calendario eventi  :: 

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17/2/2010

Pergola

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

1916: Le Corbusier builds a « Villa Turque » (Turkish Villa), the Villa Schwob, flanked by a pergola, in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). Some years later, he publishes photos of it in L’Esprit Nouveau. On the ground, in front of the villa, a white smear betrays retouching: the pergola has disappeared. Less than a century later, the Iraqi journalist Muntazer Al-Zaïdi throws his shoes at George W. Bush’s head.

Poltergeists are on the agenda at PERGOLA. Against the background of a haunted modernity, silhouettes of erased lives demand restitution: Swiss tavern lanterns cast a gloom over the museum space, the ventilation shafts bring back good memories of monumental architecture, the melancholy of the Renaissance seeps into this no man’s land, pneumatic dispatch breaches communication…. In the public spaces, the forsaken demand equal treatment in the art works by Charlotte Posenenske. This is the opportunity to discover for the first time the works of this important German artist, alongside the art objects of Valentin Carron, Raphael Zarka, Serge Spitzer, and the large shoe of the Iraqi Laith Al-Amiri.

LAITH AL-AMIRI
Symbol of Courage

Baghdad, December 14, 2008—the Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri Al-Maliki, meets his American homologue in front of an international array of video cameras. While the two men prepare to shake hands, a journalist leaps from the third row and throws his shoes, one after another, at Georges W. Bush. For this act of protest, Muntazer Al-Zaidi was condemned to three years in prison. He is released from the military base Muthanna after only a few months of detention and considered a national hero. From Baghdad to YouTube, from word of mouth to CNN, all the communication networks picked up the story and contributed to the generic loafer’s surge in popularity in the anti-establishment imagination.

Precisely because of these event, Laith Al-Amiri, from Tikrit, presents a shoe of monumental proportions. Created in January 2009 in collaboration with orphans, Symbol of Courage is a monument raised to the glory of the journalist Muntazer Al-Zaidi. Destroyed soon after it was built, this artisanal work comes back to life inside the walls of Palais de Tokyo, where the artist interrogates this age-old form. Once a clothing accessory, the shoe becomes a symbol of protest, an archetypal form disabused of its practical usage, and it becomes a completely theoretical object. A consumable good, an ephemeral accessory, this shoe collapses as it sinks into the world of timelessness. Inversely, the monument, a physical mass sacred in the collective memory, curiously appears to us as “peripatetic.”

[1965] Born in Tikrit. Lives and works in Tikrit.

VALENTIN CARRON
Monsieur

On his way from vernacular iconography to religious symbols, passing through pastiches of public spaces, Valentin Carron interrogates identities through the forms that they celebrate. By invoking these archetypes, the artist doesn’t give in to forgeries, imitation, or even simple reproductions. Seemingly displaced, fragmented and multiplied, his works are either synthetic, serial, or monumental; since they have cashed in on minimalist abstraction, they are freed from a single and unchanging viewpoint.

Here, he uses humour to hijack objects, images, symbols, and their popular usages. Imagery from modern art as well as traditional and contemporary folklore redeploy under a regime of falsehoods, with the candour of a roundabout sculpture. The lanterns evoke either a fanciful Switzerland with mountains and chalets or a heavenly Midwest with wooden sculptures, natural parks, and amusement parks. All these works oscillate between the celebration and the criticism of a romantic and wild country—an elaborate myth that moulds a nation. But even though he plays with notions of authenticity, the handmade, the readymade, and the kitsch aesthetic, Valentin Carron holds out against all ideologies. Or rather, he gives in to all of them: he “poaches” in the matrix of popular consumer culture. Through his works, collective memory becomes a monument that glorifies each of our lives.

[1977] Born in Fully (Switzerland). Lives and works in Martigny (Switzerland).

CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE
Retrospective

Charlotte Posenenske’s works draw on a wide range of modern heritage. From Cézanne, she inherits her interest in landscapes and, from the Dutch and Soviet avant-garde constructivists, she gets her concept of spatial composition and her the notions of standardization. Abandoning the pictorial representation of space for sculpture, Charlotte Posenenske raises the question of experience, first from the subjective point of view and then from an anonymous point of view. In 1968, disappointed by the material limitations of art to resolve urgent societal issues, she ends her artistic career and pursues her endeavours in sociology.

