calendario eventi  :: 

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16/5/2008

Five exhibitions

MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum, Leon

NOCTURAMA - Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Curator: Marta Gerveno
Venue: Halls 4.1, 4.2, 5 and 6

* and promenade, cinelandia, solarium…

MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Cas ti l la y León, presents NOCTURAMA* , the f i rst one-person project in Spain by the acclaimed French artis t Dominique Gonzalez-Foers ter . Through both the spatial inter vention in the hal ls of Leon’s museum and the publ i cation titled NOCTURAMA* , the creator wi l l unfold myr iad paths to help vis itors posi tion themselves wi thin the contemplation and perception of a sophisticated work, ful l of references and essential in the international art scene.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (1965, Strasbourg, France) was educated at École de Beaux-Arts of Grenoble (1982-1987) and furthered her studies at École du Magasin of the National Centre of Contemporary Art of Grenoble and the Institute des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques of Paris. A versatile artist, she is versed in the realms of film, photography, installation, net-art, architecture and even fashion. In 2001 she won the RATP competition with a project for remodelling the Bonne Nouvelle underground station and in 2002 her work was honoured with the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Of particular note among her solo shows are Intérieurs—Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1994—Ipanema Theorie/Plages—Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2002— and Expodrome—Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris, 2007. Her projects for group shows have been equally lauded, such as those produced for Documenta 11 (2002), the 27th São Paulo Biennale (2006) and Skulptur Projekte Muenster (2007).

During recent years, Gonzalez-Foerster has become an essential referent in the European art scene, and her sophisticated body of work—and its aptitude for being connected and related through evocations and concealments—have inspired many creators of different disciplines, some of whom she has collaborated with. Thus, she has been sharing projects and standpoints with Phillipe Parreno since she met him when she was a student in Grenoble. Along with other French artists of her generation, such as Pierre Huyghe, they were responsible for the transformation of the French art scene of the nineties. Although each of them contributes their own vision, and it is venturesome to consider them a group, they are united by their interest in the transformation of the exhibition space and the reception of the artistic event, perhaps inspired by the controversial exhibition that François Lyotard set in motion at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985, Les Immatériaux [The Immaterials], where the French philosopher, disciple of Merlau-Ponty, blatantly expressed the crisis of the book as an instrument for spreading ideas and the need for a contemporary thinker who would use other formats or as he himself stated, the urgency of “the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at.” The exhibition, which included artists such as Daniel Buren and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, excluded all formats that, like painting, were related to the visible gesture, instead fostering a new sensitivity for communication where visitors practiced or experienced reading through an implicit written narrative.

Gonzalez-Foerster has repeatedly used space as a distinctive feature of her artistic practice. Her work comes from many places, sites and environments, which allude to emotional values while generating a sensitive landscape within the viewer. She began in the decade of the 90s by building a series of “chambers", installations structured by subtle gestures that suggested a setting or situation where something had just happened. These encounters between memory, presence and body unleashed irrepressible evocations in the beholder, with unpredictable and occasionally unidentifiable results. They were—and still are—gestures materialised in the form of everyday objects, and it was in their associations that they were imbued with meanings. Undoubtedly, these were a prelude to the direction the French artist’s production was to take, as she became a creator of “environments” or “atmospheres” rather than exhibitions, where the elements function by creating a sort of mise-en-scène that immediately accentuates their spatial/architectural setting: “It’s an enviroment more than an exhibition,” writes the artist, “a potential space between reality and virtuality—quite pleasant to walk through, exciting to explore…”

One might say that Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s works are somehow “moments” and “environments” that are apparently heading for the void, absence, disappearance, waiting or partiality, but full of literary references or already written books that unfold in an exhibition space.

