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14/11/2007

Robert Adams / Lee Bul

Fondation Cartier, Paris

Robert Adams

On the Edge

Robert Adams’ first solo exhibition in France is presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain from November 16, 2007 to January 27, 2008. Conceived entirely by him and inspired by his current concerns, this show provides a rare opportunity to discover an artist known for his devotion to the western American landscape. Entitled On the Edge, it showcases approximately one hundred and fifty photographs that reflect both devastating and hopeful visions of the environment from three separate but related series: West from the Columbia (1990-1992), Time Passes (1990-1992), and Turning Back (1999-2003). A look back at his distinguished career via the remarkable publications that have accompanied his photographs since 1970 invites visitors to delve into his lesserknown passion for books as an equally important artistic medium.

Robert Adams was born in 1937 in Orange, New Jersey and currently lives in Astoria, Oregon. After earning a PhD in English literature and teaching the subject at the college level for almost ten years, he became a photographer in the late 1960s. While human figures are often absent from his images of both urban and rural landscapes in the American West, their influence upon the environment has a glaring presence: a billboard mounted on a tree-covered hill, construction of suburban housing projects, graffiti disturbing an otherwise serene desert view, or the consequences of “clear-cutting,” a practice of quickly and completely cutting down forests. These insightful and sensitive, yet critical and political observations have earned him such prestigious awards as the Spectrum International Prize for Photography and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has also won fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. Robert Adams has participated in numerous group shows and has been included in solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide. He was chosen as the subject for a major retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989. In addition to the many books devoted to his photographs, Robert Adams has also written two influential theoretical works entitled Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defence of Traditional Values (1981) and Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1994), and has published a collection of interviews in Along Some Rivers (2006).

The photography component of On the Edge is constructed around Robert Adams’ views of the landscape surrounding him while looking eastward and westward from his home situated on the west coast of the United States. He is intrigued by the thought that “if we face eastward we confront the remains of what was, until we destroyed it, one of the world’s great rain forests, while if we face westward we contemplate the open sea, not itself unharmed but still beautiful and carrying with it, as all beauty does, a suggestion of promise.” The unique juxtaposition of these closely-tied yet geographically opposed visions provokes contemplation of questions raised by the artist himself: “Are we free to do as we wish? Are we held accountable for the results? Might we be forgiven?”

When aimed toward the west, his camera captured the series West from the Columbia and Time Passes, the latter of which borrows its title from a chapter in Virginia Woolf’s classic To the Lighthouse. Hypnotic and hopeful ocean scenes made in the early 1990s seem to declare rebirth and redemption, while the soothing waves offer to carry one away to another time and another place. When Adams turned east, however, the Turning Back series, made from 1999 to 2003, was born. A study of deforestation that starkly contrasts the serenity of its counterpart, these photographs allow visitors to witness the American West’s rapidly disappearing forests. Robert Adams explains that “the practice of industrial forestry has been and continues to be to strip the land almost bare, a method of attack known as ‘clear-cutting.’... Historical evidence from around the world suggests that clear-cutting will eventually result in the exhaustion of the soil, in deforestation, and in climate change.” Selected personally by Adams to be presented at the Fondation Cartier together, these series most accurately illustrate the thoughts and scenes that currently plague and motivate him.

The over forty books presented in On the Edge comprehensively trace the very personal and direct manner in which Robert Adams has dealt with the fear, curiosity, and inspiration that the changing American landscape has stirred in him since the late 1960s. The care and attention accorded to each one reveals the privileged place he accords to the medium in general—each book is an objet d’art and stands on its own as a valuable form of artistic expression. This complete collection of publications, many of which are limited editions and collector’s items, is brought together at the Fondation Cartier for the first time in an exhibition setting.

A book imagined by Robert Adams on the occasion of this exhibition features the thirtytwo photographs that compose the Time Passes series, published here for the first time. The Fondation Cartier is also pleased to offer Enlongeant quelques rivières, the first French translation of Along Some Rivers, a collection of insightful exchanges between Robert Adams and various interviewers including art historians, curators, photographers, students, writers, and professors that was originally edited by Aperture in 2006.

Exhibition books

Robert Adams, Time Passes
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris
Hardback, dustjacket, bilingual English / French, 25 x 28 cm, 72 pages, 32 black and white reproductions, tri-tone printing ISBN: 978-2-86925-078-9
Price: 45 €
Publication date: November 2007

Robert Adams, En longeant quelques rivières
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris / Actes Sud, Arles
Archives privées collection
Softback, French, 15 x 20.5 cm, 96 pages, 28 black and white reproductions, tri-tone printing
ISBN: 978-2-7427-7131-8
Price: 19.90 €
Publication date: November 2007

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Lee Bul

Lee Bul, one of the leading Korean artists of her generation, will present an ambitious new sculptural installation at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. Variously suspended in mid-air or anchored to the floor, the sculptures constitute a singular environment that engages with the surrounding Jean Nouvel architecture, inhabiting and elaborating on its physical and conceptual frameworks. Complex and sensuous, the artist’s installation manifests the disintegration of utopian aspirations that continue to haunt the collective imagination in a darkly seductive space of glittering ruins and vestiges.

