrary to its physical aspect, the becoming of an artwork, as any other commodity, depends on the concept or networks of ideas it produces; and also necessarily requires the reverse process, the reassembling of those ideas as a key to access the object itself. This is the way curators, art critics, viewers as well as statisticians, sociologists or marketing companies attempt to define and control objects whatever they are: artworks, anthropological objects or commodities.
JULIEN BERTHIER
Restore Hope
2001-2006
Electric cables (1,1 km), light bulb
Variable dimension
Lives and works in Aubervilliers, France
January 2001 : power cuts paralyzed California. This marks the beginning of the work Restore Hope. Since that year, the artist has been collecting electric cables he found on disused appliances on the street. Soldered together, they create a 1.1 km extended cable. The aim of this action is to connect this cable from the artist’s workplace directly to Silicon Valley in order to avoid any other power cuts. Julien Berthier’s work “consists of inventing or creating means of construction, mostly using vanishing tricks, illusion, modification and displacement. A “classic” parquet floor and the container that holds it will go on a tour of the world, hoping to gain an “exotic” status through its journey, to change its nature simply by the mechanical virtue of the transfer.
GAËLLE BOUCAND
Works and lives in Paris and Berlin
A particular feeling, a sort of 20th century nostalgia comes from “the observation of a world where any creations spread with all speed leaving behind them a certain amount of failure. This consequence is the margin of error, the difference changing between those failures and an infinite high-tech landscape which I am trying to catch”, claims Gaëlle Boucand. Flurry (2007) consists of a Super8 computer screen saver projection. The artist offers to the viewer a short story of retrieval, a jump into time from the best of the screen saver to the experimental cinema of the 1970s. 500 / 500 000 000 (2008) is made with a microfiche reader showing pictures of minerals, and plays with the non- linear evolution of technologies. The loss of data due to the adaptation to
digital technology (for instance from a floppy disk to a CD) has been encouraging some organizations to revert to the microfiche system, which enables to archive information for 500 years. 500 / 500 000 000 sets up an elastic relationship with time: technology goes back to the situation as it was 20 years ago in order to preserve archives of 500 000 000 year old minerals for the next 500 years.
VALENTIN CARRON
Lives and works in Fully Valais, Switzerland
Valentin Carron deals with the iconography of Swiss vernacular culture. Objects, images, symbols and traditions of rural culture are injected with a certain sense of humour. The perception of a sheer and perfect Switzerland – ideally symbolized by its mountains, chalets, forests and churches – is in a subversive way the object of celebration and critique. This is through a reproduction strategy by which his cross-shaped sculptures combine religious vocabulary and minimal abstraction liberating the object from its usual sense. While the artist plays with authenticity, craft, ready-made, commemorative monument and kitsch aesthetic – with works such as frame angles without architectural purpose or polystyrene-made twisted columns – his creations remain too ambiguous to embody a unique ideology.
JULIEN DISCRIT
Lives and works in Paris
In Never Neverland, Julien Discrit realizes the cartography of an imaginary landscape created by Sir J.M. Barrie to be the setting for the adventures of his children’s hero, Peter Pan. This map is based on a real territory, a Bahaman isle bought by Walt Disney to install an amusement park. The cartographic representation is a passing space, a connection between a fictitious universe, recurrent in the collective imagination, and its concrete geographical version. This last is exploitable by the entertainment culture and by the world that it models itself on both in a cinematographic and touristy way. Representing a paradigmatic figure of a twisted utopia, attesting to a contamination of the metaphoric space of childhood by the industrial production of “dreams”, this artwork questions the way we create representations of reality: “A chart is not a territory,” as Alfres Korzybski, philosopher of American language, highlighted. In these terms, Neverland, indeed, will never be Neverland.