The exhibition
In an essay titled The Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel. Essays on Historical Poetics in his work Theory and Aesthetics of the Novel, the Russian linguist Mijaíl Bajtín (1895-1975), defined “chronotopes” as the connection of the temporal and spatial relations artistically assimilated in literature; a passage of time thickened in space and vice versa where both are intercepted and become visible to the beholder and appreciable from the aesthetic point of view. Bajtín explains in his work that the «represented world» and the “creator world” are firmly linked and constantly interacting, establishing a close connection between the work—the represented world—and social discursiveness—the creator world. The perception of the real world enters literature through the chronotopes: they play the main role in the configuration of the storyline, offering the main field for the representation of events in images. According to the definition of Bajtín, for whom chronotopes are the places where the narrative cruces are set up and undone, we can say that the meaning moulding the narration belongs to them, and they end up simultaneously making manifest the interior and exterior of texts.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerters presents NOCTURAMA*, a journey through specific times and identifiable, real places with which the French artist represents the world she tells. This new narrative consists of Promenade—a work produced with Christophe Van Huffel, an invisible piece whose film-inspired use of sound makes for a radically tropicalised place; Tapis de lecture, an invitation to rest surrounded by piles of books, a reservoir of possibilities—or the material sources of their fictions; Cinelandia, a selection of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s films—some with Ange Leccia; Solarium with Nicolas Ghesquière, a space for luminous contemplation and reception; and lastly Nocturama, a new sitespecific production, a new environment. All of them are, in short, time machines capable of bringing about movement through space as if they were futurist teletransporters.

NOCTURAMA*: the publication
NOCTURAMA* is the book, another place and time of the exhibition, where the artist has intervened on the paper-space. Edited by MUSAC and published by ACTAR, all the tools needed for exploring the world of the French artist will be displayed in it, not through visual material alone, but also through the essays of Ina Blom (Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway), Penelope Curtis (Curator at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK), Jens Hoffman (Director of Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA) and Lisette Lagnado (Curator and Artistic Director of the 27th São Paulo Biennale), in addition to an interview with the writer Enrique Vila-Matas conducted by the artist herself, along with Hans Ulrich Obrist (co-Director of the Serpentine Gallery, London, UK), in which literary creation becomes the main protagonist.

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Pabellón de Escultura (Sculpture Pavilion) - Ana Laura Aláez (Bilbao, Spain, 1964)
Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Coordinator: Carlos Ordás
Venue: Hall 3 (3.1 and 3.2)

Opening on 17 May, MUSAC is to host Pabellón de Escultura, an exhibition project where artist Ana Laura Aláez returns to sculpture: the artistic medium of her origins and the one in which she has produced the bulk of her work. Loyal perpetuator of the Basque tradition, Aláez bravely explores her own past with a project that reflects upon the formal essence as a pure artistic manifesto, where sculpture and architecture meet in a spatial vacuum. Pabellón de Escultura is a project that reclaims the very act of artistic creation: a political stance that confronts the artist’s world with the audience and the artistic environment.

About Ana Laura Aláez
To approach the world of Basque artist Ana Laura Aláez is to venture into the artificial paradise of appearances. A world where the canon is inverted, where identities are multifaceted, where aesthetic assumptions become ethical assumptions, and where harmony and beauty fill all the available space. Her work, however, is not limited to this narcissistic hedonism. Throughout her career, she has developed a private micro-universe by incorporating anything that might shine back her own reflection. She has not hesitated to wield humour, sarcasm and irony against the art world, to dissolve her own identity or to flirt with other industries that revolve around the art world, or are even asserting themselves as art proper: architecture, video, photography, design or music.

Her first work from the early 1990s toyed with the implications of artifice and the body, through themes as pertinent to the final years of the 20th century as identity and the projection of subjectivity, the presence of images, the uses of photography, hybrid and mutant identity, etc. This early work also revealed the lessons she had learnt from the most relevant artists of what was to be known as New Basque Sculpture, including Txomin Badiola or Ángel Bados. On the basis of this relationship with the body; with its uses and abuse; with its negation; with travesty, decorum and artifice; with its changes and experiments, the artist found an opening into new landscapes, new spaces related not only to the body, though this was a theme she would never leave behind entirely. New spaces inhabited by herself and other individuals; those spaces we imagine and build up, and then transform into artificial cosmetic delights.

