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20/6/2001

Un art populaire

Fondation Cartier, Paris

I realize that certain imagery is hard for other cultures to comprehend, but, I also believe that when art, whether it be folk or contemporary, is dealing with very basic human experience, the language is universal."
Roxanne Swentzell

Presented by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain from June 21 to November 4, 2001, the exhibition un art populaire arose out of a series of encounters: with three artists in a pueblo near Santa Fe, New Mexico; with some singular Brazilian artists producing unique and original work in a traditional context where folk art remains a vital presence; and with a number of artists from the contemporary scene whose work involves a meditation on popular art, appropriating its forms and emphasising the interplay between this and so-called "high art."

Offering a vision of popular art today, the show features over 150 works by some fifty artists from Europe, Africa, Asia and North and South America, most of whom are being seen for the first time in France. It highlights the modernity of work done in this area, and shows how it infuses and is in turn reflected by contemporary art.

Often anthropomorphic, a mirror of man and his activity, popular art is all about other people-about community. It has a quality of generosity. Linked to tradition, to the transmission of ancestral know-how, it is characterised by its emphasis on the skilled hand, on the finished object. It is an art that takes its time. The inventive relation to making is what links Marcos Cardoso who weaves pictures out of threaded cigarette ends, Tim Hawkinson, with his cobbled-together clocks, and Liza Lou, who creates a world that is entirely covered with sequins. With its terracotta pieces, colourful mouth-blown glass, assemblages of recuperated junk and sculpted and painted wood, the emphasis in un art populaire is very much on the object. The limited choice of paintings is precise and selective, with canvases by "Le Peintre Moke, a folk artist" from Congo, and lacquer pieces by the Luo Brothers. While these pieces of popular art have an obvious aesthetic interest, we are also struck by their social dimension, their relation to life, to the real and to the present. Always without irony, without the slightest distance or nostalgia, they have the immediacy of direct observation. Witness the ever-new terracotta pieces by Roxanne Swentzell, which express an amazed awareness of their Indian origins.

More prominent in societies which, even today, are organised around the notion of community, popular or folk art draws its meaning from its collective context. A direct outgrowth of community, it is the receptacle and means of expression and dissemination of memory, traditional practices and religions. But it also reflects contemporary concerns. In these cultures where art is often the offshoot of social practices, the distinction between popular art and Art is often meaningless. Brazil has one of the richest and most creative folk art traditions, reflecting the history and traditions that engendered it. This art often tends towards social and political satire. With its everyday scenes and its religious themes-and an artist such as Zé Caboclo, with his Flight into Egypt and images of modest trades, will move easily between the two-it constitutes a fundamental dimension of Brazilian culture. A renowned master ceramist, Vitalino has influenced the younger generations with the diversity of his subjects (from meals to processions), the subtlety of his colours and his visual inventiveness. While the artists presented here may share common regional tendencies-Ana do Baú and Isabel Mendès da Cunha, for example, are both from Minas Gerais-they are noteworthy above all for their singularity and originality, for the ways in which they have managed to elaborate unique and personal works within a group identity. Thus while men at work is a recurrent theme in the art of Antônio de Oliveira and Luiz Antonio, music and festivity are also prominent, particularly in the lively musical and erotic scenes depicted by Adalton Lopes with their wild sambas. Generous and joyous, folk art often seems to express the particular pleasure of handling materials, of creating a world out of so little, and also of recapturing something that goes all the way back to childhood.

Folk art is collective, in the sense that a social or ethnic group is collective, but also in its family grounding. For example, Virgil Ortiz is the youngest in a family of artists from New Mexico. He is developing his own language while perpetuating the traditional forms of Cochiti pottery. His remarkable figures with painted and tattooed bodies, and sometimes with two heads or three legs, are renewing the aesthetics of ceramics in the pueblos around Santa Fe in a way that makes them emblematic of the young generation of Native Americans. This group coherence can also be a generational trait, as attested by the works of Takashi Murakami and Bome, which evoke Manga characters and the small figures swapped by teenagers in the streets of Tokyo.

