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12/10/2006

Betes de Style

Musee de design et d'arts appliques contemporains - mudac, Lausanne

The thematic exhibitions regularly programmed by the mudac since its opening in 2000 have tackled the most diverse subjects: the world of inflatables (“Air en forme", 2000), camouflage (“Cache-cache camouflage", 2002), shoes (“Chausse's-croise's", 2003), recycling (“Recycling design", 2003) and body extensions (“Body extensions", 2004-05). This multidisciplinary approach addresses themes in a focused manner and explores contemporary creation in fields that extensive research has revealed to be pertinent: object design, graphic art, advertising and the plastic arts.

In 2006, this dialogue invokes the animal world and its constantly increasing place in contemporary society.

Since time immemorial, the relationships between man and animal have given shape to multiple objects and works of art. For some years now we have been witnessing a spectacular resurgence of creativity among designers and stylists, while artists have regularly kept the subject alive with emblematic, sometimes explosive works. The interdisciplinary approach permits us to put this copious output into perspective by choosing a critical point of view with multiple entrances and viewpoints.
A vast panorama grouping together several hundred objects and works by more than 100 creators from all countries, "Betes de style" opens the door to numerous fantasies, asks disturbing questions about the unbridled production of objects created “for" animals and, we hope, revives the debate about the challenges of this troubling yet stimulating relationship with our oldest fellow traveller.

By focusing on seven sets of themes placing the animal under the microscope like so many stylistic devices, "Betes de Style" makes the interdisciplinary approach its own and presents the animal in all its guises, from animal representation to the animal as representation.
The seven “acts" that make up the exhibition permit visitors to stroll round and ask themselves about the true needs of our dear friends; our need to train, tame and dominate; the passion that makes us choose forms mimicking certain animals and that we integrate into the structure of our lives; our desire to ward off death through trophies or other forms of taxidermy; and finally, our thirst to produce innumerable objects in our own image to enhance the life of the animals who accompany us, follow us or precede us.

The exhibition proposes an open dialogue, in a mirror play that reactivates the ancestral dialectic in which the animal imposes itself as an essential otherness in mankind’s self-questioning.

Artists and designers:
Pierre-Philippe Freymond, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Nele Waldert, Robert Gligorov, James Mollison, Oleg Kulik, James Balog Nicolas Darrot, James Auger, Bill Burns, Elio Caccavale, Werner Reiterer, Wim Delvoye, Annika Larsson, Rosemarie Trockel, Julia Lohmann, Radi Designers, Wieki Somers, Cini Boeri, Mats Broberg & Johan Ridderstrale, Pascal Bernier, Nicolas Darrot, Systematic, Alain Huck, Radi Designers, Jennifer Yoko Olson, Patrick Jullien , Gregoire Zueger, CATNAP, Matali Crasset, Marco Morosini, ATYPYK, GOYARD, JUNON DE BAVOLLE, WANIMO

CHANTAL PRODHOM AND MAGALI MOULINIER, CURATORS OF THE EXHIBITION

-ACT I
Animal mundi

The opening exhibits serve as a prologue and as a symbolic reminder of Nature, of origins, mythology, taboos. The highly interpretative universe produced here by the works presented sets the tone for the exhibition. Drawing both from make-believe and from the caustic imagination, they act as a counterpoint for fundamental questions. Of these works which put the animal into play, none aims to provide us with answers: the “animal of the world" remains entire in its complexity. Above all here, they call on us, as “rational animals", to shift the focus away from ourselves and lay the foundations for this disturbing man/animal relationship, creating new relationships and different viewpoint levels.

