do art, for real, really real
In the early sixties, artists from various countries and fields of creation and seeing themselves as “avant-garde” thought that reflecting on their own work was not sufficient. And they asked themselves “What is Art for ?” “What is modern Art ? and “What is Modernism ?” From that radical point of view, Modern Art was a revolutionary utopia and Modernism, the various ways to express it.
In the nineties, another “avant-garde” took over. Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus belong to that group. They acknowledge Modern Art and Modernism as a moment in history. But most of all, they look on them as “categories” or, as CBMP say, “ideal protocols”. In everyday life, these “categories" have become a prescribed ideal that fashions our vision of things. This discriminatory attitude generates what CBMP call “pathologies”. This is the moment and the place where CBMP, both as artists, architects and “pathologists”, step in with the aim to apply “counter protocols” that would be “real”.
Many artists such as Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark and Ed Ruscha inherited the “programmatic categories” of the architecture of the sixties and made of them their main target. These terms meant there were canons for modern architecture, that building new districts, residential zones or “new towns” required a rational grid of interpretation and had to be placed in the centre of their reflection about art.
For example, in Paris near the recently finished Centre Georges Pompidou, Matta-Clark used a building to be demolished, on the 29 rue Beaubourg, and made a “viral” intervention that he later labelled “Conical Intersect (1975)”.
By making “cuttings” in the building, Matta-Clark attracted the attention to new shapes and volumes. He wanted to show that a building is more than just a place to live, more than a structure with ascribed social and economic functions. In other terms, a purely productive approach to environment had unconscious effects on each person.
A similar view was proposed by the French cineast Jean-Luc Godard in his film “Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle” (1967). A young married woman, Juliette Janson, has just moved in one of those big residential complexes then recently built on the outskirts of Paris. Juliettte, the figure, is doubled by the professionnal actress, Marina Vlady, who plays the role and offers another sight on the situation. And the audience finally realizes that the main character of the film is the suburb and the whole town itself at that very moment. This new environment seals the alliance between Modernist utopias and a new phenomenon, mass consumption. Behaviours, up till then fashioned by traditions and personal whims, had been standardized, depersonalized.
This “depersonalization”, of which the new archicture was the concrete illustration, is the subject of two videofilms made by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, “Crédits” (2000) and “Les Grands Ensembles” (2001). Their theme is the fate of modernist utopias and they ask : “Well, how will this all end ?”.
And precisely, “it is all over”, but how did it come? Instead, we have “metaphorical planes or platforms”, blurred physical and emotional feelings at home or outside. So a new approach to the “City”, its landscapes, its architecture and their impact on those who live there is necessary. The answer of Parreno, Huyghe and CBMP is to offer virtual planes of reality. Their aim is to “destabilize” what we consider “real” in order to discover new meanings and new experiences.
This works on many levels. The first is to be conscious that the architecture around us plays on our feelings. Secondly, this relationship can be interpreted in various ways. For instance, in how many architectures are we living right now ? The purpose is to offer experiments full of possibilities, open the conscience and the senses to a time and a space with many dimensions. Can we live “here and now and all of it”.
This utopia “in vitro” is crucial, even though no real buildings or new districts come out of it. For these artists, the tools of research are as important as the result in the end.
This new “avant-garde” sees itself more realistic, more pragmatic than their forebears of the sixties, who appeared at times fascinated by the “categories” of Modernism. Very often, these “new” artists work with experts coming from fields far apart of what we call Art. It is a hybrid research. Their realism in anchored in an environment more and more unreal. The old “metaphorical platforms” are obsolete They want “real” experiences and use all the means available for it. The art critic David Robbins 2 has named this new “avant-garde” the “oxygenized generation”.
This generation is not so much interested in the history of Art as in the history of our fears and desires, individual and collective. Their works are “metaphors” indeed, but metaphors to be inhabited. They are provocative, but only as a game could be. Which does not exclude lucidity, irony or criticism.
These artists are reconsidering Modern Art and Modernism, indeed an enduring legacy, but fraught with utopian drifts. They want to live in the duality, the “distopia” (two places simultaneously) of this legacy. As the French philosopher Michel Foucauld 3 would have said, they explore the “heteropia” (ubiquity) of a sizzling Post-Modernism. Their exploration of this physical and mental “terra incognita” does not aim to think out anti-Art, but Art for times of freedom. 4
Here is a short description of the works that will be exhibited by CBMP :
Bulles de confiance
“Autonomous bubbles containing ocytocin, an hormone stimulating trust artificially, in fact aggravating it”.
