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Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO)
10 rue des Vieux Grenadiers
Geneva
022-320-61-22
onamatterpoetic
cycle rolywholyover, premier épisode
February 21-May 6, 2007

This spring the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO) begins its seventh cycle, Rolywholyover.

The cycle’s first episode is entitled Onamatterpoetic and features five monographic shows by Siah Armajani, Bujar Marika, Christian Robert-Tissot, Jean-Claude Silbermann and Joëlle Tuerlinckx, along with a new presentation of Franz Erhard Walther’s Werklager and a variety of rehangings among our collections’ permanent exhibitions. In addition, John M Armleder remain present on the MAMCO’s first floor with his large installation Everything, as well as the prints brought together by the Cabinet des estampes, and an entirely new gallery.

On the museum’s fourth floor, Joëlle Tuerlinckx (Brussels, 1958) has created on site in the seven galleries of the Magasin des panoramas all of the elements forming her show. The Belgian artist’s work takes the form of an investigation-reappropriation of the host venue. Using a wide variety of means (variations in the lighting, slide projections, digital slide shows, drawings, photos, objects, etc.), Tuerlinckx subtly reappropriates the venue’s walls, spaces and routes, where she introduces her sensitive exploration of the material world as so many individual statements of her thinking, which is elaborated progressively and measured not in instances of space but rather in the space of instances. This then is how visitors might understand the title of her exhibition-workshop, 64 Expositions-Minute. Sur Mesure, Echelle Variable (64 One-Minute Shows. Made to Measure, Sliding Scale).

On the third floor, a show featuring the work of Siah Armajani (Tehran, 1939), L’art n’est pas le salon de beauté de la civilization (Art Is not Civilization’s Beauty Parlor), spreads out over 11 areas starting with the re-presentation of 50 scale models (an earlier donation to the museum by the artist) in a new permanent gallery conceived by Armajani as a piece of sculpture that doubles as a furnished room. This new exhibition, designed to be entirely complementary to the retrospective MAMCO mounted 11 years ago, features a range of art, from recent pieces, some seen here for the very first time, to never-before-shown works dating from the 1950s (done in Tehran) and 1960s (produced in the United States), to conceptual artworks (late 1960s), to a large body of work that also hasn’t been seen at MAMCO prior to this (including the important Dictionary for Building). In all, nearly 250 items. Since 1974 Armajani has defined himself as a public artist. His main field of activity is in public space then. He has created pedestrian walkways, reading gardens, gazebos, etc. His interior works are either models or installations and constructions that prepare or extend his reflection on the forms of an art that is addressed to, inspired by or tends to contribute to the “common place.”

Three very dissimilar artists share the second floor.

The painter and writer Jean-Claude Silbermann (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1935), who was part of the activities of the Surrealist group from 1958 to 1969, has filled three galleries with his poetic world. The Galerie des problèmes résolus features Babil-Babylone (Babble-Babylon), a vast ensemble of painted cutout wooden figures. As if affected by a loss of gravity, this erratic troop of images and characters seems to come from some dreamlike ballet where the roles are endlessly redistributed according to the sudden shifts of an altogether personal mythology. The same goes for Qui es-tu être humain? (Who Are You Human Being?), an original ensemble that translates in images Alfred Jarry’s Surmâle (Supermale), the famous “modern novel” on the mechanics of love, and which Büro Kippenberger becomes a heavenly theater of. La Chambre offers a discreet receptacle for the Cabinet des velléités. A helter-skelter collection of inconsequential objects is hunting around there for its forgetful logic. Visitors will grasp why this show is entitled Un homard dans le faux pas, or A Lobster in the Faux-pas.

The Genevan artist Christian Robert-Tissot (Geneva, 1960) returns to MAMCO with eight (perhaps nine) new pieces designed for his latest show, Wall Street. The title refers in particular to two galleries, La Rue and the former Espace d’archisculpture, which hold the pictures, wall paintings and other Styrofoam or fluorescent lamp art making up the exhibition. The medium of Robert-Tissot’s art is language in fact (words, phrases that are nominal or not). His artworks are based on both their overall formal reception and the readings that they inevitably solicit and which constitute the piece as much as a commentary on its and the observer’s status or the situation of the exhibition itself. While the expression “Wall Street” metonymizes the general idea of investment or capitalist speculation, the museum context also points up in the terms the thoroughly speculative nature of works of at, which may offer excellent financial yields these days as well as remarkable theoretical speculations on the nature of art.

