DOES MICHONNE MAKE IT, AT THE END?

The 26 issues newsletters from La Fundacion de la Rebelion (*) are a series of texts around the way art mediation operates (mainly in the press and in particular in France during the last four years).

I’m not an art critic and I even find it difficult to teach, as I do not really like the idea of giving lessons - unless they are lectures, in which I enjoy the theatrical aspects.
In 2010, I sent my own “J’accuse”, a first missive in the form of a text analysis, forwarded to a lot a people who hadn’t ask for it. I then went on writing, taking my new Zorro role seriously, because, on one hand, people were asking for more - which is always nice – and on the other hand, it made my friends laugh.
But what actually comes back in them as a recurrent trigger of my anger is social contempt,or the contempt for one’s audience. I can’t let go, it drives me mad. I do consult about it, as I told you before and I do feel much better. The proof: this is the last one.

I could have dedicated this last newsletter to a comparative study of the press communication around Mc Carthy’s buzz versus the Duchamp Prize anit-buzz during the FIAC 2014 in Paris.

On the social networks I follow, there were lots of outraged posts about the stupidity of stupid people who were stupid enough to be shocked by a 9-ft. high inflatable green tree in the shape of an anal plug, erect from one day to the other in the centre of ultra-posh Paris...
Curator Chiara Parisi, told Le Monde: « McCarthy's pieces always create reactions, but his work is not about provocation, it’s about criticism, with eyes capable of humour.” 
“Eyes capable of humour…”, that sounds weird in French too. It’s not quite clear which eyes she’s taking about. The audience’s or the artist’s? It’s also quite unusual to place humour inside the eyes, but Parisi is not French –and I’m not a native English speaker. So…
In fact, I thought that if there were reactions, it meant that you provoked something… But I don’t need to defend Paul McCarthy here. What bothers me is that she addresses a lot of people who might never have seen anything resembling contemporary art (this is France, not England, not the USA, not Germany) and tells them that a tree resembling an anal plug (or the other way round) is not provocation, it’s a critique. One should have enough humour to understand… Hu hu hu...
I call that social contempt.

- But what is this tree a critique of, Madame Parisi? A critique of the French institutions maybe? Of mass consumption? Right in the middle of the Parisian square with the most expensive jewellery shops in the world? A critique of your work and career as a curator? A comment on your last organization of the “Nuit Blanche”? Help me there, please. And what about the people who damaged the piece? And the guy who punched the artist in the face? Was there an inquiry? In the few interviews I saw of McCarthy after the incidents, I didn’t hear him speak about critique but beauty. I would very much have liked you to have quoted him on that one.

But that was outside the FIAC.

Inside, the artist Julien Prévieux was receiving the Marcel Duchamp Prize. I did a serious research to try and find an article about the work he showed there and for which he got the prize but could only find announcements of his winning it.
In Les Inrocks (a sort of pop culture magazine) he is described as “the savoury author of the famous “letters of non-motivation” (…) exploring, in the manner of a low tech hacker and through the intermediary of a powerful work of cartography, the drifts of the society of control and capitalism.” (ref)
I personally have no opinion on the author’s savour – oooh God, I wouldn’t dare - but I sincerely hope that with the 35 000 € of prize and the 30 000 € of production budget he’s just received, he will be able to better explore the drifts of capitalism. Why don't you watch the film here?

In fact, it’s his “letters of non-motivation” that have always made me feel sick. I just need to re-read a few of them to feel nauseous. For the last ten years, this artist has been responding negatively to job advertisements, choosing the less sexy fields, the lowest paid jobs to make fun of poorly attractive offers and the specific language used to make them look less “boring”…

Social contempt as a board game for people who will never have to look for such jobs.
There is no chance that someone having to respond to the ads he chooses to make fun of, will collect or curate his work as an artist. To my knowledge Julien Prévieux never took the piss out of institutional ads, or calls for projects… The film he showed at the FIAC was made in LA, and that caught my curiosity until I realized it was with FLAX, a “foundation that initiates and creates public art events to promote French cultural education and heritage in partnership with local French organizations (French Consulate, Alliance Française, Maison de la France”. I couldn’t find in this biography a single work that was done outside the frame of the Institution. But I can be mistaken…
Anyway, I must be wrong somewhere, as it can’t be for nothing that he has the Managers Jobs Pages from the right-wing newspaper le Figaro agree with the Arts Section of the left-wing culture magazine, les Inrocks. In the summer, the later published an article, signed by a journalist, which was a full “call for actors” for the theatrical adaptation of his letters.
Ahhhh… the drift of capitalism!!