Laixomil
“Ebullient basins whose liquid is a mixture of milk and of the tranquilizer Lexomil”.
Tubes épileptiques
“A network of rubber pipes, suspended and mobile, projecting stroboscopic lights on the floor”.
Traumathèque
“A library of videocassettes showing various traumas.The spectator is invited to experiment autohypnosis : staring at a trauma may minimize its emotional impact”.
Mi(e)s conception
“An answer to Mies van der Rohe's famous Farnworth House ; a living space created by eliminating matter. It is an inhabitable module whose construction implies the substraction of material”.
Jardin psychologique
“A kindergarten based on two analytic tools. Rorschach Tests in the shape of suspended mobiles and wooden chairs, collected from salvaged materials and handmade by children In the derelict areas, implicated in that experiment by the Italian artist Riccardo Dalisi in Naples in 1967”.
Boule d’angoisse
“Anxiogenic soundtrack”.
Plante à sommeil
“A network of pipes containing a sleeping drug and distributing a daily dose of synthetic sleep”.
Papier peint
“Paper made of drawings coming from the psychological test dubbed “The Tree”.”
Sans titre (Arbre à désirs “revisité”)
“This is a tree of desires in a new version. It is a device diffusing synthetic pheromone which produces an undiscernible smell that induces sexual excitment”.
Anesthetic Room
“A physical and mental experiment to put oneself in a waking state”.
“During the exhibition, an artificial fog floats at random to make the site homely. It is also the embryo of another project : nanocaptors of stress to measure the level of stress here and about.”
CBMP call their exhibits “project” rather than “work”. These works are pregnant of something to come, not closed on themselves. There are seen as “protocols” to be experimented on “your own skin”. That implies an active participation from the spectator, who is expected to play an active role and not remain the passive consumer of products imposed by the cultural industry. This way, he comes out of an imposed part and stirs up the work, he becomes the co-agent, the coproductor of it. In other terms, Art is a relationship.This conception is not new, as the American Art critic Claire Bishop reminded us recently 5. In 1962, the Italian literary and art critic Umberto Eco published “The Open Work” which has since become a milestone in literature. Eco’s thesis is that the reader is as much the author of the work as its creator, that reading a book amounts to writing it anew. In short, there are in one book as many books as readers. This goes directly against the traditional authority of the written thing.
In the Traumary, CBMP illustrate this new conception. The very name CBMP, initials covering the names of two artists as a clear sign of mutiplicity, exemplifies Eco's conception of Art, an idea that multiplies the concept of artistic creation. Its a healthy reaction against the traditional and too easy distinction between what is Art and what is Life, between creating a work of Art and enjoying it passively..
What about a surplus of life?
The exhibition’s title means that CBMP have in mind more than a layout or a system. It is a break out of all systems and, to reach it, a protocol must be shared. In fact, the exhibition is a system of “ideal protocols”. Dynamic, psychological, physiological, chemical, electromagnetic, technological, architectonic and urbanistic contrivances form a microcosm that replicate the environment outside. Simultaneously, it is a macrocosm, that is a “superprotocol” of all the individual works exhibited. This exhibition is a surplus of life as are the detailed individual projects that give it life.
Micro-architecture through each work exhibited, macro-architecture through the very exhibition itself, this is a combination made possible only if the spectator becomes the co-creator of each work, hence of the whole system of “ideal protocols”. CBMP share this attitude with Parreno and Huyghe, Liam Gillick and Carsten Höller and, in his recent exhibition, entitled mid-career, Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Architecture in itself, the exhibition in itself are essentially variables triggered by behaviours. “Architecture has seldom tried to tackle what is fundamental in our existence. Usually, it steps in when behaviours have already been codified. Our line of thought deals precisely with that : re-codify, de-codify behaviours”. 6
This way, architecture meets the spectator, depends on its desires, its fears, its reactions. It varies according to these. It projects itself as on a screen, it is a a reflection which the spectator uses to project himself in the story being told, as he would in a cinema.
In short, architecture is for CBMP something that moves toward ...
