L’Effet Vertigo — Nouvelle exposition des œuvres de la collection — MAC VAL Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 24, 2015 → October 24, 2016

The Vertigo Effect

MAC VAL first opened in November 2005, so this year it is celebrating its tenth birthday: still young, but old enough to have a perspective over time, and to have put down roots in its territory. For this birthday, the new exhibition of works from the collection explores artists’ relation to history and its narratives, and our own relation as viewers to what went before us. The gaze — what informs and constitutes it — is an essential element of this relation. The subject of the interpreter is therefore at the heart of the works and at the same time addresses the person who is looking, the beholder who makes any work of art exist.

Vue de l’exposition des œuvres de la collection « L’Effet Vertigo », MAC VAL 2015. Au centre, Nøne Futbol Club, Work n° 144 : Hot Wheels, 2014 Photo © Marc Domage

The invention of the gaze This new hanging, titled “L’Effet Vertigo,” is guided by the artists’ individual relations to history in a double, reverse movement which implies a concomitant closing-in and distancing. This filmic process was invented by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo in 1958, in order to suggest the dizziness felt by Scottie (James Stewart) on the famous stairs of the tower. It is designed to dramatize the subject by keeping them in the frame, so they don’t go out of view, by means of a simultaneous forward and backward oscillation. This can be taken as a metaphor for reading history in the present and for the stratagems and various attitudes adopted in its regard, from the distancing vital to visual focus to the displacements and changes of scenery that are sometimes needed to get closer to the subject. “I was and remain persuaded that the role assigned to creators is out of proportion compared to the one allowed to viewers. There is a whole history of art that needs to be rewritten here.”