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themes

texts Editorial p. 5

Laurent Buffet, Robert Smithson and the time of ruins: A return to the origins of the culture of disaster p. 7

Claude Cattelain An open letter to Mr. Kubrick p. 25

Memory, souvenir p. 49

History, community p. 69

Architecture, sculpture p. 87

Sense of play p. 109

Interviews p. 117

Artist’ web sites and links p. 119 -

Collector edition, making p. 121

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Monument Edition 2 is an extension of the Monument series of DECEMBER 2014 exhibitions organised in Caen, Calais and Norwich by FRAC booklet n°1 Basse-Normandie, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Edition 2 explores in greater detail some of the questions examined by the three joint curators regarding the concept of monumentality and its many contemporary derivations. Flexible and adaptable, this exhibition review is designed to evolve to reflect the rhythm and thematic concerns of each individual show, all within a consistent presentational format.

Monument Edition 2 compiles some twenty texts from various sources, derived from or inspired by the conferences organised by the partner institutions; these texts are joined by video interviews with artists involved in the project, and reproductions of the texts which accompanied those new works included in the second showing of the exhibition (Monument 2) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais (May-September 2014), as well as a review of the Monument exhibition held at the Undercroft in Norwich.

This review is divided into two distinct parts: a collection of ‘Essays’ and a ‘Themes’ section.

The ‘Essays’ section includes two extended contributions from a Doctor of Philosophy and one of the featured artists. The first text, by critic Laurent Buffet, is the text of a lecture given at FRAC Basse-Normandie in April 2014. It offers a critical interpretation of the FRAC exhibition seen through the prism of Robert Smithson’s influential 1960s writings. The second text, Claude Cattelain’s open letter to Stanley Kubrick, written to mark the opening of the exhibition Do Not Repeat in Calais, reflects on the influence of Kubrick’s war film Paths of Glory on the artist’s video work.

The ‘Themes’ section brings together texts written by the artists and exhibition curators, a video documenting the project led by artist and typographer Jocelyn Cottencin at FRAC Basse Normandie and a number of video interviews with the featured artists focusing on four key themes: Memory/remembrance, History/community, Architecture/sculpture, Playgrounds. The first three themes were decided upon during roundtable discussions at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in June 2014.

The final theme, Playgrounds, offers an in-depth focus on the work of a selection of artists featured in the collections of the Musée des BeauxArts de Calais and FRAC Basse-Normandie.

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robert smithson and the time of ruins: A return to the origins of the culture of disaster

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Laurent Buffet Writer and researcher Lecturer at the Ecole Superieure d’Arts et Medias in Caen/Cherbourg and researcher

Text from the lecture by Laurent Buffet delivered at the Frac Basse-Normandie, 3 April 2014.

Monuments are a modern invention, like the history of which they are the architectural embodiment. Insofar as history belongs to a nation or a people, so do monuments reflect this people’s identity.

And from this point of view, the works exhibited by the Frac BasseNormandie in ‘Monument’ (February 22 - April 13, 2014) would seem to be in contradiction with the title of the exhibition. These hybrid objects possess no clearly defined cultural associations and, as a consequence, are devoid of any precise function in terms of bestowing identity. The brittle materials used in their construction are in complete contradiction with the monument’s vocation to last, to resist the passing of time, and the forms of these objects mock 7

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the solemnity of a monument’s memorial function. Rather than addressing topical questions, the exhibition highlighted a crisis in the history of the monument, as described by Robert Smithson in the 1960s in two pioneering articles: ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ (1966) and ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ (1967). In these two texts, Smithson paved the way for a new aesthetic of the ruin, an aesthetic that has come to occupy an important place in artistic imagination in recent years, but he uses the term ‘monument’ in a way that is diametrically opposed to the meaning that modernity attributed to it. Unlike the ruins that attracted attention from the Renaissance to the period of the Romantics, the aesthetic vocation of these ruins is not to celebrate past civilisations – even by anticipation, such as in Hubert Robert’s paintings – but to acknowledge the decline of our contemporary industrial civilisation. They bear witness to the incursion into historical time of another time that Smithson sometimes calls ‘geological time’. In interpreting these two texts, my aim is to identify the nature and the causes of this new relationship with time (based on what we now call the culture of disaster) and its repercussions in art.

modernism and modernity: teleological time

Smithson’s writings must be taken in the context of the American art scene in the 1960s. The conception of time they express is in opposition with the one underlying Clement Greenberg’s modernist theories, which were still influential among artists at the time. Smithson’s criticism of those temporal concepts which are inherent in Greenberg’s definition of modernity, are part of a more fundamental criticism of the modern concept of history as defined by Reinhard Koselleck.

According to the German historiographer, history as a discipline was born at the end of the 17th century from the subsumption of individual histories into a common concept. It gave substance to a new and previously unknown ‘space of experience’ that signed the advent of the Modern Times. This space of experience appeared 8

on a ‘horizon of expectations’, which occupied the place originally given over to religion. Historical time gives meaning EDIto experience by imposing a direction, one that is no longer TION N°2 determined by faith in the existence of life after death, but by DECEMBER 2014 the belief that a form of rational thinking will evolve capable booklet n°1 of changing life here below. At the end of the 18th century, the French revolution provided an ‘epic unity’ to this new relationship with time, seen as a place of accomplishment, where mankind could plan and work for its emancipation. The concept of history imposed a linear vision of time, governed by the principle of ongoing progress. Marxism, with its interpretation of Hegelian dialectics, would decisively reformulate modernity’s teleological time, as defined by Kant at the end of the 18th century. By giving the proletariat the hero’s role in history, Marxism expressed its intent to transform the very course of history itself.

In the middle of the 20th century, Greenberg’s modernist theory could in turn be considered as applying this teleological perspective, devolved from the concept of history, to the field of art. It describes Modernism as a process that began with Manet in the 19th century, continued with the avant-garde movements at the start of the 20th century, before finally achieving a form of fulfilment in American painting during the 40s and 50s. He explains the process as the progressive unveiling of the specific essence of each art form. As Greenberg says: “What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. (...) It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium.”

The objective of Modernist painting was to make the spectator aware of the flatness of the support and in this way free itself from those conventions – figuration, illusionism, effects of depth – that were inherited from a past which had imposed a representational function. Like modern man, modern art is fighting for its autonomy. Modernism’s ‘historico-dynamic’ quality can therefore be understood as an extension to painting of this teleology, which is an integral part of the development of modern times. By rejecting the conception of time on which Greenberg’s theories are based, Smithson consequently rejects that global experience of time proper to modernity. As we will see, the discussion that he initiates on the art front is prejudicial to the modern vision of the world as a whole.

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from historical time to geological time

The principle of entropy is at the heart of the artist’s musings.

Smithson discovered the term in a book by Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics and Society (1950), which he quotes several times in his writings and interviews. The artist uses the second law of thermodynamics, defining the amount of disorder in a system, metaphorically to designate in turn: disorder, destruction, a lack of differentiation, decomposition and regression… These varied metaphorical uses share a common opposition to the idea that time is linear and synonymous with progress.

Dans « L’entropie et les nouveaux monuments », la notion offre, notamment, une clef d’interprétation de l’Art Minimal. Au passage, elle s’oppose à la lecture que les artistes minimalistes donnent de leur propre travail. En effet, alors que ceux-ci revendiquent la parfaite autonomie sémantique des formes qu’ils produisent (« ce qui est à voir est ce que vous voyez », dira Franck Stella), restant ainsi dans la droite ligne du modernisme greenbergien, Smithson n’hésite pas à faire des œuvres minimalistes les symboles de processus multiples de désagrégation. Tout d’abord, il fait une analogie entre l’Art Minimal et le développement de l’architecture d’après-guerre, rejoignant en cela les analyses que Dan Graham consigne à la même époque dans « Homes for America » (1966/67).

Mais alors que Graham mettait en évidence des similitudes formelles entre les œuvres minimalistes et l’architecture standardisée des banlieues américaines, Smithson voit dans les premières des évocations sculpturales des « slurbs qui s’étalent », de « la prolifération incontrôlée des constructions nouvelles du boom d’après-guerre, [qui] ont contribué à une architecture d’entropie ».

In ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, Smithson proposes a key to interpreting Minimal Art, incidentally contradicting how Minimal artists actually analyse their own work. Whereas the latter lay claim to an absolute semantic autonomy in the forms they produce -“what you see is what you see” as Franck Stella would say - which situates them in the continuation of Greenberg’s view of modernism, Smithson has no scruples in using these Minimalist works as symbols of the multiple processes of disintegration.

First of all, he makes an analogy between Minimal Art and the 10

development of post-war architecture, an analysis he shares with Dan Graham, as expounded by the latter in ‘Homes EDIfor America’ (1966/67). But whereas Graham pointed out the TION N°2 formal similarities between Minimalist artworks and the DECEMBER 2014 standardized architecture of the American suburbs, Smithson booklet n°1 saw the sculptural evocation of the spreading suburbs: “The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number of housing developments of the post-war boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.”

However, considering Minimal Art as the simple reflection of urban change would come down to remaining dependent on a historicist perspective that Smithson wants to go beyond. If Minimalism is indeed reminiscent of the chaotic sprawl of modern architecture, he sees it more fundamentally as an allegory of universal entropy. The artists in question provide: “a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness.”

From Smithson’s point of view, his period’s art is post-apocalyptic, in other words a form of art that is no longer traversed by time.

Minimalist ‘monuments’ “are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is antiNewtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock.” Considered in this way, Minimalist works escape from historical time and embrace a temporality, a time that corresponds to natural and cosmic cycles, which is static from the viewpoint of the human observer. One oxymoronic formula follows another as the artist describes a “backward-looking future” or quotes Nabokov: “The future is but the obsolete in reverse. In any case, he opposes the concept of a stationary or involute time, which he calls ‘geological’, to the modernist conception of time as dynamic and linear. This time is no longer the time of men, the anthropological time of history, it is a time with neither beginning nor end, one which beats to the pulsations of the universe.

By now, it should be clear why ‘monument’, thus used in relation 11

to works of Minimal Art, is such a fundamentally inappropriate term and should be considered as having a meaning that is diametrically opposed to its generally accepted definition. Whereas monuments were entrusted by modernity with the task of providing a tangible representation of history, a history that the acceleration of time threatened to overwhelm, here the term actually designates forms whose symbolism originates in the relegation of history, in favour of a time that goes far beyond that of mankind and civilisations.

the futur in ruins

If in his article from 1966, the term ‘monument’ is applied to artistic objects that evoke the entropic development of modern architecture, in Smithson’s article published one year later, it is used to designate the industrial buildings of an ordinary American suburb. It is no longer the signifier of urban representation, but the direct signifier of this urbanity. In fact, probably in 1965, the artist had embarked upon a methodical exploration of New Jersey. ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ tells of one of these journeys of discovery.

Borrowing from the travel journal genre, the text is a meditation on the contemporary proliferation of ruins. Both its form and content place it in the continuation of the Romantic tradition, but its use of irony inverses Romanticism’s core principles.

Modernity is the cause of this incredible acceleration of time, leading to an ever-quicker transformation of the world and its values, but the period is also one of discovery, of both the preservation and the exploration of our collective memory, notably through travels. In the 19th century, numerous authors set off to discover far-flung lands that were remarkable because they contained the residual presence of a now mythical past. If we take the example of Chateaubriand’s canonical journey, taking in Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Cairo, the Romantic traveller turned the pages of the book of our collective memory.

Right from the start, Smithson’s text opposes this modern predilection for distant lands: as well as being a banal American suburb, Passaic is also Smithson’s hometown. There is nothing exotic here. It is not characterised by illustrious facts or universally memorable events. The so-called monuments that one can observe 12

here are but insipid witnesses of an industrial activity on the decline: an old pumping derrick stands immobile in the middle of the river, six large pipes, reminiscent of a factory’s chimneys, EDITION N°2 pump water out of a pond, nearby is a sandbox.... The artist DECEMBER 2014 constantly evokes the banality of the landscape through booklet n°1 which he is travelling: “For all I know, that unimaginative suburb could have been a clumsy eternity, a cheap copy of the City of the Immortals”. Or further on in the text: “There was nothing interesting or even strange (...) everything was wrapped in blandness.” Behind this parody of a piece of travel writing, Smithson is presenting another indictment of the myth of progress: Passaic’s pseudo monuments are the symptoms of the modern world’s ‘incurable disease’.

If in the 19th century, the Romantics travelled to discover the ruins of the past, artists from the second half of the 20th century explored the ruins of a future which haunted the devastated landscapes of modern industrial society: “That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is - all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built, but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” If modern monuments fall into ruin before they are built, is the modern world condemned to build its own destruction? At the start of the account of his trip, the narrator mentions a book that he bought in the bus station before setting off, a science fiction novel that takes place in a land which has become uninhabitable due to the presence of chemical products in its soil. Its title, Earthworks, is obviously evocative of the works of American Land Art. Passaic presented the same spectacle of desolation, resulting from the entropic development of industrial society.

Once more ‘monument’ is used with an opposite meaning: rather than designating the architectonic witnesses of history past, it evokes relatively recent constructions, whose rapid decomposition provides a glimpse, not just of their future collapse, but the collapse of the future itself. In answer to Aloïs Riegl’s analysis, which defines monumental ruins by their ‘age value’, Smithson’s ruderal aesthetic forms the basis for what could be called a ‘deterioration value’.

