Uncoupdedés.net — Le Cneai= joue l’oubli avec Elie During — Event — Slash Paris

Past: November 22, 2013 → November 22, 2014

In the context of the Cneai’s new programme, which alternates exhibition scenarios and inaugural festivals, Elie During presents his personal interpretation of the place by exploring memories of his visit.

From museum to home

Spending an afternoon at Centre national édition art image [National center for art publishing and image], on Chatou’s Impressionists island, feels more like visiting a private home rather than an exhibition. This is not only because of the architecture of the place and its surroundings — the piece of garden, the barge -, but more fundamentally because the way things are displayed — not only properly hung on the walls, but also leaning against them, resting on shelves, lying on pieces of furniture — are a very concrete evidence of the continuous activity of those who are toiling, within these walls, to organize and expand a collection while collaborating with the artists. Indeed, we’re visiting a house in Chatou (the Levanneur House) which is, from the ground floor to the attic, a workshop or a factory where art is thought through and exhibited in innovative formats that are constantly matching ways of circulating art in the age of mechanical reproduction: prints and books, but also posters, newspapers, notebooks, envelopes, maps, models, LPs, slides, etc.

Now, this is the real beauty of it all: these means of circulation are effective on the spot since any visitor can purchase, for a fair price, a book or a print that he likes. Sometimes he only needs to pick something up: LIBELLE°, the double-sided posters commissioned by Alexandre Baudelot, a 1300 copies prints sealed in their flexible envelopes, are one of the many examples of forms that the «economy of giving» can take in such a context. While leaving the Impressionists island, one does not bring back the grand catalogue acting as a trophy of our participation to the exhibition event, either directly or remotely. Instead, we’re bringing home fragments of the place itself, like you would take a stone from an archaeological site to add to your personal collection. Whether they will be added to a treasure or passed along to people you meet, these fragments of art — that don’t need to be called artworks — are acting, above all else, like the elements of a tangible memory of having been there. Together, they’re setting up the marks or milestones of what could be the diagram of an exhibition that would be, by essence, virtual. Something like taking sample or drawing a cross-section of the process.

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