Arnaud Maguet — Spleen le Jeune — Sultana Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 4 → October 23, 2010

Using very diversified means, Arnaud Maguet questions the basic aspects of the 1950’s to 1970’s subculture. He starts with music (rock’n’roll, punk, krautrock, hip-hop, free jazz, psychedelic and experimental music…), then goes on to Kenneth Anger’s or Andy Warhol’s experimental films, D.I.Y. graphics, underground literature, popular films (and all the letters that categorise them, are translated fromthe fromB to Z and vice-versa) ; in so doing he calls forth a great many more or less well known legends. These legends have in common a garage type of aesthetic — or how, after one has completely and urgently failed to replicate the hoped for model, one chooses to marvel at the result rather than just to make the best of it. Like T.W. Adorno who underscored the “fetishist aspect in music”, Arnaud Maguet’s pieces turn these legends into relics of our collectivememory,magnifying or distorting the original fiction. Thus he produces a body of work in which each added element completes the programme of a show that takes shape as it is being performed, creating a record company (Les Disques en Rotin Réunis / United Rattan Records), while at the same time becoming amember of various groups himself (Alpha-60, Beauty and the Beat, the Groovers, Finger On You).

Text fromArnaud Maguet & Guests, BlackJack Editions, 2009

The artist gives us his vision of the exhibition Spleen le Jeune. Intentionally cryptic and succinct, these benchmarks describe the exhibited works:

Ralph: In German, to describe a situation, there is this film concept, it is an everyday concept: “I met so and so in such and such a film.” Everyone has his or her film

Florian: In German, there is an expression: “walk beside oneself”. Which means that one is absent and conscious of being so.
Kraftwerk interviewed by Yves Adrien in Rock and Folk #137 (June 1978)

Spleen the younger is, amidst fumaroles in a cemetery of junk, the electric chant that howls to the moon.

Spleen the younger is a gilded homage to the good taste of the master of the house, L’Ambassadeur.

Spleen the younger is a memo in attempt to stop this sort of homage/pretext in the future, if there is one.

Spleen the younger is a little monument to found footage that keeps a low profile.

Spleen the younger is a makeshift orchestra that, in obscurity, warps the next revolution in a cappella without really believing in it.

Spleen the younger is, at the end of the line, a box that flashes alone in the night, an attaché case that will never take off.

Spleen the younger is the mark made by the hands that, every day of the year, still attempt in vain to write the other pop song and each day go back to this work on one of the oldest occupations in the world.

….Today, one cannot seriously affirm anything else. So it will be like this.

Arnaud Maguet