Often hastily associated with unchanging traditions, hereditary procedures and fixed forms, folk art in its most contemporary form is, on the contrary, rich in creativity, invention and renewal. Moving freely from one continent to another and one oeuvre to another, un art populaire brings out the workings of mimesis, homing on the space where different creative fields naturally come together and feed into one another. Witness Mike Kelley's Memory Wares, which take on a reference to Canadian popular tradition. In these pieces covered with buttons, badges and other junk, the artist amplifies the gesture embodied by a piece of folk art found in Toronto. Combining quotations from art history with traditional practices, the ceramics of Diego Romero instil doubt by using objects that seem to refer back to both folk art and high culture. They are in fact a precise reflection of the artist's training, which took him from the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Here and there, anonymous works from Liberia and Bolivia are set alongside sculptures by Calder in a confusing encounter of the spontaneous and creative recycling of found objects and artistic bricolage of genius. un art populaire addresses the idea of the object-its development, and the transformation of the utilitarian object into an aesthetic one. With his painted coffee-makers, statuettes and shells, Alessandro Mendini displaces the everyday object, while Jeff Koons' polished steel sculptures transfigure the everyday. Unknown in France, the work of Arthur Bispo de Rosario proposes a rereading of the history of contemporary art. Working outside the art scene in his isolated cell at the psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro, his mind free of references, he has produced an extraordinarily powerful, varied and radical body of work. Recycling the objects around him, he embroiders his sheets with the threads from his uniform, or makes accumulations of boots or metal cutlery. Sometimes occupying the borders of folk art with Art Brut, outsider art, "modest art," naive art and the art of the insane, the works brought together here cannot be clearly mapped out. They turn their backs on the categories and labels that tend to keep popular art outside the field of contemporary art. And it is this denial of categories that makes popular art modern at a time when the contemporary scene is itself challenging the borders between different creative spheres.

Parfois à la limite de l'art brut, du Folk Art, de l'outsider art, des arts modestes, de l'art naïf ou de l'art des fous, les œuvres rassemblées échappent à une cartographie rigide, tournent le dos aux hiérarchies, aux catégories et aux étiquettes qui tendent à maintenir l'art populaire hors du champ de l'art contemporain. En cette échappée des catégories réside la modernité de l'art populaire face à une scène contemporaine qui elle-même ébranle les frontières entre les domaines de création.

un art populaire brings together little-known artists whose work is being shown in France for the first time, and also includes works specially commissioned from nine artists: Adalton Lopes (Brazil), Chris Burden (United States), Wim Delvoye (Belgium), Gérard Deschamps (France), Tim Hawkinson (United States), Barry McGee (United States), Virgil Ortiz (United States), Diego Romero (United States), Roxanne Swentzell (United States).


The artists

Luiz Antonio, Robert Arneson, Ana do Baú, Arthur Bispo do Rosario, Bome, Luo Brothers, Chris Burden, Marcos Cardoso, Maria de Caruaru, Claude Closky, Riccardo Dalisi, Wim Delvoye, Gérard Deschamps, Manuel Eudócio, Tim Hawkinson, Mike Kelley, Cheik Ledy, Adalton Lopes, Liza Lou, Barry McGee, Heleno Manuel, Isabel Mendès da Cunha, Alessandro Mendini, Moke, Takashi Murakami, Nhô Caboclo, Antônio de Oliveira, Virgil Ortiz, Artavazd Achotowitch Pelechian, John Penor, Diego Holly Romero, Roxanne Swentzell, Maître Vitalino, Zé Caboclo


Every day, except Monday, from 12 am to 8 pm

Fondation Cartier, 261 boulevard Raspail, Paris
Visitors' information, tel. 33 1 42 18 56 51


Press information: Linda Jarton-Chenit assisted by Anne-LAure Bibas
tel.0033142185677

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