Whereas age value is dependent on a monument’s capacity to project us into times gone by, deterioration value is, on the contrary, based on its ability to anticipate our impending annihilation.

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from creation to decomposition

When reading these texts, it seems apt to consider the influence of Smithson’s thinking on his artistic output. How is it possible to produce a work of art from the sole perspective of impending destruction? In a time that does not preserve traces of human activity, but abolishes all traces in the indifference of universal entropy, what meaning can possibly be given to an artist’s actions? The answer to these questions supposes the downfall of another cardinal concept of the modern aesthetic: creativity.

Historical time, governed by the notion of progress, gave meaning to the creative act. From the Modernist point of view, the artist/creator participates in the renewal of forms in this department of general history that corresponds to the history of art. If the notion of progress is often contested, the more neutral one of evolution is often put forward. To quote Aloïs Riegl once more: “The idea of evolution constitutes (…) the essential point to any modern historical understanding.” And it is the avant-garde that best embodies this relationship with a form of time marked by permanent evolution. Breaking with the idea of evolution is breaking with the doxa that has dominated art since the end of the 19th century. Rather than taking refuge in academicism, which in its desire to avoid the modern diktat to renew forms perpetuates those forms bequeathed by tradition, Smithson takes a leap into the future, but a future which universal entropy condemns to the eternal return of the same – a future without futurism.

Condemning the ideological nature of the avant-garde, which originates in a relationship with time governed by the principle of progress, in 1968, Smithson asserts: “Contrary to affirmations of nature, art (...) sustains itself not on differentiation, but on dedifferentiation, not on creation but on decreation, not on nature but denaturalization, etc.» By not responding to this obligation for innovation, the artist must include those multiple processes of disintegration that alter material reality into the time of the artwork.

Robert Smithson thereby establishes a principle of destruction in opposition to the modern creative principle, a principle of involution to modernity’s evolution. Does not the very existence of his Earthworks presuppose the acceptance, even the active search 14

for a form of laissez-faire that consists in leaving matter to deteriorate, as it undergoes climatic effects over which the artist EDIhas no control? If the Land Art artists, Smithson included, TION N°2 built monumental works, these carry in their DNA, in the very DECEMBER 2014 nature of their production – crumbly materials that are subject booklet n°1 to the vagaries of the weather – the inevitable perspective of their own disappearance. One illustration of this is to be found in Spiral Jetty, which is submerged when the lake waters rise. This fragility is a key element of Smithson’s Earthworks, which bypass historical time and submit to telluric time, as evoked in the famous words of the Ecclesiastes (3.20): “All are from the dust, and to dust all return.”

This aesthetic of the collapse is implemented in a significant manner in two of Smithson actions at the very end of the Sixties.

In 1969, in the vicinity of Rome, the artist used a dumptruck to released several cubic metres of asphalt at the top of a hill: the viscous material then spread out following the slope of the land.

Asphalt Rundown could be considered a monumental form of drip painting and results in a form of radical anti-monument: the artist is not elevating blocks of material with a memorial function, but making an opaque heap of material flow away, with no guarantee that any trace will remain, other than that recorded in a few images taken during his intervention. On the Kent State University campus in Ohio one year later, the artist piled twenty truckloads of earth onto an abandoned shed, until its central beam gave way under the weight. The burial process that led to Partially Buried Woodshed is the result of a mechanical acceleration of the natural process of decomposition, which finishes sooner or later by getting the better of all material constructions. If the relationship between works of Land Art and nature is sometimes evocative of Greek philosophy, according to which art must be understood not as a simple imitation of nature but a search for perfection within nature, of course in the case of Smithson, nature is not considered as a creative force, but on the contrary as something that leads to the dissolution of everything.

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the painter of post-modern life

In his texts and works of art, Smithson opposes the modern understanding of time, but what caused him to take up this radically different point of view? Such a change affecting one’s very perception of time cannot be the result of an arbitrary decision. The explanation is undoubtedly in relation to the global historical context that paradoxically dislocated the very concept of history.

How not to see in Smithson’s body of work the traces of the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the risk of a nuclear cataclysm to come, as augured by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, as well as the first devastating consequences of mass production (documented in the same year with the publication of Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson, which gave birth to environmental awareness).

It is also deeply influenced by J. G. Ballard’s apocalyptical novels in which, at the same period, the author points to the impasses in the development of industrial society, echoing Günther Anders’ contemporary analysis that has been taken on board, continued and even taken further by a whole generation of intellectuals, from Hans Jonas to Ulrich Beck. His oeuvre records the profound mutations in society after WWII, which led to modernity’s historicisation of time being thwarted by the incursion of threats that were the very consequence of its excesses. These excesses (the effects of radioactivity, industrial pollution and overproduction on fauna, flora and mankind) are characterised by their capacity to disintegrate the temporal framework and their consequences, when they are not irreversible, cover a time span of hundreds, even thousands of years. The overexploitation of natural resources produces the conditions that will lead to a lasting planetary desert, thereby questioning the possibility of the continuing existence of life on Earth. The after-war period marks the entrance of modern times into what we could call a period of ‘negative teleology’. In his reflections on the monument, Smithson draws the conclusions for art of this reversal of perspective. In so doing, he lays the foundations for what is now commonly called the ‘culture of disaster’.

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The importance of Smithson’s theories is comparable with Baudelaire’s famous text that, one century before, coined the EDIterm ‘Modernity’. In the middle of the 19th century, in ‘The TION N°2 Painter of Modern Life’, the French poet drew the aesthetic DECEMBER 2014 conclusions of a new relationship with time that was the result booklet n°1 of mutations caused by the triumph of capitalism. In this text which is a veritable manifesto, Baudelaire invited artists to take into account a temporal dimension which had previously been scorned - the fleeting, transitory and contingent moment - and to extract from this instant its part of eternity, through the alchemy of aesthetic sublimation. This consecration of the ephemeral beauty of a period’s fashions, gestures and customs was also the consecration of the dynamic of the modern times which supplanted the solemn forms of tradition. In the middle of the 20th century, Smithson announced a new temporal revolution, dominated this time by the corrosive force of major biological and chemical cycles, set in motion by the ravages of a technological development that was out of control. Between these two extremes, Walter Benjamin had opened the way by comparing history to an angel whose face is turned towards the past, a pile of debris accumulating at his feet, whilst from Paradise the storm of progress blows, pushing him into the future. The thinking of this theoretician of Modernity according to Baudelaire, anticipated the post-modern reversal to which Smithson’s writings bear witness, presenting progress as the equivalent of destruction. However, one thing distinguishes the analyses of the German philosopher and those of the American artist. Benjamin also condemns historicism, which he associates with the continuum of ‘homogenous empty time’, but calls for the emergence of a non-linear time, with a wealth of promises as designated by his concept of ‘now time’ ( jetztzeit), which he meant as the moment when the past resurfaced in the present and transformed it, as with Ancient Rome during the French Revolution. It should be noted that the post-modern rupture with the historical continuum did not coincide with the proletarian revolution, but with what some people have recently called ‘the intrusion of Gaia’: the irruption of long time periods proper to natural biosystems, which results from the devastating action of productivism and subjects man’s activity to a reality that transcends it. And it is this very reality that Smithson’s writings acknowledge.

Can one talk about posterity in regard to a body of work 17

which so resolutely associates the future with collapse? If, in the tradition of modern messianism, Smithson does not trace the outlines of a new aesthetic programme, the artist does open out a new temporal horizon, which provides a means to situate art’s cultural and material reality. The work of Cyprien Gaillard, whose affinity with Smithson’s œuvre is well-known, is situated in this, no longer linear but cyclical, perspective. His 2011 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is a perfect example. In ‘UR’, the initials ‘U’ and ‘R’ appear respectively on two slabs, one of fossiliferous Tunisian marble and the other of glass, taken from the Forum des Halles when it was being dismantled. The work identifies a wider, circular and discontinuous view of time, governed by a simultaneous process of evolution and involution. The letters evoke both the city-state where Abraham was born, a Detroit-based techno musical collective (Detroit being the perfect example of the decline of modern industrial society) as well as being the initials of Urban Renewal. A series of Polaroids taken by the artist during his travels provides a further association with Gaillard’s recurrent ruin motif: this medium is vulnerable as, subject to the action of light, it gradually fades and returns to its initial white state. Finally, an Assyrian bas-relief connects this ‘archaeology of the present’ to that of Antiquity.

Modern Times Forever (2011) by the Danish collective Superflex provides another significant example of the post-modern ruin aesthetic. Working with the engineers from a famous digital animation studio, the group simulated the disintegration of the Stora Enso in Helsinki in a 240-hour film, showing what would have happened to this symbol of modernist architecture if it had been abandoned to the corrosive effects of time for approximately 300 years. The high level of technology used in creating this work contrasts with the elementary processes it describes and confronts modern constructivism with the destructive action of a virtual entropy. By this ‘mise en scène’ of a monument’s disappearance, the film bears witness in turn to the de-historicisation of time of which Smithson was, from a historical point of view, one of the first prophets.

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1 Robert Smithson Partially Buried Woodshed, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, January 1970.

One woodshed and twenty truckloads of earth, 18’6” x 10’2” x 45’. © Estate of Robert Smithson / licensed by ADAGP, Paris.

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

2 Robert Smithson Asphalt Rundown, 1969.

Outside Rome, Italy. © Estate of Robert Smithson / licensed by ADAGP, Paris.

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

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1 Cyprien Gaillard UR, Underground Resistance and Urban Renewal, 2011, silkscreen printing on glass and fossilized marble, 241 x 246,5 cm each. © Courtesy Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris.

2 Cyprien Gaillard Geographical Analogies, 2011, 2006 - 2013, wood, glass, 9 polaroïds, 65 x 48 x 10 cm.

Installation view: “UR”, Centre Pompidou, Paris. © Courtesy Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris.

3 SUPERFLEX Modern Times Forever. The Stora Enso Building, 2011, film, 240 mn.

Picture extracted from the movie Modern Times Forever.. © Courtesy of Superflex and Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris.

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an open letter to mr.kubrick

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Claude Cattelain

This letter was originally written to be read at a conference/performance on 20th February at Calais’ Musée des Beaux-Arts, as part of the exhibition Do Not Repeat. It was accompanied by a slideshow.

Dear Mr. Kubrick, Here we are in February 2014, and I’m sitting at home in front of my computer, writing you this letter and trying to persuade myself that you’ll be there in person when I read it out in Calais. I’ll be at the Musée des Beaux-Arts on February 20th, sometime in the early evening. As it happens there’s an exhibition on at the museum called DO NOT REPEAT, featuring a new series of my drawings.

They’re putting on a conference, and I’m supposed to talk a little about my work.

As I thought about how best to approach this conference, I realised that I needed to come at it from a certain angle so as to avoid talking about my own work too directly.

I thought that writing a letter to another artist might help me find this new angle, a change of approach.

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So that’s why my speech has taken on the form of a letter, which I’m addressing to you.

“And why me?” I hear you ask.

Well Mr. Kubrick, the fact of the matter is that as a child the first work of art which really had a profound effect on me was one of your films.

Ever since, some of the images you created have influenced the way I look at things and the way I work. At first this influence was probably unconscious, but sometimes I’m very conscious of it indeed. So you’ll understand why I so dearly hope to see you there in Calais.

Even if I am worried about sending this letter out into the great unknown, with no reason to be sure that you’ll appreciate me using your work as a mirror to reflect on my own. A trick mirror, perhaps.

I know about your fondness for mirrors, as you often make use of them in your films, and I’ve always admired certain sequences where you use reflections to make the transition from the real world into a world of dreams, of nightmares, or into the great beyond.

But I’ll come back to the mirror analogy later, because I think the best way to get started would be for me to explain how one of your films, and one scene in particular, first came to be a conscious source of inspiration for one of my projects.

It was for an exhibition back in 2008, in Valenciennes.

I had been invited to the town to put on a show on the theme: ‘Valenciennes, a military stronghold’. I must admit I felt pretty restricted by this theme. What I really wanted to do, as soon as possible, was to achieve a shift of perspective. I thought I might be able to do this by getting out of the town and WALKING into the countryside. I wanted to start my research by WALKING. I didn’t go as far as walking over sheets of paper, as I later did for an exhibition in Calais, for now I just wanted to go walking in the surrounding countryside and see if I could find a few 26

surviving traces of the Great War. I was hoping to come across something that would launch me on a train of thought which would be useful for my exhibition. It was wintertime, and every EDITION N°2 day I would set off across fields which were by turns muddy, DECEMBER 2014 covered in snow and even frozen. Just as I had hoped, I found a booklet n°1 good number of old military structures: watchtowers, bunkers, look-out posts, the supposedly impenetrable strongholds of a completed section of the Maginot line. There are still loads of bunkers in this region, even if farmers have tried to destroy a few of them to take back the land. They inevitably give up in the end, discouraged by the colossal masses of concrete and steel bars.

As for me, despite the cold I enjoyed walking from bunker to bunker, studying the subtle differences in these simple, robust forms, architecture reduced to its most basic principles. I felt like an explorer, impatient to get up close, to take a look around and then finally venture inside. Down there, in the half-light, I often came across animal bones: rodents, rabbits, shrews, dormice, all fallen prey to predators who had pulled them in here to devour them in peace within the safety of the reinforced concrete walls.

The doors and hatches leading to the underground levels were often blocked or sealed off, for safety reasons no doubt, but some of the bunkers had been forgotten and were still wide open. When I came across an opening, I’d slip down through that hole in the ground and explore the cellars and foundations.