We should not forget that a close bond has existed between architecture and the body throughout history: from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, through Palladium or the Bauhaus, the coincidences, simulations and appearances linking both have provided the basis for a discourse that has reached our time. The whys and wherefores of these nuances are relevant to Ana Laura’s art precisely because she masks her work between those two poles and through everything related to the body (cosmetics, pose, cult, identity, look) alongside notions that have more to do with architecture: space, design, décor, proportion, restoration, canon, etc. On closer scrutiny, however, we appreciate that many of these nuances often overlap and are combinable. Taking the notion one step further, Ana Laura’s works could be seen as embodying a second skin, as can be appreciated in her installations She Astronauts (1997), at Fundación la Caixa’s Sala Montcada in Barcelona; She is in outer space (1997), at the Istanbul Biennale; Mobile Studio for an Artist of the 21st Century (1998), at the Pontevedra Biennale; Pink Room, Liquid Sky and Rain Room (2001), at the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; Dance & Disco (2001), at MNCARS’s Espacio Uno in Madrid; Beauty Cabinet Prototype (2003), at Palais de Tokio; or her project for the Towada Art Museum, Japan, in 2008.

On Pabellón de Escultura, a project for MUSAC
Pabellón de Escultura is Ana Laura Aláez’s project for MUSAC, due to open on 17 May, where she returns to sculpture in search of her roots. Since her very early work produced in the 1990s, Aláez embraced this discipline on the basis of her belief and her training. Indeed, even when working in the medium of photography or video, she has often been considered a sculptor, by virtue of her very special way of arranging the work in space, whether it be two- or three dimensional. Pabellón de Escultura is an unwavering statement of her intentions and her roots, devoid of trappings or disguise, asserting sculpture as the essential point of departure for all her work, regardless of the nuances it may acquire along the way.

The project, which includes a number of pieces and items, should be taken as a whole, though each of the pieces in turn carries sufficient momentum to be appreciated as an independent work.

Pabellón de Escultura is split into two spaces. A small triangular lobby welcomes the viewer with a figurative presentation of the work flooded in white light, between white walls, that provides an inkling of the crude, underground and even harsh nature of the world we are about to enter. This first installation includes black leather jackets slashed down the back, with sculptures emerging out of them. Here Aláez tells us about the body and its loss, about its relationship with other spaces, about sculpture as a prosthetic replacement of something lost, as opposed to the freestanding works on podia we will find later on. This first space acts as an “other” inverted or convex space against the second hall; a negative print offsetting the larger installation.

Crossing this first threshold we enter the hall that gives the exhibition its name, where the overpowering black of the walls underlines the presence of a “grand sculpture”. Measuring fifteen metres across and five metres high, this colossal piece takes on architectural proportions, though it never loses its original character as a sculpture. It is indeed a massive pure sculpture, made out of intersecting aluminium sheets assembled into a construction that expands chaotically. However, at the same time this architecture, like a good pavilion, reveals itself as something empty, ephemeral, like a venue for temporary use, a kiosk devoid of its posters, its claims, its propaganda... The political game is in the emptying out, in the silence and, naturally, in the placement of a sculpture this size within a museum context, whereby the artist challenges our modes of cultural production and our patterns for the social appropriation of representation spaces. In the light of all the above, Pabellón de Escultura’s narrative lies in its essences, in its very shape, in its explosion, in the vision of this massive multifaceted geometric pavilion that contains no sculptures, since its expansive form, which even encroaches on the museum walls themselves, is the message. Thus, the implements for representation explode within their own tradition, with the artist left feeling like an outsider cast away from the art world, sometimes a rebel, sometimes just misunderstood.

Pabellón de Escultura is a turning point in Ana Laura Aláez’s career, revisiting her entire creative universe and confronting her early sculpture from the 1990s with her latest production. All these works share a common feature: the solid, organic black of the sculptures that mourn on white podia spread out about the room, where bereavement appears to have replaced a vanishing belief in Utopia. One could nearly imagine that Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International had collapsed and the artist were at odds to glean hope out of past assumptions. In any case, her beliefs are not that different, since this new project demonstrates a seamless connection in Aláez’s work over more than ten years, thus establishing an ironic and perverse game that the artist continues to uphold as her stance before the world.

Pabellón de Escultura. The Book
Co-published by CHARTA and MUSAC, the Castilla y León Museum of Contemporary Art, this book revisits the artist’s past work in the fields of sculpture and architecture. It focuses on Aláez’s major projects from the 1990s to the present, paying particular attention to the most recent, including her permanent piece Bridge of Light (2008) for the Towada Art Museum, Japan and her installation Pabellón de Escultura at MUSAC, 2008. The book also includes a comprehensive review of her work in sculpture, as well as an essay by Txomin Badiola and an interview with the artist by Agustín Pérez Rubio.

