Uncoupdedés.net — La Maison des Arts Georges Pompidou — Event — Slash Paris

Past: February 16, 2013 → February 19, 2014

The Maison des Arts Georges Pompidou à Cajarc plays seversal with David Evrard and Guillaume Pinard

Nobody can escape art, but can one combine esoteric intentions with the duties of a missionary?

As a centre d’art and artist residence in the heart of a rural area, the Maison des Arts Georges Pompidou places the public’s relationship with art and artists at the heart of its challenges. It asks two artists to discuss them, reversing the usual structure of art spectacles. David Edvard and Guillaume Pinard talk about various subjects, evoking their relationship with viewers as artists and their experience of art as viewers. This shifting of perspective fosters inventive thinking and an experimentation for all art lovers and poachers.

October 24, 2012 09:29:02


Dear Guillaume, (…)


I’ve realized two things. The first is that I rather like being flattered, for people to say they like what I do, I find that great, in general. Likewise, I often say to myself that what I deal with is so vague that once in it I can’t allow for the least concession. Neither one nor the other is true (…).


One of my more notorious experiences of a “wider audience” was in Fiac, a village that has turned its annual fete into an exhibition, with the opening night a ball lit with Chinese lanterns, at which you show among the inhabitants. In four days more than 3000 visitors filed through.


Everyone came: hunters, then priests, then farmers, then the old, then professionals, then the young, etc… and nobody balked at the idea of posing in front of the kind of faux-paranoid western set I’d made with people on the farm where I was staying. At this time, a sociologist informed me that as a social category “people” was an extremely recent political invention. It was a populist thing that dates from between the Wars. A kind of ploy to supplant the all too leftist concept of “the People.” I even wonder if it wasn’t under Pétain. And “public” just flowed from that.


October 25, 2012 00:09:28


Good evening David,


As an artist, I never know what to do with compliments. They always give me the impression of being a mechanic who’s correctly changed the number plates on a Picasso. They make me feel damned uncomfortable (…). In my work, I expect nothing from the public as a mass, a people, or a group. I have the feeling like I’m continuously peeing into a violin in the hope the instrument will play itself and wake someone up who’ll feel intrigued enough by the tune to let me know that perhaps it is indeed music I’m making. “An art without a recipient,” that was it: to work for a private and almost exclusive relationship with an unknown person, not one with a profile, but someone who’ll say that he’s interested (or not) in the adventure and who’ll invent a story to make clear the fact that I’m doing something, rather than nothing. A gallery can take on this kind of ambition if its collectors have an ear for music, if it can bear the dissonance behind the applause. But it can also chuck the musician out if the cacophony cuts off the readies. (…)

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