The Geneva-based Albanian artist Bujar Marika (Tirana, 1943) sees his work first as an act of offering a gift or contribution to art and society. Although 63 years old, Marika only began to define himself as an artist in his own right six years ago. The portmanteau word Bâtimental serves as the title of this show, which Marika created in its entirety in the three galleries MAMCO put at his disposal. His pieces “speak” of time, history, the history of art, modernity, logic, randomness and the concrete venue in which they appear and for which they are dreamed up. Evincing a postminimalist and postconceptual esthetic, these works are first and foremost a cosa mentale yet are no less ready to adopt its forms, whose perceptible qualities are striking for both their pure simplicity and the precise beauty of their formal design.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO)
10 rue des Vieux Grenadiers
Geneva
022-320-61-22
onamatterpoetic
Siah Armajani, L’art n’est pas le salon de beauté de la civilization (Art Is not Civilization’s Beauty Parlor)
cycle rolywholyover, premier épisode
February 21-May 6

To build commonality
In Iran, about 1957, Siah Armajani discovered modern art in fragments (in particular writing documenting Braque and Picasso). This was the beginning of his work, a survey and of those fragments, done in Persian tradition as much as in a contemporary esthetics (that of lettrisme, inter alia, which the artist was unaware of). Arriving in the United States in 1960 Armajani initially continued on this path, reducing its to only the writing. For example, he would cover entirely a piece of fabric or a shirt with Iranian poems that he knew only by heart and poetry will continue as a constant resource of his work. At the end of the 1960s, he gravitated toward conceptual art that interested him because of the writing and the theoretical reflection it involved. He began to participate in major exhibitions, such as Art by Telephone (1969, MoCA, Chicago), Information (1970, MoMA, New York) or Documenta V (1972, Kassel). The current exhibition brings together almost all of his work that remains from this first period and much of his new work.

In 1967 Armajani developed an interest in bridge architecture, the structures of vernacular habitats, and intervention from a formalized art point of view. In 1974, he decided he should be defined categorically as a “public artist.” Since then, the core of his work developed in public spaces: pedestrian footbridges, benches, gardens, reading rooms, kiosks, and gazebos. For him it is always a question of proposing not only objects of artistic or aesthetic admiration, but also functional, “useful” structures in which the observers of the work are also the users. His art is more about others and its contribution to the person in the experiment of his or her freedom or freedom of thought, which is already in reflective suspense in the continuous flow of daily constraints. His works are bridges, with a clean purpose as well as a metaphorical purpose of establishing linkage or holding together. This is why his works find their forms in the architecture of engineers or popular culture rather than in the authorized vocabulary of architects.

Because of this, an Armajani museum exhibition can account only for his interior works. It is either of the models, drafts or projects (realized or not); autonomous constructions (“sculptures”, installations, etc.) illuminate the possibilities of an entire art turned toward commonality. Thus there is the title taken from John Dewey: “art is not the beauty parlor of civilization.” Our view of the exhibition begins with the reinstallation of the 50 models (which Armajani donated to the museum in 1995) in a new permanent space that the artist conceived as an environment that he conceived as a furnished room or a semi-domestic exhibition device. He conceived the exhibition to be complementary to his MAMCO retrospective 11 years ago. The new exhibition brings together recent and new work as well as a broad whole of parts shown at the time (most significantly Dictionary for Building).

Siah Armajani was born in 1939 in Teheran and lives in Minneapolis.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO)
Bujar Marika, Bâtimental
onamatterpoetic
cycle rolywholyover, premier épisode
February 21-May 6

It is consistent with scientific method that he would practice the trades of both teacher and writer for the Albanian review Science & Life, especially for a designer of international fame, but Bujar Marika is a strongly inclined both to art and architecture. He however chooses not to follow this path that would without any doubt have created problems for his career as realistic-Socialist artist: “It was perhaps already an artistic act to not officially enter art.”

