manon klein
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ÉTABLI AFIN D’ÊTRE RENVERSÉ
/ SET UP IN ORDER TO BE BLOWN DOWN


Co-curated with Association STartE promotion 2015
  
Exhibition with Peter Downsbrough, Claude Rutault, Lawrence Weiner, ExposerPublier, Julien Journoux, Aurélie Pétrel et Vincent Roumagnac

Galerie Michel Journiac
Paris, France  
2015
 In an academic context of transmission of knowledge and rules, this exhibition is a daring answer to current artistic creation, strongly marked by the avant-garde of the sixties and seventies. The exhibition borrows its title from a statement by Lawrence Weiner, inviting to consider an upheaval of what is ongoing, but whose outcome is unknown. In the exhibition, three major works chosen in Daniel Bosser’s private collection will be reactualized. At the basis of each of these reactualizations lies a “protocol”, a statement written by the artist, giving instructions for the realization of the work. The practice of the protocol, initiated in the late 1960’s enables us to think about the fate of the work of art, its aesthetic value as well as its authorship. As a first draft of an answer, another generation of artists takes those tensions into their hands in order to reveal new possible variations and (re)incarnations of works of art.

During all the time of the exhibition, Aurélie Pétrel and Vincent Roumagnac, freed from any instruction from a protocol, interpret in space and time a photograph by Jeff Wall (A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947, 1990), making its outlines implode. Julien Journoux also uses an existing work: Bartleby, the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville as a starting point for his own art. He makes his the original novel, erasing word after word before (re)writing them one by one by hand. He thus offers a new interpretation of the novel, taking the motto “I would prefer not to”, that the hero famously use when refusing to work, backwards. The exhibition also features a state of the protocol work Le ciel du 18 mars, that consists in photographs of the sky, sent to the artist every 18th of March, on his birthday, since 2013, by his close friends. He requested those photographs by sending his friends a text message. In this archive lies a poetic attempt to keep a link with people close to him, as immaterial as it may be. ExposerPublier overturns the terms of existence of the work of art, turning the publication into an exhibition space while pushing back the exhibition into a pretext for the publication. They offer to realize, within the exhibition, a work by David Flaugher, a New York based artist who sent them a protocol especially for the occasion. The work is meant for disappearance and will be gone by the end of the exhibition. The only trace of this gesture will be an editorial testimony, documenting this experience.

Conceptual artists used language as both a means and an end in itself as early as the 1960’s. In this exhibition, language is again used in many variations. Works by both Pétrel | Roumagnac (duo) and ExposerPublier punctually transform the exhibition space into a workshop, or a space where a show is being set up/dismantled, where the work is in a state of transition.

SET UP IN ORDER TO BE BLOWN DOWN is the outcome of a period of six months of work by twenty students, with diverse backgrounds, in a curatorial Master course headed by Françoise Docquiert.








manon klein