For three years the Dancing Museum takes the shape of a building site, where the problematics of collection and museology are central. After expo zéro or the “strangling time” night, brouillon continues to explore collectively the potentialities of this future institution.Since this museum project has been launched, those interested in it don’t fail to come back from such or such exhibition with a mental catalogue of the works the Dancing Museum could welcome, contain, exhibit. But in the same time as desires pile up, rises too the impossibility of seing such desires be fulfilled…. and perhaps the absurdity of the desires of completion that come with it becomes obvious. What is the use of producing a catalogue of the best works that would suit our museum, if the invention of its collection and of its museology does not lead to experimenting that will change the course of what the Dancing Museum must urgently become?

So we simply thought of an exhibition called brouillon. At the beginning, it was simply a matter of assembling a small team of curators who would choose a body of plastic artworks. Whose exhibition would be carried out by a handful of performers in charge with the permanent hanging up / taking down of the artworks, following their own ideas. In charge of organizing the confrontation of those works together. In charge with airing them or moving them about. Cleaning them. Oiling them. Touching them. Unfolding them. Reading them. Observing them. Testing them. Testing oneself physically and mentally before those works. Which would have a bone to pick with the project of a dancing museum, whether they resist the movement or call for it.A body of works set in motion for a museum’s building site. brouillon applied itself to change a dissatisfaction, an impossibility, a discomfort in front of the artworks-that-didn’t-wait-for-that-project-in-order-to-exist, into a territory of experiments of what an exhibition in motion can be. Objects-that-didn’t-ask-for-anything found themselves in a dance museum, for better or for worse. We also imagined an unexpected expansion by inviting a second time in Rennes le Pavillon, the creative laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo.

Under the shape of an active service, the nine residents (7 artists and 2 curators) have tried to achieve “the desires” of a museum, while asking what might have been their own desires if the commission hadn’t existed, or rather what kind of alternative desires arise during the carrying out of a commissioned work. After the volet of April 10th, 2010, where the works’ first results were shown, the artists were given the possibility to exhibit their own projects next to (or over or underneath) the works they were commissioned to show. And during the time of that week-end it was also possible to visit the Petit Musée de la danse that Thierry Micouin has invented with the children of the Picardie school! The slightly chaotic entirety of all those productions, as well as the proper brouillon room, formed the matter of that exhibition that wished to be, at the least, an experiment of all, objects, workes, performers, artists, visitors.… A brouillon (rough draft) of a museum in motion.

Jeff Guess

Born in 1965 in Seattle, USA
Lives and works in Paris, France

La Criée center for contemporary art is thrilled to present the solo exhibition of Jeff Guess .  From 18 March to 17 April 2011, as part of Le Sténopé, un procédé photographique – Le Monde par le trou d’une aiguille (“Pinhole Photography: An Original Look at the World”), American artist Jeff Guess looks into the pinhole concept via a three-part presentation: an installation comprising two video projections – Disambiguation(2004 [2011]) and Addressability (2011) – and the photographic object Partially Instantiated Object (2011). The two latter pieces have been specially made for the exhibition.

Jeff Guess’ practice is pervaded by consideration of the processes at work in the creation of technical images and the way such images continuously interweave with language. His early work resulted in the making of optical devices drawing directly on photography’s technical and historical principles, notably the pinhole camera. His experiments then gradually moved towards information technology. His most recent work centres on the specific character of computer programming as a form of writing which, once activated by a machine, can generate moving images and texts.

The small room to the right of the exhibition space is home to Partially Instantiated Object. Here we have a photograph under Diasec showing a program-language text providing a formal description of a virtual camera in a 3D space. The description makes direct reference to pinhole photography and the relevant optical and mathematical theories, with the pinhole camera actually serving as a model for the creation of 3D environments. In this photograph Guess presents both the production mode of the virtual object and the preconditions for the making of the two other works on show in the exhibition.

Disambiguation takes the shape of a computer program projected inside La Criée’s main space: a program which enables real time 3D visualization of news dispatches from a host of different sources. Each sentence traverses an enormous area of darkness while, from time to time, a word or group of words detaches itself from the statement, moves through the space and is incorporated into another statement with no deviation whatever from the grammatical and syntactic rules. As this interplay of signs goes ahead, the deliberately factual, denotative words of the dispatches open up to fresh interpretations.

