FIAC 09
October 22 – 25
Grand Palais, Cour Carrée du Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries
Matthieu Laurette
I AM AN ARTIST, 1998 – in progress
Gallery Gaudel de Stampa
Laurette makes a habit of scrawling I AM AN ARTIST on the stationary of expensive hotels – Chateau Marmont, Hotel Costes, and Helmsley Park Lane, to name but a few. The juxtaposition between location and self-affirmations is primarily a taunt: for deluded romantics, who hope to someday be interrupted by room service; for ideologues, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a fluffy bathrobe; and for the rest of us, who, upon recognizing the names, will simply wonder how he affords it. The medium is, after all, the message.
Babette Mangolte
(Dance scene)
Broadway 1602
All successful denim ads share three features. The image must be in a scratchy black and white; it must show a (male or female) Mick Jagger doppelganger (if not in pout, then at least in groin); and the photograph must always imply that the pants aren’t the point. Babette Mangolte’s frenzied shot of young dancers in the 70s had me fooled.
Aya Haidar
Untitled, 2008
Bischoff/Weiss
Aya Haidar defaced envelopes and letters addressed (and, apparently, mailed) to world leaders. An address in Beirut, Lebanon, “is destroyed” courtesy of the artist’s poison pen; post-invasion, Haidar’s Beirut stands for “Be Ruthless.” Mr. Mervat Tallawy, Under-Secretary General of the U.N, is redubbed “an executive retard,” while the Economic and Social Commission for Beirut “never came through.” Her contempt is playful, creative, and scathing; just call her playa haidarter.
Yona Friedman & Jean-Baptiste Decavèle
Balkis Island, 1996 – 2000
Galerie Anne Barrault
This project uses photographs Decavèle took in the nearly inhabitable region between Greenland and the Bering Strait as a backdrop for Friedman’s ghostly Tipp-Ex (whiteout) drawings and transparencies. The images evoke an apocalyptic vastness; their collaboration, a striking loneliness.
Regina Virserius
Atlas-Imago Mundi, 2008
Eric Dupont
Regina Virserius’s photographs could serve as illustrations for a Michael Pollan book. Food (not too much, mostly plants) is presented cleanly on a black backdrop: bursting figs and ripe pomegranates, slim-stemmed leeks and glasses of milk, piles of grain and potatoes and water, tea, and coffee. Even the meats are easy on the eye: slick, smooth, and bloodless.
Galerie Alain Gutharc
Alain Dutharc’s booth looks just like a Paul Smith boutique – all reds and angles and taxidermy chic. Except it was designed by Christian Lacroix.