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Constelación (Constellation) - Artist: Carmela García (Tenerife, Spain, 1976)
Curator: Alberto Martín
Coordinator: Helena López Camacho
Venue: Hall 2

On 17 May MUSAC is to unveil Constelación, Carmela García’s most recent project, where she continues her ongoing exploration of gender and identity, moving from her traditional medium of photography into video, drawing, installation and workshops. Produced specifically for the exhibition venue at MUSAC, Constelación addresses the relationships between a group of women who shared a specific place and time: Paris as a city, the rive gauche as a specific location, the years between the wars (the 1920s and 30s) as a timeframe. Working within these parameters, the artist documents and reconstructs the presence of a group of female identities who, through their cultural, artistic and social activities –and indeed their very lifestyle– shaped the debate on the modern woman, defying convention and the dominant hierarchies surrounding the roles of male and female, and modifying sociocultural references and behaviours in a way that remains entirely relevant today.

About Constelación
Constelación takes the artist one step further in her inquiry into gender and identity. Here, Carmela García focused her work on a specific place and time: Paris as a city, the rive gauche as a specific location, the years between the wars (the 1920s and 30s) as a timeframe. Within this framework, the artist documented and reconstructed a group of characters, of unique identities, who converged in that place and time and often lived and worked together: women such as Berenice Abbott, Gertrude Stein, Eileen Gray, Suzi Solydor, Janet Flaner, Telma Woods, Marie Laurencin, Claude Cahun, Suzanne Malherbe, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Tamara de Lempicka, Colette, Channa Orloff, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes or Natalie Barney, amongst others. They make up the Constellation in the title, with the presence shining through the works on show.

Carmela García traced these women’s lives, their work, the image and symbols that each projected, their relationships and the places where they lived. With all this material, she reconstructed the cartography of a collective identity. An exercise in restitution and renewal that poses a range of questions such as the relationship between space, memory and identity; geography and gender; the subject’s representation and self representation; self-perception as a way of thinking and constructing one’s identity; or the relationship between artistic and sexual identity.

The research and analysis process that underlies the project is presented as the starting point for the exhibition. A huge collage, under the title Constellation, was transferred from the artist’s studio to MUSAC. The panel reveals how the project was structured, the paths that were followed then abandoned –or not even tackled– the connections that were gradually established, the hunches, the locations pinpointed on a map of Paris. From the artist’s notebooks, also unbound and put on display, the viewer can glean an impression of how she drew up a geography and an imaginary realm on the verge between the real and the artistic, between the historical and the merely plausible. From this material, viewers can project and reconstruct the exhibition, embark on a process of their own, establish their own connections.

Starting from this initial piece, the exhibition develops along two lines that are closely connected and often intersect. These lines unravel a dual cartography shaped by a constant flow of documentary and artistic references from the time, reconfigured through the artist’s reconstruction and fictionalisation work. A map that revisits the places where these women lived and made art; a map of the identities conjured up and re enacted by the symbolic image they developed as their own characters, in a balance between representation and selfrepresentation.

The series of portraits I want to be… delves precisely into this play on representation and selfrepresentation. Carmela García reworks Berenice Abbott’s portraits of many of these women, updating them and transferring them to our present day. Abbott’s perception of people from the past switches and overlaps with a contemporary perception of other individuals, thus generating a visual crossover that speaks of the possibilities of constructing a woman’s image through new identities, imagined or represented.

Another of the pieces on display is closely linked to the portrait series. Casting suggest a game based on allocating characters and parts on the basis of an analysis of the conditions that define the production of images. Carmela García draws up a large cast in order to allocate star system celebrities the roles of the different historical personalities she refers to in the project. In contrast with I want to be..., here she chooses to highlight the artifice implicit in creating one’s image, the weight of photogenia and the predominance of convention when it comes to representing the subject.

