History
Richard Serra
January 29 – March 2, 1977
It was in Paris that Serra discovered sculpture, more precisely in Brancusi’s studio, which has been reconstructed at the Musée d’Art Moderne, and which he visited almost daily to draw during his stay there in 1964-1965. […] Brancusi, he would later say, made him realize the importance of the line of drawing in sculpture. From then on, Serra’s thinking, and his subsequent activity as an artist, led him to banish all pictoriality from sculpture, insisting on the physical presence of the object. He therefore took a critical look at his first works (1966-1969) which, despite their immense plastic qualities, still sacrificed too much to pictorial conventions: Belts (1966-1967), a suite of suspended rubber straps, is directly related to Pollock’s great Iowa Mural; […] as for the pieces spread out on the floor, which take up some of the propositions from the list of verbs then published by Serra (Splashing, Cutting, Tearing, Scatter Piece), they cannot avoid a pictorial-type arrangement. This is not to minimize his works With them, Serra has given the material a decisive place, as well as the manufacturing process (“Process”). Sculpture is the result of all these factors. Transferred to another material, it would lose all reason to exist (whereas traditionally, the final work, in bronze, has been worked in a flexible material). On his arrival in New York in 1966, he stumbled upon tons of rubber, a material that allowed him to work directly with it, creating a work with random shapes determined by gravity. I am not involved,” he writes, “in a final purpose for my work. The process alone suggests to me certain types of organization.”
This is what the Prop pieces from 1960 onwards are all about: lead plates leaning against each other; unstable balances, the fruit of physical manipulation; the Props pose as a matter of course the question of balance at the basis of sculpture. It is indeed the “Process” that determines the different types of organization, rather than a conceptual scheme or a serial problematic as with Sol LeWitt. Here too, the material can play a decisive role: by bending, lead determines certain shapes, and later, Corten steel will enable large-scale creations. The limit of the Props lies in their size. House of Cards, for example, the fundamental work in the series, defines an interior and an exterior space. But only the latter is visible, which is a major obstacle for Serra.
Alfred Pacquement, Les années 80, November 1983
Bernar Venet
April 30 – May 28, 1977
The proposals put forward by Bernar Venet question the work within itself, postulating that it refers to itself, and to itself alone, but that its interpretation is only possible by recourse to another language that will describe its intimate structure, this second language being itself explicable only through the intermediary of a third, and so on. This spiral of thought, into which any theory that refuses to take into account the fact that the practice it administers does not have complete autonomy, but rather a relative autonomy, since it is inscribed in history, gets stuck, in fact, and more banally, raises the question of the status of art in society, and of the ideology that this status carries and implies. Let’s add that we’re assuming that these proposals will have no spectator, or rather that those who look at and examine them will not lose themselves in the projection of their fantasies, nor seek in them the trace of that “delirium of the gods” where what they repress speaks.As soon as they come into view, included in the artistic series, they become enigmas, emblems with inexhaustible meanings. Distracted from their context, where their monosemy is effective and efficient, the scientific analyses and rational objects that Venet arbitrarily but logically delivers to us in the artistic field cease to function as such. We can’t fail to give them an “aura”, a “here and now” that transforms them into unpredictable monuments to the world we live in. We thus leave behind the plane of pure denotation, where they were maintained in their own context, to fall back into that of connotation, which inescapably becomes theirs from the moment that it is as art objects that we must – and can it be otherwise? – apprehend and question them…
Painted and reproduced, they are the product of a double lie. To the necessary, demonstrative illusion of the textbook is added the superfluous, playful illusion of art. Venet deliberately accuses it, calling it deception and trickery – isn’t this what certain 18th-century “trompe-l’oeil” were called, such as the one Jean Clair reproduces on the cover of his book on Duchamp – since he doesn’t determine a priori the value of his reproductions of angular figures or arcs of circles, but measures it after the fact, once the work has been empirically produced. In the end, dare we say that conceptual art has found here the path of pleasure, that of artifice and that of artifact? Or that Venet has never come so close to achieving the monosemic, single level of meaning to which he wanted to reduce the art object in his diagrams and mathematical plates?
Bernard Ceysson, Extracts from the catalog of the exhibition at the Musée de Saint-Etienne, February-March 1978
Andy Warhol
Hammer and Sickle Series
May 31 – July 9, 1977
The star of New York Pop Art, Andy Warhol’s legend and clique are both profit-driven, making every one of his public appearances and exhibitions a small event. From 1961 to 1965, he was unquestionably one of the most singular, if not one of the most important, artists in an America that claimed leadership of artistic creation. Explicitly bringing photography, along with a few others, into the historical realm of painting, and avoiding any emotional attitude, he used the techniques and images of commercial advertising with exceptional refinement. No censor, and even less moralizing, Andy Warhol deliberately stuck to the coldest formal effects and most superficial techniques to establish a distanced observation of a certain way of life and the impossibility of changing anything about it. Soup cans, Coke bottles, laundry detergent packets, the idols of the star system – Marilyn, Liz Taylor, Marlon Brando or Jackie Kennedy – suicide images, the atomic bomb, race riots or car accidents, all reached a tragic dehumanization in the impersonal process of mechanical reproduction on canvas that is screen printing (a process he has been using since 1962), and a distancing from reality that could be perceived as an image of death.
