Art, Television and Video
23 october – 28 november 2004
The Musee d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris/ARC
at Couvent des Cordeliers
15, rue de l’Ecole de Medecine, 75006 Paris
T: 01 53 67 40 00
Open everyday except on monday from 12 to 8 pm
www.mam.paris.fr
Ice Cream Social #2 (Chicago), 1998, Flag cake, (c) David Robbins
ART, TELEVISION AND VIDEO Ready to Shoot : Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum / videogalerie schum
Olivier Bardin avec Judith Ickowicz, Televisions
David Robbins, Ice Cream Social
Between 1967 and 1973, the years during which the projects of the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, then those of the Schum Videogallery ( televisual gallery ) at Dusseldorf see the light, some decisive changes take place in the field of art, at the level of creation as well as that of “exhibition”. Television offers then the system and the model of an immediate and simultaneous communication of recorded images, at the scale of a public territory almost infinite. Such is the starting point of an extraordinary experience, carried out by Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers, with the ambition to increase social broadcasting in the field of art through television first, then by putting on the market “Art video” productions.
Echoing this founding experience, the works of Olivier Bardin and David Robbins have been chosen to present this exhibition. Both question, each in his way, the involvement of the artist in the social world through the medium of television.
Olivier Bardin conceives videos and devices inspired by the strategies followed by television. Televisions is an editing of different projects directed between 1991 and 2001. Through the use of a set for recording, he explores the constraints of broadcasting and the drafted protocols of transmission and reception of the image by involving non professional contributors. The artist has invited Judith Ickowicz, a jurist, to elaborate from his films a line of speech inspired by the civil rights code that governs relationships between individuals following the telvision codes, thus, putting forward a new way of interpretation.
In another field, David Robbins has developed for twelve years Ice Cream Social, a protean work (performance, setting, painting, novel, film, television series…) aiming at inventing a community, and creating moments of social intercourse that refer to a typically american tradition of american ice cream tasting “parties”. His last project, for the american cablevision Sundance, is displayed here for the first time. Going beyond a video art simply appropriate to television, this series applies to the mass.
In these three cases: Schum – Bardin – Robbins, it is a question of attempts at infringements that imagine and pave the way for other mechanisms, not without colliding with a starker reality based on the economic rules of television, by inventing new types of programs, in a redifinition of the fields of art.
This exhibition has been granted the support of the Kunsthalle of Dusseldorf, Ministerium fur Stadtebau und Wohnen, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kunst-Und Kulturstiftung Stadtsparkasse Dusseldorf, StiftungKunstfonds, Kunststiftung Nrw, Ecole nationale des beaux-arts, France Culture, galerie cent8 -serge leborgne, Attese Biennale Ceramica Arte Contemporanea, Vitra, JRP Ringier, Siemens and the contribution of the Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts.
