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CONSTRUIRE UNE COLLECTION NMNM - VILLA SAUBER MARCH 21 – NOVEMBER 1, 2015 CONTENTS I – CONSTRUIRE UNE COLLECTION • PRESS RELEASE 2 • A MUSEUM IS ALSO A COLLECTION! 3 by Marie-CLaude Beaud, Director of NMNM • FORMING OR PERFORMING A COLLECTION: 4 A WALK THROUGH THE WONDERS OF THE NOUVEAU MUSÉE NATIONAL DE MONACO by Chiara Parisi, Member of the NMNM’s Scientific Committee • PROGRAMME FOR THE PUBLIC 6 • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7 II - NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO • PRESENTATION ET PROGRAMME 8 • ORGANISATION CHART 12 • PARTNERS 14 • PRACTICAL INFORMATION 15 PRESS KIT - CONSTRUIRE UNE COLLECTION - NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO 1 I. CONSTRUIRE UNE COLLECTION PRESS RELEASE Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM) presents the second chapter of Construire une Collection (Building a Collection), a selection of works purchased by the museum over the past ten years. The first chapter of the exhibition at Villa Paloma closed on June 7. Since by definition a national museum is rooted in the history of the country in which is it situated, its mission is to acquire, preserve and promote collections to help safeguard the natural, cultural and scientific heritage. Over the years, the NMNM’s collection has therefore been enriched—in light of Monaco as a unique territory and the historical collections from the former Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des Beaux-Arts), the long-term loan of a collection of theatrical items from the Société des Bains, a donation of dolls and automata collected by Madeleine de Galéa—with works purchased, donated or on long-term loan thanks to state funding and the support of private patrons, particularly the Association of Friends of the NMNM and UBS AG, the Museum’s main partner. The enhancement of a collection of heritage or historical importance is inextricably linked to considering contemporary art, because it is through living artists that the link between the past, present and future is maintained. The idea of contemporaneity is therefore self-evident, and, one could say, absolutely essential. Construire une Collection opened to the public on March 21 at Villa Sauber. It will bring together works by Arman, Robert Barry, Christian Boltanski, Lourdes Castro, César, Mark Dion, Erró, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Claire Fontaine, Jeppe Hein, Linda Fregni Nagler, Camille Henrot, Bertrand Lavier, Anne and Patrick Poirier, and Hans Schabus. Most of the works presented here were either inspired by collections or the collections themselves have become or have inspired works of art in connection with time, history and memory. At Villa Paloma, Construire une Collection featured works by William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Michel Blazy, Pascal Broccolichi, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Alain Declercq, Jean Dubuffet, Hubert Duprat, Jan Fabre, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Geert Goiris, Gary Hill, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Jochen Lempert, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Su-Mei Tse and Cerith Wyn Evans. These artists offered a revisiting of form and Nature with the aim of re appropriating Nature in their own way to give it a new symbolic meaning. They therefore allow a redefinition of landscape while highlighting the relationship between art, science and architecture. Construire une Collection (Building a Collection) is also an opportunity to review progress made since the project for the Museum was first conceived just over ten years ago in 2003, and five years after the opening of the Villa Paloma (September 2010), which, with the Villa Sauber (which had housed the Madeleine de Galéa Collection of Dolls and Automata for 35 years until 2009), definitively formed the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. A catalogue published by the NMNM and designed by Pascal Storz and Tim Wetter will be released in the summer, with texts by Joerg Bader, Sarina Basta, Marie-Claude Beaud, Celia Bernasconi, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Sofia Eliza Bouratsis, Marie de Brugerolle, Natalia Brizuela, Cathleen Chaffee, Thierry Davila, Christine Eyene, Eva Fabbris, Mark Feary, João Fernandes, Jill Gasparina, Danièle Giraudy, Jacinto Lageira, Enrico Lunghi, Simone Menegoi, Olivier Michelon, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Chiara Parisi, Cristiano Raimondi, Damien Sausset and Chris Sharp. Construire une Collection Curators : Marie-Claude Beaud, Célia Bernasconi et Cristiano Raimondi Press contact : Elodie Biancheri, [email protected] ou +377 98 98 20 95 PRESS KIT - CONSTRUIRE UNE COLLECTION - NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO 2 A MUSEUM IS ALSO A COLLECTION! BY MARIE-CLAUDE BEAUD, DIRECTOR OF NMNM Some people will wonder if the works on view in Construire une collection at the Villa Paloma and the Villa Sauber represent all the acquisitions, gifts and loans which, for the past ten years, have made it possible for the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco to exist. Obviously