I remember one very cold day down in one of these underground caverns, when I came across a huge and extraordinary animal boneyard. Dozens of animals must have fallen down into this hole and never managed to get back out. Engrossed in this discovery, I only gradually came to realise that there was a strange noise in that space, a sport of feeble beating sound. Ever so quiet. I turned my torch up to the ceiling and, taking care not to step on the bones, I went in search of the source of this sound…

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In a far corner, deep within the bunker, a few butterflies were suspended from the ceiling, slowly beating their wings. They had been overcome by the freezing conditions, but were just clinging on courageously to life. The tiny sound of their wings flapping, almost silenced by the winter chill, rang out over this animal graveyard.

So these bunkers weren’t just war relics and animal ossuaries, sometimes they were home to living things too. Certain predators use them as dining rooms, of course, but some other animals find shelter there. Insects crept and crawled through cracks in the walls, birds made their nests and rodents made babies in the labyrinthine air vents.

While some animals were still living in these bunkers, there were also traces of a different kind, evidence that some of these places had been used as shelters or even makeshift homes by poor families after the war.

I even found shards of old crockery, metal bed frames, the remains of wooden chairs and tables rotted away by the damp. Sometimes the walls were covered with paintings mimicking wallpaper, with floral patterns and fake landscape views painted straight onto the concrete. There were fake columns, roaring fires and mantelpieces painted around the holes in the walls which were originally intended for machine guns, and where these post-war residents must have built their own fires to stay warm.

Back above ground, in the cold winter of 2008, I spent weeks visiting every bunker I could find and taking photos. A bit like you must have done, Mr. Kubrick, when scouting locations for your next film. The difference was that I still didn’t have a project. All I had were a handful of images, always in landscape format. I felt that this was the form in which the message would be delivered to me, but the photographs themselves just weren’t doing it.

All I was looking for was a different point of view.

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It was just at the moment that I was taking yet another photo, framing that landscape shot, that I looked out through the window of a bunker and suddenly thought of you.

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I was already familiar with your work, especially 2001 and The Shining, but it was your film Paths of Glory that really provided the inspiration for my work for this exhibition.

In this film there was one sequence in particular which really stuck with me. The scene is set in 1916, the middle of the First World War, in a French army trench near the front line. The French colonel, played by Kirk Douglas, is walking along inspecting his men, lined up with their backs to the walls on either side of the trench. The battalion is soon to launch a suicidal attack on a German stronghold known as the ‘ant hill’, an absolutely unassailable position, and the men know there is little chance of them coming back alive.

The lieutenant strides determinedly through the trench and the camera – your camera, Mr. Kubrick – tracks backwards and films him head-on as he walks towards us. So the camera retreats as the lieutenant advances, imperturbable, determined, surely trying to instil courage in his troops, because the roar and the dust from the explosions in the background make it all too clear how this absurd attack will end.

In this sequence, this main tracking shot is intercut with a first-person perspective of what the colonel sees. The camera’s perspective becomes the colonel’s perspective. And what he sees are his men watching him as he walks through the trench. So the scene cuts back and forth between an objective perspective (the colonel advancing towards the camera) and a subjective perspective (what 29

the colonel sees).

The camera films the soldiers looking at their colonel, and thus looking at us - the viewers through the screen, drawing us into their situation, immersing us in the story. The effect is to make the feeling of anguish which pervades this scene all the more palpable, creating a sort of mirror effect which binds us to the characters on screen.

It was this scene which set in motion the train of thought which would lead to my work for the exhibition in Valenciennes, a video which I entitled Reflected Pixel.

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In this video I’m holding a camera in my hand, pointing it at a mirror which shows its reflection. This mirror is the first in a chain of twelve which I’ve arranged in a line, balanced on their edges.

So I move the camera forward, filming its own reflection get bigger and bigger as it gets closer and closer to the mirror, until eventually it bumps into the mirror and the mirror falls backwards to reveal the next mirror, and the camera keeps getting closer and closer and bigger and bigger until it hits that mirror too.

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The mirror falls backwards to reveal the next mirror, and the camera keeps getting closer and closer and bigger and bigger until it hits that mirror too, and the mirror falls backwards to reveal the next mirror.

Impact, reflection, impact, until all of the mirrors have been toppled. Some of the mirrors break right away, and then I repeat the process over and over again, more and more aggressively until all of the mirrors have been destroyed. Until it is impossible to go any further.

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It wasn’t just the parallel with soldiers on a battlefield, falling one after the other, which interested me in this project. Above all I was fascinated by the action of the camera. That the camera itself should strike down the mirrors and destroy its own reflection. That the camera should be the main protagonist of the action it was recording. Like the sequence where the camera sees what Kirk Douglas sees as he passes through the trench in your film, Mr. Kubrick.

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When this video is played in a loop, the sound of the collisions and the shattering mirrors is an imposing, unbearable presence. For the purposes of the exhibition the sound was turned up as far as possible, because I wanted the spectators to be unsettled by the noise. I wanted those visitors to want just one thing: to get away, to leave as quickly as possible, to retreat. I must admit it worked even better than I had hoped it would.

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After making my video Reflected Pixel I re-watched your film Paths of Glory, with the famous trench scene. But what really struck me was the next scene in the film, which I’d somehow forgotten.

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It’s the scene where the soldiers attack.

The colonel blows his whistle and the men climb out of the trench and run straight towards the German defences. The ground has already been churned up by all the previous battles. There are bomb craters into which the men fall, blown backwards by a hail of enemy machine gun fire. A truly hellish landscape.

It’s utter carnage: one by one the men fall as the roar of the machine guns and the exploding bombs rages on.

You can barely make out the whistle of the colonel as he attempts to lead his men. It’s a truly apocalyptic vision, and your camera, Mr. Kubrick, films it all mechanically, impassively.

For this scene you use a long, extremely slow tracking shot to follow the laborious progress of the soldiers over the battlefield. They move from left to right, which further emphasises that feeling of toil and struggle.

Meanwhile, the camera moves crisply, precisely, smoothly – indifferent to the tragedy unfolding before our eyes. A totally detached observer as the men continue to fall by the dozen.

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booklet The extreme precision of the camera n째1 movement, a remarkable technical achievement, is more successful at conveying that overwhelming sense of chaos than a lot of modern productions where hand-held cameras are shaken and knocked about. Here the precision of the tracking shot carries an air of implacability, highlighting the absurdity of this battle and the callousness of those who ordered it.

This scene really had a strong effect on me, and it provided the impetus for a video which I called Colonne Empirique [Empirical Column]. To a certain extent, Mr. Kubrick, I wanted to borrow your idea of using a smooth tracking shot to film something dangerous, absurd, obstinate, impossible.

To make this shot possible I nailed some boards to the floor to create a runway ten metres long. For the camera dolly I used an old skateboard, rolling it over this wooden track. The idea was for the camera to follow the progress of the actions I intended to perform, capturing a long, continuous shot.

At the start of the film, we see two blocks lying on the ground.

The first block is in the centre of the shot, and the second one is on the far left side. I come into the shot from right of screen, and push the first block from the centre towards the other one on the left. Once the two blocks are touching I lift Block 1 and stack it on 37

top of Block 2. So now we have a column of two blocks at the left of the shot. Without stopping the recording, I exit stage right, going behind the dolly/skateboard and pushing it a little further along its track. The camera thus slides along and a third block enters the frame from the left. The camera stops, with the two stacked blocks now in the centre of the shot and the new (3rd) block to the left.

I enter from the right and push the two stacked blocks towards the third one at the left-hand side of the frame. Once the blo-blocks are touching I pick up the stacked blo-blocks and place them on top of Block 3. We are thus left with a column of blo-blo-blocks in the left-hand side of the frame. Without stopping the recording, I exit stage right and push the dolly/skateboard a little further along its track. The camera thus slides along and a fourth block enters the frame from the left. The camera stops, with the three stacked blocks now in the centre of the shot and the new (4th) block to the left.

I enter from the right and push the stacked blo-blo-blocks towards the fourth one at the left-hand side of the frame. Once the blo-blo-blocks are touching I pick up the stacked blo-blo-blocks and place them on top of Block 4. We are thus left with a column of bloblo-blo-blocks to the left-hand edge of the shot. Without stopping the recording, I exit stage right and push the dolly/skateboard a little further along its track. The camera thus slides along and a fifth block enters the frame from the left. The camera stops, with the four stacked blo-blo-blo-blocks now in the centre of the shot and the new (5th) block to the left.

Pushing the blocks, building the empirical tower, moving the camera.

Obviously this work becomes more and more difficult. The column of blocks becomes increasingly heavy to move, and the column becomes increasingly unstable. It’s not just a parallel with soldiers advancing one after the other across a battlefield; above all it was the camera’s gaze which interested me in this project. I wanted that awareness of the intermittent movement of the camera as it follows the progress of the blocks. I wanted it to be clear that it’s me controlling the camera, just out of shot. I wanted the movement of the camera to be palpable, to be an integral part of the action.

And all of that was a response to that sequence in your film, Mr. Kubrick, where the camera executes a long tracking shot as it 38

follows the laborious process of soldiers over a battlefield.

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The two videos I have described here – Reflected Pixel with the line of mirrors knocked down by the camera, and Empirical Column with its precarious pile of blocks – were both very consciously intended as a response to those two scenes in your film Paths of Glory.

The framing of the shot is very important in both videos: shot/ reverse shot, and what goes on outside of the shot. But above all – above all – the fundamental principle was to keep moving forward, come what may. Even if that means bumping into your own reflection in an absurd, destructive collision.

A few weeks after shooting these two videos, the one with the blocks and the one with the mirrors, I moved into a big house/studio in Valenciennes, the house where I still live today.

The house was built by the previous owner, who had bought up two adjoining plots of land which once belonged to houses bombed and destroyed during the war. This previous owner was traumatised by the memory of the bombings, and it took him years, working alone on these two plots of land, to build this big, solid house. He worked on the house at night, using materials he’d collected during the day from the different building sites he worked on. The external walls of the house thus resemble a sort of giant patchwork, a jumble of light bricks, red bricks, fire bricks and concrete of all textures.

Nonetheless, the end result is remarkably solid. The floor is a thick layer of reinforced concrete. The solidity of this house, its reinforced concrete and its simple, square shape, so typical of the 1950s, are in some ways reminiscent of the bunkers I came across out in the country.

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So in early 2009 I had just moved into this house, with the intention of doing it up gradually. But by the time spring arrived I’d started to hear strange noises. It was a mixture of gentle ruffling and loud bangs, which would suddenly start up from time to time. The noises started to become more and more regular, and I began searching the basement and the attic to see where they could be coming from. I came across a window with a light coating of mud, which appeared to be criss-crossed with claw marks. This window was in the large room which was earmarked to become my studio, overlooking the garden.

I moved slowly toward this window, and just as I got right up close a black mass collided with the pane right in front of me!

This black mass disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. It was just a bird, a blackbird, coming to knock on my window.

A few seconds later it was back again, attacking the window with its beak and wings. Then it would circle around, build up a bit of momentum and come back to attack the window with its beak, its feathers and its claws. Fly off, come back, a smack with the beak, a ruffle of feathers, fly off, come back again, smack, beak, feathers, smack-beak-feathers, smackbeak-feathers. Fly away.

I couldn’t understand it at all, what was the meaning of this violent display? I opened the window to let the bird in, but he wouldn’t come in.

I left food out but he wouldn’t eat.

I soon ran out of ideas, but that bird kept coming back and attacking that window, relentlessly.

I started to count these attacks: at least one every minute.

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The traces it left on the window started to accumulate, the patterns changing form with the constant onslaught of smackbeak-feathers.

Looking back now, I think the bird saw his own reflection in that window. A black, inverted image of himself which he took to be another bird, an enemy to be attacked mercilessly, a rival to be banished from this territory at all costs.

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Territory, enemy, inverted image, reflection, mirror.

It’s 1916, Mr. Kubrick, in your film Paths of Glory. The scene is a French trench. The French colonel, played by Kirk Douglas, is walking along inspecting his men, lined up with their backs to the walls of the trench. The battalion is soon to launch a suicidal attack on a German stronghold known as the ‘ant hill’, an absolutely unassailable position, and the men know there is little chance of them coming back alive. The colonel blows his whistle and the men climb out of the trench and run straight towards the German defences. The ground has already been churned up by all the previous battles. There are bomb craters into which the men fall, blown backwards by a hail of enemy machine gun fire. A truly hellish landscape…

The soldiers will never reach their goal, they will never even see the enemy, not even from afar. And not even once, not in a single solitary scene, do we the viewers ever see that enemy. If it wasn’t for all the shells and machine gun bullets, you might even think that enemy didn’t exist. And yet the shells keep falling.

Under this thick hail of bullets some of the French soldiers don’t even make it out of their trenches.

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Shocked, the French general who is overseeing this assault from afar gives orders to his artillery to bomb their own troops, to kill the soldiers who won’t leave the trenches.

But the artillery captain refuses‌After the retreat has been sounded, the general decided to punish this disobedience by executing 3 men, to set an example.

Condemnation.

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Execution.

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The enemy isn’t always who you think. ….

This execution, Mr. Kubrick, is filmed with great formality and symmetry.

This impression of order and control contrasts sharply with the chaos of trench warfare, and yet these are two facets of the same bloody absurdity. Here we find ourselves confronted with the spectacle of a society expediting its own inexorable destruction.

The film could have stopped there.

