“The word panorama was used for the first time in England, in 1787. It designated the representation of a landscape or a historical scene within a cylindrical structure, designed to afford the audience placed at its center a 360-degree view.”
This exhibition originated in an exchange between the two curators, Laurence Madeline and Jean-Roch Bouiller. It started with a text message, “I love panoramas” (a phrase spoken by Jean Dujardin in the French spy movie OSS 117) which crossed one of their phones like a flash of lightning. Familiar to artists, this flash of lightning is some little detail, an epiphany that engenders the work: in this case, an exhibition.
A fruit of the collaboration between the Musées d’Art et d’histoire in Geneva, Switzerland, and MuCEM in Marseille, France, this exhibition is a sweeping chronological survey of the panorama. It sheds light on the historical, scientific, economic, military, and artistic aspects of the phenomenon, which modifies our relationship to the contemplative and/or introspective world.
The analysis of this system of representation ushers us into the exhibition “I love panoramas” like children into a fairy tale.
From the moment the patent was filed in 1791 (for the importation and the development of cylindrical painting, called panorama), it quickly became obvious that the idea of panorama, considered as proto-cinema, is an expression of human desire to represent reality in its totality, albeit to very different ends. This desire, explored here by contemporary artists such as Jeff Wall, David Hochney, and Olafur Eliasson, is the guiding thread through the six main areas of the exhibition. At the end of the tour, we even find the antipodes of panoramic irrepresentability—Sigmund Freud’s “oceanic feeling,” illustrated by such works as François Morellet’s “La Ligne No 2” or Elina Brotherus’s “L’homme face au grand paysage.”
The scenography opens with a raw exterior that funnels into a sophisticated room which bears the mark of the designer. Even if the scenography is sometimes complicated, visitors will be aware of the masterful effects of lighting; they will be thrilled at hearing the soundtracks from Contempt and Once Upon a Time in the West and will especially enjoy the shaded blue hallway where works are perfectly displayed.
“I love panoramas” is the joint effort of two curators, Laurence Madeline and Jean-Roch Bouiller. They present and explore the notion of panorama, reappropriating with simplicity and enthusiasm the desire, the mad idea, of capturing an event in an image. Panorama, to borrow Neal Cassady’s phrase, “is a beautiful thing with everything in it.”
EXHIBITION
J’aime les Panoramas (I Love Panoramas)
From November 4th, 2015 to February 29th, 2016
MuCEM Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée
7 Prom. Robert Laffont
13002 Marseille
France
+33 (0) 4 84 35 13 13
http://www.mucem.org
