Valérie Breuvart

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  previews September 2001

  Des Territoires

  Over the past few years, Jean-François Chevrier’s seminars at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts dissecting the social and political implications of the visual arts have brought together students, historians, sociologists, and a handful of interested artists.

  Over the past few years, Jean-François Chevrier’s seminars at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts dissecting the social and political implications of the visual arts have brought together students, historians, sociologists, and a handful of interested artists. Now the resulting research forms the basis of “Des Territoires.” The exhibition includes such figures as Jeff Wall and Giuseppe Penone as well as a number of lesser-known participants. In place of an exhibition catalogue, the fifth and final issue of Chevrier’s periodical Des territoires en revue is available. All five issues

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  print December 2000

  the 2000 Taipei Biennial

  For its fifth edition the Taipei Biennial has made itself resolutely international. After a selection of artists from East Asia presented by Fumio Nanjo two years ago, the curatorship of this new edition and the selection of the thirtyone artists exhibited was entrusted to Jerome Sans and Manray Hsu. The theme they chose, reflected in the exhibition’s subtitle, “The sky is the limit,” corresponds to the heterogeneity of the works and artists presented. The curators envisage the interweaving of different practices and the use of remixing or sampling techniques, present in most of the works here,

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  print November 2000

  “Voilà”

  Unlike most thematic exhibitions, which in their attachment to illustrating an idea become mired in a fairly colorless systematic display, “Voilà: Le Monde dans la tête” (Voilà: The world in mind) stood out for its freshness and originality. As articulated by Suzanne Pagé in the supplement to Les Inrockuptibles that served as a catalogue, the goal of the show (cocurated by Pagé and Béatrice Parent) was to look at the century now ending through works that evidence memory and the recording of time, using techniques that involve “encyclopedic compulsions, fragile biographical traces, learned systems

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  print Summer 2000

  Florence Lazar

  Two of Florence Lazar’s three recent videos were shot in Serbia following the conflicts in Kosovo. Born in France in 1966 and a graduate of L’Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Lazar is of Serbian descent and has long been concerned with the situation in Yugoslavia. She took her first trip to Macedonia in March 1999—along with the three videos, this exhibition also included Cibachrome photographs, some of them taken there—and it was after seeing Yugoslavia, Suicide of a Nation (1999), a documentary produced by the BBC, that she decided to go to Serbia to gather testimony in a

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  print April 2000

  Olivier Dollinger

  In the collective imagination lipstick represents romanticism and sensuality, and it should come as no surprise that various artists have used its image in their work to subvert those very notions. Claes Oldenburg’s postcard Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, 1966, and his Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969, installed at Yale University Art Gallery, or Andy Warhol’s silk screen Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962, come immediately to mind. Of the latter, Kynaston McShine wrote, “Reducing Marilyn to an anatomical fragment, to a kind of repeating osculation machine, it dispels any romantic

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  print December 1999

  Claude Closky

  When Maison Levanneur, the Centre National de l’Estampe et de l’Art Imprimé, was transformed into an exhibition space for contemporary art, its new director, Sylvie Boulanger, set out to create a program dedicated to recent work that has something to do, at least in part, with printed art, thereby respecting the center’s original mission. Each exhibition is the occasion for the printing of a work or an edition by a contemporary artist.

  For “Tatouages” (Tattoos), the recent exhibition by French artist Claude Closky, the walls of the space were covered with various wallpapers. Some of them—Sans

• previews September 1999

  “Jean-Marc Bustamante: Photographic Works 1979–1999”

  With simultaneous shows in two Parisian galleries this season, Jean-Marc Bustamante clearly has the wind in his sails: Now the Centre National de la Photographie presents a retrospective of his photographic work, the first of his career. Among the five series on view, two seem to be highlighted—“Something is missing,” begun in 1997, and “Tableaux,” 1979, the artist’s first works on Cibachrome—while his pictures of the city, the countryside, and the zones in between (“decivilization,” as he calls it) have pride of place. A catalogue raisonné, with text by Jean-Pierre Criqui, will be published on

• previews September 1999

  Raymond Hains

  After his participation in Documenta X (“Cassettes pour Kassel”) and a recent exhibition in a Parisian gallery (“Castelli, les Jardineries du Sud”), Raymond Hains is showing new work inspired by his travels around the Iberian Peninsula. This “hypnagogic” show (to use the Surrealists’ term, which applies particularly to Hains’s first works from the late ’40s) was organized at the invitation of the Fundação de Serralves and has provided Hains the opportunity to revisit some of his old pieces and display them with his recent photographic works. The catalogue includes texts by Catherine Bompuis,

• previews September 1999

  “Jacques Charlier: Art foREVER”

  Born in 1939 in Liège, Belgium, Jacques Charlier is a sedentary artist, showing mostly in his own country. This first retrospective, which brings together some sixty pieces, pays overdue homage to a body of work that knows few limits on form (painting, music, assemblage, photography, Super 8 film, performance). Indeed, Charlier’s La surface de l’art, a work realized in 1997 by cleaning a rectangular patch of the Casino’s facade (making it look as if a painting had just been removed), suggests a devotion to satirical explorations of the ways in which images accrue meaning—putting him squarely in

• previews May 1999

  Robert Morris

  Last June, the Musée de Lyon inaugurated a three-part show devoted to the art of Robert Morris (one installment each summer). The first exhibition comprised four installations from the '60s and '70s as well as Mirror Film, 1969; for the second, Morris has constructed a gigantic (1,000-square-meter) labyrinth, wherein four of his vintage performances will be presented on video screens: 21.3, 1964; Arizona, 1963; two versions of Waterman Switch, 1965; and the now-famous Site, 1964, in which Carolee Schneemann appears in the role of Manet's Olympia. We will have to wait another year for the third

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  print March 1999

  “Veilleurs du Monde”

  “Veilleurs du Monde” (Worldwatchers) came about through the efforts of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin, two artists who work together under the name Art Orienté objet (AOo). Disappointed by the wave of recent exhibitions that drew supposed comparisons between contemporary European and African art and motivated by the desire to see a real collaboration established between artists of both continents, they organized a residency in the summer of 1997 in Cotonou, Benin, which brought together a small group of representatives from Europe and Africa, with the idea of pairing them off and giving