The works of “What about a surplus of life ?” are indeed projected on a screen, in a climate of their own. The exhibition replicates itself on screen, within the settings of a subterranean city. It states its will to stay apart of the ordinary world, its will to stand as a world “apart”.
This flight forward, or rather toward a metaphorical logic, reminds us of “No Stop City”, designed by the architects that created the group Archizoom in Florence, in 1966. A most creative year for the radical Architecture of the sixties. Archizoom was founded by Andrea Branzi, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi and Gilberto Coretti. The same year was created in Florence the Superstudio, by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, joined later by Alessandro and Roberto Magris and Piero Frassinelli.
These were the years of radical politics, of the Gay Pride, of feminist consciousness, of sharp criticism of consumerism, of “fantasy technology” (as opposed to “sad technology”), of “radical design”. Modern Art was put under the magnifying glass of provocative analysis. This era is now exemplified in Dojo 7, an exhibition organized by a group of young Italian artists gathered par Luca Cerizza, an art historian and museum director.
Functional objects gave way to “negative utopias”, to an architecture “in between” its traditional object and the negation of it. To illustrate it, Superstudio used new methods and means : photomontages, sketches, storyboards, films. Its thought was shuttling between politics and anthropology, between politics and anarchy. For instance, the absurdity of modern planning was exposed in a collage showing Manhattan under the sea.
An “architecture on paper” as CBMP say, an architecture “in the making” that exposed the contradictions between Modernism, by then mainstream thinking, and the demands of a market economy. This new architecture wanted to escape from a sad environment, a too predictable and oppressive architecture, at home as in the city. It escaped through visionary, hypothetical theories, using non-sensical logics.
Many artists, architects and intellectuals were striving in the same direction in Italy and elsewhere. They were Riccardo Dalisi, Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, Gaetano Pesce, Remo Buti, Carlo Guenzi, Franco Raggi, Eugenio Battisti (who invented the Experimental Museum) and Germano Celant. Also groups that called themselves UFO, Lidbidarch, Sturm, 9999 ou Ziggurat.
There were landmark exhibitions : Superarchitettura (Pistoia, 1966, Modena, 1967), Immagine per la Città (Venice/Accademia and Genova/Palazzo Reale 1972), The New Domestic Landscape (New York/Moma 1972), Fragments from a Personal Museum (Graz/Neue Galerie and Paris/8e Biennale 1973.
These views were also alive in Art reviews such as : “Che”, “In”, “Inpiù”, “Modo”, “Casabella”, “Domus”, “Marcatré” or “Pianeta Fresco”, with signatures such as : Branzi and Ettore Sottsass Jr, Giovanni K. Koenig and Enrico D. Bona.
All these influences are at work among our generation of architects, designers and artists such as : the Studio Alchimia, Memphis Group, Rem Koolhaas, Foreign Office Architects, the Gruppo A 21, Stefano Boeri, the group Multiplicity, Décosterd and Rahm, François Roche and, finally, CBMP.
The effect of architecture on man and its environment is positive and negative at the same
time. It entails a “global vision” that puts man and its environment at the centre of a complex network of relationships and changes. Studying these effects “in real time”, finding where they come from and what is their “radical matrix” are the aims of CBMP.
“What makes a statement radical is not so much its form as its disturbing impact on society, politics and mentalities. Critical utopia is not planning another world. It is a “scientific” instrument of knowledge that enables us to show the world as “real”, the reality as “existing”. So, if there is such a thing as”nowhere”, it is here and now” 8.
“Radicalism equals virtuality, it is a sharp consciousness of chaos all around. Happyness necessary lies in knowing that we are not perfect. The history of our most radical desires and fears is then the most radical history. Its understanding demands that we find and apply “indispensable and adequate protocols” 9.
For CBMP, the “avant-garde” was not only the radical approach of a given generation, it is a working guide. From it arose a basic design that blended nature and artifice, a design that carefully merged items and qualities neglected by modern industrial production. And these are colours, finishings, tactile feelings, in other terms esthetic caracteristics hard to define and mesure but that “talk” to us in an unconscious, shrouded, pervasive and fluid way.
It is the concrete language of the body and the mind. Art done for real.
Andrea Viliani
(English version by H-A. Baatsch and M. Laperrière)