Societe' Realiste
dal 26/10/2011 al 16/12/2011
Segnalato da
26/10/2011
Societe' Realiste
Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Zurich
Archiscriptons. For its first solo exhibition in Switzerland, the Parisian cooperative features a speculative exploration of the common scripture practice shared by architecture and discourse. Is the writing of architecture the same as the architecture of writing? The revolving discourse of this question constructs a space between recent artworks, drifting from one to the other, and ranging from film to written photography, from installation to inscription.
For its first solo exhibition in Switzerland, the Parisian cooperative Société Réaliste presents Archiscriptons, a speculative exploration of the common scripture practice shared by architecture and discourse.
Is the writing of architecture the same as the architecture of writing?
The revolving discourse of this question constructs a space between recent artworks, drifting from one to the other, and ranging from film to written photography, from installation to inscription.
The first work on display is Société Réaliste's full-length movie The Fountainhead (2010), based on the 1949 capitalist propaganda eponymous film written by Ayn Rand, arch-priestess of American libertarianism and author of some of its strongest cultural myths. The original studio movie tells the story of a Promethean modernist architect - a character based on the figure of Frank Lloyd Wright - fighting against a surrounding collective decadence in the name of his personal genius. Société Réaliste has removed the sound and deleted every human presence to reduce the film to its decorum, its ideological architecture.
As an echo to the disappearance of the topic in the film, Société Réaliste presents Commonscript (2011), a series of 48 enamel panels and prints mounted on dibond, equitably melting emptied videograms extracted from The Fountainhead with inscriptions. The images show magnificent, stereotypical and almost abstracted modernist architectural views from a Prime City (New York), extracted from the original 1949 film script. The sentences are the main ideological affirmations personally stated by the hero that have been systematically transcribed by Société Réaliste in the plural form. Turning a supposedly autonomous discourse into a generalized one, allows to counter-balance the ideal views of a standardized world.
The link between the personal and the general in the inscriptions is made in a new font designed by Société Réaliste entitled Falling Haus (2011). This centaur font is the hybridization of Frank Lloyd Wright's font named "Exhibition", and Josef Albers' global-abstract font known as "Universal". Additionally, they defined a color chart under the title Colors of the Spectre (2011) based on architectural color nuances from some of the world’s most important seats of executive power.
A bridge between views and scriptures is opened in the middle of this speculative area. Written-over photographs presented as lightboxes use the same methodology: the view of a building covered by an inscription drawn from the motif of the building's master plan. A gift from Birobidzhan presents the other end of the spectrum: an imaginary manhole cover from the capital city of the Jewish autonomous district in Siberia created in the 1930s. A modernist grid - emblem of the unfinished, unattainable - surrounds the city plan.
Another link between semantic blocks, human scaling and architectural projection is Fingerprint Architecture: Switzerland (2011), an installation mimicking an architectural model, composed of fingerprint books for unregistered inhabitants, presenting as many registration pages as the estimated number of people migrating to Switzerland in 2010.
Also exhibited are some recent works on currency signs and systems, such as New Alphabetical Order (2009-2011), Zero Euro (2010), Infinite Dollar (2011), Nec plus ultra (2011) and EurO&T (2011). As an extraction point to the speculative space constructed by the exhibition, the sculpture Archiscripton (2011), gives its title to the exhibition, takes the form of a tattooed version of Le Corbusier's iconic Open Hand.
Archiscriptons is the continuation of Société Réaliste's recent exhibitions in Paris (Jeu de Paume, 2011) and Istanbul (Akbank Sanat, 2011), and a preamble to its upcoming show at Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest, opening in March 2012.
Image: A gift from Birobidzhan, iron, Ø 60cm
Vernissage in the presence of the artists: Thursday, October 27th, from 6 to 8 PM
Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie
Bleicherweg 33 - CH-8002 Zurich
Tuesday - Friday 12:00 - 18:00
Saturday 11:00 - 16:00
and by appointment