Lignes de vies — Une exposition de légendes — MAC VAL Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 30 → August 25, 2019

Lignes de vies — MAC VAL, Vitry Avec pour point de départ les échos pluriels d’une crise d’identité polymorphe et des stratégies de dépassement autant que les résistances plurielles qu’elle suscite, l’exposition Lignes de vies au Mac Val convoque quatre-vingts artistes qui sont autant de vies singulières affirmées dans leur œuvre. Une grande réussite.

“Lignes de vies — une exposition de légendes” brings together work by several different generations of artists, representing every kind of practice. It continues an approach to programming that, ever since the museum first opened with the exhibitions “Détours” by Jacques Monory (2005) and “Le Grand Sommeil” by Claude Levêque (2006), has sought to question the way identity or, more precisely, identities are constructed. From the cycle “Zones de Productivités Concertées” (2006–7) and again the group show “Emporte-moi/Sweep me off my feet” (2009–10), it then went on to analyse the role of the economy and of emotion in our lives. Next it was on to gender (and, more precisely, masculinity) with “Chercher le garçon” (2015) and even the idea of cultural identity in “Tous, des sang-mêlés” (2017).

For “Lignes de vies — une exposition de légendes,” we are turning towards more intimate and personal territories. Indeed, the works (by both men and women) assembled in the exhibition, take autobiography and biography as a visual raw material, generating a reflection on identities, from the presentation and the construction of the self. The aim is to interrogate the relations between art and life and, eventually, to question the effectiveness of art, its inscription in the real, through various artistic positions that all put into practice (between illustration and activation) the dissolution of this purported frontier.

Pierre Moignard, (autoportrait) 5 VI 97, 1997 — Huile sur toile — 27 x 22 cm. Photo © Alberto Ricci. Courtesy galerie anne barrault.

Considering that identity is a fiction that is performed, a multiple and fragmented narrative, telling one’s story and making one’s life — one’s gesture — a raw material, is therefore an act of deconstruction, of affirmation, of empowerment — a kind of molecular revolution. The political gesture of taking control of the narrative of one’s own legend.

The self is a “political fiction” (Paul B. Preciado and others), a “social puzzle” that “stands in for identity, which is as variegated as the imaginary unity which is supposedly its base is non-existent” (Clément Rosset): a legend. Following the parallel between person and fictive personage (character) established by Clément Rosset, it is possible to state that the self

“does not constitute the unity of a personal identity but the aggregate of qualities it is recognised or not as having, depending on the mood of its entourage.”

(Loin de moi, Minuit, 1999, p 88). Or, to put it another way: “The ‘I’ takes all its substance from the ‘you’ that grants it to him/her” (ibid, p. 50).

Frank Lamy