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29/6/2006

Untouchable

Villa Arson, Nice

The Transparency Ideal

“We live for the most part within enclosed spaces. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is in a sense a product of our architecture. If we wish to raise our culture to a higher level, we are forced for better or worse to transform our architecture. And this will be possible only if we remove the enclosed quality from the spaces within which we live. This can be done only through the introduction of glass architecture that lets the sunlight and the light of the moon and stars into our rooms not merely through a few windows, but simultaneously through the greatest possible number of walls that are made entirely of glass- colored glass. The new environment that we shall create must bring with it a new culture".
Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, Ed. Xavier Barral - Villa Arson (traduction : DR)

Untouchable (The Transparency Ideal) is an exhibition based on the free adaptation of Paul Scheerbart’s 1914- manifesto, Glass Architecture. This visionary text written by the German poet and journalist claims the coming of a transparent and coloured architecture, fundament of a moral and political transformation of the individual and the masses.
Based on the movement between transparency, reflection and opacity as a script for the 20th century (in terms of aesthetics, but as well of economy, politics, and psychoanalytic interpretation on the constitution of the subject), the exhibition will focus on the visible and invisible links between the dematerialisation of economy and of the work of art. The fascination for the aesthetics of service economy in contemporary art works, the eroticism and hygienism of transparency, constitute an aspect of the utopia of transparency that will be shown with its collateral dystopia: the opacity of economical void, the frustration of glass separation, the confinement of the subject.
Transparency, opacity and reflection: their permanent combination is a secret story of the 20th Century, that the exhibition will attempt to make sensible, in a movement from total visibility to black-out, from glare to dusk, from purity to contamination and break, from appearance to disappearance.
Francois Piron & Guillaume De'sanges

Work method
The notions of transparency, opacity and reflection constitute the basic linking factor of the project, and not its theme. While the exhibition rests on a historical vision, it does not consist in making this vision explicit. Being neither linear nor discursive, it offers formal and conceptual juxtapositions, based on representations of the oblique utopia of transparency in certain contemporary practices. While this notion comprises architecture and more largely the evolution of Western society during the twentieth century, the exhibition evokes it through works of art, and gives privilege to those questioning and multiplying the stakes, rather than illustrating them. The exhibition program does not consist in assembling artistic practices, the transparency of which would be the “subject", but in a visit during which the works maintain their multiple meanings, escaping any kind of theme, and making the viewpoints more complex instead of making them explicit.

Scenario
Paul Scheerbart’s manifesto, an aesthetic and political program, which seems to have come out of a dream as much as out of a nightmare, constitutes the invisible literary basis of the project. However, the exhibition deviates from the text, sticking to its excess while revealing its dark and dystopic side at the same time. Regularly, references will be made to the text, in the form of quotations and will punctuate the exhibition (“More colored light!", “Elimination of vermin", etc."). These echoes, taken out of the context of Scheerbart’s emphatic and visionary poetry, deviate from the visual proposals of the exhibition, rather than merely highlighting or subtitling these, and multiply the possible connotations.

Construction
The segmentation of the exhibition corresponds to three essential notions, indirectly resulting from a utopia / dystopia dialectic of transparency: Eroticism, Hygiene, and Service Sector. Each one of these categories, intermingling and answering one another, is developed through an association game, using a dialectic logic among the works themselves or on the scale of the exhibition rooms: from utopia to dystopia, from prospective positivism to material dilemma, from the construction of a transparent or reflecting world to its darkening, its perversion, its collapse or its disappearance. The visit starts with an introductory room dealing with the positivist celebration of transparency, and ends with an ensemble evoking opacity, collapse and disappearance.

Historical perspectives
The selection of works is that of recent works, which aim at interrogating the way the question of transparency, present throughout twentieth century culture (from Walter Benjamin to Mies van der Rohe, and then Dan Graham), has been updated and given a new interpretation today. Some works considered emblematic of certain movements of the last century (Minimal, Conceptual, Performance art) will also be presented because of their artistic pertinence, but also to represent historical markers demonstrating the survival of such preoccupations.

Slideshow
A slideshow by the curators will also be presented alongside the exhibition. It will associate works of art, design, historical and contemporary architecture to a reading of extracts from Glass Architecture. The slideshow will offer a proliferating panorama of transparency throughout twentieth century creation.

Exhibition organisation
Introduction: A celebration of transparency
Transparency. Utopia. Vision. Purity. As an introduction to the exhibition, the Galerie Carre'e of la Villa Arson is dedicated to the projection of an ensemble of works by Belgian artist David Claerbout. Theses works, presented in a specific and unprecendented display, specially conceived for the exhibition, announce the exhibition program through a celebration of transparency, while evoking connected phenomena, such as appearance, blindness, separation and frustration. The first rooms of the exhibition, including works by Rodney Graham, Larry Bell, Dan Graham, Sarah Morris and Laurent Montaron, offer different readings of a certain positivism in terms of the relation to transparency.