But – contrary to expectations, Mr. Kubrick – you include one final scene in a bar. The colonel watches on as his men drink and laugh raucously as they mock a young German girl who has been forced onto the stage.

When the young woman starts singing a melancholy old German ballad the men quieten down, moved by her voice and her song.

When he hears his soldiers joining in with the chorus of the girl’s song, the colonel himself is moved and leaves them for a few moments before calling them outside, for it is time to return to the battlefields.

And that’s where the film stops: the return to combat.

They must carry on fighting, to defend their territory and to survive.

Climb out of the trench, attack, fall backwards, get up, retreat.

Climb out of the trench again, retrace your steps, fall backwards, get up, attack an invisible enemy until you can’t go on, attack your own reflection in the mirror, like the bird attacking his mortal enemy in the window of my studio.

A blackbird, relentlessly attacking, smacking into that window, a mass of beak and feathers.

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He flies off, he comes back, smack, beak, feathers. And now I realise that he’s going to be coming back for a fair while. I set up a camera in front of the window, gazing out at the cold, grey-blue sky through the pane. I press record, and leave the camera to keep filming, mechanically, while I go off and walk in the countryside.

It’s early spring now, and I try to find any traces I may have left a few months ago while the ground was still covered with snow. But the landscape has changed, the green shoots are returning and my footsteps are long gone.

Retracing your own footsteps, not to go backwards but to keep moving forward within yourself.

Counting your steps, the ones you’ve made without knowing how many you have left.

Coming out of a copse I spot some fresh animal tracks, but I don’t know what sort of animal made them.

Maybe those tracks have always been there.

My dear Mr. Kubrick, with that image it is time for me to bring this letter to a close.

Yours sincerely, Claude Cattelain

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The project TAP has been selected within the frame of the INTERREG IV A France (Channel) – England cross-border European cooperation programme, part-financed by the ERDF.

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monument and the undercroft

Amanda Geitner

Chief curator at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

In many ways, for the Sainsbury Centre, the theme of Monument was developed with the Undercroft in mind.

A cavernous space beneath the Edwin Lutyens cenotaph at the centre of memorial gardens, the Undercroft sits directly in front of Norwich City Hall and at the back of the Norwich market. For many years the space was used by the market stall-holders to keep fruit and vegetables and to store their rubbish bins. In 2004 the memorial gardens above were closed for refurbishment and the Undercroft cleared. At this stage the space was revealed as a space that invited other kinds of occupation and intervention as the gardens reopened in 2011.

The Undercroft is protected - as part of the memorial gardens - by an English Heritage Grade II listing which means there are limitations on what can be done within it. Walls, floors and ceilings can not be drilled, the long sloping rectangular space is punctuated by square columns and only temporary, free standing walls can be added. Cold and cavernous, uneven, damp, hidden and unknown, the Undercroft is a very difficult space to work with, but it was the perfect space for this exhibition and a wonderful context for the work chosen for it.

As our selection of work was made a number of key concerns were kept in mind.

The work must be commanding and legible in the Undercroft space, the installation as a whole had to communicate the many tangental understandings of a Monument that the project as a whole set out to explore and at the same time remain mindful and respectful of the War Memorial situated directly above it. Critically, we were showing this work in the very centre of the City, at the back of a busy market, and we aimed to draw an audience in to the Undercroft beyond the visual arts audience attracted to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. For this broader audience we were determined to provide some work that directly related to a shared popular understanding of a Monument and hoped that some work, which was more clearly related to the 1914 and 1944 anniversaries, would provide a bridge to the other territories that the exhibition explored.

Marcus Vergette’s bell, Silent, Beat, Silent, moved from the centre space of the Sainsbury Centre to the EDITION Undercoft. An object of such fine N°2 craftsmanship sat solidly and elegantly DECEMBER 2014 booklet in the rough, unfinished and leftover 2 space of the Undercroft. When the bell was rung the sound powerfully vibrated through the space and could be clearly heard at the memorial above.

The fluidity of sound in the space was a particular and unanticipated pleasure of the exhibition - voices drifting in from the market, the bell ringing out from underground at the very heart of the city centre and from Effie Paleologou’s video piece, Water Tank, came the disorientating chirp of cicadas, a sound evocative of hot summer nights meeting you as you entered this cool damp place.

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It is a disorienting and exciting experience to enter the Undercroft for the first time. The room seems to have so little to do with the the world just outside its door, despite the fact that voices from the other side of the wall drift in through the vents in the walls. It is colder than outside, lit with basic utilitarian fluorescent strips, the floor is an uneven slope (steeper than you can easily perceive when you enter) and when it rains water comes in and pools around the flag poles that rise up to the gardens above.

John Cornu’s Brume (Haze) - a complex installation of hanging anti-personelle mines, or horse traps - hovered in front of the entrance to the exhibition. Compelling and ghastly objects in isolation, as a suspended cloud they became like a swam of moths, strangely light and organic, as if in defiance of their intended purpose, to be scattered in mud to maim and disable soldiers and horses.

Behind Cornu’s Brume ranked a single file of the artist’s structures which together formed Assis sur l’obstacle (Sitting on the fence), and they constituted a powerful, black dissection of the space. The formal, precise structures were a grand foil for the messy irregularity of the surfaces of the Undercoft.

Didier Vivien’s books, 1914(Cold Memories)2018, provided a direct connection back to the individuals who died in the Second World War. A simple table in an austere white alcove held the four books and gloves were provided in an invitation to respectfully and carefully look at them.

The simple combination of the name, rank and company of a soldier with a current image of the location of his death drew our attention back to the experience and loss of an individual and the ability of a place to hold or relinquish memory.

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Towards the back of the Undercroft a room was constructed to show, in near perfect darkness, Effie Paleologou’s work Water Tank. The film of the water tank at night was made mysterious in this space, and as their eyes adjusted viewers often struggled to interpret what they were looking at, reading the concrete pillar rising from the tank as a path through the night to a space beyond. The soundtrack, a hot mediterranean night with the noise of rhythmic cicadas interrupted by the barking of dogs, was a strong presence in the hard, echoing volume of the Undercroft and the disturbance to the water of the tank threw rippling light across the walls with unexpected brilliance. It was a beautiful, ambiguous, evocative presence in an exhibition otherwise dominated by large-scale sculptural forms. At a talk given by the artist, Paleologou posed the question of whether such a work could be a form of Monument.

An audience member responded that Water Tank was very much about time, loss and memory - all core elements of a monument.

From the intimacy of Water Tank audience encountered Societe Realiste’s flags hung down the right side of the space in a striking sweep of colour. UN Camouflage was an installation of 193 flags reworking the colours of the UN member nations in a camouflage pattern, each colour present in the same proportion as the original flags. Together they made an unsettling and tantalisingly, almost recognisable subversion of the familiar representation of state and politic.

Becky Shaw adopted a more impersonal approach to memory, endurance and image in her slowly evolving work. Images of the lithographic prints of David Roberts (1796-1864), particularly those recording the excavation of the pyramids, were taken from the internet, varying in colour, scale and resolution, and printed from an inexpensive colour printed on to white A4 paper. The printer ran constantly while the exhibition was open and with the end of each ink cartridge the images distorted, paled and disappeared.

Visitors were welcome to take copies of the images away with them, but few did.

Following the exhibition the printed paper was recycled, but even so, the endless printing and accumulating paper was an important aspect of the piece and perhaps its most uncomfortable element.

Monument in Norwich was shown in two vastly different environments - the cool and Modern spaces of Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre on the University of East Anglia campus and the hidden cavern of the Undercroft at the very centre of the city.

Engaging with an ambitious range of contexts and audiences, this collaboration between educators and curators, artists and designers was an exciting and inspiring model for our exhibition practice, and one which we are eager to continue and develop.

Amanda Geitner, Chief Curator, Sainsbury Centre October 2014

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2 1 John Cornu Brume, 2012.

300 german traps, black painting, variable dimension.

2 Didier Vivien 1914[Cold Memories]2018, 2014 4 books, 72 pages each Courtesy of the artist

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effie paleologou Walter tank (citerne)

Effie Paleologou studied at the Royal College of Art and is based in London.

Filmed on a hot summer night on the Greek mainland, Water Tank is an evocative, repetitive work that choreographs sound and image to reveal itself slowly, as if our eyes where adjusting to the light.

The work features a fresh water tank on an agricultural research site that was run by Effie Paleologou’s father and which was strictly out of bounds to her because of the mortal danger it presented to children who could not yet swim.

Along with her older sister, the artist made many an illicit trip to the tank while the adults took their afternoon siesta. Now run down and virtually derelict, the location has continued to fascinate Effie Paleologou in adulthood and this film was made during a summer of repeated nocturnal visits to the site.

Water Tank is a discreet memorial, making both monument and mystery of a site of autobiographical significance. Filled to the brim, the water in the tank is disturbed by an event we cannot see and then slowly, the ripples that register this moment return to calm. Many influences converge here - amongst them an aesthetic interest in the formal concrete structure of the tank and the way in which the night reveals and conceals, playing with light and dark and making the familiar appear strange.

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Effie Paleologou 1 b.Greece, 1961 2 Water-tank, 2013 HD video with sound track, 6’08’’ Courtesy of the artist

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1914 [cold memories] 2018 photo memorial Didier Vivien

Artist exhibited in Calais and Norwich (Undercroft).

In the Pas-de-Calais there is always a British cemetery not far away. I knew there were many, but I did not realise just how many. Visiting all the cemeteries around Arras makes you giddy, but it is a cold, flat giddiness, without substance, leaving you with just one question: how could it happen? History books concentrate on the political and technical minutiae, the motivations and ideological ambitions… but they don’t answer the question, and you are left wondering. Ten million dead and twenty million wounded. Numbers so huge that they become meaningless, and you come up against the human inability to grasp such an accumulation of suffering, violence and injustice. I would often pause before the tomb of a soldier who had died on the battlefield – my mind a blank.

The historiography of the war then gives way to metaphysics; what the First Word War inflicted on those living at the time and on EDITION N°2 their successors on this earth is a strange sense of absurdity in relation to the modern human condition. While these magnificent gardens, so beautifully maintained by the invisible gardeners of the Commonwealth, pay homage to the fallen, bear witness to their sacrifice and remind the living what men with war machines are capable of doing to resolve their differences, they are also places for philosophical reflection, like the ruins of lost civilisations.

With the passing of decades and successive generations, war becomes an abstraction. We must then make a sustained, repeated effort of memory to arrive at the conclusion that ultimately we do not remember what we have not experienced. Contemporary documents help remedy this failure, but we need to be receptive to them. The culture change brought about by computers combined with the constant stream of random infotainment will make the dialectical perception of war archives increasingly uncertain.

Besides, why should we remember the carnage, the butchery, the mud, the vermin, the human madness, the violence of the war machines? We know: for our post- or supermodern generation, there can be no humanism without an awareness of death inflicted by acts of industrial war. Men have fought since the dawn of time, but the violence and cruelty of their bellicose clashes are overdetermined by the efficiency of their war machinery.

That is why, after two terrible world wars, political reason advocates armed peace, the nuclear deterrent, and “doux commerce”1 between peoples to avoid the worst. At present, the stamina to withstand the onslaughts of the economy is rooted in the painful memory of the war. This peacetime economy is evident on the site of what was, a century ago, “the theatre of operations”. In the place of – and in place of – the trenches, there is now a bypass, a retail park, a residential development – and the occasional military cemetery or war memorial. A farmland desert with super-powerful tractors which are still unearthing shells.

When I was combing the battlefields around Arras this winter, I was reminded of an essay by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, “What is an Author”, which has now become canonical: “[…] the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the

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game of writing”2. The same applies to documentary photography.

This is perhaps what I was seeking to establish: not a memorial to the dead, but a photo memorial for the dead – or even a precise description of the common places of the amnesiac living. I had to “assume the role of the dead man” and look carefully at all the dead would have seen had they not died in battle, had they lived, survived or been born later.

It is not possible to express everything; we fail to show, or remember, and we also need to forget in order to live – that is why memorials exist. As for photography, it has nothing to do with the purported “truth” of the landscape. Realistic and exhaustive as it is, it remains despite everything an allegory – you could say the depiction of that which definitively resists depiction. The purpose of most of the photographs we consume is to sell something or to share the increasing insignificance of people’s private lives via social media.

These images are made for the living; the others are destined for the survivors. The photographs in these albums should be set in the context of war archives. It is here that we live on for a long time afterwards.

Didier Vivien, January 2014 Translation © Ros Schwartz

1. Translator’s note: The concept of “commerce” in the eighteenth century had strong social connotations which are almost the opposite of our modern focus on commodities.

It was the exchange of commodities by people that made business activity “commerce,” not the commodities themselves. Commercial relations were “commerce” because they were relations. Commerce brought people together, and caused people of different experiences and nationalities to mingle (think of port cities as an example); therefore many eighteenth-century thinkers believed that commercial relations fostered tolerance and understanding, smoothed over social, religious, and cultural differences, brought refinement of manners, and, in the long run, political and social peace.

A century earlier Montesquieu had coined the term doux commerce, meaning “sweet commerce” or “gentle commerce,” to describe this phenomenon.

2. Translation from The Foucault Reader, Edited by Paul Rabinow, Penguin Books, 1984.

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1

2

Didier Vivien 1 France, 1960 2 1914[Cold Memories]2018, 2014 4 books, 72 pages each Courtesy of the artist

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notes from a still life Pema Clark

Artist invited for a performance in Norwich.