In the 1960s, her research on pictorial space is expressed in a series of metallic reliefs, sculpted and mechanically painted, in architectural pavilions that are modifiable by the consumer-spectator. In 1967, Charlotte Posenenske conceives of the series D and DW: quadrangular tubes rely on a modular system in which production, distribution, and consumerism, call into question industrial processes. Their manipulation is entrusted to the spectator (series DW) and their assemblage is delegated to the exhibition curator (series D). By leaving the final form of her works up to others’ imaginations and supervision, the artist celebrates societal cooperation and criticizes standardized work. Between perfection and disorder, imagination and impediments, vindication and powerlessness, fluid diversions and rational forms, Charlotte Posenenske imposes a poetry of improvised action.

[1930 (Wiesbaden, Germany) – 1985 (Frankfurt, Germany)]

SERGE SPITZER
Re/Search, Bread and Butter with the ever present Question of How to define the difference between a Baguette and a Croissant (II), 1995-2010

Serge Spitzer aims to reveal hidden elements, structures and systems, the effects of which we perceive without trying to question their nature. Since the 1970s, he has been formulating mechanisms of communication, perception, and consciousness. These “reality models” are extraordinarily lucid sculptures in which everyday life confronts while merging with the imaginary. The artist borrows a complex vocabulary from our surroundings to generate the constant conflict and equilibrium of his works. His sculptures, while autonomous, are ephemeral monuments that possess inside themselves the potential conditions for self-destruction.

In this same way, Re/Search, Bread and Butter with the ever present Question of How to define the difference between a Baguette and a Croissant, a monumental installation first made in 1997 for the Lyon Biennial, coincides with the democratization of the Internet. Presented today in the context of information technology hegemony, this work attests to the pre-existence of a quasi-organic communication network. Serge Spitzer unveils a chaotic pneumatic transport system where capsules, propelled by air, whizz through a maze of tubes. Installed in 1866 under the streets of Paris, this kind of device originally served to transmit commercial orders between the Central Telegraph Office and trading rooms. By bringing a technology back into the public space that ordinarily lurks under our towns, like a beast in a cave, Serge Spitzer ironically interrogates its function and renders it perfectly obsolete. The installation brings together two systems that work against each other, but are forced to coexist together; the networks neutralize each other. Messages shoot through these vessels without sender, without recipient, and on a quest without beginning or end. Here, order faces off with chaos and stringency brushes against weakness: everything is intertwined, but all of it is accidental.

[1951] Born in Bucharest. Lives and works in New York.

RAPHAEL ZARKA
(A list of which I could tediously extend ad infinitum)

Raphaël Zarka doesn’t get ahead of history, but he doesn’t fall behind it, either. By contemplating the world, the artist realizes that it is furnished only with phantoms, reoccurring forms and remanence. As a result, he photographs and catalogues polyhedra: these geometric forms, first studied by Archimedes, then rediscovered by Luca Pacioli and Leonard de Vinci, reappear as breakwaters in Sete, France, or as a library in Minsk. According to the artist, they make up the “Formes du Repos,” archetypal figures so stiff that they seem naturally photogenic. Raphaël Zarka is, therefore, an inquiring artist who proceeds slowly by juxtaposing these complex cases.

This discipline inspired him to write an essay (La Conjonction interdite, 2003), a lacunary chronology (Une journée sans vague, 2006), and then a documentary entitled Topographie anecdotée du skateboard (2008). This forty-minute long documentary treats the array of surfaces skaters use to sublimate their discipline. Invented in California, skateboard dissociates urban forms from their functions, and in doing so, installs the bases for a naturalism of streets and a wasteland of sidewalks. Raphaël Zarka observes this hijacking and puts it into perspective: the empty swimming pools, which inspired the creation of skateparks, possess the physical elements of cycloid curves from Galilean mechanics. Here, the elementary principles of energy move from a scholarly form to a popular usage. In consequence, the artist reproduces the draisine, two motorbikes welded “head to foot” in a makeshift freight car. This rudimentary vehicle, originally conceived of by engineer Bertin to travel the length of the Aérotrain monorail, appears as the antithesis of progress and emerges as a point of tension for a futuristic vision that will never come into being.

[1977] Born in Montpellier. Lives and works in Paris.

Image: Laith Al-AMIRI. Symbol of Courage, 2009. Photo : AFP - Mahmud Saleh

Press contact:
Dolorès Gonzalez Tel : +33 1 47235200 presse@palaisdetokyo.com

Opening 18 February 2010, from 20 to midnight

Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du President Wilson, Paris
Hours:
12 am to midnight, monday closed
Admission:
full: 6 euros
reduced: 4,5 euros

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