So it was necessary for him to have patience before starting, at 52, in the midst of a career as a plastics technician. To embark on his training a stimulant was necessary — he burned his bridges and took the radical approach. A newcomer to Bern in 1992, he briefly came into contact with Max Bill who showed his cubes and derived forms to Naef Spiele AG, a company specializing in construction. On the advice of Mr. Bill, he started to paint. He met with Ulrich Loock, then director of Kunsthalle Bern, which represented the Zurich concrete art movement. But this form of art that seemed too rational and controlled, Marika preferred the open work of Umberto Eco and, like the literature of Joyce, Kafka, and Nabokov that had already set the example, and pursued making art that was post-conceptual and post-minimalist in nature. In trying out the matter to idea ratio he became interested in addressing social and political problems with his work.

BâtimentaI, the title of his exhibition, is more than a pun. This double-edged word marks the fusion of two spaces, that of the building and mental space that MAMCO introduced into the building. Marika questions the history of modernity by commenting on the works of some of its guardian figures (Manet, Mallarmé, Duchamp), and also reflects on the museum, its nature, its philosophy, and its capacity to make work. Thus Banc Ryman, a Plexiglas bench, was greets museum visitors, recalling the many artists like Robert Ryman who were museum guardians. Work underscores the role of the institution in the long maturation of an artist and invites the visitor with a similar initiating experience.

Marika is the prototype of the attentive guest that any museum would hope for. During his frequent visits in MAMCO, committed to memory in his glance and his memory the successive events in the same exhibition spaces. Column-view-point is a tower of glass made up of milfoils of A4-format plates, the total surface of which is equivalent to the glazed surface of the rooms of the fourth floor of the museum the windows of which are hidden by walls.

The various versions of the installation entitled Duchampiana influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even (The Large Glass), perhaps the most noted Duchamp work with 564 mirrors making a phallic form that suggests the impatience of the bride to consummate her nuptials (or nine single people). The original title of the work, is retranscribed in code bars, offering an alternation of white and dark lines.

One of his paintings, the diptych Scriptio Continua parodies a characteristic form of conceptual art (words painted on a monochromic bottom) and plays with the progressive abandonment of “the writing continues”, with the profit of easier codes of reading, different other médiums appear in the row in which it is necessary to count poetry, the chance, the inaccuracy, the negation, the setting in abyss, the obviousness, the articulation of space, the zones of contact, the chances envisaged and unforeseen, the thought…

Bujar Marika was born in 1943 in Tirana in Albania and lives in Geneva.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO)
Christian Robert-Tissot, Wall Street
onamatterpoetic
cycle rolywholyover, premier épisode
February 21-May 6

In 1995, after having weeded a field in the mountains of the Jura to clear brush and do some large-scale recycling, Christian Robert-Tissot realized that his “work was not related to a specific technique but was rather composed of a convergence of multiples.” In the same vein, shortly after this first experiment, he installed Perdu de vue, a sign on the roof of a building next to MAMCO, during his exhibition in 1996. Consequently, forsaking the territory of his first work, a fabric stretched on a frame, he began to investigate the most familiar underpinnings that can materialize, yet are immaterial of the human “instruments”: the language. Linguistic signs have always been the focal point of work that interests C. Robert-Tissot. He plays with language, in all senses of the word, though not flirting with conceptual art. Robert-Tissot confers the specific terms of art on words of the popular vocabulary, on the stereotyped expressions, and if there is a tendency that they are spoken without having had time to be moderated by the plastic density of reflection — because they are painted and formatted — it’s only the unsuspected ability of reappropriation by the reader. Sometimes the pure poetry of the language carries it, other times it profits by the tangle of mental representations, yet other times the playfulness commits it to a continued pleasant linguistic drift, as long as it is not stopped with the reverse of a reality that until that point had not fully measured.

C. Robert-Tissot draws from a tower of Babel that dares to convene in a milieu of multiplicity. One would not imagine it before the era of the computer … filling notebooks (they could have been blue) with daily-heard words, sentences with double direction, determining qualifiers and expressions. And others (red, these) covered with multiple entries, communication, myriads of characters that traverse the typographical chess-board, from severe characters to those which are exhilarations of wild curves and cuttings, while passing by the sobriety of those that appear to be “modern”. Becoming open to unlimited possibilities of reading is due to the successful convergence of graphic presentation, of the work of the representation, the plays of the signs and the references.

