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6/10/2010

Three Exhibitions

Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris - MAM, Paris

DIDIER MARCEL. sommes-nous l’élégance
curated by François Michaud

Here Didier Marcel, whom we know as a romantic model-maker – to quote Jérôme Mauche – takes us for a stroll. More exactly a stroll through the exhibition venue. Fortunately everything we see is a mix of the fake and the very fake, as in the case of Mother Nature and our media-mediated relationship with her.

Didier Marcel borrows from reality and sculpts from life. Whether the imprint is taken from the living or the mineral, and whether the model itself is artificial, the choice hinges systematically on a highly personal rapport with the banal: with everything that's ordinary and invisible, everything that merges with the landscape.

For the ARC Marcel has come up with something like the last stage of a work in progress, the bit you only get to see on opening day. From one project to another there's an ongoing something or other, a kind of attempt at documenting reality, some endlessly renewed Sisyphean operation. But then his work always contains this radical questioning of man's engagement with nature.

His method is founded on mise en abîme, on the realisation that the natural is itself something staged, to the point where it is all but impossible to sort out the true from the false. The artist samples fragments of man-made landscapes, then reproduces them artificially before situating them in the pared-down setting of the museum.

Didier Marcel was part of the ARC Workshops of 1988 and won the first Ricard Foundation prize in 1999. He has had a number of solo exhibitions, notably at MAMCO in Geneva (2005), the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg (2006) and MUDAM in Luxembourg (2009). He is also a contributor to the art segment of the new Paris tramline T3 East.

Didier Marcel was born in Besançon in 1961. He lives and works in Dijon.

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LARRY CLARK. Kiss the past hello
Curated by Sébastien Gokalp

ARC is delighted to be presenting the first French retrospective of photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark, born in 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Organised in close collaboration with Clark himself, the exhibition sums up a fifty-year oeuvre with over two hundred original prints, most shown here for the first time. From the black and white images of the early 1960s to the feature-length films – among them Kids (1995), Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002) – he has been making since 1995, this internationally recognised artist offers an uncompromisingly hard look at teenagers adrift without bearings.

In addition to portraits of newborn babies and animals by his photographer mother – Clark worked as her assistant – the exhibition includes the mythic images of Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983), as well as other work from these periods never shown before. His 16mm film on addicts in Tulsa, made in 1968 and recently rediscovered, is also being screened for the first time.

In his photo series from the 1990s and 2000s Clark shows us teenagers in a daily round of staving off boredom with drugs, sex and firearms, together with skateboarders ranging geographically from New York to the Latino ghetto of Los Angeles. Equally based on street and rock culture, the series 1992, The Perfect Childhood (1993) and Punk Picasso (2003) confirm his cutting eye for a marginality America refuses to face up to.

The large format colour works of the Los Angeles series 2003–2010, chronicle the evolution from child to adult of young skateboarder Jonathan Velasquez, the central character of Clark's film Wassup Rockers (2006).

Since the publication in 1971 of Tulsa, a seminal work on a generation's lostness and violence, Clark's work has haunted American culture. The power of his images, quite apart from their grimness and dark appeal, lies in his quest for a naked truth, a realism stripped of all prudishness.

Related events
8 Octobre - Conference of Larry Clark at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

The Cinémathèque française is organising a retrospective of seven films by Larry Clark from 8–11 October 2010, in partnership with the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

The exhibition is prohibited to those under the age of 18.

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Etats de l'artificie
Victor Alimpliev, Olga Chernysheva, FFC, Chto Delat, Nikolay Oleynikov

This exhibition presents four artists and collectives who regularly employ theatrical situations in their videos and films.

Some works explicitly revive filmed theater or dance, while others utilize the technique of "performance trouvé" — scenes discovered by the camera in a documentary situation and used as a constitutive element of the film. A blend of theatrical devices and formal reflexivity carried out in diverse ways characterizes the work of the show, all produced from mid 2000 on. If the 90s celebrated violent self-expression in radical performances reacting to new freedoms and their illusions, today many artists employ reflective strategies marked by formal experimentation, often incorporating references to the styles or events of the Soviet past.

In her videos, Olga Chernysheva frames accidental performances filmed in documentary situations with a reflective/poetic structure, often reminiscent of genre films. The artist reflects on the archetypical imagery of collective performances from the Soviet visual canon, such as demonstrations or popular public celebrations. Her camera, however, is interested in the failures of their artifices today, registering and revealing the mutations of the new and old symbolic orders.

In Victor Alimpliev's elaborate films play on a tension between their titles and the rigorously constructed visual scenes, always meticulously directed and acted by professional performers. Carrying subtle allusions to classical iconography, these titles, such as "To Trample Down an Arable Land" or "Weak Rot Front", are translated into a drama of the collective movements of the performers' bodies. Made in constant interaction with the camera, the slightest movement or gesture of the performers has a dramatized appeal based on a persistent tension of collaboration and coordination.

In their films, the FFC Group stages improbable encounters and impossible dialogues — between ballet dancers and unemployed people or between two generations debating the use of the communist heritage today. Very often the origin of their videos are workshops whose participants become actors and performers. These forms of staging for the camera allows the group to inquiry into the contemporary resonance of certain Soviet myths.

The Chto Delat Group creates pieces of theater for the camera, emphasizing the artifice of play production. Their theatrical videos follow quite faithfully the Brechtian model of epic plays, while the camera reveals details of the stage construction. The choice of Brechtian aesthetics isn't accidental, but is dictated by the Group's artistic position. In their interpretation, the past or present events they evoke in their films are neither dramas nor tragedies, but rather "Lehrstücke" — didactic pieces to be analyzed and learned from.

Rather then following a specific theme, this exhibition unfolds along two broadly defined leitmotivs. One focuses on the artists' self-conscious engagement with the specific elements — stories, films, imagery — from the Soviet realist canon, exploring its conflicts and correspondences and making the spectator experience old debates and events as new encounters. The other takes up art’s current fascination with theater's transformative power and its ability to speak about the present, sometimes described as "the present as fiction" or "l'artifice du present ".

The exhibition will change over time following a specific timeline and involves the projection of different groupings of films selected.

Press officer: Marine Le Bris
Tél. 01 53 674050 Email marine.lebris@paris.fr

Image: © Didier Marcel, L’arbre aux chaînes, 2009. Courtesy Le Consortium

Press preview 7 Octobre 11am-2pm

Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
11 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris
Open Tuesday - Sunday, 10am - 6pm
ADMISSION
Full rate: 5 €
Concessions: 3,50 €
Half-price: 2.50 €
Under 18 : free

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