Andy Warhol had devoted himself to the cinema, and didn’t return to the world of painting until 1973, with 150 portraits of Mao. Today, he offers us a series of Sickle and Hammer, inscribed in red and black, still using the practice of silkscreen transfer, on large white canvases where the traces of the painting gesture can be read. But don’t panic, La Faucille et le Marteau (or rather, the sickle and the mallet) are in no way images of a revolution. Andy Warhol does not make revolution, and even when he showed us, in 1967, these admirable and terrible Electric Chairs, the most sophisticated device invented by the justice of men to put other men to death, the artist never testifies for or against a system; he knows too well the limits he cannot cross. The symbol of the working and farming classes is here a cliché, like any other, that of the superpower that makes the Americans tremble.
Le Matin, June 7, 1977
Willem De Kooning
September 17 – October 29, 1977
Whether it’s temptations, carnivals, night rounds or Jewish brides, self-portraits or horsemen, Pilate’s judgments or Saul’s suicide, via the parable of the blind (that garland of exorbitant clinical cases that De Kooning precisely traced) ; from wheat fields with crows to the conflict of horizontal and vertical over landscapes and steeples, to boogie-woogie in city blocks; Whether we throw up a canvas or, on the contrary, erase it, whether we reveal the hallucinatory allusion of line and canvas in the excess of a color that seems to turn over in its fibered extinction, it’s always the same convulsive catastrophic force that takes shape in the visible, touchable, graspable, drawable, paintable, sculptable, volumizable, the same asserted impossibility. How to make painting cry out that it will never be able to speak? How else than by giving the illusion that nature in the process of becoming flesh is written in strokes and colors only to sign the reverse where flesh should become verb?In a way, De Kooning is like all the others: he never stops signing. Except that he incorporates his signature into his signature (action painting, it’s called) in such a way that he seems to walk through it. He begins to draw his neck muscles very closely in front of a mirror: there he is, projected into an infinite series of women, the cruelest ever cut out. Lilith,” he says, laughing a funny laugh. We’ve been doing it since Mesopotamia or prehistoric times. Conjuring an idol covered in skulls, a bulge of origin that will be buried to better fix it. De Kooning’s “girlies”, on the other hand, move quickly from top to bottom or from right to left, with their mutinous heads of death, their idiotic, carnivorous smiles, their erotic, greasy flesh showing the hole in the skeleton […]. Public, advertised, desacralized and televised, they begin with the consumption of their mouths, only to see themselves reentered-raped into the space they call upon to perpetuate. Tube lips, mute pencil bones, here are heads glued to blue or yellow palette trunks, before they are drowned, legs open, in multiplied landscapes where there’s only this to see: the nothing to see of the species’ gratuitousness at the edges of its concern for the planet, the splintering of having, the admission that seeing is done in the fact of seeing alongside.
Philippe Sollers, art press, October 1977
This is, I believe, the first time that Willem De Kooning has exhibited his sculptures in Paris. We’re all familiar with his painting, which can be linked to lyrical abstraction, and the canvases he is exhibiting at Galerie Daniel Templon alongside his bronzes show that the 73-year-old artist has lost none of his force. The strident yellows and reds bursting out of the white parts, streaked with black splashes, are imposing in their vitality. No part of the canvas is at rest. The pictorial material seems at times to be boiling, at other times to be quivering under the gust. Tributaries of color converge on an accident of terrain that causes them to gush out in other directions. The painting gives the impression of being in constant mutation, as if the hand were still working on it. It is made, unmade and remade before our very eyes. We are reminded of what Paul Valéry said about the creation of a poem: he compared it to the gesture of a smoker who makes his own cigarettes. The tobacco strands are rolled and unrolled in the paper until the cylinder finds its final shape. The same is true of De Kooning’s paintings. All the incidents we catch on their surface end up ordering themselves and finding a balance.
Pierre Mazars, Le Figaro, September 24, 1977
Bill Beckley
November 5 – 30, 1977
Like many conceptualists and proponents of narrative art, American artist Bill Beckley, born in 1946, expresses himself through text and photos. The relationship between text and images is in no way explanatory. Beckley seeks a second-degree analogy. The photos are banal, capturing a typical aspect of reality: a bus, a coconut palm by a lagoon, the made-up face of a mannequin… From the initial image, Beckley develops an idea to which different visual sequences are attached. He starts with an enlarged photo of a carpet, then moves on to the idea of comfort represented by the detail of a velvet sofa, which is paralleled by a Tahitian-style beach. The image blocking verbal descriptions, the labyrinth of words opposing photographic representation – these are the problems Bill Beckley tackles. Is this linguistics? No, but a very subtle reflection on all forms of expression.
