Été 70: the Plein-Air Exhibitions of Supports-Surfaces
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JCS 1 (3) pp. 349–368 Intellect Limited 2012 Journal of curatorial studies Volume 1 Number 3 © 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcs.1.3.349_1 Rosemary O’Neill Parsons The New School for Design Été 70: The Plein-Air Exhibitions of Supports-Surfaces Abstract Keywords In the summer of 1970, artists of the collective Supports-Surfaces installed ephemeral Supports-Surfaces works across the French Mediterranean coastline, a prelude to their first Paris exhi- Intérieur/Extérieur bition as a named group. Curated by Claude Viallat and Jacques Lepage, and enti- Travaux de l’Été 70 tled Intérieur/Extérieur, artworks were situated on beaches, hill towns, riverbeds plein-air exhibitions and landscapes in the lower Alps. This article examines how this peripatetic exhibi- Jacques Lepage tion, and its subsequent re-installation in Travaux de l’Été 70 (1971) at the Jean Claude Viallat Fournier Gallery, interrogated the conventional practice of painting by dismantling its material components, challenging its social and political ideology, and sanction- ing artistic autonomy. From June through August 1970, artists soon to be affiliated with the 1. Occitan is identified by a distinct Latinized collective Supports-Surfaces embarked on an ambitious program of language with a twelve installations titled Intérieur/Extérieur (Interior/Exterior). Staged diversity of dialects in an area encompassing along the Mediterranean from the beaches and hill towns on the French southern France, Riviera to the Eastern Pyrénées on the Spanish border, this region is histor- eastern Spain and ically associated with Occitan culture.1 Antagonistic to uniformity and northwestern Italy. control, the artists in Claude Viallat’s circle aimed to dismantle painting as a visual paradigm and to produce new spaces of artistic practice capable of addressing the cultural dissent of the time. Their works were conceived as nomadic, aleatory arrangements that were installed, disassembled and re-installed for brief durations by the artists as they moved from site to site. In an effort to break from the conventional painting format that prioritized the visible side with markings or images, they aimed to expose 349 JCS_1.3_Neill_349-368.indd 349 11/22/12 1:29:13 PM Rosemary O’Neill 2. Also see the manifesto, the inherent qualities of materials and structure, and to open-up the ‘INterVENTION “A”’ signed by Viallat, possibilities of disseminating their works beyond the insularity of cultural Saytour and Dolla institutions. These artists imagined a parallel system based on interven- issued two years tions into the everyday where the works created their own spaces (Lepage later in Nice (Viallat [1968] 1980). They 1974: 4), and were propositional, transitory and geared to open-ended critique cultural experiences for the artists and spectators alike. decentralization initiatives, advocate for These installations, organized by Viallat with critic/curator Jacques arts produced within Lepage, were a culmination of a series of exhibitions that they began the local milieu, and object to systemic organizing in 1966 with Impact 1 at the Musée de Céret, which featured obstacles impeding a diverse group of Mediterranean, Parisian and Catalan artists, among the dissemination of their work to the public them Daniel Buren, Arman and Ben (Vautier). For Lepage, these artists (Noël Dolla 1980: 53). recognized the significance of the historical moment, voiced a shared protest against the consequences of modernity, and maintained an anti- institutional stance.2 During the intervening four years, Viallat and Lepage organized several exhibitions on similar themes, which built the founda- tion for the plein-air installations of Intérieur/Extérieur. This show was pivotal, for it constituted the prelude to the first presentation of the group Supports-Surfaces organized by Pierre Gaudibert and Viallat for ARC 1 in 1970, sponsored by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and its initiative to engage with contemporary debate, research and confronta- tion in the arts. The summer 1970 installations were ephemeral, rolling out over a course of two months from east to west in heterogeneous sites within which the artists designated spaces, delineated routes and embedded works in remote locales and small towns. Artists Daniel Dezeuze, Bernard Pagès, Patrick Saytour, André Valensi and Viallat considered these sites as ‘neutral’, that is, spaces beyond the control of cultural institutions and critical mediation. De-coupled surfaces and supports were situated in a process of geographic inscription whereby the valorization of one site over another was left to the subjectivity of the spectator (Valensi [1971] 1983: 67). Given their brevity, the