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18/5/2007

Five exhibitions

MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum, Leon

MUSAC presents the first “event” in Spain by the French artist Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe
A Time Score

Curators: Agustín Pérez Rubio & Marta Gerveno
Coordination: Sophie Dufour
Venue: Halls 1, 4, 5 & 6, MUSAC

Pierre Huyghe, one of the artists who have most profoundly influenced creative practice in the past decade, presents his first solo show in Spain at MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Under the title A Time Score, the show, conceived as an event, includes both projects that the public will recognize and new productions, whereby a new and different cartography unfolds, enabling visitors to embark on a journey through the past and future of his career, where collective subjectivity, especially copyright, and his commitment to the idea of non-linear time, arise as the true navigation vehicles.

Pierre Huyghe (Paris, 1962), representative of the French Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennial and winner of the Hugo Boss Prize 2002, showed his Celebration Park at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and London’s Tate Modern in 2006 before holding his first solo exhibition in Spain at MUSAC, which comprises projects that have been established as pieces that are fundamental for approaching the artist’s oeuvre —Atari Light Pong, This Is Not A Time For Dreaming and A Journey That Wasn’t—, as well as new productions. They are all intended to celebrate a large event what renders the cartography with which to overview the past and future of Huyghe’s career, where ideas on collective authorship, copyright and non-linear time stand out as authentic protagonists, which could doubtlessly be traced to his earliest experiences in life and art.

During his adolescence, Pierre Huyghe took part in activist cultural movements such as Punk and Anarchy. After finishing secondary school, he enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, where he focused on video editing, photography, design and set design. During the early 80s he began to explore Situationism and public art, and he produced some of his earliest works with the also French artist Claude Closky, known for works addressing the hyper-consumption of advertising symbols. His first projects therefore took on the form of street posters, which he still makes today for some of his events. After finishing his studies, he came into contact with other young French artists such as Xavier Veilhan, Pierre Joseph, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno, with whom he has conceived numerous projects throughout his career. These first indications of collaborationism were to embody one of the fundamental pillars of the construction of his identity as a creator: “collective subjectivity”.

“I…”: collective subjectivity
Over the last decade, the question of collective subjectivity has become all the rage in artistic discourse, specifically in that pertaining to relational art and group projects that reconsider the collective utopias of the 60s as a reaction to the profound discontent with authorship and the monumentalization of artistic objects during the 80s. The collective impulse soon became visible in the artistic practices of creators such as Tiravanija, Parreno, Gonzalez-Foerster and Pierre Huyghe, whose career has been a constant celebration of the “I/We” in detriment to the antagonistic “I/You”; of the “Plural I” instead of “Singular I”.

In 1995 Moral Maze was held at the Dijon Consortium. It was a group show organized by Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, which ended up turning its participants into a social reality, Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Xavier Veilhan founded La Association des temps libérés [The Freed Time Association]. They proposed to extend the duration of the exhibition operation —which led to the association’s first meeting— and become the departure point of a series of projects of indeterminate duration, such as the reopening of a provincial movie theatre or the recovery of an abandoned house. Likewise, Anna Sanders Films was created, a film society including other collaborators such as Charles De Meaux, which has published a magazine and produced projects such as Boy from Mars (2003) by Philippe Parreno, Atomik Park (2003) by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Snow White Lucie (1997) and The Third Memory (2000) by Pierre Huyghe.

Nevertheless, the collective element has not only been a form of practice in Pierre Huyghe’s work, but also its storyline. It is fitting to recall that in 2003 Pierre Huyghe produced Streamside Day Follies for the Dia Art Foundation. This was a production accompanied by the celebration of a festive event and the foundation of a new community called Streamside Knolls. The footage of this event, made by the guests —who inaugurated a new urban settlement in Fishkill, New York, next to the Hudson River—, is part of the film Streamside Day Follies. Streamside Day, in which Huyghe invented a ritual celebration for a new suburban community. The production involved the collaboration of a photographer, a singer, draughtsmen and writers.

“… I do not own…”: copyright
In some way, collaborative creation and therefore collective authorship leads us directly to one of the central features in the work of this French artist: copyright, a controversial issue applicable to any artistic expression we may address and to which we could devote pages and pages. In any case, one could outline the personal way in which Pierre Huyghe, alone and/or in the company of others, “plays” with determination, while not aiming to erase or eliminate the original author, but to offer the opportunity of extending the story’s narrative capacities.

