print September 2000

Robert Morris

A NARROW, LABYRINTHINE PASSAGE leads to the center of the vast room on the second floor of the museum. There we are faced with projected images from World War II—photographs from the Centre d' Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation in Lyon, headquarters of the Gestapo during the German occupation. Not wanting to linger over these images because of painful memories they call to mind, we fix our attention instead on Mirror Film, 1969, made by Robert Morris as he walked through the Wisconsin snow, mirror in hand. Turning around us as we stand in the middle of the room, this projection

print October 1999

André Raffray

André Raffray makes reproductions of masterpieces. As a result, he occupies a marginal place in the contemporary art world, but he is well known to curators like Pontus Hulten, who exhibited him several times at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Little by little, Raffray has put his stamp on his methods of reproduction, which never yield straight copies of the original. This exhibition, entitled “L’Éloge des autres” (The praise of others), presented works from his retrospective last spring at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, a confirmation that he is now recognized as an artist in his own

print April 1999

Alain Fleischer

This exhibition, entitled “La Vague gelée/The Frozen Wave: cinéma et photographie,” presented fifteen works stemming from Alain Fleischer’s ongoing reflection on the reciprocal relationship between film and photography. This meditation has nourished Fleischer’s work for years, his writings as well as his cinematic and photographic productions. Novelist, essayist, filmmaker, photographer, aesthetician, Fleischer tracks the reality of things beneath their surface, and in so doing, brings to light the limitless strata of appearances, in a mise en abîme that is also a deliberation on time. The

print December 1998

Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle’s work stands in the twentieth-century tradition of turning life into fiction and fictions into life. Her art consists of imagining scenarios in which she herself is implicated and arranging these vignettes so that she can physically live out the adventures of her heroine, adventures that she then records in photographs and journal entries. Many of these works have given rise to books, and the story of her marriage to Greg Shepherd was the subject of a film, No Sex Last Night (1993), whose success contributed to her reknown outside artistic circles.

It is no surprise, then, that Paul

print November 1998

Michel Blazy

There has been much talk in recent years about Michel Blazy, a young French artist whose work arouses divided reactions—either enthusiastic approval or rejection and disgust. It is difficult to remain indifferent before one of his “vegetal sculptures,” composed as they are of living organisms—plants, weeds, and mashed vegetables. The installations give off smells ranging from pleasant to mud, and, depending on their freshness, may even have begun to attract parasites, flies, or aphids. This is precisely Blazy’s intention. Project for an Interior Pleasing to Insects, 1996, welcomed the

print November 1998

Gérard Garouste

For the inauguration of Fondation Coprim’s new exhibition space in the Marais, the painter Gérard Garouste presented a remarkably original installation, La Dive Bacbuc—Installation drolatique sur la lecture de Rabelais (The priestess Bacbuc—A ribald installation on reading Rabelais), 1998. Large painted canvases were attached by cords to a circular, forged-iron frame (almost eight feet tall and twenty feet in diameter) that resembled an enormous drum or a circus tent. The canvases were done in acrylic, like the artist’s “Indiennes” series (started in 1987), named after the fifteenth-

print February 1998

Yvan Salomone

Yvan Salomone makes watercolors, and yet he shows with an avant-garde space in the thirteenth arrondissement that is part of the community of galleries recently dubbed the “Scène Est” (East scene). It should be pointed out that this forty-year-old French artist doesn’t create the kinds of pretty landscapes one might associate with the medium. Instead, he depicts port cities, such as Saint-Malo, Le Havre, Dieppe, Shanghai, Dakar, or Rotterdam. Salomone lives only steps away from the port of Saint-Malo in Brittany, and he has visited it constantly for several years now, in addition to taking

print September 1997

Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger

For more than a decade, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger has borne witness to the most overwhelming event of our century—the Holocaust. Born in Israel and a resident of France since 1982, Lichtenberg-Ettinger has modestly, and little by little, managed to express the inexpressible. Her series “Eurydice,” 1992–96, consisting of mixed media pieces on canvas and paper and shown here along with other works, rescues from oblivion images that have been hidden in the shadows—just as Eurydice herself was in the myth of Orpheus, after she was sentenced to death by her lover’s impatience. Lichtenberg-Ettinger

print May 1997

Monique Frydman

Monique Frydman’s work tends to elicit either indifference or enthusiasm. The indifference stems perhaps from the fact that her paintings take no part in current artistic trends. But for those who still pursue beauty and pleasure in art, Frydman’s canvases are both provocative and affecting.

Frydman defines pleasure in painting as “the deployment of a particular form of knowledge . . . The fact of being at once mortal and eternal . . . the memory or the subconscious knowledge of happiness as a form of human materialization and perfection,” and she models her work on the paintings of Cézanne. (In

print January 1997

Gloria Friedmann

For several years now, Gloria Friedmann has waged a campaign against the blurring of boundaries between media images and real life. In a series of ephemeral tableaux vivants entitled Les Représentants (The representatives, 1994–96), two of which were presented in her recent show, she leads the viewer to an abrupt confrontation with natural substances that are becoming less and less visible in today’s environment. In each of these works she boldly places animals and the detritus of mass-market culture side by side on a meaningful site: horses and wrecked cars in a working-class residence in

print January 1997

“L’Art au Corps”

Unfortunately, it seems that a comprehensive history of performance art and related genres in the United States, Europe, and Japan has yet to be synthesized into a single exhibition. “L’art au corps, le corps exposé de Man Ray à nos jours” (Art on the body: the body exposed, from Man Ray to the present) was presented as a historical exhibition focusing on art that uses the body itself as a medium, in particular works that emerged during the ’60s and ’70s. Intended to serve as a kind of tribute to the French journal ArTitudes and to its founder Francois Pluchart—who from 1971 to 1977 was a great

print March 1996

Françoise Vergier

This exhibition—the first retrospective of Françoise Vergier’s work—included 70 rarely seen pieces dating from 1980 to 1995. The large number of works presented could perhaps be attributed to the fact that Vergier typically works on a small scale, with the exception of the life-size statues of women she sometimes sculpts.

In Vergier’s work one finds evidence of her sensitivity to nature, her affection for literature, and her loving relationship with her child. Despite this personal aspect of her oeuvre, some of her work retains a link to Conceptualism. The early pieces that appeared in this

Anne Dagbert