“Les Sculptures meurent aussi”
Kunsthalle Mulhouse
The third and last in a cycle of exhibitions curated by Lorenzo Benedetti at the Kunsthalle Mulhouse, “Les Sculptures meurent aussi” (Sculptures Also Die) looked like a primer on recent European sculpture, however predicated on such sculpture’s extinction. A twist on the opening lines from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s 1953 film of the same name—“When men die, they enter into history; when statues die, they enter into art”—Benedetti’s title evoked a familiar endgame while suggesting that there might be a more concrete, or at least pithier, solution: Maybe dead sculptures enter purgatory, a