We remember the remarkable exhibition “Hitchcock and Art” at the Centre Pompidou and its catalogue, which was immediately sold out! It was a question of symbolism, particularly of the spiral, the leitmotif of Vertigo, of the chignon of Madeleine/Judy on the dramatic spiral staircase high up in the Mission, creating a strong emotional disturbance in the viewer as if going around the truth meant moving further away from it.
The precision and effectiveness of this process of double reverse movement, invented by the director, inspired Alexia Fabre in celebrating the 10th anniversary of MAC VAL, one of the first museums to be built on the edge of Paris. What is the right distance to adopt towards the collection’s history and the duty to remember. From the present, what do we make of what the artists have taken the trouble for us to see? Are we not made dizzy in this spotlight? The act of retouching and digital restoration carried out by Agnès Geoffray in “Incidental gestures” from anonymous images replays the possible falsification of history.
The image then places us as witnesses. In the second of the books by Pascal Convert, the persistence of the past by transmutation and crystallisation, acts as a trail of the many of the world’s libraries burnt by totalitarian regimes. The challenge of the luminous impression on the landscape of the sublime by Dove Allouche, the weight of time on the introspective face of Maria Callas in the video by Ange Leccia, sedimentation from one practice to another in the work of Stéphane Calais, the building of identity in adolescence confronted by the problems of displacement by Laura Henno, archetypical reconstruction and incarnation of an actress by Natacha Lesueur, looking attractive in photographs and empathy with the medium by Valérie Belin or the fable and territories of fiction by Pierre Huyghe.
The question from left field, about the making of the image, the hybridisation of genres and the diversion stratagems, the idea of the co-author and the original (many pauses in deciphering the iconoclastic duo None Futbol Club) are as much clues for breaking the undercurrent of memory, outsmarting the bad omens, avoiding the pitfalls, and finally finding meaning in rewriting the present with the power of looking.
INFORMATION
MacVal is 10 !
L’effet Vertigo : new exhibition of collection
Temporary exhibition Seven Corridors by François Morellet
Musée d’art contemporain du Val de Marne
Place de la Libération
94400 Vitry-sur-Seine
France
http://www.macval.fr
