The culmination of 18 months of cross-cultural research is a month-long visual arts festival exploring ideas and themes paramount to the international art world, with the goal of encouraging intellectual discourse between institutions, artists, scholars, students and the public. More than 30 events (exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, conferences) that will take place at 20 partner venues.
NEW YORK, February 5, 2014 — The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States are pleased to announce ART², a month-long visual arts festival exploring ideas and themes paramount to the international art world, which will be presented with 38 partner museums, galleries, universities, and non-profit spaces in New York during April 2014. The culmination of 18 months of cross-cultural research, ART² will consider six main issues prevalent in today’s patently global art world through exhibitions, public lectures, workshops and conferences by French and American art experts, with the goal of encouraging intellectual discourse between institutions, artists, scholars, students and the public. The conversations and workshops aim to generate constructive debate and explore the differences among French and American culture. More than an event-driven project, ART² was conceived as a platform for generating “intellectual friction” between artists, arts professionals and those interested in contemporary art.
Antonin Baudry, Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy, explains, “We are delighted to organize this ambitious festival in New York City addressing fundamental issues of our time through the lens of the visual arts.” Baudry continues, “Though the starting point was France and the US—two countries that share many common interests—the themes and issues explored are fundamental questions facing the international art world. While the value of art is often described in monetary values, we believe that its greatest value lies in its intrinsic capacity to inform our understanding of the world, and as such, we hope that this festival will generate international discourse using art as a point of departure for political, economic, and cultural issues.”
During April 2014, ART² will include more than 30 events (exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, conferences) that will take place at 20 partner venues. On the occasion of this festival, 4 publications published by Les presses du réel – New York Series. ART² and its various components are organized around six areas of investigation, curated by renowned art experts:
1 – THE EXHIBITION MACHINE
A history of exhibitions by artists. Curated by Florence Ostende (Curator & writer)
The Exhibition Machine looks at artists who are using the exhibition as both a medium and source material to create various occupations of space, temporality, and organizing principles, in order to challenge the spectacularization of experience and conventions of the event. Considering the pioneering role artists have played in exhibition history, a series of exhibitions, symposiums and events will investigate four typologies (emergence, setting, material and archive) operating within the fields of history, philosophy, science and politics. This multifaceted project is curated in collaboration with Johanna Burton, Katherine Carl, Jenny Jaskey, Brett Littman and Alicia Ritson. Participants include Pierre Huyghe, Franz Erhard Walther, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Museum of American Art.
2 - COMPOSING DIFFERENCES
Curated by Virginie Bobin (Independent Curator & Writer)
Within today's "crisis of education", driven by privatization, many artists, curators and art institutions attempt to reinvent the relations between art and research outside of the academic world, and to experiment, often in a collaborative manner, alternative models of knowledge production and exchange. Composing Differences brings together artists, curators, researchers and others from Europe and the United States, who are establishing new platforms to experiment with art and knowledge production, which defend the circulation of knowledge and the immaterial value of art as a tool of social change. A program conceived with Glass Bead, PAF, Council and Open School East, with the participation of Tristan Garcia, Esther Salmona, Guillaume Fayard, Noé Soulier, and Jeffrey Mansfield.
Composing Differences is organized in collaboration with MoMA PS1 as part of Sunday Sessions (Please can you link to Sunday Sessions as opposed to the MoMA PS1 homepage http://momaps1.org/sundaysessions
3 - MUSEUMS TODAY
With Glenn Lowry (MoMA), Richard Armstrong (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Adam Weinberg and his curatorial team (Whitney Museum of American Art), Tom Campbell (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Michael Govan (LACMA), Martin Bethenod (Punta della Dogana–Palazzo Grassi–Fondation Pinault), Alain Seban (Centre Pompidou), Jean-Luc Martinez (Musée du Louvre), and Xavier Douroux (Le Consortium)
This platform was conceived as a French-American exchange of perspectives centered on issues and themes that drive museums, foundations and art institutions alike. These places are guarantors of an encyclopedic knowledge essential for enriching our vision of the world, but what tactics do these cultural institutions use for transmitting knowledge to the public? Several topics of reflection will be studied over the course of these two days of discussion: exhibiting collections, presenting new perspectives on art history, offering an artistic yet pedagogic program, producing new works and supporting the creation of contemporary art, and opening international satellite museums in an effort to globalize a museum’s presence.
4 - THE NEW EXISTENTIALISM
Curated by Tim Griffin (The Kitchen, New York)
During the past decade and a half, New York has seemed a unique laboratory for paradigmatic shifts in society, providing a locus for crises in financial and economic structure, political organization, and climatic patterns. And yet the circumstances unfolding in all these spheres have prompted a sense of insecurity that pervades not only the old centers of the occidental world but also territories beyond. In an effort to reframe (and de-privilege) humanity’s place in this radically altered world environment, a number of increasingly prominent voices in contemporary thought have been seeking to instigate a break with historical modes of intellectual engagement stemming from continental philosophy in order to find alternative models that might depart from referential practices, poststructuralism, and even sociological theory. At the same time, such an impulse is shared by an emerging generation of practitioners in art.
In two roundtables featuring French and American thinkers and artists, followed by a published volume, "The New Existentialism" will evoke recent philosophical proposals and link them with related artistic practices. More specifically, emerging philosophical tendencies around the notion of objectivity, and of Speculative Realism, will be put in tension with similarly developing philosophical approaches that encourage subtle re-readings of structuralism, a new reception of Guattari's legacy in the field of anthropology, and a political appropriation of the notion of anthropocene. An aspiration here is to underscore certain misunderstandings that oppose these different models and, in turn, to articulate and understand their disputes more clearly.
