LE POINT  18 FEBRUARY 2012
 
 

Après une inauguration en grande pompe à Chaumont, le Centre Pompidou mobile entame sa deuxième escale à Cambrai.

À gauche, la rue d’Alger. À droite, la rue de Nice. Des promesses de Méditerranée qui, sous les ciels bas du Nord, ont presque des airs de pied de nez. Avaient, plutôt : sur la place de la République, à Cambrai, les tentes bleues, oranges et rouges du Pompidou mobile viennent désormais dynamiter le gris et le blanc laiteux. Le tout premier musée nomade vient de s’installer pour trois mois, entre les façades art déco du Crédit agricole et de la chambre de commerce.

“Nous sommes désormais certains que notre structure est bel et bien itinérante, ça marche !” sourit Loïc Julienne, architecte avec Patrick Bouchain du projet. Il y a un mois encore, le musée mobile était à Chaumont, dans la Haute-Marne, où le président de la République est venu l’inaugurer le 13 octobre 2011. Trois chapiteaux, combinables les uns aux autres ; de la toile de cirque au-dessus, de la toile armée en dessous, soutenues par des armatures métalliques : le tout doit pouvoir être monté et remonté, accrochage des oeuvres compris, en quelque quatre semaines.

Réponses

Pour sa première étape, le Pompidou mobile avait été installé sur un ancien terrain militaire. À Cambrai, il est accolé à l’hôtel de ville : on y accède par l’entrée d’honneur, celle des grands jours et des mariages. Dans trois mois, il migrera vers le port de Boulogne-sur-Mer. À son bord : Picasso, Kupka, Dubuffet, Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle et d’autres : 15 joyaux de Beaubourg. “Il a été difficile de choisir les oeuvres. Il a été plus difficile encore de devoir expliquer qu’elles ne pourraient pas être prêtées pendant un an”, raconte Emma Lavigne, conservatrice pour l’art contemporain au Centre Pompidou.

Cette première exposition (elle changera après l’étape de Boulogne, lorsque le musée partira vers le sud) est consacrée à la couleur. “Exposition”, le terme n’est d’ailleurs pas le bienvenu. “Il s’agit plutôt d’un accrochage, comme nous en organisons régulièrement à Beaubourg, d’un parcours dans les collections”, souligne Emma Lavigne. La couleur, donc, qui, chez les très grands, manifeste à la fois l’unité d’une recherche qui parcourt le XXe siècle et l’extrême singularité de chaque oeuvre. L’orange presque irréel du monochrome de Klein répond à L’hommage au carré de Josef Albers, aux Deux Vols d’oiseaux d’Alexander Calder (de très légers courants d’air, impensables au musée, rendent dans la tente le mobile à sa première vocation), aux Grands Plongeurs noirs de Fernand Léger ; L’aveugle dans la prairie de Niki de Saint Phalle contemple la mélancolie de La femme en bleu de Picasso.

Populaire

Quatorze ou quinze oeuvres, pas plus. Pour des raisons pratiques bien sûr, mais pas que. “Je suis frappé, explique Alain Seban, président du Centre Pompidou et inventeur du Beaubourg itinérant, de voir comment dans les musées les visiteurs courent d’une pièce à l’autre. L’idée est ici de faire comprendre comment, si on donne du temps aux oeuvres, elles se mettent à nous parler.” Difficile en effet, dans cet espace restreint, de ne pas laisser le cinéma de couleur d’Olafur Eliasson répondre au Rythme de Sonia Delaunay. Difficile de ne pas écouter L’Estaque de Braque parler à la Double Métamorphose de Yaacov Agam. Difficile de ne pas s’arrêter : parce qu’on voit peu, on voit mieux. D’autant que, contraintes de conservation obligent, les toiles sont éclairées de l’intérieur des caissons qui les protègent : pas de reflet qui vienne perturber la vue.

