Les vigiles, les menteurs, les rêveurs — Erudition concrète 3 — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 16 → November 14, 2010

“Watchmen, Liars, Dreamers” is the third part of the programme “Concrete Erudition” proposed by Guillaume Désanges, a curator invited to devise a cycle of shows at Le Plateau. This cycle challenges the links between art and knowledge, focusing on certain contemporary activities.

By being part and parcel of “The Planet of Signs” and “Prisoners of the Sun”, it is the intent of “Watchmen, Liars, Dreamers” to this time present the work of artist-observers, with a keen eye on both present and past. The highly documented visual forms adopted by these watchmen of the contemporary world and history are subject to the need and urgency of a message to be sent rather than to any pure stylistic wish.

Directly echoing the idea of a far-reaching and precise erudition which turns into hybrid forms, the show will be developing different strategies for writing historical, legal, anecdotal, circumstantial and factual facts which, based on a practical reason and a political will — militant and manifest alike — end up tending towards the poetic and the lyrical. All these artists, who are extremely eclectic in the subjects broached, share the outcome of their research, and do not shrink from creating their own documents when necessary.

They thus play on ambiguities between fiction and reality, documentation and falsification, historical objectivity and personal writing of facts. Subject to obligations involving means more than results, these artists see themselves as rapporteurs and inventors, sometimes contesting the position of the demiurge creator. By using shared information and knowledge liaison, inventory and information, all as weapons, these watchmen, spy-like, intend to introduce another way of criticizing the contemporary world.