Alain Bublex
Boris Achour
Ben Kinmont
Alicia Framis
Valérie Mréjen
Begona Munoz
Otto Berchem
Asier Perez Gonzalez
Minerva Cuevas
Pierre Giner
Paul Ardenne
Ami Barak
Jackie Ruth Meyer
Life Ahead of You, or: the Real Turned Inside Out (like a Glove) Having "life ahead of you" rings like a promise-a promise that things are going to carry on. It is the title of the exhibition that Ami Barak has chosen to bid farewell to the management of the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Contemporary Art Fund (Frac), thus creating an event in tandem with the Cimaises et Portique Art Centre in Albi. This exhibition is like part two of a theme proposed by the Albi venue in 2001 to a panel of artists: experiments with the real. Curated by Paul Ardenne, Ami Barak and Jackie Ruth Meyer.
Life Ahead of You, or: the Real Turned Inside Out (like a
Glove) Having "life ahead of you" rings like a promise-a
promise that things are going to carry on. It is the title of the
exhibition that Ami Barak has chosen to bid farewell to the
management of the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional
Contemporary Art Fund (Frac), thus creating an event in
tandem with the Cimaises et Portique Art Centre in Albi. This
exhibition is like part two of a theme proposed by the Albi
venue in 2001 to a panel of artists: experiments with the
real. Life is made up of realities and dreams-an interweave
of real and make-believe. Fiction is a situation of the real.
The real is the real. It is palpable life, with its theatre of
cruelty, to paraphrase Artaud, with its cinema-to wax
oxymoronic-of reversal; to do as the invitation to the
opening does, bearing a photograph of a pilot being ejected
together with his seat from a fighter plane, an image which
shows something akin to a counter-performance-an imposed
performance. Juggling with the signs of the real is an artist's
trick, a clear artistic (mis)appropriation of a desire nowadays
shared by many people involved in the art scene. It is no
longer a matter of representing or re-creating the real, but of
gathering it up in its most tangible goings-on, each one
asserting its involvement by proposing a work for the
occasion: they all turn the glove of the real inside out, and in
the end form holds sway. It is 6.30 p.m. on Rue Rambaud in
Montpellier. It is hot, and it feels like there will be a storm.
This could be the beginning of a thriller, but it really is real.
Outside, three trucks with their engines running block the
street, their deafening noise violently irking the eardrums
until the artist, Alain Bublex, gets rid of them at around 7.30
p.m. These monstrous agitators, these inhuman mutineers,
protagonists in a one-off performance, are thus filmed for an
hour by a closed-circuit camera, and the film then projected
will represent the evidence of the crime. The door opens.
Boris Achour plug some joystick on a play station video
games, directly on the wall. The visitors can turn on the
space galery virtually becoming territory Plug & Play. Ben
Kinmont prepares the dinner menu based on recipes
proposed by artists (Malevich, Dan Graham, etc.),
incorporating actuality within a modern history, while at the
same time reactivating one of our basic links with life:
eating. Here, eating is also creating, two verbs which pen the
history of man between nature and culture. Alicia Framis's
changing cubicle consists of a curtain fluttering in the draught
made by a fan, and is closed by a sensor that reacts to
human presence. So the visitor can put on a special dress,
but one that exists: an item of clothing invented so that
Muslim women are clad against attacks from skinhead dogs.
A playful-cum-tragic presentation of a violent situation where
the garment symbolizes the double imprisonment of these
women, while the curtain, for its part, is free. The destiny of
the image, in its relationship to the real and to written
memory, is lost in the series of videos titled Les
souvenirs/Memories" by Valérie Mréjen. In Montpellier, an
actor recounts a memory based on a true memory, which the
artist has re-written based on the screenplay procedure. In a
serried grid of real and make-believe, the idea of the
memory seems reinstated, and we take part in it, pitching
about between truth of the message, lie of the image, and
vice versa.
Begona Munoz quite simply asks the Frac
Languedoc-Roussillon staff and the staff of the Albi Art
Centre, along with the curators, to sponsor the schooling of a
child in the Third World. She revisits the relationship of the
patron to art, delivering her "statement" based on a
humanitarian idea which powerfully echoes Romain Gary's
book, La vie devant soi/Life Ahead of You (1). Otto Berchem
undertakes an investigative task running counter to the
reporter's job. He wants to get hold of the photograph taken
by a whacky spectator who, during the 1999 Tour de France,
caused the winner of that leg, Giuseppe Guerini, to have a
collision and fall off his bike. The event caused a media
maelstrom, but the snapshot, which was also that lunatic's
"crime weapon", has never been seen. Over and above the
object, it is the artist's approach which takes cognizance of a
relationship to the real perverted by the media and
madness, and this by trying to sidestep and reverse
eye-catching customs. By way of a "Montpelier-Albi and back"
board placed in the two exhibition venues, Asier Perez
Gonzalez suggests that visitors might experiment with a
highly "trendy" reality-car-sharing! Two fabric banners borrow
Evian advertising visuals under the title Egalité
Campaign/Equality Campaign: the manipulation of people in
the advertising business is the manipulation of
communications experts--division: politcal campaigns. With
this proposition, Minerva Cuevas achieves a shift which
repositions the real in its most opaque aspects, from which
emerge historical symbols, from Vichy to the Evian
agreement... Each one of these works is accompanied by an
"acoustic notice" placed by Pierre Giner: a synthetic voice
announces the titles, but in an unexpected and as if a priori
impossible way, because it reinstates the accentuation. If
digital "colour" is removed from the true-from the authentic-,
technology, not to say technicity, tries, once again, to create
a connection with reality, a symbolization which stems from
the very issue of cloning and artificial intelligence. "The
crowning piece" comes in the form of an eponymous work by
Mathieu Laurette and Boris Achour. A rocket placed close by
explodes at the twilight hour-about 10 p.m.. This is the final
firework flourish before curfew. Tomorrow the sun will rise and
life will carry on. "Art is what makes life more interesting than
art", wrote Robert Filliou in the 1960s, and in the end of the
day, what if it was the opposite, what if it was life that made
art more interesting than life...
La vie devant soi/Life Ahead of you, curated by Paul
Ardenne, Ami Barak and Jackie Ruth Meyer.
Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, 4 rue Rambaud, Montpellier. Tel:
04 99 74 20 35. From 6 July to 21 September 2002.
Cimaise et Portique, Departmental Contemporary Art Centre,
les Moulins Albigeois, 41, rue Porta, Albi. Tel: 05 63 47 49
97. From 29 June to 4 November 2002.
The Frac is supported by the Conseil régional and the Drac
(Ministery of Culture) Languedoc-Roussillon
Contact press > Martine-Hélène Gonzalez 06 62657728