not!The two areas devoted to the National Museum would not suffice. Others will be surprised by the predominance of contemporary works, while the collection has, needless to add, been enriched by works from the past. An exhibition is not an inventory, it is a deliberate and assumed choice of works offered to the visitor’s gaze. When I arrived here almost six years ago, I admired all the work done by my predecessor Jean-Michel Bouhours and the NMNM team to display a large part of the collection in the form of temporary shows at the Quai Antoine 1er. Inviting the most generous and relevant artists and thinkers possible to help us to show all the wealth of the collections, but also to lead us to other places, beyond our certainties, thanks to their visions of the world and their works, has always been my firm persuasion, and still is. Thomas Demand was the first artist invited for the Villa Paloma’s opening in 2010 with the masterful La Carte d’après Nature, which marked the minds of every visitor, and the entire NMNM team. The same power of imagination guided all the other guest artists, forcing us to go further than history, further than objects, further than forms, here, elsewhere, and in different ways. A big thank you to all those artists, writers and thinkers—I would be incapable of naming them all! Thank you to all those who have helped us to enable the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco to exist a little more, and a bit better. I cannot sign off without offering my heartfelt thanks to HRH the Princess of Hanover, because I know that her commitment has permitted, and will go on permitting, the Museum to grow, and be a place of sharing and exchange at the service of art and artists. Now let us give the last word to one of them: “In our darkness, there is not one place for beauty. The whole place is for beauty”- René Char PRESS KIT - CONSTRUIRE UNE COLLECTION - NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO 3 FORMING OR PERFORMING A COLLECTION: A WALK THROUGH THE WONDERS OF THE NOUVEAU MUSÉE NATIONAL DE MONACO BY CHIARA PARISI, MEMBER OF THE NMNM’S SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE CULTURAL PROGRAMME DIRECTOR AT MONNAIE DE PARIS "Collectors are happy people" (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) The life of a collector today is rather like that of an Olympic athlete: a sort of triathlon that requires physical and mental preparation, training and perseverance. The limits to overcome are those of distance, an understanding of an unstable and turbulent market, negotiations, and the adrenaline rush of making an investment. Collectors start collecting even before they see the work, or at least as they prepare to see it. With their financial resources, of course, but also with their own sensitivities and taste, and with their expertise. Social class is not everything: it is not today, nor was it ever in the past, as the American philosopher Larry Shiner explains so clearly in his The Invention of Art, an authentic cultural history of the visual arts: "Obviously, the untutored French noble buried in the provinces, the English 'booby squire' who cared for nothing but meat, drink, and the hunt, the Prussian Junker preoccupied with his horses and rank were little more sensitive or knowledgeable in the fine arts than some of the populace." So what is it that inspires a tiny number of people – because we are indeed talking of a niche, rather like the "happy few", the readers to whom, underestimating himself, Stendhal dedicated his Charterhouse of Parma? How exactly is a collection created? Right from the sixteenth century, the collector was a gatherer of astonishment and wonders, and the Wunderkammern are still there to prove it. This disorienting urge to accumulate has come all the way down to us, and it makes little difference that patrons have changed, hiding behind the "creative freedom" of the artist: it is of course true that, at least until the eighteenth century, the patron of the arts subjected the artist-craftsman to his own desires, whereas today the artist and buyer tend to be on an equal footing, with the collector buying not just "a self-contained work but also the producer's imagination and creativity expressed as reputation." But the objective remains the same, and still today it has to do with three fundamental aspects: the desire for possession, the ambition to obtain public prestige, and a wish to capture a fragment of eternity. A promise of happiness that can be obtained through the objects that we refer to as "works of art", though they are by no means easy to classify – after all, how can a nineteenth-century view of Monaco attributed to the painter J.M.W. Turner be put on a par with the documentation of a performance by Rebecca Horn? It is this dream of resisting the entropy of time and the craving to capture the zeitgeist by means of a collection that allows us to attribute value to works of art. And this leads to the eternal ethical (pseudo)dilemma: is it possible to create art in exchange for money? What price should we put on a work of art? "Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on", the painter William Blake is said to have declared.