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16/3/2007

The Eventual

Frac Bourgogne, Dijon

Artists: Francis Alÿs, Johanna Billing, Matthew McCaslin, Adrian Piper

Curator: Eva González-Sancho

The group exhibition The Eventual is the brainchild of Eva González-Sancho, director of the Burgundy Regional Contemporary Art Collection [FRAC], and brings together four works by Francis Alÿs Untitled ( New York, September 2000), 2001, Johanna Billing (Where She Is At, 2001), Matthew McCaslin (The Walk Threw the Woods, 2002), and Adrian Piper (Bach Whistled, 1970). These works suggest differing landscapes in which an event or situation may occur at any time, greatly altering them. The works create a state of suspension, interruption, and deliberate unfinishedness, in which nothing seems to be happening, and nothing is explicitly said, either, but where, for precisely these reasons, everything becomes possible. These four works, recently acquired for the Burgundy FRAC, brought together incorporate video and sound in the exhibition area like so many ways of suggesting to visitors that they grasp a present state . By different devices, the works dilate the here-and-now, and come up with its essence, honing both consciousness and experience.

The ephemeral, the fleeting, and the transitory are the pivotal principle of the work produced by Francis Alÿs (born in Antwerp in 1959). Untitled (New York, September 2000), produced in 2001, is a video installation showing a picture of Manhattan, a tight shot of tall buildings in which many vertical and horizontal grids are overlaid.

The video Where She Is At (2001) by Johanna Billing (born in 1973 in Jonkoping, Sweden) shows a young woman standing on a diving board in the grip of a lengthy shall-I or-shan’t-I. She captures a moment of uncertainty and anxiety, as caught in the rather ordinary act of diving. Involved here is a moment of doubt and questioning when faced with a free choice which a person must make on her own.

With A Walk Threw the Woods (2002), Matthew McCaslin creates an environment using the aluminium. Just as he reveals the presence of flows and wires behind the electrical equipment in his early works, here it is the structure of the walls, and their framework, which is uncovered. The walls are invisible, and it becomes possible to pass through them, and even live in them.

Bach Whistled, by Adrian Piper, is a real performance, no less. The piece lasts 45 minutes. And these minutes are taxing. It is not just sound and space that are presented here. Adrian Piper’s gradually exhausted and breathless body is just as present as Bach’s music.

These different densities of the present offered by the works in the show The Eventual are so many ways of asserting the work as a way of being in the world, through the different forms in which narrative and performance have been redeployed, after the radical breaks of the 1970s, less for their aesthetic dimension than for the way in which they address the spectator.

Text by Claire Legrand / Gwénola Regruto
Translated by Simon Pleasance

Image: Francis Alys, 2001, installation sonore, vidéoprojection, Dimensions 5 mn. en boucle. Achat à Peter Kilchmann Gallery (Zurich - Suisse) en 2006

Supporting Bodies: The Minister of Culture (DRAC : Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Burgundy), the Regional Council of Burgundy and the General Council of the Côte d’Or.

Burgundy Regional Contemporary Art Collection (Burgundy FRAC) / 49 rue de Longvic / F-21000 Dijon
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday from 2 pm to 6 pm (except April 28th and June 09th)
Guided Tour: Saturday 12th May, 2007 – 3 pm – free entry.

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