In Marseille, an exhibition celebrates the art of loving through a panoply of works many of which are by photographers. Helena Almeida, Nan Goldin, Antoine d’Agata… so many artists who have made passionate love a playground.
The young woman is injured. She has blood on her knee and looks fearfully in front of her. At the same time, she seems to be removing her panties, Her face is fragmented by the light: one side in darkness, the other completely in the light.
Created by Todd Hido in 2011, this portrait illustrates well the theme of this exhibition at the Marseille Musée d’Art Contemporain (Mac); Quel Amour?! The question mark is important because it questions the plural dimension of love which generates its own set of consequences: destructive passion, sentimental break-up, happiness with life, identity problems, motherhood, life as a couple, marriage…
Quite early in the exhibition a terrific series by the Portuguese photographer Helena Almeida is on display. The artist questions the longevity of desire through some sensitive self-portraits where she stages her own body that talks to her alone about the tribulations of time passing. One of the photographs – which is used elsewhere as a poster for the exhibition – shows two legs of an elderly couple, one feminine, the other masculine, tied by a rope. A great metaphor for the life of a couple which perhaps achieves its acme by this march, together until the end and, at the same time, prisoners, one of the other, in the perfect contradiction into which we throw romantic life. Loving is doubtless this rope which binds the legs of two beings and requires them to walk together at the same pace, the same rhythm, so that they won’t fall down.
Marriage
Unless love first passes through love of oneself and the conception of oneself. It’s true, how to love without loving oneself first. The is the meaning of the video entitled Le Miroir by Chantal Akerman where a young woman looks at her silhouette, considering at length the nature of her shapes. Chantal Akerman speaks to us about the body as an object of desire, but also as a social object, an object of representation in society with its bundle of stereotypes, be they sexist or homophobe.
The private body that becomes, through its representation, the social body and which finds its apogee in the event of marriage. With malicious irony, Sophie Calle invents for us her own marriage in 1992. In that year, the artist organised a fake celebration, immortalised in a photograph that’s being shown in the exhibition. In it we see Sophie Calle posing proudly in a white dress surrounded by a group of friends and a fake husband, recruited for the occasion. The deception aims to titillate everyone on the importance that is placed on marriage even today when divorce rates have never been higher.
Turbulent
Because love has its other side: the sentimental break-up. This is brilliantly illustrated by the Marseille artist Marc Quer in his series “Monsieur Drame” produced in 2010. The man collected the break-up emails sent to him by a dozen women. “Leave me in peace” clamoured one of them while another said to him, “Marc, I have to tell you that I don’t love you anymore. I don’t want to see you anymore”. To these missives, every time, the artist added a photograph of the frontage of a miserable hotel. The dilapidated facades, where for example the sign “Ideal” crumbles on one of them, resonate particularly well with the sour words that these women toss into their messages.
Because sometimes the exchange is broken off as suggested in a video by the artist Shirin Neshat. Her work Turbulent (1998) is a film shown on two screens. On one of them a woman sings in front of an empty room while on the other a man stays mute in front of a microphone while a group of men stands behind him. A powerful image of the difficulty of communicating in the field of love and the contradictory feelings that it brings out where sometimes the song is sung to oneself when the time to talk to in front of others leaves us speechless.
Darkened room
It has to be said that love finds its setting in our intimate lianas. The jungle that we have within us, of desires, fantasies, images of the other, is powerfully shown by the photographer Antoine d’Agata who documents his sexual life with shots where the bodies are entangled, confused, like in Francis Bacon’s paintings – one of which is shown elsewhere in the exhibition. For d’Agata sex is a time where orgasm is mixed with suffering, passion with destruction, vertigo with nausea. In the depths of a corner of the museum the photographer is showing no fewer than two hundred and sixty self-portraits that are as many views of this world where fucking and drugs reign in disconcerting sincerity. The camera is then the poet of a darkened room where nude bodies are displayed, reduced to the sexual act and at the same time vaporous, like ghosts, not without a certain poetry of the moment that send us back to our own fragility.
These damaged flowers that d’Agata shows are also grown beautifully by the American photographer Nan Goldin. The real masterpiece of the exhibition, her series entitled All by myself, produced in 1995 depicts the world of an adolescent who is discovering the joy of love and sexuality. At times dark, at times enchanting, her photographs are shown in the form of a slide show in which one image is mixed with the next in a play of superimposition. The faces are merged, the settings too, and everything invokes the feeling of a journey into the adolescents torments linked to the discovery of love. It’s a world of extreme confusion, of turmoil where identity is still not clearly defined, where there are innumerable paths at the crossroads that constitutes a handsome tribute to the word “love”, which calls to this distraction, to this wandering, in this eternal question addressed to each of us.
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin is a journalist, author and director who lives and works in Paris
Quel Amour ?!
From 13th May to 2nd September 2018
Musée d’art contemporain de Marseille
69 Avenue d’Haifa
13008 Marseille
France
http://culture.marseille.fr/les-musees-de-marseille/musee-d-art-contemporain-mac