It was December 2002 when I got the phone call from my mother in America to tell me she had breast cancer. I was pregnant with my third child. It feels like a long time ago now but I can still remember the crying. It wasn’t coming from my mother.

My younger sister, Annabel Clark, is a photographer in New York.

Ever since her teens she has carried a camera with her everywhere she goes. She has an uncanny ability to capture time without people noticing she is even in the room. After our mother’s cancer diagnosis, the camera never stopped. Our mother, the late actress Lynn Redgrave, always seemed so happy in front of a camera or on stage. The photos poured out of my sister: the diagram of breast tissue drawn by the oncologist. Our mother sitting silent on a New York subway after a hospital visit. The moments leading up to her full mastectomy (she is wearing a hospital gown and cap, laughing because her best friend had just told her a funny story). Half naked, in her underwear, plastic tubes and drains coming out of her chest.

I can’t help thinking it looks like a heart. And then there are the post-op photos, the most beautiful (to my eyes) being a portrait of my mother in a white linen nightie, standing and looking straight

into the lens. She is not smiling. She has one breast. Her hair is very short. She doesn’t look happy anymore.

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Our mother always wanted to live for a long time. She never let the cancer stop her from acting or from living life to the full. In fact, she used to say her cancer was a kind of gift, a tool for teaching her how to live for the moment and get the most out of each day. It gave her back her happiness, in a strange way. When I asked her if she was afraid of dying she said, ‘No. I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid to say goodbye.’

May 2010. The end finally came. Our mother went out in true style, at home in Connecticut, surrounded by friends and family. I remember thinking how beautiful even her final breaths sounded.

What an extraordinary sound and how much we take breathing for granted.

The ground opened up to take our mother home.

The grass grew again.

2014. Still Life. This is the title of a performance I gave for the Sainsbury Centre in the Undercroft in Norwich. Surrounded by contemporary monuments for the commemoration of WWI by French and British artists, I sat in silence for six hours in front of my mother’s white linen nightie portrait. I also wore a white linen nightie. It was my mother’s although not the one in the photograph.

People came in and out of the gallery to see the exhibit. Although I fixed my eyes on a spot on the far wall, I was still very aware of the people around me and the variety of responses. One man asked the gallery assistant if I could still hear and if he thought I was saved

by Jesus. Another man sat on the floor and watched me. A woman who knew me covered her mouth in surprise upon discovering who my mother was. Others stood back. Some glanced. Some came close. And all the time I sat in silence with my eyes open and using every tool possible from my seventeen years as a practicing Buddhist. Watching the thoughts. Watching the play of my mind.

The Buddhist masters refer to the everyday mind as the monkey mind and as I sat in the gallery I could really see why. For the first couple of hours my thoughts darted here, there and everywhere.

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After a while I noticed boredom, discomfort, fatigue, and an endless display of thoughts from thinking about what I needed to do later in the week to my shopping list. But after all of the noise in my head calmed down, I began to realize there was nowhere to go and nothing to achieve. My mind settled. I began to think about my mother. I began to wonder what it must be like for people seeing me next to her portrait. After all, I have always been told how alike we were. The older I get the more I realize it is in ways other than just appearance.

After the performance I took water and felt hunger (I had not eaten nor had a drink since the day before). I felt elated and exhausted, humbled and, somehow, transformed. I wondered how sitting and doing nothing can have the ability to transform. I have come to a few conclusions since that day and it has something to do with the mind having nowhere else to go but into the body. We can spend so much time looking out, comparing ourselves to others or berating ourselves, living in the future or the past. But with nowhere to go and nothing to do, the mind can come to a stand still. Its true domain seems to be: be here now. When I think of my mother and the lifetime I had with her I wish I could have followed this directive. I have so many regrets but the only solution, now that she is no longer with us, is to be present with my memories of her, try and see her for who she was, doing her best in a broken world, loving her family and her work and holding a beacon for all women who have suffered and continue to suffer from breast cancer. There is still life, after all. This is my memorial to my mother.

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27.18 27.19

Beginning of his talk

Mark Edwards

V.S.

The artist participated in the Study Day in Norwich organised by the SCVA in June 2014.

His works were exhibited in Norwich (Sainsbury Centre) then in Calais.

Introduction by Veronica Sekules Mark is a photographer who made the wonderful work where Marcus’ bell was in gallery 1 - the large photographs lit up. Mark teaches at University Campus Suffolk which is part of the UEA family but also has work in many public collections and is going to talk to us now about his work.

Mark Edwards

Thank you.

M.E.

My dad was in the RAF in the bomber command when I was a small boy so we ended up travelling around a little bit and at a moment in my life I lived in Lincolnshire which is known as bomber county and therefore has remnants of lots of old discarded runways and airfields are everywhere and it has always fired my imagination but I’ve never photographed them whatsoever. Actually, I did try to photograph them but really badly - just ended up being very nostalgic.

The work that you see out there is very different to what I normally do which is large colour work, but a friend of mine came down who is writing an archaeological book on the

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landscape and he went to a place called Hethel and we just went on a walk and we walked around the perimeters around what turned out to be an old- RAF base, which I didn’t know that at the time but I came across these amazing wood piles. They kind of looked like outsider art to me, some kind of sculptural things, and this was about two years ago I guess and I really liked them but I didn’t know what to do with them and I didn’t photograph them I just kept going to them and walking around and I started to think there must be a connection between these what I call sculptures and the actual site itself and it is quite an interesting site - it is on the edge of Lotus car manufacturers so they are testing cars there and its quite noisy and because I’m a bit of the old romantic it kind of reminded me of these old Lancasters taking off and landing from this old RAF airbase. So I was also reading a book called On the natural history of destruction

by Sebald as a series of lectures that Sebald gave in Europe and I quite liked the connection between Sebald and obviously the UEA. There’s a passage in there when he talks about the ruins in mainland Europe. I’ve got it here, let me read it. It’s describing the makeshift shelters as being ‘transformed by the dense green vegetation growing over them the roads made their way through this landscape this new landscape like peaceful deepset country lanes’ and it started to remind me of the things that I was kind of encountering and also the fact they have got this corrugated roof on reminded me of the old bomb shelters from the second world war in addition to that. So when the proposal came though it gave me an idea that I could link this duality of remembrance not only to the airman that have have set off from this base but these wood piles also became a memory or memorial to the people that have died in the city so its this kind of dual remembrance thing really that was the idea. I didn’t really know how to photograph them. These are pictures taken on a very small digital camera. Then I thought well, the second world war to me is always in black and white pictures and then I think if you are in the war the newsreels like the pathe footage was always in black and white as well. That’s actually video but doesn’t work unless you are on a mac.

It was just to show you how long the exposures were really I think almost a minute for each exposure. So then I went back

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with this camera to make this series of pictures. I had to wait about 12 months. I wanted to photograph it in winter but I also needed the correct weather conditions and my concern was, I suddenly kind of freaked out, I thought ‘what if they’ve gone?’ because they are only there just to season the wood. To my delight of course not one piece of wood has been taken away and in fact they are actually growing and he’s started to make new ones.

There was only six there, I knew how I wanted to photograph them so as say I had to wait about a year and I made all the pictures in one day actually and it took me about six and a half hours. But I hadn’t shot black and white for about twenty years and for the last exhibition I had made a lightbox. One of the things I noticed with the lightbox unintentionally had this three dimensional quality so I thought it would be interesting to make a series of lightboxes that not only reference the pathe newsreel the cinema films that you used to see in a cinema in the war but also they would act as like a sculptural quality to them and I just really perceived these as being almost like portraits of these sculptures and actually the real artist was the guy who made them. In fact, unbeknown to me I didn’t anticipate it but people thought I’d actually made them which I took as a compliment really because they are quite simple pictures - just skim through those now.

And the hope was, whether I have sort of achieved it or not, they would act like beacons in the exhibition really as remembrance for... there’s loads of figures about how many people lost their lives how many bombs were dropped etc etc but talking to both sides of the conflict.

That’s it.

V.S.

Great. What’s wonderful about this work Mark is the interaction between your memories and your personal history and the current experience and then you’re linking it to a wider history, that in response to our call it just seems like such a creative response that you made all those connections to create this work.

M.E.

Well, yeah, when that call went out it seemed like it was the catalyst really, everything came together. I couldn’t figure out EDITION N°2 what to do with these I had a load of reference pictures, had all this reading, had this interest, had this personal history. I’d had a longing to make work about bomber commands specifically but more generally about this but never known how to do it. So it was a lot of time in the making I guess.

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It’s kind of exemplary joining of theory and practice and the history and your reading of Sebald and everything as well. That it was all connected.

M.E.

That was a really nice connection for me was the Sebald connection to the UEA as well, really important not just in this work but in lots of my other work as well.

V.S.

M.E.

V.S.

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V.S.

Well I think he would have liked that very much Yeah, that would be nice.

Thank you Mark

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Applause

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history / community

Veronica Sekules

Veronica Sekules, deputy director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, head of research and education

A really interesting collection of thoughts and discussions emerged in response to the suggested theme of community and history. Each project discussed related in some important way to a community to which the artist had either responded or belonged, whether it was to fellow artists, as in John McDonald’s case, to a community of practice in India for Andrew Burton, or to the wider communities of viewers and users as for Marcus Vergette and Becky Shaw.

But in fact the projects had much more striking commonalities in their deeper themes and associations. All of them in one way or another were made in the aftermath of a traumatic event, or somehow encapsulate an element of its resolution in their form. All of them have moved visitors to the exhibition, in some cases reducing them to tears.

Becky Shaw’s references to the work of David Roberts originated in her work with a victim of Altzheimer’s disease. But the work itself Half-Buried has associations of colonialism, ranging from the thrilling discovery of ancient worlds and the skill of the artist in their representation, to its more poignant aspects, showing the hubris of a once grand civilisation

and the decay in its wake.

John McDonald writes here about the trauma he experienced in the London bombings of 2005. His work is far from literal however, and captures contrasting aspects of his experience as an artist, both chaotic and ordered. In terms of practice, he references history in his craft both by the techniques he uses and the imagery, regular,

is needed for it to be rung openly and freely in the EDITION N°2 public domain. So, Marcus’s bells in public sites are strong symbols of community power as well as arresting the attention and bringing a particular beauty of sound and solemnity to the wider environment.

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tower-like and braced with curves like the iron framework of stained glass windows. Andrew Burton’s tower both rises and collapses, a monumental edifice losing its summit and both spreading and crumbling apart at the edges.

Burton’s immediate reference in the title Things Fall Apart, the Centre Cannot Hold is to a 1917 poem by Yeats and the construction as he explains here recalls his experience both in India and as a teacher in Newcastle, UK. Whatever his intentions, his form also recalls a whole heritage of famous towers in art, from medieval images the Tower of Babel to the famous spiralling shape of Vladimir Tatlin’s 1917 monument to the 3Rd International intended for St Petersburg, but never built.

So history is both implicit and intentionally created through the work. The form of Marcus Vergette’s bell also echoes a long artistic tradition, but his design innovations have re-imagined its appearance and dramatically affected its sound. Of all the works in the exhibition, the original bell being made in the wake of recovery from foot and mouth disease, this one is a monument to and for a community. As Marcus explains, the ringing of a bell is a not to be undertaken lightly. It is associated with control, regulation, order and special dispensation

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half buriedto add to with notes from talk Becky Shaw

The artist participated in the Study Day in Norwich organised by the SCVA in June 2014.

His works were exhibited in Norwich (Undercroft).

I first encountered the lithographic prints of David Roberts (1796-1864) in Cambridge, where a respected architect, Christoph Grillet showed his collection to me, as a way of introducing his experience of dementia. The images depict the pyramids, and other Middle- and Near-Eastern monuments and ruins as they appeared in the 1800s. Through the layering of and removal of sand, the images record a process of

exposing and concealing, reclaiming and losing civilisations. The images also give an insight into colonial and acquisitive patterns EDITION N°2 that have shaped several centuries of East-West relationships. That moment with Christoph, and one image in particular, The Pronaos of the Temple of Edfu, has haunted me for years, leaving me astounded at Grillet’s ability to use it to speak of his own organic quicksand.

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I began to search for images of ‘The Pronaos’ using the contemporary technological quicksand of the internet. Every day I searched for this image new ones appeared and ones from the day before disappeared. Unlike the remarkable quality of the ‘original’ lithoprints, the web versions were a motley crew with poor colour balance: lemon yellows instead of golden sands, digital copyrights across them, badly framed, and taken in bedrooms or with flash glare. Half-Buried takes the cache for one day and prints it repeatedly in the gallery. The printer is put into over-ride so when ink runs low it continues to print, splitting the images, layered in time, into colour fields. The printer first exhausts the golden sand, then gives everything a pink cast, then finally bleaches the blue, before leaving hesitant lines and hollow caves of black before disappearing entirely. The splitting of colour reminds me of the visual halo we get when we move from dark room to bright sun- the change in conditions splitting light into its components.

During Monument the columns of prints accumulate, mirroring the sand layering steadily over ruins, or the wind exposing what is there already. The columns of prints begin to fill the gallery, as if they themselves are the sand, layering up the columns in the Undercroft space. The stacks of prints are an excess of remembering. Excess is important. Half-Buried employs repetition for the sake of it, like in a Beckett play; nothing starts and nothing ends, there is no final product. On one hand Half-Buried is romantic, nostalgic, and even kitsch, and on the other hand cold and critical, accommodating the insignificance of memory. In ‘Ghosts of my Life’, Mark Fisher says, ‘In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost’.