One of the most memorable cases in the artist’s career in this respect is No Ghost Just A Shell. In 1999, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights of a Manga character from K-Works, one of the two companies in Japan specializing in the production of characters for Manga and cartoons. Her name was AnnLee, and she was an anodyne schoolgirl conceived as just another extra. From there, Huyghe and Parreno contacted several artists to invite them to work in an organized way with, on, from or starting with the character: González-Foerster, Gillick, Tiravanija, Pierre Joseph & Mehdi Belhaj-Kacem, François Curlet, Mélik Ohanian, Anna-Lèna Vaney, M/M Paris, Joe Scanlan, Lily Fleury, Richard Philips, Henri Barande, and Angela Bulloch & Imke Wagener were some of them. They released the rights and image of AnnLee so that others could redesign her, give her a voice, psychological capacities, one or several bodies and a background through which to develop. The idea was not to create a new fiction, but to consider the character as a symbol that had been liberated from copyright and could thereafter be capable of expressing its own nature and reality, in short, extending its narrativity. It then became a contemporary fable of collective authorship, with an ever growing number of chapters —one of which, One Million Kingdom (2001), is part of the MUSAC Collection, and has already been shown at the museum—, that ended with the legal transference of the copyright to AnnLee herself, and the celebration of her disappearance —or death— as symbol in December of 2002 in Miami (A Smile Without A Cat) and the exhibition organized by Benjamin Weil at the SFMOMA. To be sure, by purchasing the rights, the artists participated in the copyright economy, but by making this act public and elaborating on it in their works, they interrupted the art world’s silence.

Besides this group project, Huyghe’s artistic production includes other more personal projects along the same lines and focusing on the film industry, such as The Third Memory (2000) and, especially, Snow White Lucie (1997), which revolves around the figure of Lucie Dolène, the woman who dubbed the voice of the leading character of the classic Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in its French version. She appears in it singing “Someday my Prince Will Come”, with her face framed by her silver hair. Through Hyughe’s video she tells us how Disney repeatedly used her performance of this song without her permission, and how she ended up suing the company and finally winning the case. Dolène explains that “when I gave that character my voice I was Snow White, but when I see the movie today I get a strange feeling. It’s my voice, but it’s as if it no longer belonged to me, but to the character and the story…”

“… The Garden of Forking Paths”: non-linear time
Fictions (1944) by Jorge Luis Borges, is perhaps one of the most representative books of the work and style of this universal Argentine. It includes some of his most famous tales –though calling them tales, for lack of a more appropriate term, is just a way of designating this masterful and suggestive mix of erudition, imagination, ingenious, intellectual profoundness and metaphysical concerns. Of all those included, there is one, The Garden Of Forking Paths, that could very well be a meeting point and dialogue between both worlds, Borges’ and Pierre Huyghe’s. “The garden of forking paths” —says the tale— “is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time; this recondite cause prohibits its mention. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it. That is the tortuous method preferred, in each of the meanderings of his indefatigable novel, by the oblique Ts’ui Pên. (…) your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.” And he adds that in the work of Ts’ui Pên —the true protagonist of Borges’ tale— all endings occur; each one is the departure point for other forks. “In some, the paths of this labyrinth converge; for example, you arrive to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend.”

With this material it is easier to understand the French artist’s “forked” career, or the apparently “contradictory” artistic labyrinth in which he occasionally seems to submerge us, and specifically, to return to what we took as a departure point: the need for a collective subjectivity wherein to celebrate the polyphony of voices inside every one of us, our acts, stories and realities. This may be a tool for understanding works such as This Is Not A Time For Dreaming (2004) and A Journey That Wasn’t (2005).

In This Is Not A Time For Dreaming two times converge, 1959 and 2003, in addition to two characters whose meeting seems impossible in linear time. In 1959 Harvard University hired the famous architect Le Corbusier to design a building for the Visual Arts Department, to create a symbol of the university’s intellectual aspirations. However, the project did not progress because of problems between the architect and the university administration. The building was finished in 1963 when the architect had already died. In the year 2003 Pierre Huyghe was invited to produce a work to commemorate the building’s 40th anniversary, and the artist encountered the same difficulties the architect had during the production of his project. The two of them appear in the video as puppets in a theatre watched by an audience, presenting their projects and struggling against a ghost-like character who presents all sorts of problems and difficulties for them to carry out their ideas.