Opposite is a second new work, Addressability, also a video projection. Especially for this exhibition Jeff Guess has come up with a computer program which seeks out images on the internet and arranges them in a 3D setting. Intended as a companion piece to Disambiguation, this work allows pixel by pixel observation of an image flow in a state of constant de- and re-composition.

Benoît Laffiché’s video work tirelessly interrogates the issue of apprehending territories and population movements in the post-global age. For his exhibition at La Criée, the artist has chosen to ‘Unfold’ these issues, not via information overload or a militant stance, but by focusing on the most sensitive of spaces: the paths trodden by marathon runner Abebe Bikila (Jato, 2010); the ocean waves of Africa ridden by the surfers in the 1966 film The Endless Summer (The Endless Summer2011); the darkest depths of the nighttime soundscape created by Senegalese fishermen (Pirogues, 2011).

All this means there will be three video installations on display at La Criée. That phrase doesn’t do justice to what’s happening here, though. Déplier is not simply an assortment of images occupying some exhibition space. Déplier is concerned more with exploring the potential of video images, in and of themselves, to create mind-dazzling dark spaces and blind spots. Within this exhibition space, Déplieris also an attempt to overcome the inherent fragility and simplicity of images, upholding their power to create ‘other spaces’ – or as Michel Foucault calls them, ‘heterotopias’: spaces that are not defined by the traditional boundaries of identity, territory, governments or institutions; spaces opening up journeys beyond mere reason.

Benoît Laffiché’s exhibition takes time and space to their extremes with disconcerting simplicity, all the better to reveal the power of images to engage with the world in all its density and complexity. In the video Jato, the vast expanse of Ethiopia’s plains and plateaus takes pride of place as marathon runner Abebe Bikila’s abilities take us beyond the limits of his body and the terrain itself. Displayed in a small room, the video image appears discreetly on a section of wall. The confined installation contrasts with the infinite expanses covered by the runner – both geographically and in the mind.

In the larger exhibition hall, a 4.5 meter wide partition has been set up in isolation on the floor to project Pirogues, a work based on sound and images. The video clings to this monolithic structure, etching out dark scenes crisscrossed by rays of light. A soundscape crowded with human voices, the noise of the sea, and the sound of the Senegalese fishermen’s pirogues bumping against one another adds to the sense of disorientation.

The Endless Summer – an excerpt from the film of the same name produced in 1966 depicting surfers seeking out the best waves in Africa – is a fitting testimony to the relationship between the human body and the vastness of the ocean. The images of surfing are projected onto a large wooden rectangular panel, rising out of the floor and resting quietly against the walls of La Criée. Switching from a conventional panoramic horizontal view to an unusual vertical screening allows the image to add still more depth to the space defined by the wave.

The Unfolding of these three video works in La Criée exhibition space embodies the archipelagic insight of poet Edouard Glissant: “Another form of thought: more intuitive, more fragile, exposed and yet ready to engage with the chaos of the world and its unforeseen events and developments. Although it builds on the triumphs of the humanities and social sciences, it soon branches off into a poetic worldview encompassing the imagination”*.

* Edouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, p 43.

About the Exhibition

Rockbund Art Museum is very proud to present the first major solo show in China of the Italian artist Paola Pivi with her latest outstanding installations and new productions. Born in Italy in 1971, the artist Paola Pivi works and lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Very productive in the international contemporary art scene since 1995, her paintings, installations, performances, photographs, videos are all inspired by an art of making upside down situations.

The artist produces works that comes from pre-existing ordinary materials and living creatures but the way she puts them into conjunction creates very extraordinary situations, unusual and enigmatic environments: paintings blooming into amazing colored pearls sculptures, ribbons standing as powerful minimalist installations,everyday liquids such as coffee or inkforming monochromatic paintings and sculptures.

Paola Pivi likes to generate ambiguous and contradictory feelings like lightness and weight, smoothness and violence, warm and cold, seriousness and absurdity, singularity and mass. As is often the case in Paola Pivi’s exhibitions, narration is not straightforward. The first impression of strong visual surprise gives way to an analysis that leads the viewer into an atypical, absurd, bizarre and extravagant world. The artist likes to create improbable situations, to be experienced and experimented with. Anything becomes possible.

