JOHN BALDESSARI & JILL MILLER
7 October 2007 to 6 January 2008

Le Magasin is once again presenting in its central “Street” area the Composition for Violin and Voices (Male) that Baldessari conceived for and originally showed in this space from 3 May 1987 to 28 June 1987. It is now part of the collections of the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon.

It is without a doubt the biggest work made by this artist. Comprising 43 photographs, it occupies this monumental space for which it was conceived. It uses the horizontal joins of the plaques constituting the walls as the lines of a musical stave in which the notes are replaced by black-and-white or colourised (red, green, purple, blue, yellow) photographic images of the faces of known or unknown men. These express a wide range of emotions.

Throughout its history, Le Magasin has produced original new works in close collaboration with guest artists, for whom these have represented milestones in their career.  These have been conceived on a scale with their setting, which in most cases was “The Street,” (La Rue), and occasionally the galleries. These works, most of which were ephemeral and have therefore disappeared, constitute Le Magasin’s immaterial collection.

At the same time Le Magasin is showing a video work by Jill Miller, I Am Making Art Too (2003). This is a 3-minute video loop in which Miller quotes and comments on a 1971 video performance I Am Making Art by John Baldessari, with whom she studied in San Francisco. An artist with strong feminist concerns, Miller’s work addresses the position of women in art history as well as the notion of the author and relations of filiation (master-student) between generations of artists.