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27/10/2014

The never ending stories cycle

Mamco, Geneve

In the autumn-winter sequence of Mamco’s never ending stories cycle, presented from 29 October 2014 to 18 January 2015, the main focus is on female artists. Of the six temporary exhibitions in the sequence, four are by women: Ulla von Brandenburg, Sonia Kacem (winner of the 2014 Manor Cultural Award), Marcia Hafif and Amy O’Neill. On the male side, Swiss artist Stéphane Zaech’s strange paintings disfigure the human body and disturb the viewer. The sixth exhibition pays tribute to Claude Rychner, one of the founders of the Écart group (together with John M Armleder and Patrick Lucchini), who died in 2014. Also on display are four monographic sets of work from the museum collection: drawings by François Martin and Dennis Oppenheim, which were recently donated to Mamco; poems by Carl Andre; and vocal works by Kristin Oppenheim.

Ulla von Brandenburg
24 Filme, kein Schnitt

The German artist Ulla von Brandenburg’s 24 Filme, kein Schnitt, (‘24 films, no edits’), an exhibition that brings together for the first time all the films she has made since 2000, occupies the whole of the fourth floor. As the title makes clear, the films are uncut and unedited, except insofar as the camera allows it – they are presented ‘raw’, without artifice. Most of them thus consist of a single long take, and last no longer than the reel of film on which they have been shot. Their details are toned down by the use of black-and-white, the camera movement is hazy, and the scenery, clothing and accessories do not indicate any particular period or place – a loss of spatial and temporal clues that make the exhibition feel like a Symbolist reverie, with fragments of nursery rhymes, spiritualist séances, magic tricks or folklore rituals emerging from it. Famed for her sculptures and installations, Ulla von Brandenburg now shows a less familiar side of her work here at Mamco.

Marcia Hafif
Photographs

On the first floor of the museum, in the Ménard and Pécuchet Rooms, is an exhibition by the American artist Marcia Hafif, simply entitled Photographs. On returning from a stay in Italy, Hafif gave up painting in favour of photography, video and installation, so that she would no longer depend on just one medium. The photographs that make up the series U.C.I. Gallery, Irvine, CA 1971, 1-12 (1971) were taken in the gallery where Hafif’s work was to be exhibited. Each black-and-white shot was a detail of the exhibition space: electric sockets, skirting boards, the floor, details of the ceiling. This set of works belonged to the artist’s most conceptual period. The Pomona Houses series, contemporary with the one produced at UCI, evokes nostalgia for Hafif’s childhood in her native city of Pomona. Tracking down the remnants of her childhood, she crisscrossed the city for two months capturing districts and railway lines with her camera, and focusing on portraits of houses built in the 1920s and 1930s. Her aesthetic was based on the specific principles applied in her painting, and more generally on the whole of her work since the 1960s.

Sonia Kacem
Loulou

In her exhibition Loulou, Sonia Kacem, winner of the 2014 Manor Cultural Award, presents some ten pyramid-like structures made of recycled cloth in the Don Judd loft (third floor). Sonia Kacem’s installations are marked by careful attention to materials and the exhibition setting. Describing one of her works often involves combining elements of the technical description with a gesture that makes them spatial: scattering dust, crumpling huge sheets of paper, breaking glass or pottery, bending resin. The title of the exhibition, Loulou, particularly chosen for its childlike sound, refers to Loulou the parrot in Gustave Flaubert’s short story A simple heart, written in 1877. In the story, a middle-aged and somewhat simple-minded servant called Félicité is utterly devoted to her parrot Loulou, which she has stuffed when it dies. A figure of imitation and repetition – not one, but ten cloth pyramids are presented here by the artist – the parrot also symbolises exoticism in literature and painting, at a time when the Orientalist movement was at its height – for what could be more exotic to the nineteenth- century Western mind than a pyramid? Yet Loulou also refers to the kitschy aesthetic of the giant casino hotel Luxor Las Vegas, built in imitation of the Giza pyramids – and it was during her recent stay in New York as artist-in-residence, when she had an opportunity to visit Nevada, that the Geneva artist decided to organise this exhibition, in which the literalism of form lapses into monumental pastiche.

Amy O’Neill
Trucks

In her Trucks series, Amy O’Neill draws trucks and buildings in the form of trucks. In the American imagination, these represent both the instrument used for the coast-to-coast trip and the strangeness encountered en route. However, unlike the places of interest dotted along tourist routes, trucks are not primarily tourist objects. These mammoths of the highway embody the sovereignty of machines over the expanse of territory. Even more than cars, they are nomadic objects, forever migrating. This notion of being an eternal traveller, coupled with the sense of monumental power and gigantic size, has naturally made trucks fascinating objects. Just as in cars trucks’ windshields frame an ever-changing landscape, like a constantly renewed painting. And truck drivers sleep in their cabs; their trucks are their homes. O’Neill has a great fondness for the world of truck drivers and an aesthetic taste for their visual culture. Yet she remembers that trucks are popular children’s toys. So we should not be surprised to find some childlike features in her designs. The artist thus views these kings of the road with an amused, but not mocking, gaze – for what this series, like the rest of Amy O’Neill’s work, is ultimately searching for is the inmost essence of the American soul.

