Arnaud Cohen — Ruins of Now — Une archéologie du contemporain — Laure Roynette Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 7 → February 17, 2012

Humorously, Arnaud Cohen considers himself as a post neodadaist punk, an illegitimate grand son of both Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers. Mr Kaepplin, the French secretary for the visual arts, discovering Arnaud Cohen’s recent works in a parisian artshow, said : “Keep on pissing on the [French contemporary art] institution, it will end up buying !” His works were first shown in 1998 in Brussels, at Art brussels by the Marwan Hoss Gallery (Paris-Brussels). Since then, his work has been mostlyexhibited in France and in the US.

“From the start, my work has always had something to do with collage. My ambition is not to create new shapes. I want to give meaning to today’s empty art shapes. As an artist, my whole work is about détournement. Through this method, I do appropriate and scandalize the world. And through this process, though I think that not a single way opens out of the Society of the Spectacle anymore, I still find a way to surf on what Jean Baudrillard calls Hyperreality. I do agree that détournement contains a showdown with art as an elevated activity in order to see the artistic process as something containing a proletarian revolutionary potential. But as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think artists should renounce to every visual activity. Still, I consider that this activity should be very limited, in order to avoid and resist any ornamental temptation. I think Ready Mades have lost the fight, so it’s now time for what I call Made Readies, which are Almost Ready Mades, Ready Mades with a very limited intervention. It is this intervention that creates the détournement. And, sometimes, the intervention can be limited to the title of the Ready Made.”