Chapter 1: Service sector > Workaholism > Economic vacuum
Functionalism. Productivity. Start-Up. Shop window. Data Base.
In architecture, as well as in design, glass and transparency materialize emblematically the ideological and idealistic context of the boom of the service industry, by specifically responding to this sector: intangibility, dematerialization, legibility, dialogue. In art, the evolution of forms follows a troubling parallel track. Critical mimicry or unconfessed fascination? Once the merchandise / studio work has been evacuated, the decor of the activity becomes more than ever the subject of the undertaking (in the service sector and in the arts) and develops materially. Forms, colors, messages function like new agents of identity defining a service style exploiting transparency and reflection, but also the repressed disappearance of the merchandise and of the worker.

Chapter 2: Eroticism > Voyeurism > Frustration
Narcissism. Humidity. Peep Show. Tears.
Transparency is by definition linked to the idea of exhibition; its counterpart, voyeurism, leads to frustration, due to distance and the anonymous gaze. We touch with our eyes. The falsely bashful blurring and (narcissistic) reflection are more frustrated modes of eroticism. Liquid transparency, condensation from the inside towards the outside, steam, and oozings are many possible reactions to this troubled fascination. The eroticism of transparency evokes a fundamental stake in art, in its relation to the spectator/voyeur: the frustration due to the unreachable object, un- possessed, “lost", triggering the libido and creating fantasy.

Chapter 3: Hygiene > keeping at a distance > Repulsion
Voice screen. Decontamination chambers. Asepsis. Anesthesia.
For reasons of hygiene, the transparent membrane comes between bodies. Practical, invisible, it does not prevent a gaze but puts a stop to gestures. Loss of contact. Transparency, which apparently would seem to bring together, keeps at a distance in fact, exposes, frames, controls the subject, even sets him aside, pushes him back, condemns him. The consequence of this oblique ideal: phobia of anything organic, of contamination. Generalized analgesia. But paradoxically: this hygiene reduction that isolates from others, creates in turn new conditions for putrefaction, debasement, self-vileness by confinement.

End/Fade-out: Disappearance > Collapse
Vanity. Opacity. Loss. Going astray. Vampires.
The counterpart of transparency: the loss of identity. Blindness, opacity, negative image: negation of one’s self, infinite mirror effects. Schizophrenia. Windows get dirty and become opaque. Mirrors brake to pieces. Until they no longer reflect anything. The subject disappears.

Artists:

Ignasi Aballi
Boris Achour
Martin Arnold
Art & Language
Larry Bell
David Claerbout
Philippe Durand
Harun Farocki
Hans Peter Feldmann
Michel Francois
Jonah Freeman
Ryan Gander
Dora Garcia
Liam Gillick
Douglas Gordon
Dan Graham
Rodney Graham
Graham Gussin
Hans Haacke
Damien Hirst
Pierre Huyghe
Corey McCorkle
Laurent Montaron
Sarah Morris
Man Ray
Anri Sala
Joe Scanlan
Philippe Thomas
Rosemarie Trockel
Hannah Wilke
Heimo Zobernig

Curators

Guillaume De'sanges (b. 1971) is an art critic and a curator. Member of the editorial board of Trouble, he collaborates with the magazines Exit Express and Exit Book (Madrid). In 2004, he worked with Thomas Hirschhorn (the 24h Foucault project, and Muse'e Pre'caire Albinet) and organized the Exhibition Pick-Up at Public>, Paris (with Martin Arnold, Omer Fast, Bertrand Georges, Joseph Grigely, Thomas Hirschhorn, Claude Le'veque, Dominique Petitgand, Beat Streuli). He also teaches at Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Clermont-Ferrand and is general secretary of the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers

Francois Piron (b.1972) is an art critic and curator. He is co-director of Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers and founder and board-member of Trouble journal. He teaches theory and art history in the National Art School of Lyon. In 2005, he has curated the exhibition Invisible Script (A Letter to Morel) at W139 art centre, Amsterdam, and has been advisor for Altadis company collection, for which he curated an exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He has recently edited and published the first monographic books of Atlas Group and Boris Achour, and has contributed to catalogues of artists Scoli Acosta, Ibon Aranberri and Dora Garci'a.

General coordination
Eric Mangion, Director of the National Contemporary Art Centre - Villa Arson

Catalogue
Bilingual, 270 pages, black&white and colour, Xavier Barral Editions Created in parallel to the exhibition project, the publication Intouchable. The Transparency Ideal and Glass Architecture is more than a mere catalogue. It constitutes a counterpoint and places the theme of the exhibition into historical and theoretical perspectives.
It gathers:
-original texts, written specifically with regard to the issues arising out of the oblique ideal of transparency in twentieth century art history.
-a complete reedition of Paul Scheerbart’s landmark manifesto, Glass Architecture (1910).
-photographs of the exhibiton, linked with reproductions of key artworks of the 20th century, dealing with the transparency)

Image: Pierre Huyghe, 9 perfect minutes, 2000. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris-New York

Opening on the 30th of June 2006. Director: Eric Mangion

National Contemporary Art Center of Villa Arson
20 rue Stephen Lie'geard 06105 Nice Cedex 2

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