5 - ART & SOCIETY
“Protocols of Participation” curated by Alexander Nagel (Institute of Fine Arts- New York University) - “Civic Society and New Patronage” curated by Tom Eccles (CCS Bard College) & Fionn Meade (Bard College and Columbia University)
This area of investigation introduces the Nouveaux Commanditaires Program - Fondation de France and its commitment to commissioning artworks and artistic research that responds directly to issues of public interest contextualized within the terms of civil society. This platform will propose two events:
A panel discussion on “Protocols of Participation: Recent Models of Socially Engaged Art in the United States and Europe”. It puts the New Protocol into dialogue with other models of socially engaged art, and in particular with the Creative Time, which has achieved a similar level of success in the United States;
A workshop on “Civic Society and New Patronage”. Focused on the aesthetic and ethical terrain explored by specific artistic practices, this workshop will include dialogues with artists and look closer at the unique opportunities and challenges afforded by new models and approaches, engaging a dialogue with Nouveaux Commanditaires representatives and artists negotiating the shifting terms of civil society.
6 - ART & VALUE
Curated by Fionn Meade (curator and writer)
In 2014, it can be argued that reputational capital and visualized networks of consumable artistic identities precede, distort, and often surpass the reception of artworks and artists themselves, conditioning value in new ways and realizing new speculative assets. By putting forward a series of provocations and re-castings of the space between materialism, idealism, and ways of working that are identifiable but not easily consumable, The Skin of the Bear exhibition invites Paris-based castillo/corrales, a co-operatively run non-profit contemporary art venue, to organize a series of programs and events reflecting on related issues of our time. This platform will include a separate exhibition exploring the life and work of Janette Laverrière (1909-2011), including her role in crucial shifts in design aesthetics and the politics of value within architecture and interior design. Laverrière’s exhibition will be complemented by a panel discussion. The research focus area “Art & Value” concludes with a new performance.
For additional details and most up-dated program go to frenchculture.org/ART2
PARTNERS
MUSEUMS, FOUNDATIONS & ART INSTITUTIONS: MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Musée du Louvre, Fondation de France, MoMA PS1, New Museum, LACMA, Punta della Dogana–Palazzo Grassi–Fondation Pinault, Judd Foundation
UNIVERSITIES: CUNY Graduate Center, CCS Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Columbia University School of the Arts/Columbia Maison Française, New York University-Institute of Fine Arts
ART CENTERS & NON-PROFIT SPACES: The Artist’s Institute, The Kitchen, The Drawing Center, Danspace Project/Saint Marks Church, Artists Space, Le Consortium, castillo/corrales, Silberkuppe, The James Gallery, Open School East, The Council, Glass Bead, Performing Arts Forum, Forever & Today, Inc, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Museum of American Art
COMMERCIAL GALLERIES & PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS: 303 Gallery, Josée Bienvenu Gallery with Hervé Bize Gallery, Andrew Kreps Gallery, TWAAS (Thea Westreich Art Advisory), Dominique Levy Gallery with Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery
PUBLISHERS, MEDIA & PRODUCTION COMPANIES : Les presses du réel, La Dispute/France Culture
SPONSORS
ART2 is generously supported by Air France, the Florence Gould Foundation, Fondation de France, Pommery and Van Cleef & Arpels.
ABOUT
THE CULTURAL SERVICES OF THE FRENCH EMBASSY provides a platform for exchange and innovation between French and American artists, intellectuals, educators, students, the tech community, and the general public. Based in New York City, Washington D.C., and eight other cities across the US, the Cultural Services develops the cultural economy by focusing on six principal fields of action: the arts, literature, cinema, the digital sphere, French language and higher education. www.frenchculture.org
INSTITUT FRANÇAIS is in charge of implementing France’s cultural action abroad. Under the supervision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its role is to act as the conduit for a new, more ambitious “diplomacy of influence”, within the framework of French governmental policies and priorities. It will help to promote French influence abroad through greater dialogue with foreign cultures, while responding to the needs of France via a policy of listening, partnership and openness to other cultures. www.institutfrancais.com
FRENCH MINISTRY OF CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION aims to make the major works of humanity - and especially those of France - accessible to the largest number of people possible. As such, it maintains a policy of protection and of development of all components of French cultural heritage. It supports the creation of works of art, the development of the artistic and cultural education of children and young adults, and the establishment of local and global cultural initiatives. The ministry focuses on bolstering culture-related governmental policy and it contributes to the evolution of new technologies for sharing cultural creation and heritage. It implements, in conjunction with other related ministries, the actions of the State destined to ensure the influence throughout the world of French culture and artistic creation. It contributes to cultural initiatives outside of France and to initiatives relating to the establishment of French cultural initiatives throughout the world.
www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr
FACE (French American Cultural Exchange) is an American nonprofit organization, chartered by the state of New York and dedicated to nurturing French-American relations through innovative international projects in the arts, education, and cultural exchange. In partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, FACE administers grant programs and projects in the performing and visual arts, cinema, publication and translation, secondary and higher education. www.facecouncil.org
MEDIA CONTACT
FITZ & CO
Rebecca Taylor
Tel: 212-627-1455212-627-1455 x 258
E: rebecca.taylor@fitzandco.com
Different venues - New York