Gymnase nihiliste — Thibaud Croisy — CAC Brétigny — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 9 → December 14, 2013

The Nihilistic Gymnasium is a group of spectators responsible for the examination of several artistic projects which are destined to see the light of day. The members of this Gymnasium, ten in total, enrol in a collective working process to analyse the challenges of each project, the status it has within the artists’ work in general, and their presence in the cultural landscape. Following investigations and debate, the Gymnasium selects one project and definitively suspends its production so that it will never be realised. It will then publish a report detailing the reasons for this choice.

As its name suggests, this Gymnasium is nihilistic: it seeks to avoid any acting out, any commercial exploitation and, as a consequence, producing any expenditure or event (no success, no failure, no tour). Above all it aims to remove a production from the market and it does so by maintaining a project in a state of pure potential.

This construct therefore proposes to consider the conditions and the forms of existence of a work of art — including what differentiates its conceptual form from its material form. As it ponders upon what should have been seen, felt, experienced but won’t ever be, it observes how what has been interrupted, compromised, unfinished, can continue to live through memory and the imaginary — and perhaps acquire added density in comparison with the initial ambitions. Nevertheless, the expected spectacle does not occur and, in its place, it leaves behind the infinite possibilities that it could have generated in the lives of the artists and the spectators alike.

Four artists have agreed to submit a project at the Gymnasium: Patricia Allio & Éléonore Weber, Yan Duyvendak and Thomas Ferrand.

Curator: Julien Duc-Maugé.