Conceptual Art at the Oscars; Aurélie Nemours Dies at Ninety-Four; Critics' Takes on "Regarding Terror"

CONCEPTUAL ART AT THE OSCARS

Who said the Oscars holds no surprises ? This year, conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth is nominated along with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry for best original screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. According to some reports, the film’s director Gondry got the idea for the movie from one of Bismuth’s works, in which the artist handed out cards with the message “You have been erased from the memory of [X]” and then recorded their recipients' reactions. But Bismuth denies the connection. "The idea for Eternal Sunshine never was intended to be an artwork,” said Bismuth in a press statement. “It was a story that came out of a telephone conversation I had with a friend. I told [Gondry] my idea, and we agreed to write a short synopsis. The art work that is probably confused with this is the series called ‘signed anonymous letters to be sent to people I don't know’—letters, written with cut-out type from newspapers, saying ‘I DONT KNOW YOU.’ Each message goes with an envelope on which I write the name of someone chosen randomly in the telephone book."

Whatever the source of the film’s storyline, such recognition has not always been practiced. Take the successful French film Amélie; the storyline seems as if it may have been inspired by a film and installation by the Berlin collective Die Tödliche Doris, active from 1980 to 1987. Der Fotomatonreparateur (The photobooth repairman), which was first shown at the 1982 Paris Biennial, includes a collection of torn-up photographs made by a repairman who abandons his test images—a central storyline in Amélie.

AURÉLIE NEMOURS DIES AT NINETY-FOUR

The French painter Aurélie Nemours died last week in Paris at the age of ninety-four. As Libération’s Hervé Gauville reports, over one hundred thousand visitors saw Nemours’s 2004 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Born Marcelle Baron in 1910 in Paris, Nemours studied with Paul Colin, André Lhote and Fernand Léger before deciding to dedicate her oeuvre exclusively to the abstractions of squares, rectangles and crosses. Nemours’s inspiration lay with none other than Cézanne, in particular what she called his “sensitive sensorial Cubism.” “Cubism was a real revolution,” she said in a recent interview. “It rediscovered the essence of painting, which had become lost at the end of the end of 19th century.” But Nemours went on to liberate the canvas from humanistic figuration. “When you work with Cubism, when you start with a model—for example nature—you take possession of space and, slowly, you understand form,” said the painter of her own approach. “You try with the canvas, and you start the painting.”

CRITICS' TAKES ON "REGARDING TERROR"

The first assessments are in for the controversial “Regarding Terror: The Red Army Faction Exhibition,” which opened last weekend at Berlin’s Kunst-Werke. Curated by Felix Ensslin, Klaus Biesenbach and Ellen Blumenstein, “RAF” garnered both reviews and reflections on terror in the German newspapers. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Mark Siemons does not believe that the show justifies terrorism, as many critics had imagined it might. “One cannot make this reproach,” writes Siemons. “The artworks seem to have an almost mystical nature, which says more about them than about terror.” In the Tageszeitung, Brigitte Werneburg also focuses on mystification. “While provoked by the events [of the past], the artworks certainly don’t intend to mystify these events; but the works also cannot completely distance themselves from a certain fascination in order to destroy the aura surrounding [the past events].”

In the Frankfurter Rundschau, Silke Hohmann writes, “[The show] is explicitly an art exhibition and not a historical one. Yet art placed in the service of something else is bad art; one may rail at such art when one sees it, albeit for different reasons.” In Die Zeit, Hanno Rauterberg doesn’t see things so clearly. “It seemed for a moment that the fear of the ‘70s had returned,” says Rauterberg of viewing the show. “One did not really know what to make of things: There was talk about art, about historical documents, and then about what the curators wanted to research— namely, what remained of the ‘ideas and ideals’ of the RAF. Instead of presenting the history of the RAF, [the exhibition] focuses on how the media saw terror, what kind of images artists have made from these media images, and what images are created in our minds from these images about images. The reception of the reception of the reception—that seems like a dreadfully confusing affair.”

— Jennifer Allen