Note: This month’s ArtSeen is a sort of in-between space, to announce what is happening, how things are looking, to signal the forthcoming further focus on Boris Achour (May ArtSeen, with 2 shows opening in April 2009 with his works: not to be missed if you are here!!!)
Last week I attended a lecture on rhetoric at la Sorbonne where the invited guest said “beauty plus history equals art”. This passé notion made me flinch. I wondered what he would do with all of the self-flagellating artists of the 1970s who self-mutilated on film or in live performance pieces. More importantly, when I reflect on the current art focus of Paris, how would he see the use of objects as art? Not pretty, ornamental things from some other era, but gigantic colorful cows, a rumpled, worn-out dress tossed on a museum floor, or Paris artists Olivier Babin, with his bronze, painted watermelon(photo above) entitled “Art for the very last people”, 2005, and Boris Achour, with his “Actions Few” (1993-97) a kind of “soft guerilla warfare”. Achour, unlike Babin, does not make an object, but used objects found on the spot in unusual “public interventions” which he then photographed and filmed—as in his hanging baguette (see photo, from his site: http://www.borisachour.net/).
Boris Achour- Baguette on Pipe
Propaganda, art, fame, object, design, life, utility, beauty, consumer(ism)—the world of art has battled with these themes, terms, and their ramifications for ages, but ever since the 1917 urinal entitled “Fountain” by Duchamp and his many other Ready-Mades, the artworld, and its audience (museum-going tourists to critics and collectors) have both expressed moments of dubiousness, and others of sheer pleasure when looking at (or touching) something we might see in other contexts as “everyday item”. This month’s Artseen therefore reflects on a few Parisian artists, galleries and museums who focus on the object: not those who make installations of objects from their own lives or around rooms they have lived in (such as the many museums focused on famous author’s lives and how/where they lived—like Victor Hugo’s house) but those who take the object away from its natural setting and, à la Marcel Duchamp, make us see it again, anew, differently—in as simple ways as seen in works by Paris artist Sophie Calle, for example her bed, which she mailed to a lovesick Josh Greene and around which emerged an expo of bed, letters, emails (see photo).
What is certain is that artist’s—especially those here—have been trying to modify our interaction with art for over a century, and one of their ways of doing this has been through an exploration of the object, both objectified from the tradition of the still life through the very amusing play on simulacrum. Duchamp wanted to move the object away from a purely “retinal art” position. Boris Achour’s does this in an entirely new way, playing on the context not of the object in museum, but of art in the world, and also of it. For example, for “A Sculpture”, Achour deposited 20 books with glued pages in 20 public libraries around Paris. These were cataloged and shelved as fiction books, because they look like books, yet they are not readable (http://borisachour.free.fr/english-oeuvres/asculpture.html ). The “spectator” for this artwork will not be seeking out art, but reading material, when he/she stumbles upon the art object. Purpose, aesthetic, and interaction with “art” are all put into question, in very fun ways by such a project: a tricking of context takes place when the everyday object, or perceived thing, is out of place in comic or perplexing ways.
Often, however, the contemporary treatment of things reverses this effect to make us see the object again, focus on our visual relationship with it—just as with the soccer ball pictured here, (also from “Actions Few”), where Achour has transformed one of the iron spheres forming a border between pedestrian and driving space into a soccer ball. The likely viewer will be a pedestrian, perhaps out running errands, who might not even notice the work, or see it as “art”. They might even try and give it a kick (with painful consequences). The initial viewer’s interaction with the creation will not be the same as our interaction with Achour’s photo or film of it in a gallery, or here. The artist therefore is finding (and seeking) ways to move through various spaces, taking himself and work into and out of the expected role of art(ist) and object(ifier/-maker). Once in the gallery, however, and hung on the wall, there is a return to the object objectified, such as in the popular consumer items portrayed like icons by Andy Warhol.