Both approaches meet in the piece Une fête dans le jardin, a large group of drawings by way of a storyboard that suggests a film very different to that which we would have imagined on the basis of Casting. Here, the past is recreated on the fertile borders of plausibility, through the conversion of historical sources into an alternative yet believable fiction loaded with symbols and meaning. A subjective reconstruction evocative of a broader and more complex identity construction process. A process that puts our group of protagonists at the heart of this plausible scrip.

By way of a conclusion and reflection upon the three works we find Espejo, a mirror on whose surface the artist has written the names of the women approached in the exhibition. The mirror is a key element in and highly representative of the strategy of constructing one’s identity, thanks to its symbolic and disruptive potential: it represents the importance of selfperception and subjectivity; the tension between reflected images and representation, between image and identity. Carmela García references Claude Cahun’s “magic mirror” and “mirror with memory” and in its reflection, sums up the play on identities and underlying subjectivities that inspired the entire project.

The locations mentioned above are mapped out in Escenarios, a large piece made up of thirty photographs in various formats arranged on the wall by way of an imaginary map drawn from memory. Locations are treated within the whole as atmospheres for identity and for exchange, for affirmation and encounters: homes, studios, gardens, streets, bookshops, brasseries and nightclubs. A map where Gracía registers presences and absences with the same upfront honesty, speaking in the plainest possible terms of how Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop “La masion des Amis des Livres” was converted into a hairdresser’s, or how Suzi Solydor’s cabaret became a brothel; in the same way as she photographs Colette’s home or Channa Orloff’s impeccably preserved studio.

The few plaques or texts that commemorate these women’s presence in these places also reveal the selective monumentisation they have suffered. Enduring presences and absences that establish a field of visibility for this close bond between gender and location, between identity and space. These settings trace a route through Paris that automatically becomes a spatial metaphor of identity. The formal strategy that shapes these photographs has a lot to do with the act of re-photographing and re-mapping, of revisiting previously recorded places in order to subvert, re-read or re-map the material elements they are made up of or the symbolic aspects they contain. The women who inhabited and continue to inhabit these settings with their symbolic presence established a close connection between their lives and their creative universes, they weaved a tight bond between the person and the character as a vessel for emancipation and the affirmation of an identity. This connection is translated into images by means of an alternation between indoors and outdoors, public and private spaces, the intimate and the social spheres, two traditionally segregated fields that these women succeeded in reconciling through their choices and their lifestyles. Thus, the empty settings for Carmela García’s characters are a way of stating an absence, an invisible topography that emerges as a recollection and a symbol.

The same issue is dealt with in the video Bord de mer, a journey through the house designed and built by Eileen Gray, which gradually becomes an indoor landscape of considerable poetic and subjective quality, heightened by the constant sound of the sea. The rumbling of waves dragging stones along the shore and the light that floods the house’s interior are a presence unaltered by time, in contrast to the building materials that have aged over the years. The house itself and all its rooms swell with the simultaneous evocation of presence and absence, gradually shifting into a landscape for memories.

Constelación is an exhibition that takes on the form of meta fiction: characters, places, works and identities overlap and interrelate through a collection of documentary, artistic and fictional material. It traces the course from the person to the character, all the way to the biographical icons that these women represent, as symbols of the broader question of identity. It captures the locations and settings they moved in as landscapes of symbols and memories. It addresses the fictionalisation of those characters and possibly our own fictionalisation as a process loaded with transformative potential. These stages and characters appear as true biographic stylisations, as constantly re-enacted icons of lives and identities.

Constelación. The book
On occasion of the exhibition, a large-format artist’s book will be published under the same title. It will cover Carmela García’s project, with a wealth of documentary, fictional and artistic material, as well as Berenice Abbott’s portraits of the women, works by Romaine Brooks, Gisele Freund, Thelma Woods, Marie Laurencin and Claude Cahun-Suzanne Malherbe, amongst others; all tied in with Carmela García’s images reconstructing these identities as contemporary characters or revisiting the settings, both public and private, where they lived their lives.
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Hedi Slimane
Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Coordination: Marta Gerveno
Venue: Hall 1
With the support of Maraworld

MUSAC presents on May 17 the project that the artist Hedi Slimane has produced ex professo for the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Through a publication and an installation created expressly for this occasion, Slimane continues his personal exploration of youth aesthetics in relation to music as a factor of construction and transformation of identity.

