Groupe Mobile : retracing the social life of artworks through photography

From February 13 to July 2, 2016

With Yaacov Agam, Andrea Ancira (Pernod Ricard Fellow), Ellie Armon Azoulay, Kemi Bassene, Yogesh Barve, Kim Beom, Jean Bhownagary, Judy Blum Reddy, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Luis Camnitzer, CAMP, Esther Carp, Clark House Initiative, Camille Chenais, Justin Daraniyagala, Jochen Dehn, Cristiana de Marchi, Max Ernst, Mitra Farahani, Joanna Fiduccia, Alberto Giacometti, Alberto Greco, Zarina Hashmi, Iris Haüssler, MF Hussain, Sonia Khurana, J.D. Kirszenbaum, Naresh Kumar, Emmanuelle Lainé, Laura Lamiel, Life After Life, Nalini Malani, V.V. Malvankar, Ernest Mancoba, Julie Martin & Billy Klüver, Henri Matisse, Tyeb Mehta, Adrián Melis, Marta Minujín, Martine Mollo, Juana Muller, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Prabhakar Pachpute, Akbar Padamsee, Amol K Patil, Rupali Patil, Pablo Picasso, Edward Quinn, Nikhil Raunak, Man Ray, Krishna Reddy, Edward Ruscha, Gerard Sekoto, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Sumesh Sharma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Shunya, Francis Newton Souza, Pisurwo Jitendra Suralkar, Sharmeen Syed, Jiři Trnka, Marc Vaux, Marie Vassilieff, Georges Visconti, Susan Vogel, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Caroline Zelnik and many others.

Curators: Mélanie Bouteloup & Virginie Bobin
With the com­plicity of MNAM CCI – Centre Pompidou

Bertrand Prévost, Marc Vaux Archive, 2015 (c) Centre Pompidou – Mnam – Bibliothèque Kandinsky.

A former car­penter who took up pho­tog­raphy after being injured in the First World War, Marc Vaux began in the 1920s to carry his pho­to­graphic chamber around the var­ious artist stu­dios of Montparnasse and Paris. By the early 1970s he had pro­duced over 250,000 glass plates. To stand in the reserve hold­ings of the Centre Pompidou (where the col­lec­tion has been housed for the past thirty years) and hold in gloved hands a pho­tograph by Marc Vaux is to watch as the mar­gins of his­tory and of the work of artist­s—which the pho­tog­ra­pher kept out of frame some­times with a strip of black tape—­come to life. It is to pick up the trail of works of art lost during the Second World War. It is to observe all the objects, images, and news­paper cut­tings that together paint the land­scape of the artist at work, but also to see the move­ment of the artist’s works, piled on top of each other on the floor, leaned up against walls not yet prepped as pic­ture rails, rich in lives jux­ta­posed in hybrid and tran­si­tory assem­blages, in the manner of what Constantin Brancusi called his groupes mobiles (mobile groups).

Our explo­ration of the Marc Vaux Archive acts as a point of depar­ture for the Villa Vassilieff’s inau­gural pro­ject, where we re-examine, in a dia­logue with con­tem­po­rary artists and asso­ciate researchers, the pho­tographs, their pro­duc­tion con­texts and the his­tor­ical nar­ra­tives attached to them. Rather than set our sights on the unattain­able ideal of an objec­tive and defini­tive his­tory, we focus instead on the inves­tiga­tive pro­cess involved in the cre­ation of these his­to­ries: reading, ver­i­fying, unframing, com­paring, dating, dig­ging, iden­ti­fying… Today, as the Centre Pompidou is set to under­take the mam­moth task of dig­i­tizing the archive, we have a unique oppor­tu­nity to par­take in the pre­cise cat­a­loguing of thou­sands of glass plates, and examine the pro­cess of pat­ri­mo­ni­al­iza­tion itself as it is being car­ried out in as many actions, manip­u­la­tions and recon­di­tion­ings as there are new pho­to­graphic images. What do we pre­serve? Where do we store the glass plates? How do we name and class them? According to what cri­teria? How do we put them back into cir­cu­la­tion given the frag­men­tary infor­ma­tion we have for so many of them? How do we foster pro­duc­tive fusions with other resources them­selves iso­lated in other reserve hold­ings? Where do we begin?

At a time when it is nec­es­sary to chal­lenge the (intel­lec­tual, geo­graphic, eco­nomic) modes of accessing knowl­edge, we might imagine col­lec­tive and intu­itive ways of working that go beyond dis­ci­plinary bor­ders, beyond the single aca­demic field, to make way for sin­gular inter­pre­ta­tions and to reassert the role of art as a “con­tact zone” for society.

