Résurrection — Dohyang Lee Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 22 → July 17, 2010

An exhibition proposed by François Aubart With Continuous Project, Alexis Guillier, Pierre Leguillon, Emilie Parendeau and Yves-Marie Rinquin

It has become common to hear, with greater and greater frequency, that this or that artist has reworked the modernist heritage, the issues of conceptual art, or some other part of the history of art. To such a degree that it seems illusory to want to identify the various applications of this strategy. So it is without any ambitions to exclusivity that the Dohyang Lee Gallery is thrilled to present photocopies of sold-out publications, a conference on the geometric motifs of Piet Mondiran, a plan that helped Robert Smithson in his preparation of Amarillo Ramp and which now bears his trace, the attestation that at the MoMA Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel is still spinning, and the return to circulation of a work of Ben Kinmont. The gathering of these proposals assumes that any manipulation of a work can bring it back to life, knowing that it does not necessarily act only from what it experienced up to now.

Indeed, the movement from the past — which saw the birth of a work — to the present — which welcomes it today — always produces a renewal. It is thus endowed with supplementary strata, applied through the conditions of these diverse appearances, which ceaselessly reconfigure them. The artists exhibited here, rather than deny this fact, exploit it as a means of production. More precisely, by refusing to consider historic works as unalterable, they consider them from their current situations, which are not the situations of their creation. As no measure can take them back to the moment of their conception, it appears healthy to situate them in the time which has the responsibility of conserving them. If the return to the present reanimates them, on terms which were probably not present during the act of creation, it also guarantees to keep them alive. A life which is prolonged by this new apparition.

In this way, the reviews and books photocopied by the Continuous Project Collective are presented in the most elementary printed form. The revival of different media and in varied contexts of Piet Mondrian’s geometric forms are presented by Alex Guillier as “survivors” from the painter’s work. In creating a work of sculpture that evolves with the natural cycle, focussing on an objective representation of territory, Yves-Marie Rinquin proposes a paradoxical implantation. The documents which record the risks with which Pierre Leguillon has recreated one of Marcel Duchamp’s habitual gestures, places adventure, once again, at the heart of the visit to a museum, while thwarting the established codes that are imposed upon it. The protocol developed by Ben Kinmont to respond to economic constraints is recomposed by Emilie Parendeau so as not only to address the institution that welcomes it, but also its public. Here, past works are not objects that are eternally inscribed on a lost period, but which are also able to haunt ours. They are activated by a consideration of Walter Benjamin, who postulated that “the history of art is a history of prophets.”