interventions were contingent upon the character of the individual spaces to produce varied effects: a forested area on the outskirts of Nice, a beachside in the small tourist and fishing village of Villefranche-sur-Mer, a verdant meadow and dried riverbed in the perched Alpes-Maritimes villages of Levens and Cantaron, an abandoned quarry in Aubais, the ‘Rose Coast’ where the Tancade creek entered the sea in Banyuls-sur-Mer, an isolated beach in Maguelone, as well as public spaces such as streets, squares and a small bookstore in the Pyrénées-Orientales communities of Le Boulou, Céret and Perpignan. The network of installations was based on a ‘relay’ system that config- ured the works discretely or as an ensemble for a period of one to four days, triggering a changing mise-en-scène in which the ‘materialization of process’ affirmed the priority of the existence of the work itself (Lepage 1974: 4; Viallat 1971). The construction and dismantling of the installa- tions mediated the normal sense of time present in the diverse natural and social spaces. Though not altering these spaces, the works left behind an echo of encounter and disappearance, which in some cases resulted in their being rebuilt by individuals who had come across them earlier. Adopting a practice/theory approach, the Supports-Surfaces artists focused on analyzing painting’s fundamental elements in order to 350 JCS_1.3_Neill_349-368.indd 350 11/15/12 10:47:41 AM Été 70 liberate it from merely serving as a carrier of representations, a paradigm 3. This exhibition was preceded by two that signaled for them the closure of painting as a generative practice. others that seeded the Viallat refuted the object focus of Nouveau Réalisme and representational idea of an informal group: Ecole Spéciale imagery of Pop Art that held sway through the mid-1960s, recognizing d’Architecture in Paris that abstract painting had been deserted before it could be more system- (1969), which included atically examined in relation to the structures imposed upon it historically. Marcel Alocco, Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, Bernard He re-positioned abstract painting as an ‘unfinished project’. Just months Pagès, Jean-Pierre before Intérieur/Extérieur, artist Dezeuze in collaboration with Louis Cane Pincemin, Saytour and Viallat; and La Peinture published ‘Pour un programme théorique pictural’ (‘In the Direction of en Question at the a Theoretical Pictorial Program’) in which they established a schema to Musée du Havre (1969) that included works rationalize painting as a ‘science of surfaces’. By taking into account the by Dezeuze, Saytour, effects of support, medium, gesture and tools, the production of a surface Viallat and Cane. became the subject of the painting, opening up the work as something autonomous but within a geographic context. Limiting the surface image to a repetitive graphic, this surface ‘intensification’ focused on process and material spatial arrangements rather than expressive painting effects, thus providing the works with a contradictory sense of autonomy from and dependence upon the context of their display (Dezeuze and Cane 2010: 283–86). The plein-air installations were pioneering experiments in how artworks interact with natural or social sites, and how these environments condition the works and the viewer’s experience, especially without fore- knowledge of artistic intentions or the mediation of critics and advertising (Saytour [1970a] 1998). Following Julia Kristeva’s argument that chal- lenging the inertia of language habits through analysis of literary process enables ‘the unique opportunity to study the becoming of the signification of signs’ ([1968] 1998: 28, emphasis in original), these types of site-specific installations questioned how painting functioned within diverse spaces. The exhibition Rencontres de Coaraze (Coaraze Encounter) organized by Viallat and Lepage in July 1969 was precedent-setting for Intérieur/ Extérieur. Lepage maintained that this was the first plein-air exhibition of Supports-Surfaces – ‘the village was entirely occupied by the works’ (quoted in Chroniques Niçoises 1991: 392).3 Dezeuze, Pagès, Saytour and Viallat staged their works throughout this provincial hamlet, one of thirteen sites along the ‘Route of Perched Villages’ on the outskirts of Nice, demonstrating how these presentations of their research on mate- rials, forms, colour and use of visual repetition produced sites of artistic and social exchange in relation to temporality and history. With refer- ences spanning heraldry, festivals and even cobblestones and hanging laundry, they challenged notions of artistic progress as evolutionary and linear through the use of repetitive surface markings and structural reversions that manifest diverse pictorial enunciations (Dezeuze [1969] 1983: 44). Paralleling