ELISE FLORENTY
Lives and Works in Paris and Berlin
As highlighted by Gabriel Tarde, a social process has its own logic: it means that it’s structured like a model of language. The schemes imitation, appropriation, transformation, implicit in the notion of propagation, reflect linguistic learning including its dysfunctions, which can create linguistic disjunctions and delirium. Her film and installation devices are spread out in the exhibition space with images flowing from the screen into the three-dimensional reality. Réidio Siti was inspired by a real fact: the neurosis of an American citizen who, due to his refusal of the English language, transcribes each word into its phonetic spelling. It questions the linguistic pragmatics of a pathology whose socio-historical backdrop conditions the appearances. This artwork also links the eruption of thought to the experience of its transmission and its weaknesses.
FABIEN GIRAUD
Lives and works in Paris
Straight Edge is a video made by Fabien Giraud in 2005. The artist deals with a straight-edge concert (music which associates the violence of the American hardcore scene with certain rigorous abstinent life principles). His method includes propagation of information: the artwork process starts with an investigation of the Parisian straight-edge scene, using the same codes and media as this community. It has enabled him to collaborate with a band and the usual audience of such events. Fabien Giraud integrates this group, but he keeps a distance like an outsider observer (or ethnographer). He attempts to assimilate the running of this urban microcosm focused on music and essentially based on the complex between individual and collective consciousness.
SWETLANA HEGER
Lives and works in Berlin
PETER JOSLYN
Lives and works in London
The works of Peter Joslyn form a meeting point between painting and sculpture. Predominantly wall- based, they derive imagery from a number of diverse sources - postcards, the hills of Bavaria, the clothing of American cheerleaders, LED wall displays from Wall Street and so on. For instance, the work exhibited in Bass Diffusion Model is a subversive appropriation from a Labour Party tapestry, depicting a march. The artist made the pictural representation on a wooden boarding. Formally simplified and flattened, Joslyn’s version of the Labour Party tapestry is also ornamented with ironic scrolling LED texts. The work is inspired by the artist’s need to escape – to escape from his surroundings and the dreaded normality of life, and the desire to find idealism without content. The pursuit itself is the goal.
PIERRE-YVES MACÉ
Le Livre Des Passages (2005-...)
This musical creation, still in process, will last about three hours. For the exhibition, it is reduced, fragmented and diffused into three different points of the space following the logic of a trip. In the first room, a fifteen minutes-long extract is broadcast in loop, by little bell shaped speakers designed, to be audible by the visitor only when he comes under this set. In the second room, two shorter selections are offered by a cd-player with headphones. It means that it is the viewer who decides to start up the device and to voyage/sail between both the tracks of the CD. In the last room, the device is more important (bigger speakers with an audio-bass amplifier) and broadcast sequentially four short pieces interrupted by long silences. This piece is partially audible from the nearest rooms in the exhibition space. Originally, Pierre Yves Macé’s composition has been created as a reference to Walter Benjamin’s Paris, Capitale du XIXème siècle, and especially to his Parisian passages, which analyse like a witness and are symbolic of the emergent industrial modernity. It is made quasi-exclusively with samples from the 20s or 30s, which are conceived like “musical products” and valorised symbolically as emblems of the mass production of records from the beginning of the 20th century. All the song voices are systematically erased and the artist keeps only the instrumental introductions, which become some commonplace melodic formula played by any orchestra or pianist. These samples are treated by a montage of cuts and superimpositions with a lack of differentiation. Thus it reveals the interchangeable nature of these samples and echo the collage tradition of the 20th Century avant-gardes. Emptied of their singularity and of their commercial value, these samples signify simply a nostalgic feeling, undefined and collective, as Benjamin explained it like the circularity of fashion. The sound contents are by different transformations precisely located on some samples (stretching, loop, reverberations…) to give back to these extracts a particularity and to recreate a new form of continuity, which would reveal some potentialities which had never been realized. Benjamin’s concept of history is one of violence is exerced by the main culture on a past which left no trace.
It is this immemorial past that the “Livre des Passages” tries to underline. Lives and works Paris Pierre-Yves Macé creates music which can be seen as a mix between “free music”, pop and contemporary music. According to him, electronic music is a means to access the deterioration or transformation of acoustic sound. When applied to traditional musical instruments, Macé’s compositions play with spatialization and individual interactions between each instrumentalist. He recently collaborated with Sylvain Chaveau, Steven Hess, Rainier Lericolais and other musicians, and he released two albums Circulation (Sub Rosa / 2005) and Crash_Test ii (Tensional Integrity) (Orkhestra / 2006). For his contribution to the group show, Bass Diffusion Model, Pierre-Yves Macé presents an updated version of his work Le Livre des Passages.