C. Robert-Tissot returns in MAMCO with a whole of parts designed to occupy street space. Wall Street, the title of his exhibition, immediately launches the pleasure of the linguistic play of the references: the place of unrestrained finance and these walls of the MAMCO space where the works are presented. The installation releases a dense energy. The colors vibrate, squeak or are harmonized in part of space, the words that sprout from the fabric, delight in their form or try hard to confer sight. This expressive attack, the dumb whiteness of the corridor answers where the icy white neon of d’Amateur illuminates and the sly bulge of the wall pours out in a silent sigh.

Christian Robert-Tissot was born in 1960 in Geneva where he lives.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO)
Jean-Claude Silbermann, Un homard dans le faux pas
(A Lobster in the Faux-pas)
onamatterpoetic
cycle rolywholyover, premier épisode
February 21-May 6

The confusion of the reigns
It was the serrated silhouette of a menu holder in front of a restaurant that provided Jean-Claude Silbermann with a radical resolution to the problem he was having with his painting: the treatment of the painting space from which his figures were detached. It was a work in which a whole carousel of characters turns, floating in an indefinite, imaginary space. The sleepwalking levitation that characterized them seemed to absent-mindedly free them of the fate of the wall, sometimes the crucifix of the picture. And the picture is not the problem in Silbermann’s painting. His painting, like traps in the dreams of Hopi Indians, tightens its nets around his volatile images that border on the edge of consciousness.

The finish carpenter who carves outlines, the painter who colors in forms does not leave his workshop to devote himself to this "subtle hunt.” This explorer travels only around his room. And the Technicolor ghosts that he meets there provide the only conversation. This interaction with the phantoms spares him the inconveniences of daily socializing. In his dream, he seems to prefer it. Silbermann is a fabulist, an engineer of the wonderful.

Babil-Babylone, the first of two installations at MAMCO, as indicated by the title, sails between Babel and prattle. In a time of the accelerated extinction of the languages to the profit of imperial sub-English, it makes sense that he align his work between the Babylonian multiplicity of the old world and the unstable babel of desire and glory. He maintains an inextinguishable wish devoted to the unstated question: “who are you human being?” and puts into pictures certain stories of Surmâle, the famous "modern novel" of Alfred Jarry (1902). It is also healthy to ask who we mirror in this physics of love, this mechanics of always multipliable sex which is emblematic of Surmâle, the untimely hero who lives up to his precursor, the Nietzschian Superman.

Viewers will see, in the Cabinet des velléités, that the wishing part of our difficult humanity is readily the prey of a polymorphous bestiary. In this room of marvels, the animals of the fabulist appropriate offhand liberties: the angels here think only of making the animal (reigns are contagious). The disparate, the erratic character of this collection without criterion also testifies to the diversity of the affects as to the aesthetic of missing no shrubby crosspiece. Frivolousness can also mask a refusal to comply with the codes of good behavior. If his "signs" are "sly", it is because Silbermann does not care about rules of his game. His theatre is often a two-sided mirror but it is also a rainbow that disappears in the contour — like a lobster out of step.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO)
Joelle Tuerlinckx, 64 Exhibitions-Minute. Made to order, Variable Scale
(64 One-Minute Shows. Made to Measure, Sliding Scale)
onamatterpoetic
cycle rolywholyover, premier épisode
February 21-May 6

Joelle Tuerlinckx creates installations that question the exhibition’s site as much as the exhibition itself. She transforms the research laboratory space given her, using processes inspired by scientific method and academic systems and cultures a presentation close to the life of the archive. Her exhibitions approach choreographed reality of found objects, manipulated gallery lighting, film or slide projection, paper screens, or graffiti marks — a plethora of work that functions to advance the concept that seizes the site. Her exhibitions are always built on a work in progress that accounts as much for the specific data of the place as the reactualization of former work. Perhaps should it be specified that her works are seldom produced to have an autonomous existence that they seem to exist neither in time or space, allowing them each time to be new in the context of the presentation. The exhibition is therefore a process of seizing the site and its concrete physical reality, along with its geographical, historical reality, and symbology. Tuerlinckx conceives her interventions as accounts which are never allowed to absolutely grab the viewer but which try to highlight, to peel off modes of perception (by using comparison and contrast or by integrating elements that disturb perception) and engage the spectator in an a physical and conceptual experiment.

