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Often, the art system itself becomes inextricably bound up in a series of ticks that not only increases the distance between art and viewer, but also assumes that the viewer is mad. Thus, paradoxically, the culture and the intellectual challenge to which the art aspires are lost. To this end, Montse Bahia has underscored the need to stay alert to the “gap” between art and society, while, last January, Martí Manen explored the often testy relationships between institutions and artistic communities. Now, François Piron is offering a critique of reductionist cultural practices. Mr. Piron is a founding member of The Laboratories, a small artistic institution located on the outskirts of Paris, devoted to cultural production and contact with society.
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FRANÇOIS
PIRON
"Social evil did not arise the first time someone said, ‘This is mine,’ but rather the first time someone said, ‘You are not my equal.’” (Jacques Rancière, Le maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle, Fayard, 1987, p. 134) Perhaps ingenuously, I would like to find an application for this sage observation from the world of political philosophy in contemporary French political culture. Undoubtedly, one could find clear applications in other countries, too. Indeed, the cultural sphere, of which the “art world” is a chronic component, is essentially a society built on disdain.
Rancière continues: “Inequality is not the consequence of anything. It is a primitive passion in its own right or, more precisely, its only cause is equality itself. The passion for the inegalitarian is little more than the frenzy of equality, laziness in the face of the infinite work it requires.” The same could be said of political culture (and, by extension, of political ideologies), obsessed as it is with reducing the very inequalities it spawns through its own actions. The litany of these inequalities when it comes to art is endless: social, economic, educational, geographical… Indeed, cultural institutions operate on the principle that the artwork they display is inaccessible for certain publics, that their mission is to please “their own” preconceived audience. By acting this way, by emphasizing the clear conscience within the bad, they endlessly invent new mechanisms and teaching methods, mediating and publicizing art to “make it accessible”, to “place it within reach” of a public previously conditioned, quite reasonably, not to assume a priori that it is directed at them.
We must certainly be careful not to overdramatize the relationship with contemporary art, especially in light of the vast “cathedrals to the image” so often produced by museums in their everyday shows of strength. However, when the pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction, the result is the presentation of works to the public in convenient user-friendly packaging, where the viewer’s “active participation” is sought as if his role as observer were no longer enough to satisfy the thirst for abolishing inequalities that so characterizes the responsables des publics, literally, “directors of publics”. This unfortunate, pluralized term implies, among other things, that we must address the elderly, the unemployed or children, for example, in different ways. Today, most curators have learned this post-modern lesson well and highlight only the work process itself, an instance of intransitive legitimization, of a means without an end, along with the reception and display of the work, which they oversee and control. Hence the endless escalation of related equipment and tools, akin to prostheses for the disabled, whose primary consequence is that of ensuring that the portion of cultural institutions actually devoted to art is but a fleeting stop along the vast culture distribution chain. In the Bermuda triangle formed by the curator, the artist and the institution, two crucial pillars have been lost: the artwork itself and the public.
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We must not forget one particularly deft act of concealment in the issue of art and, above all, the issue of the works themselves, namely: the frequent recourse to legitimizing exhibits by means of their processes, including their style (conceived of as “workshops” or announced with boxed invitations), and the growing reliance on separate spheres of knowledge (sociology, ethnology, urban development, politics…). These fields of study are used as shields in press releases and sprinkled liberally over the artists’ works in those cases, more common than one might think, where, ultimately, just a few dozen subtitles remain, floating in a sea of diluted works. (For recent examples, see the latest edition of the Berlin Biennale or Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian.) For it is in the exhibits themselves that, at times, we find ourselves wishing to call the curator over so that he can justify the apparently random grouping of pieces, scattered like clockwork bombs over a no-man’s land, or laid out in a species of hieroglyph, as if they were the key words in a sentence penned by the curator himself.
These considerations in part formed the basis for the project drafted in 2001 by the art critic Yvane Chapuis, the choreographer Loïc Touzé and myself for The Laboratories, a non-institutional space founded by an artist in 1994. The Laboratories concentrate their activities in four main spheres: the production of artwork, the public dissemination thereof, publishing and professional training overseen by artists who guide students beyond the usual pedagogical constraints.
