ART CITIES:Paris-Pure Fiction
Marcel Broodthaers was associated with the Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionnaire from 1945 and dabbled in journalism, film, and poetry. After spending 20 years in poverty as a struggling poet, at the end of 1963, he decided to become an artist and began to make objects. He performed the symbolic act of embedding fifty unsold copies of his book of poems “Pense-Bête” in plaster, creating his first art object.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive
No work in the exhibition “Pure Fiction” requires reading. The brain has two very distinct hemispheres, the artists presented here each lead a double life. The exhibition presents works by: Ed Atkins, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Dean, Robert Filliou, Pierre Klossowski, Henri Michaux, Win McCarthy, Giuseppe Penone, Bunny Rogers, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Josef Strau. These artists, born between 1899 and1990, express themselves through both visual and written means. If one doesn’t always presuppose the other, both practices do sometimes overlap. One common think of Michael Dean’s sculptures, Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s performances and Ed Atkins’s videos is that their works “There are pure fictions that do not necessarily derive from words or stories, but strike with the power of their visual language instead”. Within Josef Strau’s oeuvre, text is often filtered through his installations, or appears as a complement to his “Icons”, canvases with metallic drawings. “Book and Muscle”, a work by Michael Dean, intertwines the body of the sculpture with the body of the text. The subtitle of “My Epidemic (A body as public as a book can be” (2015) by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, perfectly describe the artist’s own corpus. Her long curtains, stained with vermillion ink, evoke a manuscript uncoiling. Bunny Rogers exhibits a doll tied to a stump of a ceramic tree on which rests one limited edition of her “Cunny Poems”. For Marcel Broodthaers and Pierre Klossowski, words seem to come before image. The murals by Ed Atkins maintain the deaf violence of his videos and the acuity of his poems. In addition to the exhibited works, books written by all the artists are available for consultation. Collections of poems by Giuseppe Penone are positioned close to “Cocci” (1979), his works in terra cotta and plaster. It’s pure fiction for the imagination, such as when one gazes upon “Always these few raindrops and/never the storm/always a partial view” (2015), a work by Win McCarthy which represents the artist’s self-portrait.
Info: Curator: Julie Boukobza, Marian Goodman Gallery, rue de Temple 79, Paris, Duration: 10/6-22/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://mariangoodman.com
