Etienne Chambaud
Counter-History of Separation
14 November 2010 – 27 February 2011
Curator Chiara Parisi
Centre international d’art et du paysage
Ile de Vassivière F – 87120
communication [at] ciapiledevassiviere.com
+33 5 55 69 27 27
www.ciapiledevassiviere.com
Different ways of framing are played out on this stage in the shape of an island. Frame is superimposed upon frame—by turns including and excluding. The frames recall Martin Heidegger’s concept of Ge-stell, meaning literally the enframing, the plinth, which he defines as modern technology’s mode of revealing. To paraphrase roughly, it is the way a frame calls for another frame in order to secure its enframing.
The exhibition Counter-History of Separation develops from a reflection on these superimposed mises-en-abîme. It brings a new frame into the frame, but is more interested in what the frame frames off-sight than in what is framed within the frame. Its focus is not on what the exhibition exposes but on what it excludes.
With Counter-History of Separation, Etienne Chambaud (Paris, 1980) continues to investigate his notion of the “Decapitated Museum”: a museum of objects that are always already written, a museum which is as much the site of exclusion as exhibition.
The film which lends its name to the exhibition, co-written with Vincent Normand, is a documentary featuring the Museum and the Guillotine. The voice-over script, which underpins the film, is composed of lexicological entries and other fragments. The images that follow are filmed on a device inspired on the multiplane camera, where hands, cut-off from their off-screen bodies, attempt to synchronize the handling of documents to a pre-recorded voice.
The film begins in the Reign of Terror period, when the public museum and the guillotine were both invented and ends in 1977, when the last beheading took place in France and when the prototype of the transparent, post-modern museum opened: the Centre Pompidou. The film focuses on the moment of dissolution of the political functions of the guillotine and the modern museum, which give way to what the authors define as the “Decapitated Museum.” In the “Decapitated Museum”, the gash (the guillotine) and the genealogical suture (the modern museum) dissolve, and what is exhibited is the separation or rift between the displayed objects and the narrative that attempts to link them (cultural heritage, politics, and so forth). The film analyzes its own operations—in addition to those of the guillotine and the museum—in terms of autonomy, the machine and auto-eroticism and settles on the “moment” of the Bachelor Machines as a figure of the film’s methodology: images and text coexist in their relation of mutual exclusion and thus remain precisely as “bachelors”.
The exhibition Counter-History of Separation takes up the contradictions, tensions and misunderstandings of the film and redeploys them on the Arts Center’s space itself. It explores the idea of vertigo as the very condition of its own functioning: a constant imbalance between the materiality of the works and the language that grounds them. The exhibition is therefore constructed around the Arts Center bookstore, where the film is projected and a certain number of books, chosen by the artist, are on display. The bookstore is its pivotal point: the first and last room of the exhibition. Thus, the exhibition begins with text and returns to it. The bookstore is both a library, where one can find the sources and the more or less distant, perhaps illusory or even lost origins of the exhibition, and a shop: its by-product, its remainder.
But, in fact, the exhibition begins even before one enters the building. On the meadow outside, a dead-weight made of concrete moors a taut steel cable leading to the top of the lighthouse where a cable goes through a window and hangs down vertically inside. It is as though the lighthouse were anchored to the island. The mobile is suspended to the island—a mobile with restricted movements, an (im)mobile: Model for Hospitality, i.e. Exclusion.
After leaving the bookstore, we enter the nave with its Museum Visit. The space seems empty, except for marble captions and a plinth which expose—as negatives—some genre paintings and a classical sculpture.
In the workshop, we find hanging basis suspended from wires that disappear through the ceiling.
In the study center, we see stones, which have been collected from the island, stacked one on top of the other, forming unstable columns supported by the weight of objects which can only be seen from the floor below.
A neon cross-out bars a window in the small theater. It marks the separation between the architectural forms and the landscape they frame.
At the theater, on occasion, Diderot would see a play several times; sometimes he would close his eyes, other times he would hold his hands over his ears.
Ipods
Commissioned specifically for Etienne Chambaud’s exhibition, the iPod audioguides were written and recorded by Fabien Giraud and Gabriela Jauregui.
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Press contact
Heymann, Renoult Associées
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Sarah Heymann et Marika Bekier
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www.heymann-renoult.com
Centre international d’art et du paysage
Frédéric Legros
tel.: +33 (0)5 55 69 27 27
fax: +33 (0)5 55 69 29 31
communication@ciapiledevassiviere.com
The Centre international d’art et du paysage is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Communications/Drac Limousin and the Regional Board of Limousin.
The exhibition Counter-History of Separation receives the support of the Syndicat mixte “le Lac de Vassivière”, Mademoiselle bio and Pro Natura. In the frame of ARTools, it was financed with the support of the European commission.
*Image above:
Courtesy of the artist and Cosmic Galerie, Paris.