The project was defined as an artistic project, and this was meant in an absolute, not relative, sense. For all actions to come out of The Laboratories are the result of a project carried out by an artist, a project whose coordination and launching we manage by providing the adequate intellectual, logistical and financial accompaniment from the time of conception to the public presentation. The emphasis on production does not mean we seek to make the process itself the show. On the contrary, it aims to embrace the rhythm of creation in all of its myriad forms, for The Laboratories work with both creators involved in the fine arts and choreographers and writers. They are thus a multidisciplinary space, and yet they do not demand that their collaborating artists be multidisciplinary, too, for they are founded on the belief that true transgression can only be achieved in the context of a medium’s specific history.
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LES LABORATOIRES
Located in Aubervilliers, in the northern outskirts of Paris, The Laboratories are a center for the production and dissemination of works by artists who primarily hail from the fields of the visual arts, theater and literature. Founded in 1994 and headed since 2001 by Y. Chapuis, F. Piron and L. Touzé, they comprise a team of 9 people and each year play host to a dozen guest artists invited to create new works.
Their most recent publication was The truth will be known when the last witness is dead, by the Atlas Group, co-published with Walther König Verlag (Cologne).
Resident artists for 2005 include John Menick (USA), Vincent Dupont (France), the Club des Cinq collective (France), Claudia Triozzi (Italy), Ryan Gander (Great Britain), Aurélien Froment (France), Joris Lacoste (France) and Frans Poelstra (Netherlands), among others.
Laboratoires
41 rue Lécuyer, F-93300 Aubervilliers,
Francia
www.leslaboratoires.org
info@leslaboratoires.org |
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The Laboratories are not usually used for shows. However, from time to time, they do display the works they produce to the public, adhering to a “rendezvous” concept in order to accommodate whatever pace might be required to ensure the necessary duration and full realization of each project. One project that exemplifies The Laboratories specific work method in several ways, though without constituting a model per se, is Musée Précaire Albinet, executed in May and June 2004 by Thomas Hirschhorn and located at the foot of several apartment buildings in a neighborhood of Aubervilliers. Without a doubt, the invitation sent to Hirschhorn in 2001 was proof of a preexisting convergence of views with the Swiss artist’s own work model: his affirmation that the works themselves should enjoy a certain autonomy, as well as of their uncontrollable and culturally irretrievable nature; his faith in the encounter between the viewer and piece as a necessarily individual and possibly life-changing experience; his reiterated statements, seen, controversially, as obsolete, even reactionary, modernist resurgences, upon which the artist acts with the unwavering commitment required of such a large ambition and to which The Laboratories wholeheartedly subscribes… The result, Musée Précaire, was a piece born of simplicity, whose interest lies solely in how it was carried out: displaying 20th-century masterpieces in a venue built jointly with neighborhood residents and using the pieces to generate a compact series of artistic happenings, ranging from writing workshops to debates and conferences, held almost daily over a period of eight weeks, each devoted to a single artist (in this case, Duchamp, Malevitch, Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Léger, Dalí, Warhol and Beuys)
We lack the space to describe here how a project deemed unviable by the majority of the endless intermediaries it required was successfully brought off. Indeed, many considered the project untenable due to its ties to a neighborhood dismissed as “conflictive” and its commitment to working with the residents thereof. Compounding these doubts was its insistence on performing this work not in accordance with some pre-established formula for cultural activity that would lead to “enhanced wellbeing” or even under the guise of some misleading double-speak that might justify it as having a social function, but rather with the firm conviction that making residents jointly responsible for the project was the only way to ensure its survival.
The Musée Précaire, a project of proximity, isolated from all other artistic happenings, owes its success to the clarity of its discourse with regard to this social purpose, which was at the same time explicitly denied by Hirschhorn in relation to his own role as artist. The project has allowed numerous interlocutors (educators, trainers, association office-holders…) to freely assume the project as their own in order to pursue their particular social and occupational integration goals, targeting the forty people hired to construct, maintain and disassemble the Museum, after fifteen of them had received remunerated professional training lasting several months, in particular, at the Pompidou Center. The project is “neither a success nor a failure,” according to Hirschhorn, and The Laboratories are simply proud to have contributed to its unlikely existence. |
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