The Villa Vassilieff’s inau­gural exhi­bi­tion, enti­tled Groupe Mobile, invites the vis­itor to a double immer­sion: into the Marc Vaux Archive, and into the ren­o­va­tion pro­cess of Villa Vassilieff. We thus chose to ini­tiate a dia­logue between many pho­tographs and objects gath­ered during the year that we spent plan­ning for the Villa Vassilieff. Through the lens of pho­tog­raphy, Groupe Mobile intends to draw the con­tours of an insti­tu­tion willing to set in mul­tiple motions again the his­tory of art as a dis­ci­pline that is still too anchored (espe­cially in France) in Eurocentrism and the weight of Academia. After a dis­cus­sion with the director of the Ateliers Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (our neighbor in Montparnasse), during which he shared his desire to move away from the French aca­demic tra­di­tion, we chose to gather at Villa Vassilieff a few of the works found in their stu­dios (by Martine Mollo and Caroline Zelnik), as an invi­ta­tion for them to play truant.

The scream expressed in Kim Beom’s video under­lines — with a cer­tain irony — this will to set free from the weight of a tra­di­tion that con­tinues to stand on a largely formal appre­ci­a­tion of the work of art, still per­ceived as a fin­ished pro­duct rather than as the fruit of a pro­cess. This is also at stake in Luis Camnitzer’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in Groupe Mobile, him who embraced teaching and ped­a­gogy so that they would never be sep­a­rated from life. Write the biog­raphy of an idea thus invites vis­i­tors to reflect on the tra­jec­to­ries of ideas and works, and trans­form their appre­hen­sion. This leit­motiv also guided the choice of including Man Ray’s film Étoile de mer. With the com­plicity of Kiki from Montparnasse, Man Ray dis­rupts the con­ven­tional codes of per­cep­tion. Filmed through thick glass, the char­ac­ters are blurred, and the film calls for a con­stant exer­cising of our gaze. Groupe Mobile thus encour­ages com­pan­ion­ships that may at first seem unusual or anachro­nistic, yet that help us rethink our rela­tion­ship to works and ideas.
Exhibition views, pho­tog­raphy of art­works and artists, and the recon­struc­tion from archives permit a wider focus on the art­work to encom­pass social, eco­nomic and even polit­ical data. The incred­ible epic journey of a Fang sculp­ture—re­counted by Susan Vogel in her 8-minute film—of­fers a brief run through of the trans­for­ma­tions under­gone by works of art through eras and fash­ions. We watch the piece, within each envi­ron­ment, evolve according to the var­ious pro­duc­tion con­texts it is slotted into (or rather lose its per­son­ality, as recounted in Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s inter­ven­tion). This is exactly what is at stake here: under­standing the com­plexity of cir­cu­la­tions and encoun­ters at play in the for­ma­tion and the life of works, which Edward Ruscha wished for in his text The Information Man. As a ter­rain, Montparnasse appears to be a good departing point to study them.

Our first explo­ration of the Marc Vaux Archive gave us access to the work of artists such as Esther Carp, Pan Yuliang or Francis Newton Souza, who emerge as a few of the por­traits of this cos­mopolitan Paris. The cura­tors of Clark House Initiative chose to fea­ture the inter­ac­tions and rela­tions (including amorous ones) between Indian and inter­na­tional artists from the 1960s up to this day, with, as focal points, Paris and the painter, film­maker, ceram­i­cist, magi­cian, film pro­ducer and inde­fati­gable host Jean Bhownagary, who held a posi­tion at UNESCO for nearly forty years and whose work now occu­pies every nook of the apart­ment where his daughter still lives in Boulogne. The extraor­di­nary work car­ried out by Clark House Initiative on thinking about the his­tory of art dif­fer­ently, out­side of museum insti­tu­tions, while giving a voice to very young artists, seems to us to be of cru­cial impor­tance. The con­stel­la­tion of artists and mate­rials they brought together and scat­tered throughout the exhi­bi­tion reveals and stim­u­lates new encoun­ters between artists as well as the migra­tion of ideas, through cir­cu­la­tions that chal­lenge the con­cept of national iden­tity in art and a homoge­nous and Eurocentric notion of moder­nity.

Looking into the Marc Vaux Archive is also tack­ling (tearing into) the blind spots of art his­tory, the lost works of art, the artists (mostly women) absent from hege­monic or par­tial nar­ra­tives (like Marie Vassilieff), which too often rel­e­gated them to the roles of friends, muses and hostesses... It is in part thanks to the Marc Vaux Archive that Nathan Diament was able to track down the work of his great uncle J.D. Kirszenbaum, work that was scat­tered or destroyed as the painter fled the rise of Nazism in Berlin in 1933, and then occu­pied Paris in 1940. Kirszenbaum was asso­ci­ated with the “School of Paris” (less a move­ment than a “his­tor­ical event”)—the con­ver­gence, par­tic­u­larly around Montparnasse, of a number of artists and intel­lec­tuals from diverse geo­graphic and social hori­zons. Whether passing through or set­tling there for the long-ter­m—or taking on French nation­ality, even—these artists devel­oped the lan­guage of poly­phonic moder­nity, res­o­lutely transna­tional and sus­tained by indi­vidual his­to­ries and polit­ical engage­ments too often faded out by the lin­earity of offi­cial nar­ra­tives.