-ACT IIThe
Animal’s Voice

The animal is given its voice in a large gallery offering an empathetic point of view through the contribution of works by artists and designers who try to approach the specific features and integrity of animals as best they can. This important section positions itself from the viewpoint of the “unverifiable", since just below the surface floats the debate regarding the animal’s awareness, its soul, its real needs, that has never been resolved since Aristotle and Descartes. The common denominator in these works: the attempt to go in the direction of the animal, in its defence, to recognise that it has an independent way of life over and beyond our anthropocentristic projections. Here, animal habitat, protection, defences, character and expressiveness are addressed in the plurality of perspectives of artists and designers who, while integrating animals into their work, explore possible approaches to them.
A paradigmatic work, if ever there was one, of this hypothetical animal viewpoint is the video Waiting for High Water by Jana Sterbak (2005): the triple projection presents the actual vision of a dog, which has cameras on its back documenting its movements “for us". The photographic medium is amply invoked here, and this section is somewhat reminiscent of the portrait gallery as encountered in museums and the homes of collectors. Animals envisaged, presented in portraiture, or surprising “family pictures", polysemous “cliche's" that do not directly echo any precise iconology since the codes here are cultural and perceptive. Imagining the inherent needs of animals, “verifiable" in default of being the truth, formulating functional responses: the presence of certain designers acts as a counterpoint. The fruit of observation or findings, the prototypes or objects presented here are rooted in the “shared" reality of man and beast. Protection and defence, to-ings and fro-ings between the needs of humans and animals, even between animal species, the viewpoints alternate and switch. Peeping through, far from allegory or fiction, one sees totally new scenarios in which numerous creations prepare the “post-animal" ground in the most disturbing reality, in a way that is now visionary and empathetic, now provocative.

-ACT III
Training, Taming, Dominating

The animals that we encounter here are, to varying degrees, at the service of mankind. From the utilised animal to the utilitarian animal produced by our needs as human beings and not living according to its nature, down to the animal as representation, experienced through the prism of its master’s codes and scenarios. The instrumentalisation is obvious and the suggestions proposed often abrasive: between laughter and indignation, power and domination, man imposes himself here as the great manipulator and the animal assumes, in turn, the different roles assigned to it. This section is intended to tackle figurative, fantasy manipulation and address the current scientific experimental reality by means of certain critical concepts. Other composite creatures or installations of stuffed animals, in radical works, remind us of deformities and anomalies, like the “accidents" due to all forms of manipulation, whether formal, literal or technological.

-ACT IV
Zoomorphism

Design, architecture, furniture, containers, lighting: this section concentrates on the animal references that are found in a large proportion of present-day production, where the representation and staging of animals testify to their power of fascination in the creative imagination of the home. In a rich repertoire of forms, the works and objects on display make up a plural aesthetic that reminds us at every step of the look, the particular features, the visual or chromatic wealth of birds, cows, rabbits or gorillas. An animal mimesis which undergoes parallel developments, in the forms that design assigns to it. But in every case, one can still see the animal in them, even if all that is left behind are artificial traces and substitutes for that animality that no longer has any place in our modern domestic world.

-ACT V
The Animal and the End

Here, trophies symbolise the different forms of ultimate appropriation when all chips are down. The treatment reserved for domestic animals is clearly distinguished from that reserved for animals in the wild or reared through animal husbandry -hunting and slaughtering bearing death within themselves as an ineluctable rule, excluding any possible afterlife. This theme wishes to record the paradoxes of present-day society, in which man is simultaneously capable of love and of unthinkable “bestiality" towards animals and inflicts on them brutalities that might be said to mimic the violent relationships he entertains with his peers. A lot of space here is devoted to trophies, designers and artists using “misappropriation" of materials in order to better deconstruct mankind’s contradictory attitude towards animals through a sort of animal “vanity". Even more ascerbic, certain works testify to the way in which artists manage, with the aid of the “pinned" animal, to shift the subject matter to other types of relationship, whereby the animal, even “frozen" in death, still acts as a powerful catalyst of decidedly human realities.