In MAMCO, the fourth story rooms have an abstract configuration, detached from the structure of the building. As the name suggests, the rooms in, Magasin des panoramas do not offer a point of view but offer a maze of uniform walls that bring to mind the best of cubic white, neutral space. What characterizes this area is its continuous loop nature that induces the idea of wandering or sequential unfolding.

Tuerlinckx used these space characteristics; it is after experiencing the installation that is title, 64 Expositions-Minute. Made to order, Variable Scale, reveals itself. This title obviously refers to the 24 images per second of cinematic film projection. It suggests a quantity of micro-exhibitions that coexist in same space, either simultaneously or in sequence. It also ironically refers to an acceleration of time that influences our manner of consumption, including the consumption of the exhibition. The term “variable scale” begs to be understood in a physical or conceptual sense, in that it reinforces the specific link between the form of the exhibition and its physical space. It is as from this perspective that one can understand Tuerlinckx’s choice to show papers, images or abstract objects. Because it is definitely in the neutral and abstract character of the rooms of the Magasin des panoramas that advances the mimetic if not tautological strategy to advocate the forms and the materials here.

Joelle Tuerlinckx was born in 1958 and lives in Brussels.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO)
John M. Armleder, Amor vacui, horror vacui
onamatterpoetic
cycle rolywholyover, premier épisode
February 21-May 6

The contagion of genres
Here we have paintings (on walls, on canvas), drawings, posters, sculptures, photographs, a range of installations, films, plants (both natural and artificial), scaffolding, confidential publications, stuffed animals, artefacts of every ilk, piles, walls covered with mirrors, pleated cloth, cotton wool, acetate, neon lamps, a whole store of artworks that look like objects, objects that look like artworks, paintings that seem to call to mind other paintings, settings that seem to have come to the wrong room, pieces of furniture that look as though they’ve forgotten their function, images that appear to hesitate about their role...

The work of John M Armleder (1948, Geneva) is polymorphous. It is not identifiable with any one medium, procedure, formal style, or visual or aesthetic world. It opens up in a myriad of guises, repeats itself, undergoes metamorphosis, only developing according to the circumstances. If chance for him is a constant aid, perhaps it’s that his entire enterprise aims to minimize effort, the part he plays in executing the art. The figure of the artist that Armleder embodies would be that of an idle powerhouse, an absent-minded producer, a relaxed stickler for detail, an engineer of approximations, a genius of indecision.

Whether his works are spectacular or barely sketched out, monumental or minuscule, shimmering or dull, labour intensive or already made, by his hand or another’s, what is at stake seems to be keeping personal expressiveness and any heroic stamp at a distance. Appealing or deceptive, his art achieves its success by throwing the notion of success into crisis, by the random construction of a system of equivalences among all the items.

If the fate of works of art is indeed to end up blending in with the setting of the home, city, or museum, wouldn’t the fate of settings be to blend in with works of art? So it is that paintings become part of the woodwork, pieces of furniture combine with paintings to be transformed into pictorial structures and supports, wall hangings become gallery-scale floating canvases, pictures are draped in the same way, tables find themselves changed into sculptures, sculptures discover their inner readymade, kitsch reveals itself to be sophistication, the accidental is taken for intention, vague approximation appears to be virtuosity, the neglected calculated, the impeccable an illusion.

Nothing here should be taken for anything other than an attempt, in the name of art, to pull off a switch in the undefined field of proposed works. In Armleder’s work, this is a product of precision mechanics. Or, if you prefer, it bespeaks a new meaning given to the Duchampian notion of the beauty of indifference — except that a strong element of play enters the equation, in which humor undercuts the tricks of irony and the pleasure of improvisation is freed from the tyranny of the "lasting desire to last."