A Journey That Wasn’t is perhaps the production that best reflects the French creator’s intricate conception of time. In February, 2005 Huyghe, with other artists —Francesca Grassi, Alexandra Mir, Xavier Veilhan, Jan Chung and Q. Takeki Maeda— embarked on a journey to the Antarctic on the ship Tara –the same one used by the explorers of polar lands Jean-Louis Etienne and Peter Drake. The mission was to investigate the rumour about a strange creature, a sort of albino penguin that lived on an unknown island off the map that had emerged due to global warming and thawing. In October of that same year, Huyghe transformed New York’s Central Park into a polar landscape where an orchestra, an island and a white penguin coexisted. The event was titled Double Negative and the music was composed by Joshua Cody, who transcribed the cartography of Terra Incognita into musical notation. The filmic journey takes us to other times, future and past, within the career of the French artist, and this is exemplified by the exhibition at the Kunsthaus of Bregenz, L’Expedition Scintillante. A Musical (2002), where the artist explored the plan of an expedition to polar territories —recovered for MUSAC through that disconcerting box of light and smoke that sounded like the Gymnopédie Satie orchestrated by Debusy and which represented Act II of the musical—; or Terra Incognita/Isla Ociosidad (2006), a project of the architecture studio R&Sie(n) —François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaus, Jean Navarro, Camilla Lacadée, Clarisse Labro and Julián Blevarque— together with Huyghe, which creates “another” reality of the island where the albino penguin lives. With A Journey That Wasn’t, like Borges, he proposes to us the possibility of viewing a “temporal labyrinth”, writing a new page without undoing the previous one to make possible a journey to the south that leads us to die in the past.

“I do not own The Garden of Forking Paths”When in 2006, at the exhibition Celebration Park held at the ARC and the Tate Modern, he expressed in neon letters “Fictions ne m’appartient pas” [I do not own Fictions], he seemed to be making a public statement of intentions: the non-possession of Fictions, the denial of fiction. By stating at MUSAC that he does not possess “the garden of forking paths”, he is actually accepting the open-endedness and continuity of his production, by applying the non-linearity to “reality” full of infinite and expanded realities: “In all fiction, every time a man is faced with diverse alternatives, he opts for one and eliminates the others; in that of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he opts —simultaneously— for all of them. He thus creates diverse prospects, diverse times, which also proliferate and fork.”

THE PUBLICATION (OR EVENT ON PAPER): THE QUIXOTE BY PIERRE MENARD
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is another of the tales included in Jorge Luis Borges’ book Fictions. The story begins with a critic’s protest against the omission in a catalogue of the French writer named Pierre Menard, whose major achievement was writing, in the nineteenth century, the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter of the first part of Quixote. The chapters are the same, every word and every comma, as those written originally by Miguel de Cervantes. Nevertheless, the narrator realizes that they are not copies. “He multiplied the drafts; he corrected tenaciously and tore up thousands of hand-written pages. He didn’t let anybody examine them and he made sure that they did not outlive him” […] “Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard […] could exhume and resuscitate” the work. Pierre Huyghe, with Francesca Grassi and Karl Nawrot’s help, will make the existence of Pierre Menard’s masterpiece real and “visible”.

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MUSAC presents for the first time Ángel Marcos’ latest photo project on China

Angel Marcos
China

Coordinator: Helena López Camacho
Venue: Halls 3.1 and 3.2, MUSAC

MUSAC presents Ángel Marcos’ latest photo project, captured during a trip to China in January 2007. This recent production ties in with two of the artist’s most outstanding series: Around the Dream (New York, 2001) and In Cuba (Havana, 2004-06), and it closes a trilogy in which the artist establishes a conversation with the city through advertising and propaganda, in an attempt to project his personal vision of the links between the powers that be, and the realities and desires of the people who inhabit them.

Under the title China, Ángel Marcos (Medina del Campo, Valladolid, 1955) rounds off a trilogy he began six years earlier in New York and continued in Havana in 2004. Though the locations are entirely different, the images revolve around the same conceptual parameter: the conversation between the city’s population and the powers that govern it through advertising and propaganda. Exploring both the city centres and the suburbs of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, the artist captures the contrast between past and present, tradition and modernity through publicity, contrasting architectures and the clash of metropolitan landscapes. The result is a broad-reaching project that includes photography and video; a window onto Angel Marcos’ personal take on today’s China.