Born in the French capital where he currently lives, Hedi Slimane (1968, Paris, France) studied History of Art at Ecole du Louvre. From 1992 to 1995 he worked for the exhibition of the centennial of the “LV” monogram of the firm Louis Vuitton. In 1997 he became the art director of the men’s collection of Yves Saint Laurent and three years later Hedi Slimane created Dior Homme. In 2002, the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) named him designer of the year. In addition to devoting himself to fashion, Slimane has worked as a shop, furniture and fragrance designer, and in recent years he has been involved with a variety of journalism and photography projects: he has been Editor in Chief of the newspaper Le Libération and he designed record covers for artists such as Phoenix or The Libertines. In the field of visual arts his activities have been increasingly frequent, both as an exhibition curator—Robert Mappelthorpe for the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (2005) and Sweet Bird of Youth for Arndt & Partner Berlin (2007)—and an artist whose photographs, videos and sound installations have been included in group shows such as Berlin (P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center of New York and Kunst Werke of Berlin, 2003) and solo shows such as Hedi Slimane. Costa da Caparica 1989 (Ellipse Foundation, Lisbon, 2007), Young American (Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, 2007) and Perfect Stranger (Galerie Almine Rech, Paris, 2007).

Certainly, when making any approach to Hedi Slimane’s work, we must do so without any formal restrictions, for, though in recent years it has been limited to the international successes earned in the field of fashion, the truth is that his aesthetic universe should not be partitioned but understood as a whole that is manifested through myriad forms of expression —let us recall in this respect that Slimane himself was the author of the advertising campaigns when he was at the head of Dior Homme. Nonetheless, this conception of creation presents some interesting distinctive features that can be traced back to before the beginning of his professional career: music—especially rock—and photography.

Indeed, in the last decade, the pictures of the French creator have revolved around the universe of teenagers and the fan phenomenon underlying the strong ties existing with music, especially music as collective events or what surrounds the spectacle of live music. And to produce his particular portrait of this vehicle of renovation and transformation of the models of social behaviour, Slimane clings to his camera. Photography has always been his tool for looking at the world he has stated himself that he remembers when he began to take photos, and that his first camera was a gift when he was only eight years old.

HEDI SLIMANE_MUSAC
In May 2007 Hedi Slimane was invited by MUSAC and Maraworld—the company that promotes the International Festival of Benicàssim—to portray with his camera the 18th edition of the major musical event. For the four days of July during which thousands of young people from all over the world concentrated on the shores of the Mediterranean to attend their annual date with music, Slimane unceasingly pursued with this camera those beats so characteristic of his own aesthetic. Now, almost a year later, the reflection of that work is presented in a project that, through an installation in Leon’s museum space, and a publication, puts the French creator’s aesthetic universe into perspective.

As regards the installation, Slimane once again exhibits the connections between musical celebration and fans, and, definitively, the constructive reciprocity of both identities through the exchange promoted by live music. Thus, visitors to the exhibition will find a display of all the iconography intrinsic to a concert: an empty stage and the young members of the audience. The artist thus ultimately proposes an inversion of the habitual role of the spectator—or fan—as the visitor is allowed onto the stage to experience the rock star’s overwhelming sensation when before the masses who expectantly await the appearance of their idol, whom they venerate, and with whom they identify.

Undoubtedly, this is an installation that goes beyond photography and in which Slimane resituates the audience inside the action, as it is both an active and passive subject of a moment that is frozen.

Rock Diary: the publication
Rock Diary represents the printed part of the project conceived by Hedi Slimane for MUSAC. Designed by the artist himself, the book has been edited by MUSAC and published by JRP|Ringier. Its purpose is none other than to offer the possibility of approaching the French creator’s work of the last ten years. The publication consists of three books: the first one contains the images Slimane captured during his four day stay in Benicàssim in the summer of 2007, which focus on the communion that takes place between important celebrities of the music world—The Horrors, Amy Winehouse and The Klaxons—and their audiences and, in short, their fans. The second book is an overview of rock diary, which Slimane has been putting together for the past decade by way of artists such as Pete Doherty or the iconography constructed by live music and young spectators.

