Initiales n°4 — Initiales M.V. — Monte Verità revisité, constellé, réinitialisé — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: Thursday, September 11, 2014 at 7 PM

In 2014, after George Maciunas, John Baldessari and Marguerite Duras, the magazine Initiales is focusing on a collective experiment and a place with this fourth issue devoted to Monte Verità. A community of pre-hippie artists and anarchists created in Switzerland in 1900, a community with variable geometry which will be described by theoreticians and artists alike in the 130 pages of this magazine dedicated to art and “retro-forward-looking” research, produced and edited by the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Lyon.

Initiales M.V. for Monte Verità, named after the hill in Ticino canton in Switzerland where a community of pre-hippie artists and anarchists was established in 1900, until the end of the First World war.

A collective, therefore, going against the grain of deciphering the work of a single figure, because here, from the writer Hermann Hesse to the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, by way of Dalcoze and Laban, two dance theoreticians, the dancers Mary Wigman and Isadora Duncan, and the economist Max Weber, it is a whole portrait gallery that is being offered to us. And so many diverse personalities, temporarily brought together for the duration of a project that would enjoy its moments of glory before an at times poorly interpreted descent into hell.

Another major challenge for this art and research magazine called Initiales is the relative disappearance of that episode which for many years dodged the radar screen of art history, until its rediscovery, in the late 1970s, by the exhibition curator Harald Szeemann. And thus a more general line of thinking about the issue and material nature of the archive. The cult curator and theoretician Harald Szeemann will be one of the figures haunting this project. The political, economic and ideological context of that period, which bears many similarities with our own, will also offer another reading angle.