J.D. Kirszenbaum, Célébration de la Saint-Jean à São Paulo, 1952, FNAC 29874, Centre national des arts plastiques © all rights reserved / CNAP / photography: Yves Chenot.

There is always some spec­u­la­tion in archive work. Even in pho­tog­raphy, gaps remain, and it is not about wanting to fill them all. The task is gru­eling, the mate­rials often dif­fi­cult to access, the infor­ma­tion con­tra­dic­tory, and mem­o­ries fal­lible or hard to share, as wit­nessed in the film by Adrián Melis, as well as by Mitra Farahani about Bahman Mohassess. Fiction some­times enters into play as a way of thinking about research method­olo­gies in art his­tory: take Iris Häussler’s mad pro­ject on the life of a fic­tional artist, Sophie La Rosière, or Tsuyochi Ozawa’s attempt to imagine Tsuguharu Fujita’s pres­ence in Indonesia during the Second World War. In short, we wish to pro­voke offi­cial his­tory and chronolo­gies so that we may chal­lenge them and con­firm that they are written according to selected points of view one is required to know. To con­sider their shadows and their bright spots, the play of light, like in the pho­tographs of Brancusi, who in his groupes mobiles incor­po­rated the moving point of view of the spec­tator into the cre­ative act. The films shot by Brancusi in his studio influ­enced Sonia Khurana, who, using her own body as sculp­ture, imposes a dif­ferent fig­ure—that of a non-European woman, with gen­erous curves and a bur­lesque manner, who res­o­lutely appro­pri­ates both the artist’s work space and tra­di­tional rep­re­sen­ta­tions of art. It’s not any­more a matter of making sculp­ture move, but of bringing one’s one self into motion, in an act of eman­ci­pa­tion.

To search pho­tograph­s—e­spe­cially in their mar­gin­s—for the social life of art­works and the move­ment that brings them into being, is also to notice with which tools, ges­tures and read­ings it is shaped. It is paying atten­tion to what lies around the studio, what is col­lected (see pho­tograph by Edward Quinn in Pablo Picasso’s studio), what encoun­ters take place there, and per­haps then to step out for a stroll, like Picasso and Jean Cocteau did in Montparnasse one sunny after­noon in July 1916, redis­cov­ered by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin in the early 80s. Photographs taken by Harry Shunk of Marta Minujín’s public destruc­tion of her art­works, con­tributed to the doc­u­menting, cir­cu­la­tion and “col­lec­tion” of per­for­mances, reshaping the rela­tion­ship between works of art and their pho­to­graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

There are so many ways of set­ting art­works back into motion, and Groupe Mobile attempts to chore­ograph these mul­tiple pos­si­bil­i­ties. Thanks to the Marc Vaux Archive, works can be observed in unusual con­texts, like Max Ernst’s sculp­tures, pho­tographed on Parisian rooftops. The camera has the ability to cap­ture dif­ferent facets of an art­work, from the front, the sides, from below… Works by Yaacov Agam and Julio González are pho­tographed from var­ious points of view. The move­ment of the work itself is some­times grasped by the camera within a single shot: Alexander Calder’s works have thus been para­dox­i­cally immor­tal­ized in move­ment by Marc Vaux.

Marc Vaux Archive, 2015 (c) Centre Pompidou – Mnam – Bibliothèque Kandinsky.

For Henri Matisse, pho­tog­raphy was a tool to record the dif­ferent stages of his paint­ings in pro­gress. Marc Vaux pho­tographed series he exhib­ited to retrace the elab­o­ra­tion pro­cess of his art­works. The funds thus offers alter­na­tive approaches to works by artists deemed too well-known. Our exhi­bi­tion also includes series by Jean Bhownagary, who tested dif­ferent ideas around a same motif on wood or metal plates, gen­er­ating as many vari­a­tions or co-pres­ences. This idea of the motif is cen­tral to the exhi­bi­tion. Similar forms reoccur, dupli­cate and trans­form fol­lowing their repro­duc­tion on dif­ferent media (like when Joanna Fiduccia retraces suc­ces­sive appari­tions and evo­lu­tions of a sculp­ture by Alberto Giacometti); or when their author him­self repro­duces them through var­ious forms, like Jean Bhownagary with scarves, ceramics, engrav­ings or water­colors. Repetition never really repeats itself, but expresses the flow of cre­ation, con­stantly nur­tured by var­ious influ­ences.

