Allan Kaprow / Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux — En affinité(s) #4 — Loevenbruck Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 20 → November 25, 2017

Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux: In 1961, Theodore Tucker wrote this about An Apple Shrine in The Village Voice : “Admittedly, Mr. Kaprow’s art poses problems.” Theodore Tucker was actually Allan Kaprow, reviewing his own work! The article goes on to say that the exhibition’s “life is a present one, and only memory can carry it into the future…. Far beyond the ‘_Apple Shrine_’s’ actual content stands Kaprow’s inadvertent quarrel with all the vapid glories, qualities and eternities which we think are History.” Kaprow on Kaprow — pretty amazing, isn’t it?

Jacques Donguy: Under a pseudonym…

A.L.-R.: That’s right, but that introduces the idea of fiction. Fiction or autofiction. As in An Apple Shrine, we encounter the real and the fake simultaneously. It is, in short, a construction.

J.D.: That’s what Duchamp did with the urinal. He wrote “The Richard Mutt Case,” published in the second issue of The Blind Man, under a pseudonym.

A.L.-R.: Of course, but I am especially interested in the example of Kaprow, because it is not necessarily what we would expect from him — invention and reinvention, yes, but not so much the real and fake from this angle. That’s how I want to approach the encounter of our work. From this point of view, it’s important to restate things historically: both the 1992 exhibition at your gallery and the first version in 1960. Allan Kaprow was one of the artists who convinced me to be an artist myself, and while my current work has taken me elsewhere, I still think his approach is pure and enriching. I would like to know how you handled the reinvention of 1992?

J.D.: Quite simply, I knew that Kaprow was doing something in Milan, at Gino di Maggio’s. So I went there, wondering how I was going to approach Kaprow. I decided to say that I wanted to do an interview with him for artpress. I had no agreement with the magazine, but of course artpress accepted the interview once it was done.

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