OUT OF STORAGE II: RYTHMES

Following Out of Storage I – Peintures choisies de la collection in 2008, the second segment of Out of Storage involves the idea of rhythms. This series of pieces from the collection, created by both emerging and more established artists, showcases works in which the notions of sequences and rhythms, both visual and musical, play a major artistic role. In Sextet, New York artist Burt Barr (1938) has assembled three pieces created between 1998 and 2000. Displayed in vertical diptyches, Angel, Rain Piece and August reveal three couples engaged in the game of erotic encounters: the pas de deux of attraction, desire and fulfilment, in which the actions of the protagonists – and the spectator’s observation thereof – appear suspended in an ambiguous tension. Barr, who with August recalls the famous kiss shared by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (1953), develops his narrative vignettes from a slowed-down cinematographic rhythm, accentuated by the slow movements witnessed on the accompanying screens. Fascinated by the elegance of movement displayed by a horse on a red carpet, the young Cuban artist Yaima Carrazana Ciudad (1981) in her work La Hybris de un Rey (2004) refers to the arrogance of Agamemnon, the King of Crete. In Greek antiquity, hubris constitutes the most heinous transgression committed by an individual attempting to challenge destiny and the gods. Here Carrazana Ciudad thus provides an ironic and metaphoric commentary on the political situation of her country of origin. The Phonokinetoscope (2001) by Rodney Graham (1949) touches upon the first attempts by Thomas Edison to synchronise cinematographic images and sound. As is often the case in his works, Graham himself is featured, cycling through the flower garden of Berlin’s Tiergarten. A handful of accessories, such as a playing card, a thermos flask, the bike or an LSD trip provide a light narrative, which follows a scenario with a high degree of precision, despite the author’s claim of apparent spontaneity. Packed with references, the film alludes to Albert Hoffmann – the inventor of LSD – and his involuntary experience of the drug while on a bike, as well as to numerous episodes taken from the history of cinema, music and art. Musician and artist ErikM (1971) is an inquisitive experimenter and a distant concrete music heir. So while he plays vinyl records, he also breaks, glues and wears them down. In both music and sculpture, his essential tools are collage and sampling. Staccato (2003) thus represents a musical composition turned into a sculpture, in which 888 fragments of vinyl records featuring music for string instruments are assembled on a long cable and mounted above a mirror. The installation is a visual transposition of the artist’s musical compositions, characterised by fragmentation and dislocation, and evokes the visual materialisation of music by an oscillograph. Both a visual artist and an experimental musician and composer, American Christian Marclay (1955) cites the Fluxus and Punk movements among his influences. In his performances, videos or installations, he not only explores the boundaries of the musical field, but also analyses musical iconography in the broader sense of the word. Video Quartet (2002) is a work coproduced with Mudam and projects a visual and sound kaleidoscope onto four screens, consisting of approximately 700 extracts from films that, in a meticulous orchestration, appear to provide a cross section of almost the entire history of cinema. The frenzied succession of short musical or acoustic sequences thus perfectly summarises Marclay’s ironic paraphrase of American painter Frank Stella’s famous saying: “What you see is what you hear”. Francis Alÿs (1959) is Belgian by origin but has lived in Mexico City for over twenty years. He sees his work as a subjective analysis of the South-American stance regarding “the concept of production, the dogma of efficiency and the promises of development”. A story of Deception, Patagonia (2003-2006) came into being during a trip through Argentina’s southern region, not long after the country was hit by an economic crisis in 2003, at a moment “when society realised it had hit rock bottom and there was no way but up”. In this laconic film, the “headlong rush” becomes a metaphor embodying the search for illusion, an “infinite experience of fleetingness”. (Alÿs) Pedro G. Romero (1964) is a multi-skilled artist, a photographer, an exhibition organiser and the artistic director of Flamenco dancer and choreographer Israel Galván. For several years now, he has been leading ambitious artistic research into the political and social emptiness of modern satellite towns. In his video La Casa (2005), viewers discover Galván the dancer measuring up an apartment in Badia del Vallès, a town close to Barcelona consisting mainly of council housing. By dancing from one room to the next, Galván casts a new light on our more or less standardised living environments and he does so with humour. Yazid Oulab (1958) is in particular interested in linking contemporary forms with spiritual traditions. In Percussions graphiques (2006), the second instalment of a trilogy dedicated to breath and rhythm, the artist’s hand can be seen gradually covering – with the help of a carpenter’s pencil and in an erratic rhythm – a piece of paper with black lines. The meditative movement is accompanied by “Leï-la”, the chant sung by Sufis at vigils. Beyond its formal relevance, the artist’s work underlines the importance of “the political reflection on the embittered memory of Algeria and its relationship to its suppressed cultural and philosophical past”.

Curators: Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Clément Minighetti (Mudam)

OUT OF STORAGE II: RYTHMES
Kuratoren: Marie-Noelle Farcy, Clement Minighetti

Künstler: Burt Barr, Yaima Carrazana Ciudad, ErikM , Rodney Graham, Christian Marclay, Francis Alÿs, Pedro G. Romero, Yazid Oulab