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questions et answers John Mcdonald

The artist participated in the Study Day in Norwich organised by the SCVA in June 2014.

His works were exhibited in Norwich (Sainsbury Centre).

I chose flat mild steel and mild steel rod because of their deep association with the weapons of mass destruction.

Iron clad ships of WW1 were riveted plates of Mild Steel put together by a highly skilled workforce, on the banks of the Clyde, Humber, and Mersey. In Belfast, Barrow, Manchester and the Midlands the Factories worked round the clock to feed the War machine using flat mild steel and rod. I wanted to explore fundamental hand crafted technologies and contrast different materials, exploring curtains an uncertain, known’s and unknown’s with the process the driving force of the sculpture.

On the 26th April 1965 I started my apprenticeship at as a Metalworker. I joined a gang of men in a dark, dangerous and very frightening place for a 15 year old boy. One of the men I will call Sammy had fought in the first world war, now he was a tired, silent and grumpy old man who could just about slither along. Sammy had spent most of his life fighting for his fellow workers rights, their education and health care, one long class struggle. However at our union meetings the most forceful speaker would be Sammy shouting at the top of his voice about the Workers Charter that he

and his fellow veterans had fought and died for. Sammy cut a sad and lonely figure, wrestling with his inner demons. Sammy had EDITION N째2 experienced the horror of the trenches he was still locked into it but was ( leaving that stuff over there and getting on with his life)..

Sammy had learnt to fight not just for his country but his working class community and there greater good.

One day in 1966 I was tacking-up with Harry a welder when all of a sudden he dived under the bench crawled into the foetal position and started shaking violently. I did not know what to do and froze Harry was going to hurt himself if he banged his head on the metal bench. Within a short time Joe arrived to look after Harry. The men explained that most of them had been in the navy in WW2 and that Harry had been torpedoed three times on the north Atlantic run, they looked after each other.

On 7th July 2000 I was on the receiving end of a bomb in an underground tube train with death and destruction abound.

However after I had done what I could to help the dying and serious injured their images and screams would not go away, they were stuck in my short term memory. I was suffering from Post Traumic Stress Disorder. Unlike Sammy, Joe and Harry I with help and made a full recovery. The work refers to my industrial working experience dangerous, dirty, claustrophobic and noisy but most of all the silver threads of humanity that twist and turn from the core of the sculpture then swirl into space.

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monu- ment to shit Andrew Burton

The artist participated in the Study Day in Norwich organised by the SCVA in June 2014.

His works were exhibited in Norwich (Sainsbury Centre).

As I explained to the audience at the Monument seminar, I encountered this astonishing object (left) at the centre of a small village in rural Rajasthan. It is made from layers of gobar – cow and buffalo dung – applied over the rock which lies at its core. Its ovoidness forms gradually through the slow accretion of hand-sized roundels of dung, each one squashed into the preceding layer of dung once it has dried in the sun, and slapped flat. Each irregular disc of dung, though mashed together with hundreds of others, still bears a singular and distinct hand imprint. Overall, there must be many thousands of hand prints that cumulatively evidence the laborious process of making This gobar-formed-world-egg is a shit monument. A monument to the value of waste. But it has a purpose. The dried gobar is used for cooking: ophlas - dung cakes - are cherished across India for the traditional, smoky, earthy flavour they impart to chapattis.

There are other dung structures in India. Bithooras, peculiar to an

area around Delhi, look at first sight as though they might be rudimentary dwellings or outhouses. In fact these solid structures, EDITION N°2 made exclusively by women, are another way of storing ophlas – a single bithooras might contain as many as five thousand. Once the individual dung cakes have been stacked to a certain height, a layer of gobar is spread over the surface to give stability and protection from rain. Towards the end of the building process, which takes weeks or even months, there is an astonishing and dramatic moment of creativity when the surface of the bithoora is inscribed with abstract or figurative patterns. This seemingly spontaneous and almost-violent process involves pummelling, prodding, punching and pinching the surface, using only the bare hand.

To suggest that there are resonances between these women-made objects and the war memorials found in villages and towns across Europe might seem fanciful, irreverent or worse, but they have something undeniably monumental about them. Grouped together, they resemble a necropolis. Their ephemeral and everchanging nature (once a structure is completed, its dismantling starts immediately as the ophlas are retrieved for fuel) suggests a different reading of ‘monumental’ from that embodied in the permanent memorials erected to commemorate the sacrifice and waste of two World Wars. These dung structures have the nobility of the handmade, they are redolent of a different kind of labour, less destructive, but are of the earth, like inverted trenches or bomb craters.

My work Things Fall Apart, made for the exhibition Monument, draws its inspiration from the appreciation that all made objects are involved in a continual process of accretion, disintegration, rebuilding, destruction, reconstruction, collapse. The amount of time that any object survives, finished and recognizably itself may vary, but the amount of matter that is available for us to use for its replacement is limited and to make anew we will use what most readily to comes hand, recycling the redundant, the familiar and the sacrosanct in the process. We reuse what we can, increasingly more insistently, self-consciously and purposefully. In material terms, we sense there is less to waste.

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Andrew Burton Things Fall Apart, 2008 – 2014, fired clay.

223 x 300 x 200 cm.

Courtesy of the artist. © DACS.

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Gobar, Rajasthan, India Bithooras, edge of New Delhi, India

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beat silent beat Marcus Vergette

The artist participated in the Study Day in Norwich organised by the SCVA in June 2014.

His works were exhibited in Norwich (Sainsbury Centre).

Bells through the ages have been constantly remoulded, reflecting the changing perceptions within a society, and can convey complex and sometimes contradictory messages. For centuries bell foundries have cast bells in peace and cannons in war. I am remodelling this ancient communication device, the bell, with a new harmonic relationships, using the latest computer developments and advanced metal casting techniques, interestingly technologies only recently developed for the military. Ringing a bell is associated with power and authority, temporal and/or spiritual. Bells are usually housed in permanent (and generally hidden) locations.

The bell sculpture Beat Silent Beat, is both mobile, to be placed in the public space, and free to be rung by anyone at any time.

The first bell I made was for Highampton, Devon, the village at heart of the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease. This is thought to be the first public access bell in the UK. In order to create a democratic bell that could be rung by anyone, there were many legal and social obstacles that were successfully overcome. The bell now celebrates the communities’ survival and strength, and is rung by many people, for many reasons.

While observing “My Feet in Earth” (the FMD bell), being cast and EDITION N°2 tuned at Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the idea was sown to try remould this ancient communication device. A new bell form, with a new relationship of frequencies became the “Time and Tide Bell”.

Which has been permanently sited at the high tide mark in five location around the UK, from London to the Outer Hebrides. The rise of the water at high tide moves the clapper to strike the bell.

Played by the movement of the waves, the bell creates a varying pattern. As sea level rises the periods of bell strikes become more frequent, and as submerged in the rising water the pitch will vary.

The “Robert Hooke Bell” has recently been completed, with its own unique harmonic construction. This was commissioned by the Mass Extinction Observatory in conjunction with the Royal Society , and is now installed outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The mould to cast this bell was carved in a limestone which is full of fossils. Consequently the bell surface, after casting, is covered with detail of the fossils in the stone. While working on this bell in the studio it was discovered that by sculpting the shape of the room in relationship to a specific bell, one could create a unique acoustic experience.

I installed a silent bell at the Belgian Royal Observatory. Many of my sculpture use the idea of a bell as a keeper of time: the “Time and Tide” bells sound at high tide, another bell made of stone gets eroded by a river, a bell placed in a tree is is gradually swallowed by the tree, an iron bell gets corroded by the water. The bell “Constant as the Polar Star” is an observer and marker of the location of the Polar Star. Consequently the axis of the bell points to the pole, and is parallel to the axis of the earth, the “lower” surface of the bell is parallel to the equatorial plane of the earth. In autumn and winter the sun is below this plane, and in spring and summer above, so the lower surface of the bell does not see any sunlight during six months, and after that, as far as it is day and without clouds, it is sunlit during six months.

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architecture / sculpture

Barbara Forest

Director of the Fine arts museum, Calais.

Wars have not only produced weapons and defensive/ offensive architecture; they have also given rise to sophisticated, large-scale surveillance and destruction systems.

Subject to constant threat, buildings have been modified using strategies from camouflage to fortification, from bunkers to towers. Many artists have questioned what Paul Virilio called the ‘administration of fear’ and the obsession with security that manifests itself in fallout shelters and glass walls alike.

Others have found in architecture the very form of the creative/destructive process.

Obliterated by hundreds of bombs, some of our cities were not able to withstand the air raids.

The photographs of Marlot & Chopard document Cologne cathedral, the only monument to survive the devastating attacks to which the entire city was subjected. Although it is made from concrete and as such is sturdy and strong, Boris Chouvellon’s Style Reconstruction, la Tour is an antimonument, a barely functional watchtower, an antiquated prop

that is crumbling and decaying.

Since 1960, the notion of entropy has been brought to the meditative ruins fêted by the romantics, a mechanism that suspends and even does away with time. The new monument is erected against time.

The same is true of the series of 15 flags that have been photographed like sculptures, veils fixed by the wind near to a theme park. These standard-bearers have become today’s disfigured veterans. When the black sculpture is a butcher’s block, worn down by thousands of knife blows, imbued with flesh and meat, the formal and

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symbolic import is such that the seemingly minimal volume is in fact a vast, devastated battlefield.

John Cornu’s La mort dans l’âme becomes a monument and the tool an object of remembrance.

Rémy Jacquier’s two structures, Hommage à Charlie Parker, share the same interest in sculpture. The work is based on the architectural model, combined with the notion of musical rhythm to which it pays tribute, and, once again, is led back to the monument. However, the dynamic relationship that is established between the volume and the spectator’s body, between identity and anonymity, between reality and fiction and between homage and reference, constructs – or rather deconstructs – the very idea of the monument.

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question of forms John Cornu

The artist participated in the Study Day in Norwich organised by the SCVA in June 2014.

His works were exhibited in Norwich (Sainsbury Centre) then in Calais.

From confectionary to ceramics by way of gardening and football, issues of form can be found everywhere. Plasticity is the mould which underlies many of our everyday activities, architecture included. It is based on a construction of forms and volumes in which we live our lives. Hence close links between architecture and the plastic arts (a term I much prefer to visual arts which strikes me as too reductive) are inevitable. And we know full well that architecture has always been inextricably involved with sculpture, painting and installation. Having said that, there are many ways for an artist to use architecture as a starting point.

If we look only at the French artistic scene, Karina Bisch’s paintings, Cyprien Gaillard’s work and some pieces by Vincent Lamouroux or Clément Laigle represent various ways of connecting architecture with the plastic arts.

The age old relationship between these two disciplines offers us an interesting space for reflection. To define it better we would have to sketch out a typology. We would have to understand how their relationship operates and the ins and outs of that sometimes stormy marriage. I am thinking here for exemple of the 1% rule in France, whereby 1% of the budget for new buildings is given over to artistic

projects, which does not always lead to clear blue skies for the artist and the architect working together...

EDITION How can one talk about architecture through the plastic arts and vice N°2 versa? That is a richly complex open question.

In my own case I would say that architecture provided me with solid foundations for my work. The first pieces that I completed around the end of the 90s already contained a dialogue with architectural themes (Procédé n°1, Procédé n° 3). Since then I have sometimes used architecture as a reference point as in Sans-titre (Fleury-Mérogis); sometimes I have worked directly within architectural projects as in the interventions Blank; and at other times I have responded to specific concepts put forward by architects such as Le Corbusier or Claude Parent (Plan libre, La Fonction oblique).

Today I would say that I am more interested in “reading” architecture at different levels. The mechanisms of power as Michel Foucault has described them are central to my thought. Prison architecture is therefore an ideal object of study and the same applies to certain forms of religious and military architecture. What I do is “read” such forms of architecture and offer a response in plastic form.

This can take the form of scenarios where the work – to adopt the formulation of Michael Heizer – is not put in a space but forms that space. Architecture becomes a plastic element which holds together the plastic project. I am thinking for example of Fonction oblique, an intervention I created in Nantes in 2011. Fixed to a bunker from the Second World War, the work makes direct reference (as the title makes clear) to concepts developed by the architect Claude Parent.

Here architecture is at once the work, the space for its elaboration and for its display.

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1 John Cornu Blank (Brussels), 2007, photo-document, black and white. © John Cornu. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

2 John Cornu Blank (Barcelona), 2010, photo-document, black and white © John Cornu.

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

3 John Cornu Blank (Québec), 2009.

Photo-document, black and white Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

4 John Cornu Free Plan, 2007, architectural project in situ (columns), Villa Savoye, Poissy, photo-document, black and white © John Cornu.

Courtesy of CMN, Paris and Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

5 John Cornu The oblique function, 2010, angled Accro-props and paint, Blockhaus Hub-studio, Nantes. © John Cornu.

Courtesy of Manifestement peint vite.

6 John Cornu Untitled (Fleury-Mérogis), 2012, wood, ink and wax, variable dimensions.

Parc Egmont, Bruxelles.

Coll. Musée des Beaux-arts, Rennes. © John Cornu. Courtesy of the artist.

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flag

Boris Chouvellon

Summary of the contribution

by Boris Chouvellon on the theme of architecture-sculpture, Norwich June 2014

« Tous les drapeaux ont été tellement souillés de sang et de merde qu’il est temps de n’en plus avoir, du tout. » Gustave Flaubert

When I arrived at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts exhibition halls, I was very surprised at the way the works were displayed.

