The Art Work Recovered

Jean-Marc Avrilla The Art Work RecoveredAll the work does seem to be presented in the two galleries that the CNEAI1 has devoted to the group show, The Exhibition Continues (Echo). Yet nothing seems normal! Calling a contemporary art exhibition “normal” just isn’t done; abnormal seems more appropriate. Not from the viewpoint of normality, which doesn’t make much sense in the domain of artistic research called contemporary art; nor from the viewpoint of a phenomenon which, to be specific, would take on paranormal parameters.The walls do hold a substantial group of paintings. Canvases on stretchers, to be precise. The formats are all different — squares, horizontal rectangles, vertical rectangles, triangles, perhaps even round canvases… Not exactly round, but certainly one oblong work with rounded extremities, like a skateboard.Major DivergenceSixteen invited artists2 and only two colors — a single white and a single black, both matte. The fist room has three black walls. The second, two black walls, two white walls and a central molding in white. The color of each canvas is identical to the wall it’s been hung on. A curious set-up because these sixteen artists certainly don’t all produce the same artworks.How could Olivier Mosset, known for black circles on white backgrounds, ever create a painting similar to that of Noël Dolla, who is so focused on color in diverse forms that he actually creates abstract landscapes? How can anyone compare Robert Barry, who paints words on canvas in the same hue as its background, playing with the word’s disappearance into a painting, to Christian Robert-Tissot, who works in the Swiss Gute Form tradition and is adamant about the legibility of the words used in his titles? If we add Josh Smith, nothing makes sense, other than the culture of the name. Maybe that’s the thread that ties all these artists together — names and words. But that doesn’t apply to Stéphane Dafflon or Philippe Decrauzat, with their shapes lifted from the best science-fiction movies or kinetic art. Not to mention Evi Vingerling’s very concrete geometric shapes next to Ditte Ejlerskov’s stacked landscapes.Monochromatic CrimeReading over this list doesn’t explain why all these paintings have been painted over with black or white paint. Just one name leaps out of that listing and this curious situation — Claude Rutault. The definitions/methods man is, in fact, the creative mind behind this most recent monochromatic crime. He’s the only one capable of suggesting that a canvas or group canvases be repainted the same color as the wall on which they’re hung. If the notion was truly sparked by intuition, the radical nature of the final act is surprising.An Unsettling StrangenessYet it was all premeditated. In Definition/Method #1723 (or D/M #172), on page 752, entitled “Forty-second Theme: Secondhand Goods,” Rutault specifies one of the possibilities for the existence and presentation of one of his works, in the case of collector X, who he calls the “caretaker.” “A caretaker who owns ten Picasso paintings could present them in a stack, with all the presentation possibilities inherent in them. The proposition may of course be combined with the D/M collection 5, which consists of repainting one work in the collection each year the same color as the wall on which it is hung.”3At CNEAI, Claude Rutault has indeed repainted all of the artists’ works. But how does one explain the mirror effect doubling each painting — either at the nearest corner or on the opposite wall — as if reflected in a huge mirror that would cut the space in two, but through which the visitor can pass! Might Dan Graham do a few tricks here, too?His name isn’t on the list. And closer observation of the dual works reveals slight differences on the painted surfaces. It’s also difficult to find your way around because the small cards posted next to each painting — usually bearing the artist’s name, title of the work, the materials used, dimensions and owner — have suffered the same fate. Meaning that they’re also solid black or white.Nevertheless, it seems that one canvas in the shape of a thick skateboard may be a Stéphane Dafflon. On the surface of the first canvas, which is black, shapes outlined with masking tape (to ensure extremely neat edges) clearly appear as part of an underpainting. But its double — which is white, on top of it — is, on the contrary, immaculate! We become disoriented in this exhibition with a certain delight, as all the traditional indications we’re usually obliged to latch onto, one after another, elude us. Claude Rutault certainly wasn’t acting alone, otherwise the terms would have been clear.Semantic ConfusionIn the title, The Exhibition Continues (Echo), should we understand the “(Echo)” to be each canvas’ double? But “the exhibition continues”? Where and when did it begin? The missing player is Mathieu Copeland, now famous in Paris as “the void man.” The curator of Voids — a retrospective of empty exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou since 1958 and presented at the Kunsthalle in Bern last fall — he