The joint exhibition Almost Animated, bringing together nine international artists, opened at the Loevenbruck gallery in Paris on February 5th this year. The show is a reflection on the evolution and role of photography duringthe 1970s and 1980s.
After the avant-gardes, photography itself was called into question over its relation with the real – its supposed objectivity – and was deconstructed by artists who sensed its deep-seated ambivalence. Meanwhile, Camera Lucida published by Roland Barthes in 1980 came as something of a thunderbolt.
The exhibition opens with an iconic piece by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Vergleich: Fördertum – Transformator (1970). Over the years, these two German photographers gradually abandoned their systematic inventories of industrial architecture to produce series of views of a single subject shot from different angles. The resulting work reflected a paradoxical attempt – driven by their research into experimental cinema – to visually ‘animate’ the inanimate, anticipating Barthes’ insight.
Playing with Dead Things also happens to be the title of an influential text by Mike Kelley, setting out a psychanalytical review of his relation with childhood fetishes that had inspired new forms of performance in the 1970s.
This founding theme pervades the entire exhibition which confronts and overlaps practices from the period when performance was no longer experienced as something heroic or transgressive, but more as the ritual staging of a pitiless dissection of the Self. This is confirmed here in sequences by Michel Journiac, Hermann Nitsch and Gina Pane and their work on body art with a strong self-analytical slant. Next to them are Peter Moore’s captures of Nam June Paik’s performance art, the ‘ruminations’ of ephemeral chewing gum sculptures set against black and white paper, produced by Alina Szapocznikow and Roman Cieslewicz, and the light, free gestures of Olga Adorno and Jean Dupuy that shift art as action towards a kind of delicate and sensitive ‘self-sculpture’. Then there is Ria Pacquée who has created two alter egos. One is masculine while the other, known as ‘Madame’, condenses all the anxieties of an adolescent emerging from her shell during the transition from childhood to adult status, recalling Dolto’s ‘lobster complex’, and uses a fantasy-type narrative as a form of release.
EXHIBITION
Almost Animated
Artists : Bernd & Hilla Becher, Jean Dupuy, Michel Journiac, Peter Moore, Hermann Nitsch, Ria Pacquée, Gina Pane and Alina Szapocznikow
From February 5th to March 26th, 2016
Loevenbruck
6, rue Jacques Callot
75006 Paris
France
[email protected]
www.loevenbruck.com