Paola Pivi’s solo show at Rockbund Art Museum will comprise three impressive installations, one large outdoor drawing on billboard, and a selection of photograph, pearl painting and lamps, whichoffer original and critical views on formatted topics about our contemporary world. Criticality in Pivi’s work does not come out from a direct sociological or political attitude but it is powerfully activated through the permanent question of how picture has the power to subvert what we name reality – society, gender, and cultural identity – into an alienated space for representation. So the artist does not pretend to represent neither to comment the existing world, she really wants to subvert the world into anomalistic situations that could open to more critical approaches about our daily representations and to our potential for more powerful and creative visions. In this way, she cleverly captivates the eyes and the cultural backgrounds of any Asian and Western viewer by putting into question any pretentiousness of Truth about our general representations of the contemporary world.

To exhibit Paola Pivi’s work into an Asian and Chinese art context is also particularly relevant because her images are always asking for more demanding articulation between images and social content. In an art context where the majority of the artists are rushing into social topics, Pivi’s strategy is radically different: it is the intrusion of an anomalistic image into the social sphere which will overturn reality into new representations and will offer the visitor to experience a creative criticality.

Paola Pivi’s works are the outcome of weird yet extremely precise, cogent orderings of things: representations are striking in terms not only of their shape, color and lighting, but above all by their capacity to assert themselves as lightning-like intrusions into reality – with no narrative gambit, no symbolic justifications, and no metaphorical or allegorical convolutions. In other words, the art of Paola Pivi systematically gambles on images with the power to be more real than any other reality. Or to put it another way: the image is fantasy within reality.

The Rockbund Art Museum of Shanghai is proud to celebrate the creative and privileged links that unite the visual arts and the practice of writing in China and in Asia.

Pascal Torres Guardiola, curator of the Chalcography department at Louvre Museum, and Larys Frogier, director of the Rockbund Art Musum, have joined forces to conceive of the exhibition “From Gesture to Language”. Assembling numerous works originating from the contemporary collection of the Chalcography department in the Louvre as well as major pieces commissioned specially for the show or else stemming from other collections, the exhibition proposes a journey that links up powerful visual and textual constructions in international contemporary art.

The exhibition accords a special interest to “anachronism”, which is to say the manner in which classical, modern, and contemporary works can match with each other – often in unexpected ways – thereby enriching their interpretation and broadening their historical perspectives.

The exhibition “From Gesture to Language” makes the connection between conceptual art and traditional techniques of creation in the plastic arts. If the concept in all works of plastic art is expressed in form, can we abstract the materiality of the work in order to allow for the spectator’s reading of merely the concept structuring the work of art? Choosing a simple concept for the object of representation brings up a question of principle: can the plastic artist let the form of his/her work take a back seat in allowing for the reading of the message contained in his/her work by means of mere words? Is Bruce Nauman’s neon lettering or Jenny Holzer’s monumental projections first of all books before being objects destined for the sight?

It is well and truly clear that all classical works, beyond their formal or even figurative appearance, only exist abstractly and mentally as a structured work – “Painting is a thing of the mind,” said Leonardo da Vinci or Nicolas Poussin. Thus nothing new, so far.… As for the relation between works of classical art and reading, it is so natural that the educated public does not intend to see or even look at a painting, but rather to read it. It is in this intellectualised conception of art where it is necessary to look for the foundation to the approach of conceptual artists.

“From Gesture to Language” intends to confront conceptual creation against the yardstick of another approach that has profoundly questioned creation in the plastic arts within the 20th century: Minimalism and Arte Povera. An approach whose final end also was to reduce the work of art to the structure that underlies it. Neither letter nor word, but the ordering of pure form like new primordial elements of a universe in gestation; in this way one must understand the presence of François Morellet’s red Lamentation.

