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23/5/2014

Two artists

Air de Paris, Paris

At first sight Lily Van Der Stokker's work seems to display a certain irony, but what ultimately emerges is a kind of irreverence. This distancing – this conceptual detachment – underlies the enthusiastically espoused, chromatically acidic flower power of wall paintings like Happy, Friendly Love, Kissy and Wonderful and the sardonic optimism of I’m Ugly, How Sad for You, How Pitiful and What a Rude Way to Treat Artists. Impatient with the pecking orders and classifications of art and decoration, she stands the famed Minimalist maxim 'Less is More' on its head and comes up with the much more apt 'The More the Better'.

For instance her Hello Chair – source of the exhibition's title – temporarily covers a large part of Air de Paris' walls and the floor with its welcoming message, but installations like these turn out to be not all that ephemeral: they might be painted over when the show closes, but they live on right there in the gallery walls. So these three new works have come here to hook up with their predecessors, themselves specially created for Air de Paris.

In a recent interview Lily Van Der Stokker mentioned the belief in modernism that sprang up among artists – most of them New York-based – in the early 90s; it went on to become slightly superficial and dropped out of fashion, but if modernism has stopped being the driving force for artists, what do they have left? With its vision of a joyously static future, No Improvement, No Progress seems to challenge modernism's inherent notions of progress and regression. And last but not least there's the comforting, convivial Don’t Worry, Nothing Will Happen, a touch of consolation from the artist, perhaps, for an art world suffering from the constant chase after novelty. Or could it be that Lily Van Der Stokker just wants to show us the special affection she feels for the word 'nothing'?

Ben Kinmont’s exhibition at Air de Paris will present new material from two of his most ambitious on-going projects: On becoming something else and Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family. Both works investigate the boundaries between what can be considered an art practice and a non-art practice and how one can sustain such an activity.

Begun in 1998, Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family consists of an antiquarian bookselling business specializing in early books in gastronomy. The project has been shown in many spaces dedicated to contemporary art 1 and numerous international book fairs2.

For the current exhibition, Kinmont will show Grimod’s Meditations, a shelf for Ben Kinmont Bookseller. Presented for the first time, the shelf is taken from an engraving of Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière (1758-1837) that was printed as a frontispiece in the fourth volume of his seminal work the Almanach des gourmands3. In the image, Grimod writes in front of a trapezoidal shelf piled high with food. Grimod was the first restaurant critic in history and it is unknown if the shelf represented in the engraving ever existed or if it was simply imagined by Dunant, the engraver.

From the same project, Kinmont will be issuing a new catalogue entitled “Gastronomy. A Catalogue of books & manuscripts on cookery, rural and domestic economy, health, gardening, perfume, & the history of taste. 1530-2013.” Printed letterpress and offering 114 items for sale, the catalogue is published in an edition of 600 copies by the Antinomian Press. Copies will be available during the exhibition.

The second major work in the exhibition will be On becoming something else. Begun in 2000, the project considers artists who have left the art world in the pursuit of their art practice. After a private event organized with Air de Paris at the restaurant Chapeau Melon, the first public activation of On becoming something else was for the Nouveau Festival at Centre Pompidou, both in 2009. In that iteration Kinmont worked with seven different chefs to represent seven biographical paragraphs about artists who had left the art world. Each recipe was written as an homage to a particular artist and the dish was offered on the restaurant menu of the given chef4. In this way, visitors to the Pompidou could take a menu and then travel to the restaurants to eat the representation of the paragraphs.

During the current exhibition, the On becoming something else archive will be on display and available for handling. Presented on a table designed by Kinmont, the archive contains hundreds of objects including correspondence; sketches; documentary photographs taken by Bruno Serralongue; audio interviews; drawings; a box of multiples made by San Francisco high school students; recipes; and letterpress broadsides.

Also being issued within the context of On becoming something else is the first bilingual edition of La Plastique culinaire, written by the famous anarchist and art historian Félix Fénéon. In the essay, Fénéon discusses the history of the pièce montée, recipes and representation, and makes an argument for ephemerality in artistic practices. Translated by Rachel Stella and with a preface by Kinmont and an introduction by Fabien Vallos, copies of the essay will be available during the exhibition.

Immage Lily Van Der Stokker, Hello Chair (design for wall painting), 2009

Opening 24th May from 6pm to 9pm

Air De Paris,
32 rue Louise Weiss, Paris, France
Tues to satur from 11 am to 7 pm. Free admission.

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