Voyager à l'étranger avec Nouveau Énergie: Part deux
West Coast New Energy returns to the Île-de-France with a collage show in Paris featuring the "Who Am I?" shape art of Erik Bluhm (below) among others. "What glue do you use?" curated by Yves Brochard, opens today and runs through Feburary.
The exhibition features the work of Dianne Bellino, Brian Belott, Erik Bluhm, Aline Bouvy/John Gillis, Sebastien Bruggeman, Richard Fauguet, Christian Holstad, Aleksandra Mir, Javier Piñon, Kirstine Roepstorff, Amy Sarkisian, Leonor Scherrer, Frieda Schumann, Josh Smith, Robert Suermondt, and Marnie Weber.
“All the books on the history of dada tell the story of how Kurt Schwitters would comb the streets of Hanover looking for used ticket stubs to use in his collages; illustrating that the basic dadaist idea that art can be made from anything is tantamount to the basic punk rock idea that anyone can make art.”(1) It is of course only one of the reasons, but we could find many others, for which the term “collage” is found regularly within the 20th century. From cubism to the current-day, going trough dadaism, futurism, and surrealism to Richard Hamilton’s seminal “Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing?” from 1956; some works from these periods maintain contemporary relevance through their use of juxtaposition, innovative use of found materials and source images, which are re-contextualized to create new and unexpected situations. In this brief introduction we should also take note of the aura that now surrounds these historical pieces, this aura that André Breton pointed out in “Le point du jour” when he evoked the years that “yellowed the bits of newspapers, whose fresh ink contributed to the insolence of the wonderful papiers collés of 1913”. We should also underline the similarity of methods between Raoul Haussman’s “Tatlin at home” in 1920 and Richard Hamilton who, forty years later, had established a sort of of “programmatic” classification: men, women, food, history, newspaper, cinema, domestic tools, cars, space, comics, television, telephones. This exhibition will make no distinction between collage, montage, assemblage... on the contrary, in its elaboration this project might have pointed to other questions : which images, which constructions, which sources?
The title is simply the first question that was asked in an interview of one of the few English artists that has always worked in collage : John Stezaker. This exhibition at the Atelier Cardenas Bellanger was built like a collage. Different artists, gallerists, and curators were asked to propose an overview as well as artists’ names for this project ; we should therefore see different perceptions of current issues, but also different methods of production of what Jean Clay called “this truly infernal machine”, whose vitality is still quietly (but significantly) influential today : “Thirty years later, I’m still here with my x-acto blade, my pile of magazines and my tube of glue.” (2)
(1) Greil Marcus: “Lipstick Traces” Allia, Paris 1998.
(2) Linder: “Dream a little dream of me” Frog N°4, Paris fall/ winter 2006.
Thanks to :
Olivier Antoine, Kyle Field, Michel François, Laurent Godin, Florence Bonnefous & Keren Detton.
Image: Untitled (Forest Dawn), 2006. Erik Bluhm.
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Atelier Cardenas Bellanger
43, rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris, France
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