Finally, the third and last of them provides a platform for the opinions of Vince Aletti— eminent American music journalist and photography critic for The New Yorker—Alex Needham—a music journalist who has collaborated with Hedi Slimane to compose Rock Diary for V Magazine—Jon Savage—music journalist for The Observer— and Agustín Pérez Rubio—curator of this project and Chief Curator of MUSAC.

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American Dreams
Artist: Dan Attoe (Bremerton, Washington, 1975)
Curator: Tania Pardo
Venue: Laboratorio 987, MUSAC

Under the title American Dreams, Dan Attoe (Bremerton, Washington, 1975) brings his first solo exhibition to Spain. In an installation of his mostly small format paintings, the US artist will reveal his personal universe, where landscapes _mixing reality and the imaginary_ are inhabited by characters whose identity is defined through the lifestyle symbols of American pop culture, with references to music, mass media and forays into the artist’s own identity.

The American landscape is a dominant theme throughout Dan Attoe’s paintings. His images, seeped in a sense of dreamlike unreality, could well be described as surreal or hallucinatory. Harking from the West Coast, his landscapes draw from the Hudson River School in the use of light and minute description of details, providing a Romantic metaphor of contemporary life. Many of his works suggest apocalyptic visions where human life blends in with the sublime countryside. The overwhelming presence of nature in the artist’s work can be traced to his close contact with it throughout his childhood, when his father worked for the US Forest Service, as he indeed reveals in the painting My dad used to fight fires and tranquilize bears for the Forest Service. Most of his works are painted from a bird’s-eye perspective, inviting the viewer to plunge into the finer details. His meticulous oil technique is evocative of the Barbizon school’s precision brushwork, or even the 15th Century Flemish tradition.

There is, however, a human presence in these spaces, whether they be real or imaginary. Dan Attoe peoples them with wanderers, not only to provide a narrative, but also driven by a conceptual desire to explore human beings’ individual identity. Influenced by American pop culture, the mass media and the music of artists such as Neil Young, Tom Waits or Bruce Springsteen, the artist explores his characters’ identity, placing them in scenarios where they can play out their cultural traits: anything from walking in the woods to drinking a beer at the bar to attending a rock concert. Thus, his landscapes provide the setting for an exploration of some of the tensions and anxieties that underlie contemporary US culture.

Indeed, Dan Attoe’s paintings capture many forms of social behaviour that would appear to be far removed from the art world. His strategy might remind us of Richard Prince’s humorous work, which highlights clichés in American culture that he fully acknowledges as being a part of his own background.

Attoe also allows aspects of his own identity to spill over into his work. His paintings are peppered with tiny texts that capture the author’s attitudes; richly ironic statements that reveal the artist to be an attentive observer of his surroundings. The thoughts he shares include phrases such as “Everything is more complicated than you think it is”, “You are full of magic”, “Always wait for me”, or “Trying to control everything”.

In line with his use of visual icons closely connected to a certain cultural context (beer cans, strippers, mountain roads, heavy metal bands), Attoe’s scenes play with musical references such as Nirvana, Metallica, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson or Tom Waits

For many years (from 1997 to 2004), the artist charged himself with the task of painting a small piece every day, thus establishing a routine that gradually built up a personal diary. To add to this effect, on the back of each panel he would write a poem or brief note on recent events in his life or stories from the media.

Dan Attoe, biography
Dan Attoe (Bremerton, Washington, 1975) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Studied Art at the Universities of Iowa and Wisconsin. His major solo exhibitions in the US and Europe include You Have More Freedom than you’re Using at Peres Projects, Berlin (2006) or You Get What You Deserve at Vilma Gold, London (2005), as well as group shows, on occasion of the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, Portland Art Museum, Portland (2007); There’s No Fooling You (The Classics), at Peres Projects, Los Angeles; the 8th Northwest Biennial, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington; The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (2005); Growing Up Absurd, Hebert Read Gallery, Kent, UK (2005) or Fictional Wonders / Real Hallucinations, Sioux City Art Center, Iowa (2004). His work is held in leading public and private collections. He is currently preparing a solo exhibition at Peres Project Berlin and is included in “Shape of Things To Come: New Sculpture” at the Saatchi Gallery, London.

MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum
Avda. de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 - Leon

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