The high point of these plastic reflections comes to flirt, in our exhibition, with the book and the engraved prints. Book objects – such as Xu Bing’s installation devoted to Saint-John Perse’s poem The Order of Birds, or Salazar’s Kafkaesque narrative dedicated to The Trial, or the collection of engravings that the Qianlong Emperor addressed to the King of France Louis XV as a way to illustrate his own martial poetry. The art of engraving, where the primary material is that of the book, the paper, or the sheet, does not suggest a fortuitous encounter between the avant-garde and tradition, but reveals the proper core of the exhibition which is dedicated to the renunciation of the traditional classical work – the most imperious symbol of which remains the most famous painting of the Louvre, Mona Lisa. Inviting the public to Funeral of Mona Lisa, by Yan Pei-Ming, is the most honest way – surely because it is the most playful – to invite the spectator to the celebration. “From Gesture to Language” proposes above all to rediscover, in a struggle between matter and spirit, the primordial role of art, which is also to nourish the senses in order to impose, on a renewed plastic form apt for the fledgling 21st century, the supremacy of the concept, in opening this relation of the gesture to language in the art of poetic language itself which constructs our literatures in colour, rhythm, and sound.

Around the collection of contemporary engravings of the Louvre, the paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations summon three major issues, from “Power” to the “Body” as well as the “Writing of Space”. Far from fixing the works under the rubric of a theme, the curators on the contrary invite the visitor to combine these issues freely through unexpected associations between the works of art.

Power of Language and Language of Power

The philosophers Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have deftly demonstrated how much language is a permanent performative act that manifests countless unstable and changing relations of power. Language is an ensemble of historical, social, and political constructions with their systems of signs, codes, forms and significations. In the exhibition “From Gesture to Language”, the artists fabricate images and words in order to question such relations, for example by blurring the boundaries between Chinese calligraphy and Western writing (Xu Bing), or in activating and reversing the simulacra of objectivity and neutrality of scientific texts (Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer). In this, works of art reveal that in which the human subject cannot escape from relations of power but that which is in a position to construct alternative creative procedures to think and represent the living for the making of text and of image.

The work of translation is equally a fascinating practice to understand the infinite processes in the reconstruction of language. When Qianlong, the fourth emperor of the Qing dynasty, offers to the King of France Louis XV sixteen drawings depicting his conquests and battles, the latter set out to turn these into bronze engravings but introducing modifications of forms and interpretations with respect to the original series. These two visual versions are thus displayed in the exhibition and are confronted by the paintings of the contemporary artist Zhao Xuebing, depicting 140 warriors within an extremely delicate and complex latticework of lines.

Incarnation and Mutations

“From Gesture to Language” questions language, not only as representation of concept but also that which constructs it by means of fluctuations, transformations, mutations while the words (dis)integrates into a body or is expelled from this – whether an intimate body or the social body. Thus, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Morris, Giuseppe Penone, Kiki Smith, Yang Jiechang have effective recourse to drawing and engraving in order to express ambiguous bodily situations that are mixed up with architectonic or landscape elements. Passing from trauma to erotic states, from delimitation of space to oneiric, dream-like extensions, the works demonstrate how language does not illustrate reality but activates new and surprising situations.

Poetics and Writing of Space

When language infiltrates real space, then it becomes something else altogether. Contemporary artists extend the act of writing in exploring three-dimensional space in order to realize critical and poetic installations. François Morellet thus uses simple and long tubes of neon that stretch to the ceiling and collapses to the ground level in the manner of abstract forms becoming immaterially concrete, or like unfinished letters attempting to take form. Of a completely different manner, Martin Salazar chooses not to visualize the letter in space, instead concentrating on the radical confrontation of very opposite materials (wood, metal, felt, sound, light), rendering the interpretation of the last phrase of the famous work of Kafka, The Trial, extremely sensitive and critical. From the 6th to the 4th floor, Xu Bing has literally constructed a mesh of interconnected letters to form an impressive vortex in space. Visitors are invited to take on the attempt to read the poem The Order of Birds, written by Saint-John Perse in collaboration with the painter George Braque.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint deploys on the 6th floor of the museum a performative space, “Read/Live”, where actors take their places on a seat surrounded by videos showing different readers, along with a simulacra of a medical headset supposedly able to decipher the interior of the brain during the act of reading. Of course, the control of the spirit is simply impossible, with language having infinite possibilities.