A key figure of the 1970s and 1980s art scene, artist, teacher, and originator, along with Gina Pane and Vito Acconci, of body art in France, Michel Journiac, who passed away in 1995 at the age of sixty, is recognized as a source of inspiration for many artists. This exhibition currently on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie gathers more than a hundred original works created between 1969 and 1994, and covers the major artistic themes of the artist: traps, rituals, contracts, and icons.
“All creation is born of the distance, of the margin, and takes us back to those who disowned the sustained dogmas and morals, recognized ideologies, in the commitment to life,” explained Michel Journiac in De la censure à la révolution culturelle (From censorship to the cultural revolution), appearing in arTitudes in March 1972. “Take the same real steps, trap what is meant in the finding of meaning, make the subject, the sociological data, and the body, the language of creation. Reject the upper-middle class’s watchdog practices and try to create their own significant practice, tackle new semantics, beyond the given codes and rationalizations on worn out canvases. Draw up, with the help of a vocabulary common to all, the questioning presence of a revolt born from blood, which beyond the censors, having hold today, could be the first step to a cultural revolution.”
Exhibition
Michel Journiac, l’action photographique
From April 20 through June 18, 2017
Maison Européenne de la Photographie
5/7 rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris
France
www.mep-fr.org
Book
Published by Éditions Xavier Barral
Texts by Françoise Docquiert, Michel Journiac, and Jean-Luc Monterosso
39 €
See also
Michel Journiac, Rituel de transmutation & Contaminations au présent
From April 1 though April 27, 2017
Le Transpalette, Centre d’art contemporain
Friche l’Antre-peaux
26 rue de la Chapelle
18000 Bourges
