Artists for Sarkozy?; Documenta 12 Billboards; Death of Art
ARTISTS FOR SARKOZY?
As France heads to the second round of voting in the presidential election, the role of contemporary art is coming under scrutiny, after the president of a French national artists association took a public position in favor of the ultraconservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. As Le Monde's Nathaniel Herzberg reports, Rémi Aron, the head of Maison des Artistes, appeared on a talk program on NS TV (Nicolas Sarkozy TV), on the campaign site of the candidate who came in first in the first round of voting. Maison des Artistes represents forty thousand artists in France and also manages the social-security system for artists.
"For twenty-five years, artists have had the feeling that political culture ignores 99 percent of them," Aron said on the program. While the discourse of Sarkozy "relays" that "overall frustration," "Nicolas Sarkozy reintroduced concepts that motivate us," Aron said, expounding on the concepts of "beauty" and "the hierarchy of the values" in artistic teaching.
"In the face of such remarks, the anger was immediate," writes Herzberg. On the Maison des Artistes website, critics of Aron have denounced his appearance. Criticisms range from his failure to respect his obligation to remain reserved, to his making the members of the Maison des Artists "hostages" to Sarkozy. "Some intend to leave the association," writes Herzberg. "Others want to have a general meeting to call for the departure of the president." Alain Lovato, the general secretary of the Maison des Artistes, has explicitly come out against Aron's "personal initiative." For his part, Aron claims not to have directly engaged the Maison, although he is presented on the show as the president of the institution. "My political ideas are well known," Aron told Le Monde. "I have the right to express them. . . . Is that a crime?" One answer comes from Eric Corne, an artist and the first director of Le Plateau. "Undoubtedly not," said Corne. "But it's certainly an abuse of power."
DOCUMENTA 12 HITS THE STREETS
The Documenta 12 billboard campaign is under way in seventy cities. As Der Standard reports, the five billboards feature the D12 logo superimposed on blurred color close-up images of flowers. According to the report, the flora—which originate from the Kassel greenhouse Wilhelmshöhe—were photographed with a broken camera. For D12 artistic director Roger M. Buergel, the design makes it clear "that we notice the visible only through a screen of culturally mediated images," and the blurriness underscores that this screen has an aesthetically independent existence. "The flower theme also makes once again clear that beauty and duration do not get along, and that Documenta can also last for one hundred days."
DEATH OF ART
Is painting dead? The French artist Christiane Jaillet seems to think so and has buried a large part of her own painterly oeuvre in the ground. As Le Monde and AFP report, Jaillet buried the paintings in a park in Nancy, France, and intends to exhume them one month later. The ritual is part of the artist's attempt to respect a Malgache Malagasy tradition, which sees the dead buried and then exhumed for one day to give them a "second life." "I am burying my works because I worked a lot in Madagascar on the passage between life and death, the passage to the earth," Jaillet said. After the paintings are exhumed, they will be placed on display in a Nancy gallery, and when the show is complete, they will once again be buried in the earth for one year, only to rise again on the occasion of the Festival of Art and Culture of the Indian Ocean, which takes place in Nancy in 2008.