Ángel Marcos: his work
Ángel Marcos defines himself as a late-blooming, self-taught artist. Despite working as a professional photographer, he did not venture into the field of art until 1992. On occasion of a commission for the Calderon Theatre (Valladolid, Spain), Viaje por el Teatro Calderón (1992), he resolved to break out of the rigid limitations of formality to embrace subjective art photography.

At that moment, the artist began to consider his professional position within the art world, applying a new dynamic to his work. He focused on staging his photographs and cutting out the superfluous and anecdotal, in an attempt to portray the location’s memory through the testimony of objects and the space itself. Works such as Estampas personales (1984) are clear precedents of the changes that his work was to undergo, moving towards setting the stage of reality, in detriment of a documentary approach.

From the outset, Ángel Marcos focused his artistic production on two key concepts: territory and its power to conjure up memory; and travel, not only as a movement through space, but as an intimate inquiry and awareness-raising. These two ideas evolve along separate tracks, not necessarily in synchronicity, but always contributing to expanding horizons. His starting point was his closest surroundings, the places and stories of his native Medina del Campo —the landscape—. He then entered an intermediate stage, focused on people and their situations —the human being—, to finally arrive to a new stage in which both elements meet in the City.

Paisajes (1997) and Rastros (2002-03) can be classed under the first group, rooted in the immediate surroundings, where the artist undertakes to get back in touch with the natural environment, intimate corners and habitat of his early years, establishing an honest conversation with the landscape and his past. In the first of them, it is therefore desolate landscapes, founded animal carcasses, empty nests or food leftovers that act as trails or traces, helping him recover his memory; while in Rastros, the artist uses the scenery as a stage, introducing objects – tiles, neons or flowers – that contribute to the desired recovery of his history.

In Los bienaventurados (1997), Obras póstumas (1999) and La Chute (2000) the human figure bursts into his work. For the first time, people placed in specific locations reference the realty of yesterday ad today. As a setting for Los bienaventurados (1997), Ángel Marcos chose two abandoned constructions as the stage, where he photographs prostitutes, children and estranged elderly people to speak about poverty, the grotesque, sadness, cruelty and exclusion, forcing the viewer to reflect upon what is there but remains shielded from human gaze.

In Obras póstumas (1999), in contrast, the artist replaces scene-setting with the insertion of photographs of people who, reflected on screens, are placed in real physical spaces linked to the narrative itself; while in La Chute (2000) it is people themselves and their relationship that take central stage. This way, location becomes a mere context.

After studying his closest environment —the landscape— and people —the human being—, and its capacity to recreate reality, Ángel Marcos founds in the city the ideal framework where both concepts blend in a way to reflect the same constants of his earlier work. And this way, with Around the Dream (2001), In Cuba (2004-06) and China (2007), the artist expands the field of his explorations through the camera lens.

Ángel Marcos: China
The new production, presented under the title of China, is the product of an extensive photographic project carried out in the cities of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai in January 2007, and it closes a trilogy he began six years earlier in New York and continued in Havana in 2004. Ángel Marcos sees Around the Dream (2001), In Cuba (2004-06) and China (2007) as a single project, in which the images, even of their entirely different location, revolve around the same conceptual parameter: the conversation between city’s population and the powers that govern it through advertising and propaganda.

The first part of the trilogy, Around the Dream, was carried out in New York City in 2001. Here, he reflected for the first time on the desires and needs of the people who inhabit it and have to deal with publicity as the main instrument of power. The artist adopts an approach whereby the billboards and slogans in and around Manhattan symbolise the idea of desire embodied by the city. A desire of success and power that, in its polarity, faces piles of trash, homeless people and life stories of failure and frustration.

Three years later in 2004, having worked in the city that stands as an icon of Western capitalism, the artist travels to Havana, Cuba, the symbol of Socialist resistance, to embark on a new project. This series is both complementary and a conceptual confrontation of the previous. He worked again with slogans, but this time the logos and catchphrases designed for a world of consumerism were replaced by icons and slogans of the Revolution. Ángel Marcos captures spaces devoid of human presence, where the streets speak for themselves, opening up to a horizon of sea and sky, and the history of a country reflected in the slogans painted on their buildings.
In January 2007 Ángel Marcos embarked on a long journey to China, intending to plunge into a distant Eastern reality with the aim of closing his trilogy. He chose China as the final station in part due to the singularity of a Communist regime that has recently embraced capitalism and its relevance to his previous investigation. Ángel Marcos saved the distances and obstacles of language and culture, shed his preconceptions and reflected through his pictures on what was happening all around him.