In my decision to stop writing newsletters, there’s also the episode # 18 called « Missing the point».
The artist, whom I had called XX and whose work it was about, never spoke to me after I published it, but many of our common acquaintances told me I shouldn’t have written about someone I knew. It was unfair.
As an ultra-atheist and in the line of the first and last Huguenots, I thought I was in my absolute right. Trusting only the inherent truth of the text, I was claiming the respect of the reader’s intelligence.
How daft I was - and still probably am.
I made a mistake. I admit it. I had no humour inside my eyes.
I should add that I did know – personally- the person, and I would never ever have guessed there could be the slightest possibility of humour in her texts and/or work.
Now that I go back to her website, I must admit I was wrong. One must have humopur in the eyes to see a good critique. For example, the ways the plays aroung with names on her website home page is quite interesting and confusing as she chooses to put forward names of institutions such as MoMA 2013, Artits Space 2013, Wiels 2012, Fondazione Antonio Ratti 2011, which are places she photographed. On the other hands the less prestigious spaces where she showed are not mentioned but replaced by the name of the show or her piece.
“Her work creates environments for other artists' work challenging the borderline between collaboration and appropriation. » (ref)

XX just won the biggest PhD bursary from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris: 1684,93 euros a month for three years to research her subject: “questioning curating”. We're not talking about a young artist who is not too rigorous about the presentation of her work, as it is her subject matter and what got her the grant... She is dead serious. I still do find it difficult to say for sure what her intentions are, knowing that her work “deals with issues of display, art institution, representation, originality, archives and documentation relating to her own work, as well as collaborations, invitations, subcontracting other artists or even including their arts works. She is interested by the meaning of exhibition/exposition (as to strip, to be exposed to external effects) applied into the situation of being an artist… (*ref) But I can’t question Nicolas Bourriaud’s choice, that would be suicide. I would nevertheless be very interested in hearing his interpretation of her choice to name institutions she didn’t work with and not name artists’ run space she worked with. Is it cynical? Hyper-cynical? - “She turns the definition of the concept of the exhibitions over” (ref) I quote but do feel conceptually under-equipped here so I click on what seems to be her last project at la FIAC:  I must admit, I do find it funny now. As you might have guessed, this is not a project with the artists on the list but the staging of a series of multiples and books described as “a container-piece, designed as an invitation to artists’ works to come and be exhibited in her boxes…” I know this is weird again. It’s extremely weird in French too. But I dont know if the site will be "corrected"... or not... (ref) -Docteur, where are my pills, it’s coming back. I have this terrible bullshit feeling… But it can’t be, she’s just won the big prize; it must be me, I must be mad. Please doctor my pills!! I couldn’t find the artist’s resume on the web, nor any curated group shows she took part in. Maybe I missed something. But I swear, before I heard she got this very desirable research grant, I never thought that her lists of famous artists names next to hers was critical, like I didn’t think her putting MoMa 2013 and not Treize, Paris was about issues of documentation, or finding a way to have Stefan Kalmar's enter her pdf a questionning of curating... It might not be contempt for the audience. Maybe something else. It must be explained in the book she commissioned about her work. (which I'd be interested to discus with someone who has read it - apart form the writers.) Pffffff, I’m not Zorro here, I’m just a pathetic Don Quichotte. “And what’s more we haven’t heard you defending the Palestinians much, have we? ”says Marc Lénot, better known in France under his pseudo “Red Glasses”. (ref)  The man describes himself on his blog hosted by Le Monde as “an non-professional art critic“ (...) “not THE art critic from le Monde” ( sic) even if he did receive the French art criticism prize of the year in 2014 (by ACIA France/ International Association of Art Critics.) He asked me to unsuscribe him from the mailing list after the newsletter « Obrist in Quatar », which I did, as it is absolutely true that in this series on art mediation texts, I did not defend the Palestinians. And there was this last exchange of mails with an art critic and curator. “You would get on well with Nicole Esterolle: same style, same fight, same hypocrisy, high class indeed” And there I thought "you have a real communication problem, girl" as Nicole Esterolle is a man who hides his identity under a pseudo referring to a hysterical female to write virulent anti-contemporary art reviews. So I answered: “Nicole Esterolle… aouch, this is very nasty, as I never share any of his points of view.” The art critic and curator: “Hazards of the trade. One should do a little bit of research before slagging people off. On your side, I don’t find you nice cute, rather aggressive.” Here again, it’s very difficult to translate as he speaks to me as if I were a man, not making the adjectives agree… as for "my side"… I have no idea what he meant. I didn’t have the energy to tell him there were grammatical mistakes in his mail. That would really have been too much. I didn"t tell him that I had spent time looking at the sites of the artists mentioned in the text, that I had talked to them, that they had answered my questions until I mentioned humour, when they politely but quite firmly refused to go further, sending me back to the notion of the real and Derrida for a better understanding of their work. I am MICHONE in the Walking Dead. I have been beaten. Please hit me there, right in the forehead. (Sorry about my English mistakes) (images from the Walking Dead, Julien Prévieux at FIAC with Prime Mnister Manuel Valls and Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin, screen shot from XX's website)