-ACT VI
The Shop

This section presents the copious output by human beings “for" domestic animals, a panoply of objects (garments, accessories, toys, housing) created for them to make them resemble us. It offers a vast selection of objects conceived by designers, stylists or produced directly in-house by branded products. This panoply makes one dizzy, the range is so rich and so resonant with a thousand cravings, fantasies and extensions of desires… all human. A passion, a fashion phenomenon opening all the floodgates of the imagination and provoking derivatives regarding the hypothetical needs of our “companions" like so many anthropomorphic projections modelled on our own. Certain propositions analyse in a focused manner the criteria that permit man and animal to live together under the same roof. The resulting products, in practice, facilitate everyday rapprochement.
Useful? Futile? Beyond moral judgement, this section, supported by other sources such as advertising, documentaries and articles, aims to show how the animal itself has become a product of mass consumption. It brings to the fore the shift in certain commercial challenges which, after children, increasingly invoke these charming little creatures.

-ACT VII
Speech

In fine, because of the choice of works, this exhibition has an essentially visual commentary. A silent and wordless presentation, in which just a few background noises or “rumblings" escape from certain videos or from Nicolas Darrot’s mechanical animal Le Souillot (2005). We wanted to keep the human voice in the background and silence the speech that is so often invoked as a possible line of demarcation between man and beast. The only work to infringe this decision is the video Language by Alain Huck (2005), in which the artist endlessly recites names of animals, without apparent hierarchy or classification. A flood of words which then leads us to breathing, the animated, the living - qualities that are indisputably shared by animal and human alike. The artist, through the physical effort of his body, is perhaps telling us here about the animal being behind the words.
Screeches from budgerigars temporarily housed at the museum, hidden out of sight, remind us that animals are not just objects or products but will always be beings of flesh and blood, living creatures. Arranged in the four corners of galleries, small mounds of Poils de chien (Dog hairs, 2005) by Gre'goire Zuger fashion an animal of random forms, made and unmade at the pleasure of our representations.

The catalogue Betes de Style follows the order in which the works are presented at the mudac and the 7-act structure.
Texts by Silvana Annicchiarico, curator of the permanent collection of Italian design, Palazzo del Triennale, Milan / James Auger, artist and designer / Daniel Cherix, Museum of Zoology and University of Lausanne / Pascal Rousseau, professor of art history, University of Lausanne / Chantal Prod'Hom, director of the mudac, and Magali Moulinier, co-curator of the exhibition.
"Betes de Style"
A co-edition by 5 Continents E'ditions / mudac
Bilingual, French - English
160 pages, 210 colour illustrations
Retail price:
45 Swiss Francs / 30 €

Illustrations on cover page (from left to right): Systematic, Daino (detail), 2005, and Nicolas Darrot, Le Souillot (detail), 2005

Event Performances of Fight-Club by the artist Ste'phane Sautour at 6:45pm and 8pm. : two Aibo (Sony) dog robots modified for “combat".

Guided tours Saturday 28 October 2006 at 11:15am. with Magali Moulinier, cocurator of the exhibition Saturday 27 January 2007 at 11:15am. With Chantal ProdHom, director of the mudac

Workshops Children from 6 years of age: Wednesdays 25 October, 8 and 22 November, from 3pm. to 5pm.
Families: Saturday 18 November from 3pm. to 5pm. and Sundays 22 October and 5 November from 11am. to 1pm.
Adults: Sunday 26 November from 11am. to 1pm.
Advanced booking essential.

In parallel The exhibitions Les plus beaux livres suisses 2005, from 13 October to 5 November 2006, and Mdvanii "ceci n’est pas une poupe'e", BillyBoy* & Lala, from 17 November 2006 to 11 February 2007

Press liaison Magali Moulinier or Susanne Hilpert, curators.
Tel. +41 21 315 25 30 or e-mail: magali.moulinier@lausanne.ch - susanne.hilpert-stuber@lausanne.ch

Private view Thursday, 12 October 2006, from 6pm.

mudac, Muse'e de design et d'arts applique's contemporains
Pl. de la Cathe'drale 6, 1005 Lausanne
Opening hours Tues-Sun 11am.- 6pm., Mon closed
Special opening hours Open 24 December and 31 December 2006 from 11am. to 4pm. / Closed 25 December 2006 and 1 January 2007

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