One looks down from a flight of stairs at a row of photographs of flags, even though they had been shot from below. To me these flags are really sculptures, cloth, veils that have been frozen into shape by the wind. My working method involves a lot of walking, a lot of wandering in suburban areas, shopping centres, entertainment complexes. I establish poetic links with what I see before me which are translated into different media – in this case photographs.

I have often been asked: “Did you tear and destroy these flags yourself, put them there and photograph them like that?” And I reply: “No, I simply found that row of flags beside an amusement park in a resort on the Mediteranean coast where tourists come from all over the world.” These photographs were shot out of season between October and December, in other words just before the amusement park is taken down. They are real flags I found in a very windy area when the amusement park was closed. If they had belonged to some prestigious public building, they would have been replaced by new ones.

To be precise, I took these photographs in 2007, kept them on my computer and only printed and exhibited them for the first time in 2009. As objects, the flags are obviously symbols of the

state, an institution which has been in crisis in recent times. The juxtaposition of shapes, the accidents of the hanging process are transformed into a narrative by the viewer. Clearly this may echo news events such as the latest European political developments.

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If you considered my work as a whole, you would see that these photographs of flags are also linked to my sculptures and could be interpreted in the tradition of the “vanitas” - I am always exploring the idea of things which will cease to exist. There is always a monumental element, whether it is found in stone seats, a concrete star or even the small architectual installation I created for the Musée des Beaux Arts in Calais. In the case of the flags, the monumental is alluded to through evocative images. Whenever I create sculptures from raw materials, they are constructed at the very place where they will be exhibited. There is always a link between what I find in the outside world, in those peripheral zones I referred to earlier, and its translation into the exhibition space. To return to the flags, somewhat anecdotically, at the time of the World Cup ( June 2014), when flags everywhere retained their nationalist ambiguity, one saw certain recurrent gestures. These have always frightened me because of the element of violence they contain, as when people scream and run down the street with a flag in hand.

It’s worth recalling that, all over the world, people are prohibited from destroying, damaging or burning the national flag. The earliest flags go back to prehistoric times but become more common at around 1500 BC in China, and it’s only from the 18th Century that they become symbols of nations.

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So, as far as iconoclasm is concerned, I am very glad that it was the wind and other natural phenomena, rather than human intervention by myself or anyone else, which were responsible for the destruction of these flags.

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1

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1 Boris Chouvellon Sans-titre, (Untitled), 2007–2011, series of 15 photographs, 120 x 80 x 40 cm each.

Courtesy of the artist.

Photographs: Andy Crouch

2 Boris Chouvellon My ruin before yours, 2011, reinforced concrete, metal trellis, 450 x 450 x 450 cm (Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille).

Courtesy of the artist.

4 Boris Chouvellon Style reconstruction, the tower, 2012, fencing panels in vibrated concrete and rubble, 300 x 80 x 80 cm (Musée des Beaux Arts de Calais).

Production 2AnglesFlers.

Courtesy of the artist.

3 Boris Chouvellon Untitled, (the terrace), 2011, reinforced concrete, framing boards, 400 x 400 x 600 cm (Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille).

Courtesy of the artist.

5 Boris Chouvellon Overturning the foundations, 2011, reinforced concrete, metal armature, coloured roughcast, paint, 500 x 350 x 400 cm (Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille).

Courtesy of the artist.

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Calais, Monument 2 RĂŠmy Jacquier and Studio Marlot et Chopard

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rémy jacquier

Born 1972, lives in Bouzillé and works in Nantes Rémy Jacquier’s work primarily takes the form of charcoal sketches and models. Exploring familiar avant-garde themes of equivalence and analogy, Jacquier blurs the boundaries between literature, visual art, architecture, music and science with creations including conceptual musical instruments.

The Monument exhibition sees Rémy Jacquier presenting a number of architectural structures, with the Pavillon Deligny at the Basse Normandie Foundation for Contemporary Art (FRAC) and Alusage, inspired by Denis Diderot, at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual arts in Norwich. These works are three-dimensional, physical representations of texts, drawings, braille writing and anatomical diagrams, which nonetheless eschew the concern for technical accuracy typical of architecture. These are hybrid forms, blending and reinterpreting the visual codes of architecture, sculpture and drawing. Rémy Jacquier himself does not refer to these works as models, preferring the term ‘architectural forms’.

The two ‘Pavillons Parker’ presented here are the largest in a series of 9 ‘architectural forms’ dedicated to American saxophonist Charlie Parker. After previous tributes to Beethoven, Satie and the cubist guitars of Pablo Picasso, Rémy Jacquier here turns his attention to the great Bird. Charlie Parker was a selftaught genius who revolutionised jazz with his rapid tempos, technical virtuosity and wild improvisations which pushed at the limits of harmonic structure. These two ‘pavillons’ (a play on words, with the French term pavillon meaning both house and a part of the ear) are constructed in such a way as to convey a sense of circularity and complex rhythmic interplay. Rendered in immaculate white, they seem to expand outwards in all directions. The interweaving chambers invite comparisons with the human brain, forming a symbolic representation of a mental space: indecipherable, endlessly oscillating, contorted and centripetal, with the various openings serving to strengthen the pull of this centrifugal force. Rémy Jacquier’s creations are dynamic, syncopated and strangely monumental, a clash of architecture, music and sculpture.

Rémy Jacquier Pavillon Parker#7, 2012. Wood, Courtesy of the Galerie Bernard Ceysson.

Copyright Rémy Jacquier.

Rémy Jacquier Pavillon Parker#8, 2003-2012. Wood, metal, 185 x 120 x 110 cm, Courtesy of the Galerie Bernard Ceysson.

Copyright Rémy Jacquier.

Exhibition views

rémy marlot et ariane chopard

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Ariane Chopard was born in 1974 in Pontarlier, Rémy Marlot was born in 1972 in Paris. They live and work in Paris.

STUDIO Marlot & Chopard Black Churches, 2007, colour photographs, chromogenic prints, 160 x 120 cm. © STUDIO Marlot & Chopard

Exhibition views

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Studio Marlot & Chopard are a duo of French photographers and filmmakers who have been working together since 1998, exploring themes such as natural v. urban landscapes and architectural heritage, along with evocations of dreams and the mysterious power of night-time. Their joint photo series Black Churches comprises 11 photographs of the cathedral in Cologne, taken in 2007 following a residency in Germany. Imbued with a certain romanticism, these shots were taken almost exclusively in late morning, using low angles and heavy shadow to flood the photographic canvas with an immersive blue. The facades are thus framed as imposing masses of stone, with vanishing lines which seem to make these architectural wonders even taller and grander. The fundamentally divine notion of ascension lends an aura of the sublime, while the tight focus on the texture of the stone, so close you can almost touch it, reminds us that the cathedral is very much a physical reality, an invitation to reflection and contemplation.

Miraculously spared by the aerial bombardment which destroyed much of the city, the cathedral’s very presence carries an air of defiance, accentuated here by the insistent repetition of the photographic composition. The impression created is reminiscent of the emotions described by Auguste Rodin in his 1914 book On Cathedrals: “Cathedrals exude a feeling of confidence, assurance, peace – but how?

By their harmony. At this point it seems appropriate to consider a few technical matters. Harmony in living beings is achieved by the counterbalancing of masses in motion: cathedrals draw inspiration from living beings. Their consistency and sense of balance are inspired directly by nature, obeying the same general laws.” Surrounded by these melancholy façades, the spectator has no choice but to succumb to the mysterious power of this historical monument. The scars of centuries are scratched into the living stone. The idea of a series of photographs might be interpreted as an attempt to capture the monument in its entirety, but this is far from the case. Black Churches is in fact more akin to an impressionistic variation on a single theme. The position of the camera changes very little from shot to shot, with the only variation coming from the vertical angle of the lens.

The title is similarly misleading: the dominant colours here are blue, white and green, eschewing black and thus stripping the monument of some of its austerity.

Once again we are reminded of Rodin’s work on cathedrals, published shortly before the onset of the Great War: ‘Very little black. Black is a forceful tool which works destined to be presented out of doors seem to be able to do without [...] the Renaissance built on the foundations laid by the Gothic movement, only using black to underscore and accentuate; subdued tones carry the day.”

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play grou

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a sense of play

Barbara Forest

Director of the Fine arts museum, Calais.

When they take games as a space for exploration, monuments can reveal a constant of war just as much as they parody it.

Certain works by Léa le Bricomte, Pascal Bauer, Benoit Billotte, Régis Favre make us smile. Sandcastles against the wall from Benoit Billotte reproduce contemporary towers ever higher and vulnerable. A child’s bed becomes a watchtower in Régis Fabre’s Choses vues series, photographs of everyday situations that are as cruel as they are light-hearted, transforming the innocuous and harmless into victims and predators.

For Pascal Bauer, expressions are patterns to be engraved on marble and opened up to reinterpretation. Both he and Léa Le Bricomte create hybrid war artefacts that are reminiscent of a Surrealist collage. The latter arranges dozens of bullets in the shape of a mandala and hangs medals on the wall to form a decorative painting, thus appropriating the insignia and masculinised myths.

However, as Michel Aubry, who as a child collected artefacts from the First World War on former battlefields, might say, in doing so she is ‘cooling’ the issue.

Nowadays, video games have replaced the miniature models that used to authorise these new narratives. They are used in the army to train and treat soldiers, making war virtual. For others, it is a world of illusion.

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Those who take part in reenactments, for example, recreate scenes of war from images taken from films or newspapers.

Michel Aubry makes costumes in tribute to the artists or writers who worked during real wars and become characters in his fictions and performances.

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léa le bricomte

Born in 1987, Montbard. Lives and works in Paris.

Léa Le Bricomte is a firm believer in Robert Filliou’s famous dictum: art is what makes life more interesting than art. You might even say that she has made this gnomic proclamation her rallying cry. The vital, pulsating energy of life is at the heart of all of her work, and it is no coincidence that her body regularly serves as the canvas and subject matter for her performances, with animalistic overtones and recurring references to weapons in various guises. A worthy heir to the iconoclastic, internationalist approach of Filliou, Le Bricomte considers playfulness a vital artistic tool, and peace the ultimate artistic goal. Her work explores notions of conflict and combat through the use of military materials and imagery: shells, bullets, targets, medals, handcuffs, all diverted from their intended purpose. Dripping Medals (2012) is an installation featuring military medals hanging from ribbons and attached to the wall in neat rows. The title and the geometric composition of vertical lines both hint at the influence of American painters of the 1950s, particularly the visual vocabulary of Barnet Newman and the techniques employed by Jackson Pollock whereby the physical texture of the material itself becomes the subject of the painting. This revolutionary approach signalled the end of the prevailing obsession with the artist’s touch, the brushstroke as window into the creator’s soul.

A new approach to painting was born, mechanical and industrial, evoking bodies in motion.

Léa Le Bricomte does not attempt to subvert the meaning of these medals, preferring instead to see them for what they are: symbols of grateful recognition for the actions, commitments and values of their recipients. However by presenting the coloured ribbons of various nationalities side by side she aims to strip away their symbolic specificity, placing different manners of celebrating labour and war on an even footing. Medal ribbons make another appearance in her piece Flags, stitched together to create a multi-coloured flag that seems to evoke an imaginary nation, or better still a peaceful, multicultural confederation which derives its strength from its difference and diversity.

The mandala, crafted here from discarded shells collected from a shooting range, is a recurring presence in Le Bricomte’s idiosyncratic iconography.

Drawing inspiration from the religious symbols and traditions of Buddhism, and specifically from Tibet, Léa Le Bricomte has produced mandalas made of sand, mandalas made of birdseed and even mandalas made of bullets. These revisited prayer materials, with their physical heft and bold geometric forms, confront the spectator with an inescapable contradiction. And yet, accompanied by a sound recording of a Buddhist ceremony being performed near Paris, the sound of metal on metal becomes strangely musical. Formerly silent and intimidating, this elaborate combination of spent weapons takes on an air of harmonious composition. With its unequivocally military title, Guerre de Tribus [Tribal War] combines mortar shells, grenades and rockets with feathers and braided leather from the Huron-Wendat Indian reserve just outside Quebec, in the CapitaleNationale region. This dynamic, 1500-strong community speaks both French and Wendat, a language almost lost for a century but now enjoying a renaissance.

In recent years, numerous members of the community have led a revival of the culture and traditions of their ancestors. The use of feathers and leather braiding techniques is a manner of fighting against oblivion, preserving the memory of a people whose identity was almost stolen from them.

régis fabre

Born 1969, lives and works in Angoulême.

Fabre describes the three photographs which make up his series Choses Vues as a form of visual apologue. “The form of the Choses Vues [Things Seen] series is inspired by the posthumous publications of Victor Hugo’s works: images and fragments, seemingly gathered together at random and without explanation. These are indeed things that I have seen, captured in the moment, presented as they are, forming an ensemble which is sometimes bitter, sometimes funny, and often cruel.

These snapshots are presented to the spectator without any context beyond what the artist sees, or what the artist infers by interpreting what he sees. In literature this technique is known as focalisation. Focalisation involves providing the reader (in this case the spectator) with only the information available to one of the characters within the story (the artist), at once protagonist and privileged observer of the action. The effect you get from this narrative technique is a sense of realism, and a closer bond between the reader and the protagonist.