Born in South Korea in 1964, Lee Bul initially studied sculpture, but quickly extended her practice to various media: in the late 1980s she began creating voluminous forms that were often paired with performances. Some of these sculptures, with stuffed appendages and extensions, were worn in performances in the streets and other public spaces, in representations of the body as a mutable, artificial, and sometimes monstrous construct. The artist’s interest in the human form, simultaneously a body as well as a social entity, continued into the late 1990s when these themes were developed in her Cyborgs and Anagrams series, sculptures made of fantastical and twisted tentacle-like limbs or baroque bio-mechanical forms. These creations expand the idea of the physical body to include new technologies that redraw the frontiers of human existence, where the borders between reality, science, and fiction are intentionally left up to individual interpretation. Lee Bul gladly combines sound, video, and solid objects that are a cross between sculpture and design, according to her artistic needs.

Her projects from this year alone include exhibitions at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, at Domus Artium in Salamanca, Spain, and the 10th Istanbul Biennial. She also participated in Real Utopia at the 21stCentury Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Her extensive solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier is her first in Paris.

Within the Fondation Cartier’s glass-enclosed spaces, Lee Bul presents a global project in which the human being remains, as always, the center of her work. In this case, however, it asserts its importance by remaining almost completely absent, and is replaced by constructions and forms that evoke key events and figures in Eastern and Western history and culture. Mirrors, reflections, metal and beads worked like lace, these ample volumes remain extremely light: sculptures suspended like floating islands and aerial architectural structures rising above spectators’ heads may be observed from many different angles thanks to an interplay of mirrors meant to stand the viewing path on its head.

While the visitors’ experience is an intensely aesthetic one, it also moves beyond the physical to the referential. The entire project, especially some of the larger suspended sculptures, refers to the works of the visionary German architect, Bruno Taut (1880– 1938), and in particular to his phantasmagoric Alpine Architektur projects and his Glashaus (‘Glass Pavilion’) (Cologne, 1914). Also celebrated for his social activism, he was active in his attempt to visualize his dreams, in his desire to make a better world concrete and tangible. Lee Bul appropriates the imaginative energy of the utopian values of Taut’s work—the references are explicit— and makes it the center of her visionary project. The decision to develop it at the Fondation Cartier is not accidental: Jean Nouvel’s building, made entirely of glass, harks directly back to Taut’s exaltation of the material as ideal for the construction of cathedrals of the future. The architect even chose Glas (glass) as his pseudonym.

While Lee Bul allows herself to go to great lengths to imagine an improved world in some of her works, thereby sending a positive message, other sculptures—despite their magnificent lightness of form, a common thread throughout the project—are charged with allusions to brutal events and figures in Korean history. Thaw (Takaki Masao) (2007) is a sort of ice sarcophagus for the military dictator Park Chung-Hee, responsible for South Korea’s brusque modernization between 1961 and 1979. Heaven and Earth (2007), a sculpture reminiscent of a bathtub that evokes the human figure due to its size, supports a stylized representation of Baekdu Mountain, the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation, on its edges. While the bathtub conjures up the memory of a not-too-distant past when it was used to torture public dissidents, however, the surface of the black ink with which it is filled reflects the utopian forms and magnificent suspensions above.

Without opposing the world of dreams to that of reality, Lee Bul presents them both to us, mirroring the contemplative and the active sides of life that always go together. One is no less real than the other; the former often gives us the courage to improve the latter.

Exhibition catalog

Lee Bul Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris
Hardback, dustjacket, bilingual English / French, 22 x 28 cm, 80 pages, 32 color reproductions
ISBN: 978-2-86925-079-6
Price: 35 €
Publication date: December 2007

Nomadic Nights

Thursday evenings at 9 p.m. (except special evenings)
Information and reservations (imperative), every day, except Monday, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.: Tel +33 (0)1 42185672
Entrance fee: 6.50 €, reduced rate: 4.50 €

Press Information
Linda Chenit assisted by Hélène Cahuzac
Tel +33 (0)1 42 18 56 77 / 65 Fax +33 (0)1 42 18 56 52 linda.chenit@fondation.cartier.com

Press opening on Thursday, November 15, 2007

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
261, boulevard Raspail /F- 75014 Paris
The exhibition is open every day, except Monday, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Tuesday evenings until 10 p.m.

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