Stéphane Zaech
The voices of painting

Stéphane Zaech’s works are oil paintings which could be called ‘classical’, and they adapt perfectly well to the academic pictorial genres: portraits, landscapes, allegories. But, contrary to appearances, Zaech does not know in advance what is going to happen on his canvas. Technique enables him to freely associate fragments of memory and images from everyday life. The painter works on several canvases at once, and there is something of a waiting room about his studio. Without really forming part of a series, each nascent painting ends up contaminating its neighbours. Zaech quotes as his references John Currin and George Condo, two American painters who dared to pursue the European tradition in an environment in which abstract expressionism, pop art and other movements had enabled painting to cast off all restraint. Various motifs, a grasping eroticism and a clownish humour are left over from this old European painting’s exile in America; but, now installed in a studio on the shores of Lake Geneva, it has rediscovered an atmosphere and a light of its own, mountains and forests.

Taxophilia Abissa
A tribute to Claude Rychner

Born in 1969 out of the teenage friendship between John M Armleder, Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, the Geneva- based group Écart, an autonomous collective close to the Fluxus movement, hoped to build bridges between art and life. As far as Rychner was concerned, it was above all through archery that this link could be created. The author of several publications on the subject, he turned archery into a veritable philosophy of life. The title of this exhibition thus refers to one of his works, Toxophilia Abissa: la source d’où l’on va (‘Toxophilia Abissa: the source we go from’, 1999), in which toxophilia, a term borrowed from Ancient Greek, means the study or practice of archery. In this essay Claude Rychner rejected any notion of competition between archers. As he saw it, archery was above all a philosophy of concentration, a way of living life to the full. This exhibition pays tribute to Claude Rychner the man and the artist.

Carl Andre
Seven Books of Poetry

Carl Andre, an outstanding representative of American minimal art, is a paradoxical artist. Even though all his work shuns the traditional gestures of sculpture, he persists in calling him -self a sculptor and nothing else; and even though he publishes and exhibits poems, he never presents himself as a writer. In fact, he practises poetry as a sculptor, the two disciplines proceeding from one and the same modus operandi, for he is always blending ‘identical and interchangeable’ elements. In Seven Books of Poetry, Andre thus opts for a concrete, formal or structural – rather than grammatical or descriptive – use of poetic language. He even isolates the words that he prefers to use in three dimensions: semantic, but also acoustic, visual and plastic. As for the sources from which the artist draws his words, they indirectly evoke his own history as much as that of America. A decisive experimental space, these poems are thus a fragmented, elliptical map of Andre’s cultural, historical, critical and political standpoints.

François Martin
Friendship (with Jean-Luc Nancy)

The two hundred and fifty-nine drawings in the L’Amitié (avec Jean-Luc Nancy) exhibition – ‘Friendship (with Jean-Luc Nancy)’ – are divided into a couple of dozen series, twenty- one of them produced in 2005 and two in 2011. This product of a partnership between the artist François Martin and the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is exhibited on the first floor of the museum. Over a period of more than forty years the two friends have built up a body of work in tandem: the artist produces drawings, then passes them on to the philosopher, who is completely free to write down whatever they suggest to him, or else leave them intact. Nancy’s annotations are spontaneous responses to the traces the painter has left on the sheet. They include incomplete comments, surprise at the created form, or a kind of bafflement. The whole work should be seen in terms of the interplay between the two authors; the focus is on freedom to experiment, i.e. the exploration of gaps and inventions made possible by the available space. The result is a vast set of works that are also a correspondence between the world of the visible and the world of the readable.

Dennis Oppenheim
Proposals

In the late 1960s Dennis Oppenheim was mainly known for his interventions in the landscape – interventions that were ephemeral in nature. The documentary and photographic traces, more than just remnants, reveal the intentionality and the process of the work; the viewer’s imagination does the rest. Only in the 1980s did Oppenheim truly seek to create lasting sculptures, in urban rather than rural settings. The sixty- two Proposals now presented at Mamco lie at the boundary between these two kinds of work. Yet when we see these plans we soon realise that many of them could never be carried out. The artist invented confrontations of materials, organisations of space that would remain utopian. The process dimension – a key feature of Oppenheim’s work during those years – was still crucial here. Alongside these plans, Mamco regularly exhibits eight scale models of the Proposals. The scale models and the plans complement and shed light on one another. Moreover, once the artist turns some of his drawings into three-dimensional objects, they can no longer be interpreted as mere sketches of ideas, but rather as a reflection on spatial organisation and the quality of the lines drawn by human activity.

Kristin Oppenheim
Cry Me a River

Since the 1990s Kristin Oppenheim has built up a body of sung work that she performs in exhibition spaces. Her vocal pieces are either covers of classic American songs or original texts, often with a melancholy tone. In Cry Me a River, a title taken from a love song that has become a jazz standard, Mamco presents a selection of the artist’s early vocal work, all in essentially the same manner: a voice with another one responding to it like an echo, with no visible sound system other than four speakers discreetly attached to the wall. As visitors immerse themselves in Oppenheim’s looping sound installations, they find themselves surrounded by song and entering a process of recall. On leaving the exhibition, depending on how long they have been listening, visitors can still hear the song that repetition has engraved in their memories. Through these vocal works, Kristin Oppenheim seeks to trigger an emotion in visitors; as they approach the speakers, they are gently enveloped by the ever more present voice.

Press office
Jennifer Ng Chin Yue tel. +41 22 3206122 j.ngchinyue@mamco.ch

Press conference, Tuesday 28 October at 11 a.m.; show opening starting at 6 - 9 p.m.

MAMCO - Musée d’art moderne et contemporain
10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers CH-1205 Genève
open Tuesday through Friday from noon to 6 p.m., the first Wednesday of the month until 9 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Closed on Mondays, Wednesday 24, Thursday 25, Wednesday 31 December 2014 and Thursday 1 January 2015.
Regular admission CHF 8.–
Reduced admission CHF 6.–
Group admission CHF 4.–

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