Le projet n’est pas de faire venir l’institution dans des “déserts culturels”. Le Nord-Pas-de-Calais n’a d’ailleurs rien de tel : la région, malgré les clichés qui lui collent à la peau, est la plus riche en musées de l’Hexagone après l’Ile-de-France. La Piscine de Roubaix travaille avec Orsay, Arras noue un partenariat avec Versailles, Roubaix et Tourcoing travaillent à la préfiguration d’une antenne de l’Institut du monde arabe… Rien moins que le vide, donc. Il s’agissait, plutôt, de faire revivre un appétit culturel et de casser les inhibitions. Pour cela, explique Alain Seban, il fallait un événement “festif, joyeux, populaire”. À Cambrai, lorsque les tentes ont commencé d’être montées, les gens croyaient dur comme fer à l’arrivée d’un cirque…

Et la démarche semble fonctionner. À Chaumont, le Pompidou mobile a reçu 35 000 visiteurs, quand la ville n’en compte que 23 000. À Cambrai, les créneaux des visites scolaires sont déjà pleins. Çà et là, au long du parcours, des références au Pompidou de Paris ont été glissées pour que le public, à l’avenir, s’y sente chez lui. Pour être sans étiquette, le geste n’en est pas moins politique — au sens le plus noble du terme.

 
— Marion Cocquet, Le Point

 
Image: Francis Picabia, “l’Arbre rouge (Grimaldi après la pluie)”, vers 1912 ; Pablo Picasso, “Femme en bleu”, 1944 ; Frantisek Kupka, “La Gamme jaune” (détail), 1907. © Adagp/Succession Pablo Picasso, 2011/Adagp, 2011 / Montage Le Point.fr

KOELN-JOURNAL.DE  1 FEBRUARY 2012
 
 

Ihre Kunst wirkt herrlich kindlich und harmonisch. Man kann sagen: Niki de Saint Phalle brachte ihre Träume aufs Papier. Aber auch wenn die bunten Werke Fröhlichkeit ausstrahlen, ihre künstlerische Karriere begann keinesfalls unbeschwert.

Niki de Saint Phalle wurde 1930 in der Nähe von Paris geboren und starb 2002 in San Diego. Sie zählte zweifelsohne zu den bedeutendsten Künstlerinnen des 20. Jahrhundert. Der Grund für ihr künstlerisches Schaffen war aber leider kein schöner.

Mit 23 Jahren erlitt de Saint Phalle einen schweren Nervenzusammenbruch. Im Zuge ihrer therapeutischen Behandlung wurde ihr die Malerei immer wichtiger. Fortan nutzte sie ihre Kreativität als Ventil, um schreckliche Erlebnisse besser verarbeiten zu können.

Die Kunst war für sie also so etwas wie ein persönlicher Befreiungsschlag — und das sieht man ihren Werken auch an. Niki de Saint Phalle spielte mit Farben und bizarren Formen ihr ganz eigenes fantastisches Spiel. Ihre selbsterschaffenen Welten spiegeln stets ihre innerste Persönlichkeit wieder, die auf diese Weise für den Betrachter viel greifbarer wird.

Noch bis zum 3. Juni 2012 werden im LVR Max-Ernst-Museum zahlreiche Werke von Niki de Saint Phalle zu bewundern sein. Die Ausstellung bietet dem Besucher einen Überblick auf eine Schaffenszeit von rund 50 Jahren. „Spiel mit mir“ zeigt Gemälde, Assemblagen, Schießbilder, Plastiken, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphiken und Modelle der gegnadeten Künstlerin.

Termin:
bis zum 3. Juni 2012

Eintritt:
5 Euro; ermäßigt 3 Euro

Adresse:
Max-Ernst-Museum
Comesstraße 42/ Max-Ernst-Allee 1
50321 Brühl

Weitere Informationen unter:
www.maxernstmuseum.lvr.de

 
— Koeln-Journal.de

 
Image: Klicker / pixelio.de

ARTDAILY.ORG  14 JANUARY 2012
 
 

BRUEHL — The Max-Ernst-Museum is showing the wide-ranging oeuvre of the multifaceted artist Niki de Saint Phalle, undoubtedly one of the most important artists of the 20th century, in a large survey exhibition. Through her paintings, assemblages, shooting paintings (tirs), sculptures, and installations, this artist created a unique cosmos which established her international reputation.

