Images, Objets, Scènes - Different Aspects of Art in France since 1978
26 January to 16 March 1997
Galleries

The aim of this exhibition, which fills the three viewing areas known as the Galleries, the Street and the Project Room, is, as the title indicates, to take a look at one or two aspects of art in France since 1978. The working method adopted has involved a preliminary examination of a broad selection of different works.

During this process, certain groups of works were gradually singled out which it was then possible to deal with by way of common questions and themes. In all this host of possibilities, the choice of a limited number of artists, together with the issues raised by them, was made on the basis of the coherence which might emerge from their being put together. The fact of bringing together this handful of groups, like a succession of parties to a demonstration, forms and identifies some of the aspects of art in France over the past twenty years. Set end to end, these aspects make up one of the "predominant tendencies" of art in France since 1978.

The year 1978 was the chronological limit proclaimed by the three fold exhibition at the ARC - Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris : Tendances de l'art en France 1968-1978/9, each of the first two instalments of which was organized respectively by Marcelin Pleynet and Gérard Gassiot-Talabot, with the third and last instalment being set in motion by a group of artists. The exhibition presented an overview of the decade that had just passed, and, in spite of itself, declared a state of mourning for the aesthetic devices embodied by the two eminent critics mentioned above. At the same time, this event at the ARC marked the end, in a relative sense, of France's superb isolation, as a result of the institutional emergence of artists who were part of the international avant-garde networks both by virtue of their careers and the nature of their activities. The year 1978 thus symbolized this broad and complex collective redeployment.
The artists exhibited in images, objets, scènes made their appearance on the art scene between 1978 and 1988, which means that the exhibition embraces, give or take a year or two, two consecutive generations, which have today achieved some form of mastery of their work, its conceptualization, and its material solutions.
A tour round the exhibition - like a gradual discovery of the different tendencies - reflects the great variety of contemporary creative work, in its differing forms and in its content alike. Such a tour leads us from a questioning of the status of the artist and his world, and from the crisis affecting the traditional media and the representation of the image, to complex sets of "staged" objects and images. The exhibition is not an exhaustive overview. It does not claim to say it all, nor does it claim to show everything, but the themes broached represent so many keys - and dues - put forward to understand the development and situation of one or two aspects of contemporary art in France since 1978.

Galleries (1st and 2nd room)

Being an artist, doing an artist’s thing
As heirs to the "dematerialization of art" - to borrow American art critic Lucy Lippard's definition in her book about the period 1966-1972 - artists have been asking questions about their status, their social function, and their relationship to production and galleries since the late 1970s.
In Philippe Parreno's film No more reality, a monologue in an incomprehensible language, the artist appears to be replying to hypothetical questions in a filmed interview, possibly film, possibly television. Véronique Joumard, Marylène Negro and Christiane Geoffroy present identical reproductions of their group image on paper bags. The image of these women artists becomes the visual background of an object of daily life associated with consumption.

Philippe Thomas, creator of the agency called les ready made appartiennent à tout le monde [ready-mades belong to everyone] - which signs his works-assigns his portrait to his collectors, whom he gathers together in a photograph taken in the manner of Fantin-Latour.

The artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has chosen to introduce viewers to Gabrielle Maubrie, the gallery owner, by hanging a series of photographic portraits.

3rd and 4th room

architecture and allegorical representation
By exploring the artistic function, artists highlight the crisis affecting representation and duly kiss it goodbye by means of allegory.

The allegorical image appropriates other images, often reproductions, emptying them of their initial meaning in order to show or say something else. It adds another sense to what it claims to be showing. BAZILEBUSTAMANTE's work Les Fenêtres [The Windows] develops a regular series of architectonic elements that are stripped of all function and all possible use.

The serial elements are arranged in succession on the wall like so many identical materials, costumes and colours. The models which stand in Michel Aubry's Studiolo form the features of a décor associated with architecture, but the basis of this construction is provided by the sound and the dimension which it offers.

In Patrick Tosani's series of photographic Portraits, he uses braille so that the blurred and illegible images can be read. Bertrand Lavier arranges a set of pieces borrowed from a Disney cartoon, Mickey at MOMA, from which he extracts drawings of the works, enlarges them, and re-presents them.

"STAGE PRODUCTION" EFFECTS
The artist becomes a manipulator of objects, images and sounds which he organizes, and stages in an ensemble whose meaning issues from the association of the ingredients thus brought together. Objects and images lose their power to production models borrowed from outside the art world. The Ozone project produced by Pierre Joseph, Philippe Parreno, Bernard Joisten and Dominique Gonzalez- Foerster records an emergency situation by combining documentary factors and fictional iconography.

With his Bar des acariens [Mites 'Bar] Jean-Luc Vilmouth organizes a social meeting-place, while Claude Lévêque creates a specific ambience with a common-orgarden chair and the word ASILE/ASYLUM written in neon. Philippe Parreno's panel Welcome to Twin Peaks and Bernard Joisten's phoney film posters placed immediately at the exit of Le Magasin’s Galleries refer to the production method and world of film.

THE STREET (MAGASIN "RUE") AND THE PROJECT ROOM
The Street and the Project Room provide an echo of what is on view in the Galleries.

Xavier Veilhan brings together a series of standard, familiar images-bridge, cow, mechanical digger, etc-which he develops in a three dimensional way by altering their scale, making it either too small or too large. He simplifies their forms, and does away with any particular features of their identity. The digger does not conjure up any specific digger, although it is instantly identifiable as a standard mechanical digger.
IFP appropriates advertising images and posters and the way they are distributed and placed. Throughout the exhibition, the Dauphin company will stick up advertising posters of the day, just like in any real street.
The Arrangement of two football goals by Ange Leccia, and the appropriation which he brings into play, creates a volume whose component elements have once again lost their function and use.

The walk-around gallery, in the form of an ambulatory, contains a series of works by Marie Bourget, Bertrand Lavier, Présence Panchounette... which deal with the appropriation and crisis of objects and sculpture.

Soundtrack Movie, the most recent of Pierre Huyghe's works which is shown in the Project Room, mixes subtitles and soundtracks to produce an imageless film-collage which the visitor can read with the help of a microphone.