also organized a fairly unexpected Alan Vega retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon last summer. Copeland is an exceptional curator, not due to the scale of his exhibitions but the subject treated or the particular manner in which it’s treated. A Spoken Word Exhibition brought together exclusively verbal work, made up of words and sentences that were read; in A Choreography Exhibition, the works consisted of movements performed by dancers.So we clearly recognize one of the singular features of his curatorial work here — inventing a situation in which the combination of selected pieces goes far beyond a simple rereading of the artists’ work. Rather, he and Claude Rutault open a veritable digression within each artist’s body of work. His curatorial work truly falls within the domain of creation.Omniscient CuratorSuch an exhibition, given its radical nature —in both method and esthetic choices — is pretty rare.  First of all, there is an obliteration of the paintings by Claude Rutault’s work, then the mirror trick, which is not a theatrical choice but a curatorial one… one of the essential undercurrents of this show. Those two approaches create a veritable narrative tension in which we profoundly feel the presence of all the artists’ works, where we are conscious of the group exhibition as a point of departure. Obliteration is an ambiguous term. It denotes disappearance by taking away, like the most well-known example, the De Kooning drawing that Robert Rauschenberg erased. But it also implies a covering up, as Rutault proposes. The choice of the mirror is quite a gamble because it’s the response to that “cover up.” For each artist’s canvas that Rutault covers with the wall color, he offers us a canvas in the same format, blank to begin with, then covers it with the monochromatic color of the opposite wall. He has no need of theatrical scenery in such a project to compensate for a lack of initial conception, the methodological choices and awareness of the potential of Claude Rutault’s work are enough.Besides, it would be more appropriate to talk about a “pause” rather than “obliteration.” This is indeed a pause for the viewer, not for the painting itself, which continues to exist underneath. It’s a form of continuum, in which past, present and future are ensured by that covering up. For Rutault, that pause concerns artworks that aren’t his because his are always to come — “on each new wall, a new painting is to be made,” he writes to Copeland.Poetics of the VoidCharlemagne Palestine, one of the protagonists of the first version of this exhibition, at the Circuit and the Gallerie 1m3 — two exhibition spaces in Lausanne, Switzerland — formulated the “pausulation” notion, a neologism derived from the syntagm “pause in permanent undulation/evolution.” 6 Mathieu Copeland understood that completely when he organized that first exhibition, which was devised with neither beginning nor end, where a work entitled “One Million Years” by On Kawara was centrally placed.But today, in the CNEAI’s two-room The Exhibition Continues (Echo), there isn’t simply the question of painting, even if the viewer is surrounded by black and white acrylic color, but of paintings and canvases — meaning that both the works of art and their support or medium is of no consequence in the end.What does matter here is, first of all, the obliteration — the “cover up” in which the canvas melts into the wall, like the missive in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” which is intentionally hidden on the mantelpiece in the minister’s office, carelessly shuffled between a few papers that happen to be lying around, like a “document of no value.” Then the repetition of passing the work back and forth between various artists, like the letter itself moved from hand to hand, which gives it its ultimate value. “The fact that the message was handed back and forth like that assures us of something that wasn’t at all evident to begin with — the knowledge that it indeed belongs to the dimension of language.” 7Handing the letter and the canvases back and forth, a repetition of open thefts like the repetition used in the exhibition, Poe’s systematic 3-character scene — as with Mathieu Copeland, Claude Rutault and each artist here — is an indirect historical discourse like a kind of rereading of the artworks by the curator… Everything may appear similar in Poe’s short story and in the exhibition, if not for two essential differences. It’s not at all a question of high treason. Each of the protagonists, including the third actor, made up of the artists in “the original exhibition,” remains linked to the others by the thread of the method chosen — by the reciprocal agreement of the exchange — and conserves its strict place. It’s not a question of repetitive reflex either. Yet it is indeed a question of language and the ineffable dimension of the painting. But here it’s Claude Rutault’s method and Mathieu Copeland’s concept that frame the movement of the symbolic system in which the question of authorship is diffused and permeates every surface of the project.