Daviet-Thery & mfc-michèle didier, Paris
Together, Nathalie Daviet-Thery and Michèle Didier present a shared curatorial project for this 2014 edition of ART-O-RAMA. Conceptual art is the common thread running through the works selected by both publishers.
Nathalie Daviet-Thery invites the artists Claire Morel and Yann Sérandour to re-appropriate, each in their own way, the Art & Project Bulletin number 72 realized in 1973 by Lawrence Weiner, following up the Four proposals for changing Bulletin 72 by Michael Riedel. For Claire Morel, it is all about reducing the bulletin’s inked surface, according to her own modus operandi. Yann Sérandour will on the other hand react to a «stained» version of the bulletin.
mfc-michèle didier presents SOMETHING IN A BOX by Robert Barry, replaying on its own scale — 10,2 x 15,2 cm — the measurements of the cards — here 62 — that were distributed about forty years ago. This new production actualizes the artist’s work Index Cards, initially created in 1971. A box made of walnut wood gathers here 62 index cards, each one proposing a different statement by Robert Barry. Art lovers, an unbound book by the same artist, contains 31 portraits of famous «Art Lovers» who were photographed by Robert Barry. They are hidden behind a black surface where only the perforation of a word reveals a few clues on the identity of the people behind it. The reader has thus no choice but to reconstruct their faces, to imagine new identities and to replace the «Art Lovers» selected by the artist.
To deconstruct the past thanks to the present in order to build a new present based on the past: history of art is a game of construction that has to be assembled and disassembled eternally.