A drawing by Bahman Mohassess rep­re­senting one of his most often recur­ring motif — a fish — is dis­played next to artists he was fond of: Calder, Brancusi and Matisse. In the mar­gins, a quote by Andy Warhol, grand master of rep­e­ti­tion and pro­lif­er­a­tion of art­works in the fabric of daily life — “into direct con­tact with people and things,” as Alberto Greco would say, albeit with very dif­ferent moti­va­tions. It is that kind of rela­tions between artists so often sep­a­rated in the great nar­ra­tive of moder­nity’s his­tory that Groupe Mobile seeks to bring for­ward. Ernest Mancoba, for instance, is one of these artists whose work tran­spires from exchanges he would have expe­ri­enced while trav­eling around the world.
It was impor­tant for us, within the non-linear story that we attempt to unfold in Groupe Mobile, to invite artists to con­tem­plate this space, and to inhabit it, in an alliance that is respectful of its his­to­ry—not to seek to trans­form it, but to work with it. Jochen Dehn is restoring it. Karthik Pandian and Paige K. Johnston (Life After Life) are filling it with ani­mated fur­ni­ture. Laura Lamiel is moving an “in­stance” of her studio into it and reg­u­larly inhabits it. Suki Seokyeong Kang is staging an instal­la­tion that cuts through and reframes the space. Emmanuelle Lainé is cre­ating a spatio-tem­poral trompe-l’œil, a mise en abyme of dif­ferent modes of pho­to­graphic staging, with the com­plicity of André Morin. The result of two weeks’ work at the Villa Vassilieff, Une méthode des lieux includes both pho­tographs from the Marc Vaux funds and frag­ments of the ongoing restau­ra­tion of the Villa Vassilieff, and for the first time, the bodies that worked on it, sus­pended in a moment of arti­fi­cial rest that can recall the artists’ poses as por­trayed by Vaux. The instal­la­tion is inviting us to take an active stance and ques­tion assigned cat­e­gories (sculp­ture and/or pho­tog­raphy, inside and/or out) and the bound­aries sep­a­rating work, rela­tion­ships and rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

To sus­tain a crit­ical doubt: must we look at pho­tog­raphy and what it rep­re­sents, or what is out­side of it? It is impor­tant to approach works of art by mul­ti­plying per­spec­tives, and most impor­tantly to move them back into the center of the public sphere, away from the side­lines or the reserve hold­ings of insti­tu­tions. Observing the move­ment of works and artists, stim­u­lating new ones, using dif­ferent tac­tics: to end­lessly under­take the task of zooming in, zooming out, assem­bling and jux­ta­posing; to pay atten­tion to mar­gins and bor­ders, espe­cially where they warp; to play with dif­ferent methods of hanging, involve mul­tiple col­lab­o­ra­tors, where they artists, researchers, neigh­bors… We thus worked with Camille Chenais and Ellie Armon Azoulay, two researchers who accom­pa­nied our explo­ration into the Marc Vaux Archive. We also invited team mem­bers who work on the ren­o­va­tion of Villa Vassilieff to leave traces of their pas­sage through sou­venirs of their choice.

Based on these alliances and a few tra­jec­to­ries we crossed during our research, we imag­ined moving as if on a path through the spaces of the Villa Vassilieff, like a house where one can amble through its rooms, read or chat with a passing guest, while always staying in touch with the out­side. The key is for these con­ver­sa­tions to spread per­ma­nently to pro­grams in insti­tu­tions, and mul­tiply in var­ious places and in dif­ferent ways. It is also about building ties with the neigh­bor­hood (like with the Ateliers Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris), learning cen­ters, uni­ver­si­ties and art schools, with a new gen­er­a­tion of civic orga­ni­za­tions. Nourishing the less exclu­sive rep­re­sen­ta­tions and cus­toms of our her­itage offers a greater chance for inde­pen­dent, orig­inal, and non-reduc­tive ini­tia­tives to emerge.

— Mélanie Bouteloup & Virginie Bobin

We would like to thank Bernard Blistène, director of the Museum of Modern Art, Catherine David, adjoint director of the Museum of Modern Art, Didier Schulmann, curator at the Museum of Modern Art and depart­ment head of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Catherine Tiraby, doc­u­men­talist of the pho­to­graphic col­lec­tions, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, and Nathalie Cissé, loan coor­di­nator, Bibliothèque Kandinsky.

Read more: Culturebox’s article, La Villa Vassilieff : the new artist’s eden at Montparnasse (In French)