Discussing the apologue as a literary form, Jean de La Fontaine says that: “the fable helps get the message across.” The only difference here is that this story is not made up, it’s taken from real life. There’s nothing shocking about that: for writers, or indeed for photographers and film-makers, life is full of striking, significant images which suffice to convey the truth of a situation, expressing a moral vision more succinctly and more faithfully than a long explanation could ever hope to do. The true artist, in the Bergsonian sense of the term, is the person capable of recognising and communicating that image.”

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Régis Fabre recontextualises objects and images from everyday life with a combination of disenchantment and irony. Working with great economy of means, he challenges received usages and perceptions to reveal the contingency and ambivalence which lurk beneath. In Vakttorn, a child’s bed from a certain Swedish brand is reimagined as a watchtower or sentry box. The commanding presence of this tower changes the whole atmosphere of the exhibition space, engaging the spectator in a strange, shifting form of role play.

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pascal bauer

Born in 1959, Tuléar, Madagascar. Lives and works in Paris.

Deep Captive is part of Pascal Bauer’s series Objets d’Egos [Ego Objects]. The title is intended the names used by the Americans to identify their nuclear submarines and other warships. Bauer subverts this practice, in doing so drawing attention to a form of poetic licence which veers towards bad taste. His hybrid creations are more or less handmade, combining technological tropes with primitive, even archaic techniques. The missile is coated with a very expensive product used to keep industrial equipment looking clean, gradually morphing into a club carved from a charred old log, flecked with shards of broken concrete. The figure printed on the side is ‘disarming’: when you recall that a rocket of this type can kill ten people, this serial number raises the possibility that mankind may be totally wiped out.

Once again, the visual impact of Deep Captive reflects the artist’s vision of monumentality: “an attempt at direct communication with the public, reaching as many people as possible, with an eloquence which is simple and accessible to all.”

We must be the most intelligent, because we’re here – a phrase uttered by a Greek politician at the onset of the crisis and transformed by the artist into a curious sort of speech bubble, a literal and ironic interpretation of the old cliché ‘set in stone’, here in the form of a headstone. These words are thus consecrated, preserved: the monument becomes an irrefutable, enduring testament to arrogance, superiority or even idiocy. The rich, luxurious marble used echoes the tradition of classical sculpture, jarring with the comic stripinspired form of the speech bubble.

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Léa Le Bricomte Flag, ribbons from various military medals, wall support, 2013, 150 x 90 cm.

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Régis Fabre Enterlude, 2010, (from Les Choses Vues’s serie) digital print on composite panel, 63 x 48 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

Tank, 2008, (from Les Choses Vues’s serie) digital print on composite panel, 63 x 48 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

Dripping Medals, sculpture (augmented military medals and ribbons), 2012, 180 x 223 cm.

Look (what the car dragged in), 2009, (from Les Choses Vues’s serie)digital print on composite panel, 63 x 48 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

Free Riders, sculpture (9 x 18-pounder shells with skateboard wheels), 2011-2012.

Lance, RF flagpole, leather straps, pearls, feathers and wood, 2013, 180 cm. © Léa Le Bricomte.

Courtesy Galerie Lara Vincy, Paris. ©Adagp, Paris, 2014.

Vakttorn, 2012, Ikea mezzanine bed. Wood,metal, card and fabric. 208 x 90 x 80cm. Collection FRAC PoitouCharentes. Photo Richard Porteau.

Mandala, firearm cartridges (various calibres), wood, metal, 2013, 35 x 160 x 160 cm.

Pascal Bauer Deep Captive, 2012, stainless steel, aluminium, wood, flint, H 22 x L 85 x Thickness 22 cm.

Courtesy of the artist and the School Gallery / Olivier Castaing.

Guerres de Tribus, 2012, mortar round, braided leather, beads and feathers.

Courtesy: Galerie Lara Vincy.

Nous sommes là [We are Here] 2012, Carrare marble, 155 x 50 x 9 cm. Courtesy of the artist and the School Gallery / Olivier Castaing.

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video interviews memory,

remembrance

Pema Clarck

Interview with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, June 2014.

Interview link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMk12SlhJjA Performance link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzoG1jhSuJo

Boris Chouvellon

Interview with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, January 2014.

Link of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=KDMNpz2Y-Ag

architecture, sculpture

Rémy Jacquier

Interview with the Frac Basse-Normandie.

Film maker: Stéphanie Brault, February 21st, 2014.

Link of the video: http://vimeo.com/114005043

John Cornu

Entretien avec le Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, June 2014.

Link of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUix598Okok

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Jocelyn Cottencin

Interview with the Frac Basse-Normandie.

Film maker: Stéphanie Brault, February 21st, 2014.

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history,

community

Léa Le Bricomte

Interview with the Frac Basse-Normandie.

Film maker: Stéphanie Brault, February 21st, 2014.

Link of the video: http://vimeo.com/113398235

John McDonald

Interview with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, June 2014.

Link of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJs4YNqV0PI

Benoit Billotte

Interview with the Frac Basse-Normandie.

Film maker: Stéphanie Brault, February 21st, 2014.

Link of the video: http://vimeo.com/113395462

Claude Cattelain

Entretien avec le Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, June 2014.

Interview link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysA7GCeiCjk Performance link: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dCFxTZ3oLkw

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artists’ web sites and links

Michel Aubry www.michelaubry.fr Adela Babanova www.jirisvestka.com/artist-detail/ adela-babanova

Boris Chouvellon www.borischouvellon.com Valérie Collart www.valeriecollart.com

Maya Balcioglu www.mayabalcioglu.com/

John Cornu www.johncornu.com

Pascal Bauer pascal-bauer.blogspot.fr cargocollective.com/PascalBauer

Jocelyn Cottencin www.jocelyncottencin.com

Benoît Billotte www.benoitbillotte.com

Isabelle Crespo-Rocha Born in 1987, Echirolles.

Lives dans works in Grenoble

Olga Boldyreff olgaboldyreff.blogspot.com/

Stuart Brisley www.stuartbrisley.com/

Mark Edwards www.markjedwards.com

Andrew Burton www.andrewburton.org.uk/

Leo Fabrizio www.leofabrizio.com

Antoine Durand antoinedurand.com

Carole Fékété www.carolefekete.com

Mick Peter www.mickpeter.com/

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Robert Foster www.axisweb.org/artist/robertfoster robertjohnfoster.wordpress.com/ Jeanne Gillard et Nicolas Rivet Portfolio complet : bit.ly/16ICqtF Swiss Art Awards : bit.ly/18pdxY1

Paul Pouvreau www.scrawitch.com/en/paulpouvreau

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Benjamin Sabatier www.ibk.fr www.bodsongallery.com/ benjamin-sabatier/ Gilles Saussier www.gilles-saussier.fr

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen www.jacquelinehoangnguyen.com

Patrick Tosani www.patricktosani.com

Rémy Jacquier remyjacquier.blogspot.fr

Sylvie Ungauer sylvieungauer.blogspot.fr

Liane Lang www.lianelang.com

Marcus Vergette www.marcusvergette.co.uk/

Micha Laury www.michalaury.com

Didier Vivien www.zerologie.net

Michel Le Belhomme www.muthos.fr

Renaud Aurguste-Dormeuil www.macval.fr/francaiss/collection/ oeuvres.../renaud-auguste-dormeuil

Léa Le Bricomte www.lara-vincy.com Simon Le Ruez www.simonleruez.net

Studio Marlot et Chopard www.marlot-chopard.com

Virginie Maillard www.virginiemaillard-photographie. com Matthieu Martin www.matthieumartin.fr John McDonald, makingurbantotem.blogspot.com

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This online edition is designed to be printed “ at home” and become a singular editorial object. It consists of 2 separate booklets and cover, printed on 3 different papers and assembled in one edition by a wide elastic.

STEP 1:

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Download 3 files at the following links:

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www.lieuxcommuns.com/monument/edition2/0-COUVERTURE-EN.pdf www.lieuxcommuns.com/monument/edition2/1-TEXTS.pdf www.lieuxcommuns.com/monument/edition2/2-THEMES-EN.pdf

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STEP 2:

Print the 3 files. Print Recto Verso. Careful, the bookbindinge is on the short side.

Follow the formats and paper specifications for each file.

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BOOKLET 1

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BOOKLET 2

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A5 80 g light brown

n°1

A4 90 g uncoated white

STEP 3:

Fold and assemble each notebook. Staple.

STEP 4:

To maintain all, assemble the 5 booklets into each other and drag in the central double page a wide elastic (minimum 1cm wide length 20 cm).

And now a collector’s edition.

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The project TAP has been selected within the frame of the INTERREG IV A France (Channel) – England cross-border European cooperation programme, part-financed by the ERDF.

editorial

management:

Sylvie Froux, directrice du Frac Basse-Normandie, Caen Veronica Sekules, deputy director of the Sainsbury centre for Visual Arts, head of research and education Barbara Forest, directrice du musée des beaux-arts de Calais Jocelyn Cottencin, artiste et graphiste

editorial team:

Sylvie Froux, directrice du Frac Basse-Normandie, Caen Anne Cartel, assistante d’expositions, chargée du service culturel et du mécénat Raphaële Gruet, chargée de communication Veronica Sekules, deputy director of the Sainsbury centre for Visual Arts, head of research and education Amanda Geitner, chief curator at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts Antoine Huet, project assistant at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts Barbara Forest, directrice du musée des beaux-arts de Calais Marie Astrid Hennart, responsable de la programmation culturelle et de la communication du musée des beaux-arts de Calais Laurent Moszkowicz, coordonnateur du Jardin des arts, Communauté d’agglomération du Calaisis Rebecca Drew, Head of Finance and European Programmes, Fabrica, Brighton Tracey Gue, Digital Communications Coordinator, Fabrica, Brighton Jocelyn Cottencin, artiste et graphiste

contributors:

Laurent Buffet Les artistes Didier Vivien, Effie Paleologou, Claude Cattelain, Pema Clarck, Mark Edwards, Becky Shaw, John MacDonald, Andrew Burton, Marcus Vergette, John Cornu, Boris Chouvellon, Vittorio Ricchetti, curatorial intern at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts Natacha Haffringues, assistante principale de conservation au musée des beaux-arts de Calais

graphic

conception:

Jocelyn Cottencin /Atelier Lieux Communs avec la collaboration de Chloé Hauser et Bruno Kervern

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thanks to:

Pour le SCVA : Les artistes : Andrew Burton, Boris Chouvellon, Mark Edwards, John McDonald, Marcus Vergette, John Cornu, Didier Vivien, Effie Paleologou, Pema Clarck, Becky Shaw Les financeurs et les collègues : Arts Council of England, Metro imaging, UK, Clare Karslake Amy Chang, Charley Ramm, Becca Sturgess, Nell Croose Myhill, Antoine Huet, Vittorio Ricchietti, Sarah Bartholomew Pour le musée et le Jardin des arts : La ville de Calais, la Communauté d’agglomération du Calaisis, le département du pas-de-Calais, la région Nord pas-de-Calais, La Direction régionale des affaires culturelles du Nord pas de Calais, L’association des conservateurs des musées du Nord Pas de Calais et les artistes : Pascal Bauer, Léa Le Bricomte, Régis Fabre, Rémy Jacquier, Studio Marlot et Chopard Pour le Frac Basse-Normandie : la Région Basse-Normandie ; le Ministère de la Culture, Drac Basse-Normandie.

Les artistes: Benoît Billotte, Jocelyn Cottencin, Léa Le Bricomte, Rémy Jacquier Frac Basse-Normandie : Caroline Caillet, Anne Cartel, François Desloges, Raphaële Gruet, Mathilde Johan, Magali Kerdreux.

Pour Fabrica : Rebecca Drew.

translation:

Pour le SCVA : Françoise Delas-Reisz Pour le texte de Didier Vivien, Ros Schwartz Pour le MBA : Société HANCOCK-HUTTON Pour le Frac : Simon Thurston

crédits

photographiques :

Smithson Foundation Andrew Burton/ Effie Paleologou/Dacs/Didier Vivien/ Boris Chouvellon, Musée d’art contemporain de Marseille/ Rémy Jacquier/Claude Cattelain/ Pascal Bauer et la School Gallery, Olivier Castaing / John Cornu et Courtesy Ricou Gallery, Bruxelles & Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, CMN, Paris, Manifestement peint vite / Léa Le Bricomte et la Galerie Lara Vincy, Paris, Adagp, Paris, 2014/ Régis Fabre, Richard Porteau, Frac Poitou Charentes/ Studio Marlot et Chopard Fabien Marques, Musée des beaux-arts, Calais DR 123

Fonds régional d’art contemporain Basse-Normandie 9 rue Vaubenard - 14000 Caen Tel. : +33(0)2 31 93 09 00 www.frac-bn.org

25 rue Richelieu - 62100 Calais Tél. : +33(0)3 21 46 48 40 musee@mairie-calais.fr www.musee.calais.fr

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

University of East Anglia Norwich, NR4 7TJ +44 (0)1603 593199 www.scva.ac.uk The Undercroft below the War Memorial, City Hall, Norwich, NR2 1NH

Le projet TAP a été sélectionné dans le cadre du programme européen de cooperation transfrontalière INTERREG IV A France (Manche) – Angleterre, cofinancé par le FEDER. The project TAP has been selected within the frame of the INTERREG IV A France (Channel) – England cross-border European cooperation programme, part-financed by the ERDF.

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© graphisme et Typographie Jocelyn Cottencin / atelier Lieux communs - © Image : “Monumental” jocelyn cottencin (2014)

Musée des beaux-arts de Calais