The world of Feux pâles: An exhibition put to the test of conservation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Conservation of contemporary art: from concepts to practice, Cloaca by Wim Delvoye
Authenticity in transition, 2013
Starting from an emblematic contemporary work, Cloaca by Wim Delvoye, we analyse how a contemporary artist conceptualises terms such as original, copy and replica and notions such as authenticity and patina. One of the jobs of the conservator consists in getting behind these terms and notions -which often lead to confusion- to grasp the concept, i.e. the artists abstract mental representation of the word. To do so, the conservator-restorer has to rely on a taxonomy shared by the profession, which in many cases still needs to be firmly established, and prove himself capable of keeping a distance from commonly accepted meanings of the words to grasp the artist’s thought.
Studia de Arte et Educatione, vol. XIII
Hide-and-seek. Absence, Invisibility, and Contemporary Art Practices, 2018
The 13th issue of the Journal of the Faculty of Art at the Pedagogical University ofKrakow, “Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia de Arte et Educatione,” addresses invisibility and absence in contemporary art practices in widely understood public sphere, where the latter concerns both urban and rural space, the Internet, as well as museums and galleries, public collections of contemporary art, art festivals and other events. Authors featured in this volume investigate those artistic and institutional practices that seek to achieve social efficacy and presence, yet their less conspicuous existence is not considered a failure. In this issue, we are interested in those approaches as well as individual and collective efforts that question the omnipresent quest for visibility. This attitude may be manifested in negating the market and the conception of artwork as commodity, or in a dismissal of galleries and museums. Yet, it may also be expressed in the artist’s approach – his or her state of mind – of being authentically exhausted with and distanced towards fame and recognition despite being a successful player in the world of high-budget commissions and festivals of art in public space. We are interested both in the intentionally orchestrated gestures of disappearance, as well as in the “dark matter” of art – this group of countless and anonymous “dogs-bodies” of culture. In recent decades, calls for invisibility, absence or withdrawal have been also voiced by institutions involved in exhibiting art. We are interested in initiatives undertaken in this sphere, as well as attempts to withdraw from it, as exemplified by the recent Biennale de Paris, which presented an alternative to the “cyclical” festivals of art. Another important issue is the presence of works of ephemeral and dematerialised nature in public art collections. In this context, we would like to investigate institutional mechanisms that allow them to include such projects in permanent collections. We wish to highlight the commonly unnoticed work of curators and completely invisible conservation practices. In this issue, we wish to consider whether all those practices are able to provide merely a substitute for a “real,” institutionalised and commodified culture? Or, on the contrary, in the media-dominated world, where everyone is truly visible and Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame is so much more than just a phrase, can efforts to be visible and retain material permanence be seen as largely anachronistic, while the most valuable qualities are anonymity and transience? Or, perhaps, this is merely another game and another strategy to – just like Banksy – enter the artworld through the back door, through the gift shop?
Collecting and art market studies of the eighteenth-century period, which saw the rise of an international art market, used to focus mainly around the circulation of Old Masters’ painted canvases. But the historiography has significantly expanded its scope in the last decades, to include the study of modern drawings. Our paper proposes to recreate the networks and practices of modern drawing collecting, and its disruption on the already well-established French art market, by a detailed study of the collection of drawings bequeathed to the Fabre Museum of Montpellier by Antoine Valedau (1777-1838), a former Parisian stockbroker. These drawings, now preserved in a museum, were originally gathered in portfolios – the practice was traditional for prints or Old Masters drawings, but assembling works from living artists remained unusual. Easily displayed and circulated, they were praised for being the enterprise of a “man of the world, friend of the arts,” who had thus created “a real portable museum which has nothing in common with the album of the lady of fashion, but which presents a real interest, that of assembling for display the worthy productions of our most distinguished artists.” Le Miroir des spectacles, des lettres, des mœurs et des arts, December 11, 1821. This collection, which we confront to other contemporary ensembles such as the Valedau and Chenard collections, as well as the collection of Alexandre du Sommerard, founder of the Cluny Museum, testifies to an emerging market and a growing consideration for modern art. This paper first presents the disrupted context in which this practice appeared at the very end of the 18th century when artists had to adapt to a market in crisis. We will also touch upon the methodological difficulties of retracing collecting practices often founded on gift or exchanges arising from studio sociablity. Provenance search, auction studies and inventory upon decease – the traditional documents of collecting studies – are often unavailing in the case of modern drawing collections. On the other hand, drawing collections, because they are evidence both of intimate links and of aesthetic choices that were less scrutinized and codified, give us unprecedented access to the networks of sociability of eighteenth-century collectors.
Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, 2019
This volume both gathers and expands on the results of the research project “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions” held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes to draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history, at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that grasps the exhibition as both an aesthetic and epistemic site.
Kunsthalle Wien, 2017
Talk for the exhibition « Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017 », 8.11.2017-28.01.2018, Kunsthalle Wien. Curator: Luca Lo Pinto. Talk about French artist Philippe Thomas (1951–1995) and about readymades belong to everyone®, an agency he created in 1987 as a conduit by which collectors became authors of the artworks they acquired. The exhibition Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017 shows his work in the section AUTORETROSPECTIVE. Philippe Thomas foresaw many of the crucial questions raised by present artistic debates and their language: the function of the audience, the conception of the exhibition as artwork, the de-personalization of the author, the scattering of artistic codes in media of mass communication, the appropriation of advertising and marketing strategies, the slippage between reality and fiction. He rewrote the artist-work-viewer relationship in a performative guise, calling into question the history of art, and art itself.
Artworks and their Conservation. A (Tentative) Philosophical Introduction
2019
What is it like to restore the works of art of the past? What principles, constrains and rules underpin our conservative practice? In this essay we will take a philosoph-ical look at the discipline of art conservation. Different philosophical positions that impact the aesthetic, ontological and conceptual arguments as to how restoration is to be conceived will be discussed, in the context of examples of artworks that have undergone restoration, de-restoration or re-restoration. This will lead us to address the following questions: Why do we feel compelled to conserve artworks? Which values should we abide by when it comes to restoring them? What role do the intentions of the original artist play? Finally, does current audience have a right to be involved in the matter?
The Two Lives of Objects: Artefacts and Artworks
How would you describe the kind of life that objects encounter before and after their entry in a museum space? To place these two periods (the before- and after-museum) in an antithesis is to rely on the way objects are treated by museums (the management team including curators and preservers). More precisely, the institutional construction or, more accurately, the museum’s attempt of re-forming these objects’ physical condition (appearance) and historical relevance establish fundamental questions about their authenticity (what it was before their entry in the museum by means of physical condition). I particularly point to the museum’s restoration acts, which are part of conservation processes and notify the museum’s request for ageless objects. This intentional approach to produce timelessness (in both physical condition and relevance) and the institutional strife for objects that appear as brand-new products seems like a matter of reconsidering the object’s biography by re-establishing the artwork’s history and its fixed life. Such an issue brings certain matters and questions into discussion.