1966–79
24 May–11 August 2013
Opening: May 23, 6:30pm
Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
11 rue Docteur Dolard
69100 Villeurbanne – France
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 1–7pm
Curator: Laurent Montaron
Artists: Dove Allouche, Katinka Bock, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Jason Dodge, Alexander Gutke, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Guillaume Leblon, Jan Mančuška, Margaret Salmon, Bojan Šarčević, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Jordan Wolfson
The IAC invites as a curator Laurent Montaron to present an overview of the artists of his generation. For the past few years, the IAC has worked closely with this artist, through the presentation of a solo exhibition in 2009 and the acquisition of works for its collection. This latest exhibition, which he has titled 1966–79, is therefore a new extension of this relationship.
The exhibition draws together sixteen artists born between 1966 and 1980, and implicitly questions the impact on this generation of the artistic heritage of the 1960s and ’70s. The title—1966–79—refers to a book by Lucy R. Lippard published in 1973, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972. Taking the form of a diary, the book brought together documents on the major artistic movements of the sixties and seventies. In particular, the author suggested the idea of dematerialisation: a notion through which she broached a set of heterogeneous practices founded on an art of action and ideas, thus giving an account of the significant transformation in the art practices of the era. While these artists—particularly conceptual ones—reacted to formalism and saw the dematerialisation of the artwork as a possibility to escape the market, nowadays there are other issues at stake.
Born in the same generation, the artists assembled for the 1966–79 exhibition all share an interest in form. Distancing themselves from contemporary dematerialisation generated by an overall process of digitization, they anchor their work in research that resembles a kind of archaeology, reappropriating gestures, procedures and techniques whose meaning has been lost or buried in the recent past and seems to escape us.
The materiality of the image, its reproducibility and its disappearance are explored by Dove Allouche and Alexander Gutke in works engaging processes of mechanical capture and chemical development. During an era of dematerialisation of media, the use of non-digital (silver) film or experimental development procedures expresses these artists’ concern with the materiality of the artwork, its fragility and sustainability. With Les dernières couleurs, a work produced from the final shots on autochrome film produced in the Lumière Brothers factories in 1952, Dove Allouche thus focuses on the disappearance of a medium through a reconstitution that we might interpret as an attempt to recover the memory of early photography and understand its mechanisms.
Katinka Bock, Bojan Šarčević, Ján Mančuška, and Guillaume Leblon point out the ability of materials to transcribe the passing of time, the repetition of a gesture, or the measurement of a distance. Their works orient the theme of the exhibition towards the notions of remains, imprints/impressions, and in general terms, towards forms that take history into account. In this respect, the work of Katinka Bock, Sechs Flächen und ein Raum, invents a mean of representing space, by cutting up clay slabs into architectural proportions.
Finally, the desire to return to a form of transmission is manifested through a revival of the use of narrative and the connections it helps spectators to make. This is particularly the case in the work of Jason Dodge, Margaret Salmon and Jordan Wolfson, or also João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, whose films draw on the spectator’s imagination and memory. Historical and political stories are also a prominent feature of the exhibition. In their film Subi dura a rudibus, Leonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren De Haan thus focus on representations of historic events, while Ulla von Brandenburg awakens the memory of North American slaves’ struggles to earn their freedom through enlargements of quilt designs.
Through sculptures, films, installations, objects or photographs, the artists brought together in this exhibition question our present state as seen through the prism of the past. They deal with the medium in its materiality, in terms of the relationship to time that it generates, and in its capacity to resist a kind of atrophying of experience, which characterises the contemporary era.
Laurent Montaron was born in 1972. Through films, photographs and installations, he questions the way in which the media has fashioned our representations and how it continues to fuel some of our most deeply entrenched beliefs, ever since the advent of the techniques of mechanical reproduction. By investigating the paradoxes that accompany our consciousness of modernity, his work uses narratives to explore how our perception of time seems to have changed through the recording and reproduction of images, sound and voices. He was also one of the founders of the Irmavep Club, an artists’ and curators’ collective that organises cycles of exhibitions that reflect on the work of recent decades.
Press contact:
Fanny Martin: f.martin [at] i-ac.eu / T 33 (0)4 78 03 47 72
The Institut d’art contemporain gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (DRAC Rhône-Alpes), the Rhône-Alpes Region and the City of Villeurbanne.
Lucy R. Lippard Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger Publishers Inc, New York, 1973).
Lucy Lippard (b. 1937; New York) is an art critic, political activist, theorist, and exhibition curator. She is the author of around twenty books and actively contributes to updating theories on contemporary art.