For more than a month he travelled the city centres and suburbs of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai —cities that are the driving forces of Chinese development— shooting their streets and corners, where advertising slogans, contrasting architectures and the clash of metropolitan landscapes provide a personal take on today’s China.

The result of this last trip is a broad-reaching project that includes photography and video, through which the artist attempts to present this singular reality, where past and future, tradition and modernity, blend and shape a vast range of contrasts. A large selection of this considerable production may be seen for the first time in halls 3.1 and 3.2 at MUSAC until 2 September 2007.

The publication: Ángel Marcos, China
On the occasion of this exhibition it will be presented a catalogue that compiles the extensive photographic project by Ángel Marcos in China.

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MUSAC hosts solo exhibition by painter Néstor Sanmiguel Diest, El segundo nombre de las cosas (The Second Name of Things)

Néstor Sanmiguel Diest
El segundo nombre de las cosas (The Second Name of Things)

Curator: Beatriz Herráez
Coordinator: Tania Pardo
Venue: Halls 2.1 and 2.2, MUSAC

MUSAC hosts a solo exhibition by artist Néstor Sanmiguel Diest (Zaragoza, 1949). This comprehensive review of his recent work brings together a number of large paintings structured in modules configuring large surfaces of colour and text. Superposed layers of information act as screens, simultaneously revealing or hiding a succession of pictorial stories that make up the author’s particular universe.

Founding member of the A Ua Crag collective (Aranda de Duero, 1985-1991), Néstor Sanmiguel Diest embarked on an intense solo career in the 1990s grounded in a defence of pictorial practice as an activity resembling a sentimental restoration, the title of his first series. An activity born of the need to find a logical order, or a number of them, through a conscious attempt to structure the void and shape chaos, aware nonetheless that there “will never be time enough”. This quest materialises in a working procedure that verges on alchemy. A production underpinned by the development of complexly encrypted visual and narrative patterns, applied with a rare pictorial rigour (not exempt of a high dose of irony) that translates into the use of painting as the “craft of avoiding”.
A process-based approach that takes form in works constructed through detailed and obsessive geometric designs, under all possible combinations, created from modules systematically repeated on the surface of canvas, paper or even on the exhibition space walls. Colour is another of the key elements that the paintings revolve around, with tones ranging from monochrome to nearly fluorescent inks.
This system of “transmutations” results in a series of paintings where figures and backgrounds are interconnected, generating a blending of text and colour planes that forces the gaze to readapt so as to accommodate the absence of a single point of reference or theme from which to approach the work. Facing these pieces demands an extra effort that is vastly compensated by the work’s suggestive complexity. The viewer will find references to a highly personal concept of art, tied in with the pictorial and literary tradition and rich in poignant nods to Op Art, geometry or discourses on perception and decoding, but where a number of additional quotes from fields as varied as music or language can also be read.

Like vessels for the immaterial, Néstor Sanmiguel Diest’s works are closed in on themselves, heightening the curiosity of those who, standing before them, begin to suspect that there may be at least three reasons for placing what is seen from the shadows of the author’s heart in a specific place and not in any other. A voice, something focused on expressing what is unspeakable, that runs throughout these “celibate machines” that appear inhabited by inner demons.

The exhibition. El segundo nombre de las cosas (The Second Name of Things)
The exhibition shown at MUSAC brings together the artist’s most recent work. It includes, amongst others, Las Emociones Barrocas (The Barroque Emotions), a series of 73 76 x 106 cm panels dated between 1997 and 2003 recently purchased by the museum. Work blending acrylic, ink, graphite and printed paper on rotofor paper. Like a diary or travel log, the piece is a documentary compendium, a vessel of time gone by, that begins with what the author terms “recollection of forms” –closed and sealed- from the period that ended in 1997. The Baroque Emotions are arranged randomly in the exhibition space, according to a system that rounds off the author’s work, at least temporarily until the next “unhiding” – the next exhibition. An element of repetition that compounds a method in itself sufficiently complex; a systematic superimposing of layers, not strictly pictorial, employing opposing methods. Breaking away from a narrative plot, Sanmiguel deconstructs the work’s formal elements to establish a system of infinite combinations that generate a number of readings structuring different plots, times and even contradictory machinations.