GENET MAYOR
Lives and works in Cheseaux.
ALEXEJ MESCHTSCHANOW
Lives and works in Berlin
EMILIE PITOISET
Lives and works in Paris
MAGALI REUS
Lives and works in London
Magali Reus’s work combines references to Land Art, modernism and exotic ornament. In your own time (2007), made with beach towels, is the abstract panorama of an artificial place. Palm trees, sea and formalism. Her installations, mainly realised in-situ, generate an atmosphere evoking business lobbies as well as sea side shops. The landscapes depicted by the artist with a certain sense of humour also function as a sort of visual Muzak or elevator music. Lulling the eyes of the viewer, her works can be compared to a synthetic lapping of waves: the nostalgic impression of a coloured simulacrum.
CLEMENTINE ROY
Lives and works in Berlin.
Pistes is an installation made by Clementine Roy and consists of a series of 250 pictures of nocturnal landscapes, taken in various countries and broadcast at random by three slide projectors. To this systematic process of taking a picture with a prolonged exposure due to the night time, usually elusive through the naked eye, responds a serial classification, disturbed by the chance nature of the projection. These light tracks propagate simultaneously in a geographical, staged and physical space, corresponding to the landscape, as well as the exhibition space, and the retina.
CLOTILDE VIANNAY AND PHILIPPE VASSET
MARIE VOIGNIER
Works and lives in Paris, France
The video Western DDR (2005) deals with the relations between East and West Europe, and with the transfers between two regimes and two political and economical systems. This documentary could also be filed under fiction. An off screen voice narrates in a neutral tone images of a cow-boy’s village which was totally rebuilt in a former DDR communist era camp, located in Templin — North of Berlin. The video is an investigation about a specific site looking at the successive steps of the erasure process. Western DDR plays with the propagation of information and the potential memory process led by the artist’s approach, as well as by the shift of economical and political models.
CHRISTOPH WEBER
Lives in Vienna, Austria.
Objets Externes (2005) results from a combination of methods and questions which usually are used in the realms of both classic sculpture and architecture. This series of five wax cubes uses imprints and hesitates between the presence and manifestation of a non-site. Using a casting technique, Weber took the imprint of a real surface in order to make it appear in positive in the gallery space, as if it was a way to introduce a new skin taken from the outside world and shifted into the exhibition space. Archiving the different textures of the urban architectural buildings, those cubes have been made with a rigorous folding process and remain as external skin imprints.
THE MIX
PUBLICATION – The Mix, 2008 by Christian Egger / Manuel Gorkiewicz / Christian Mayer / Yves Mettler / Magda Tothova / Ruth Weismann / Alexander Wolff (edited by Burozoïque, Paris) Chicago, Times, Plotter, Helvetica, DIN, Techno, Löhfelm, RR_02, Univers, Tiffany, Circuit and Memphis are the 12 issues of the Chicago magazine founded in 2002 in Vienna by a group of Austrian, German and Swiss artists: Christian Egger, Manuel Gorkiewicz, Christian Mayer, Yves Mettler, Magda Tothova, Ruth Weismann, Alexander Wolff. With 2 to 3 issues a year, the members of the team publish their magazine around their personal encounters and interests. Each issue includes around fifteen contributions, in both texts and images. Artists, writers, scientists and specialists in all kind of fields are invited to contribute and intervene within the framework of a discreet and pragmatic layout, which has already been acknowledged by the London Design Museum in its exhibition Best European Design 2005. The Mix, especially prepared for Bass Diffusion Model, has been edited by Burozoïque (editions@burozoique.fr), a French publisher of books, artists books, monographies and exhibition catalogues distributed by Paris Musées. This project is supported by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques.
INSTALLATION IMAGES