This same random procedure applied to completing the works through their placement in the exhibition space guides the installation Pollock 1943, a geometrical dripping built from 300 21 x 30 cm tablets; and El descenso del buscador de perlas (The Pearl Diver’s Descent), created especially for the exhibition at MUSAC. Panel-fragments of a narrative whose visual elements are handled as if in a flat and discontinuous universe, where each item refers only to itself, but that at the same time is able to clarify the phases of a work in circulation, methodical and perversely perfectionist. A solution that is cold opposition, by way of an antidote against emotion.

The Second Name of Things includes some other of the artist’s recent paintings, such as El Suicidio de Lucrecia (Lucretia’s suicide), also in the MUSAC’s collection; Sigue Sigue Sputnik, or the three-piece series Mari Paz en París: Trinchera blanca, El corazón de la defensa y El ojo de ángel (Mari Paz in Paris: White Trench, The Heart of the Defence and The Eye of the Angel). These are works developed through a more ‘silent’ procedure, with episodes overlapping, but limited spatially within the surface of the canvas.

A selection of 99 drawings are also shown for the first time at this solo exhibition. Works from 1999 to 2007, under the title Historias Secretas (Secret Stories).

The book. El segundo nombre de las cosas
On occasion of the exhibition, MUSAC is to publish a book under the same title El segundo nombre de las cosas (The Second Name of Things), with reproductions of the 73 visual and textual “episodes” that make up Las Emociones Barrocas (The Baroque Emotions). The book includes an essay by curator Beatriz Herráez and an interview with Néstor Sanmiguel.

Beatriz Herráez. Biography
Beatriz Herráez was born in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 1974. She currently lives and works in Madrid. Trained as a historian and art critic, Herráez advises the Exhibitions and Cultural Activities Department at Montehermoso Kulturunea (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and co-directs the Madrid Regional Government’s Image Studies Seminar. She writes regularly in a number of specialised publications, such as Exit-express and Exit Book (Madrid), FlashArt (Milan), Mugalari (Basque Country) and SUITEmagazine (Barcelona). Her recent projects include research on “alternatives to the exhibition” for the Santa Mónica Art Centre (Barcelona) or curating “Tell me the truth_esaidazu egia_pero dime la verdad”, at Bilbao’s Rekalde exhibition hall.

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MUSAC presents Say I’m Your Number One, solo book and installation by artist Carles Congost under the Showcase Project

Carles Congost
Say I’m your number one

Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Venue: Showcase Project, MUSAC

Carles Congost, one of the artist best represented in the MUSAC Collection, is behind the dual project Say I’m Your Number One, which combines a solo book under the same title co-published by MUSAC and ACTAR, and an installation for the Showcase Project (Showcases). Congost tells the story of his pop group The Congosound through a photo-novel created especially for the book and a sophisticated and caustic display that spills the beans on their new status as a franchise band.

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Pedro Paiva + João Maria Gusmão

Curator: Tania Pardo
Venue: Laboratorio 987, MUSAC
Dates: May 19th - July 8th, 2007

Portuguese artists Pedro Paiva (Lisbon, 1977) + João Maria Gusmão (Lisbon, 1979) are to hold a solo exhibition at Laboratorio 987 showing an installation of films that approach their recurring conceptual references: Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, Bergson’s intuitive method, a reversal of Nietzshe’s nihilism and Alain Badiou’s ontological and political adventure. Paiva and Gusmão’s work is based on an articulation of various elements that embody a number of specific aesthetic and philosophical elements.

In their own words, their work revolves around “real narratives”, a phrase philosopher Alain Badiou once applied to a sequence of historical moments that initiate processes of empirical discovery. João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva’s work presents some of these events relevant to the history of human kind as circumstantial occurrences or anecdotes. In doing so, their approach is essentially focused on capturing a number of riddles that in turn lead the viewer to question a set of phenomena (magnetism, spiritism or fakirism) to be found, for example, in the literature of Victor Hugo or Stanislaw Lem.

The intelligent humour that these images distil reflects the absurdity in each situation: from the man attempting to build a tower of eggs (Columbus’ Column) to the human cannonball, the magnet man, the parade of stones, etc. The artists’ work is seeped in literary references; “an artistic and intellectual” enterprise, according to their own definition.


Image: Angel Marcos. China

Opening: May 19th.

MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León
Avda. de los Reyes Leoneses, 24. 24008 León – España
Hours:
Tuesdays to Sundays: 10:00 - 15:00 / 16:00 - 21:00 hs.
Closed on Mondays
The ticket office closes 15 minutes before the closing of the museum.

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