Niki de Saint Phalle, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1930 and died in San Diego, California, in 2002, had a defining influence on the art of her day, feminine features of which she celebrated and shaped. Like no one before her, she found a valid form for the elemental force of femininity, particularly in her Nanas.

The exhibition at the Max-Ernst-Museum provides an extensive overview of her oeuvre, from the early paintings to the late sculptures. “Play With Me,” the title both of the exhibition and of one of her first paintings, is also directed at the viewer. It is an appeal to the individual’s creativity, an invitation to make an attempt and participate in the artist’s unbridled joie de vivre. That joy was evident in all the phases of her creative life. Her oeuvre unites her interest in the originality of life and her own experiences. Niki de Saint Phalle cannot really be categorised, nor was she shy of contradictoriness. Whether she engrossed herself in sources like the tarot or Indian culture, or drew on subjective experiences, such as her childhood memories, everything flowed directly into her art and involved a broad creative spectrum. Painting, drawing and printing, the colossal but also miniature sculptures, reliefs, gardens, and also books, letters and written records, up to and including films form a unique cosmos – and the essence of her creative work.

The exhibition of more than 150 works, curated by Guido Magnaguagno, former director of the Tinguely Museum in Basel, embraces the sculptures on loan from the Niki Charitable Art Foundation in California and Paris, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, and the Musée d’art moderne in Nice, to all of which Niki de Saint Phalle made generous donations of her works. The show also features works from numerous private and public lenders. It has been complemented, moreover, by quintessential works by Jean Tinguely, her partner of many years, and paintings by her first teacher, the still largely unknown Hugh Weiss. The presentation also involves the artist’s films, which illustrate her dream worlds and her engagement with the patriarchy, and which are frequently dealt with quite separately from her other work.

 
— Art Daily

 
Image: A woman looks at the artwork “Sphinx” by French artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) at the Max-Ernst-Museum in Bruehl, Germany. The artwork is presented in a retrospective entitled “Niki de Saint Phalle: Spiel mit mir” (Niki de Saint Phalle: Play With Me), which opens to the public from 15 January to 3 June. (EPA/OLIVER BERG)

L.A. WEEKLY  12 JANUARY 2012
 
 

LOS ANGELES — Is that performance art? Not an uncommon question in Los Angeles, where you might see a guy in a mud-caked bodysuit marching down Wilshire, a fleet of pink Range Rovers hauling ass through West Hollywood or a frazzled cat lady walking her pets through a corporate plaza. You look twice and wonder: Did they do that on purpose? Am I supposed to notice? So is that art?

It’s therefore fitting that the organizers behind Pacific Standard Time continue to commemorate the postwar art of the Southland by turning to the work that was done outside the studio. It’s called the Performance and Public Art Festival (January 19-29) — 11 days and more than 30 performances, including experimental music and theater, social and political protest, sculpture and installation, and old-fashioned spectacle. A bunch of them are contemporary re-enactments of works first performed by seminal California artists more than 40 years ago.

We’ve profiled five works that push the limits of performance art.

1. Best hike ever

When Santa Monica’s 18th Street Arts Center asked Lita Albuquerque to restage her 1980 work Spine of the Earth, she didn’t think the process would become a work all its own. The first time around, Albuquerque and a team of assistants were working in the El Mirage dry lake bed, using blood-red powdered pigment to create interlocking geometric shapes against the stark flats of the Mojave Desert. Unable to re-create the work outside the city, Albuquerque moved to the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, home to a dramatic panoramic view. But when she learned the pigment would stain the steps of a beloved running trail, she replaced painting with something bigger: 500 volunteers in robes, unfurling across the landscape, not unlike a paintbrush in the desert.

What was once a desert pilgrimage has become an intervention into the humdrum of the everyday. Because it’s held in a public park, there’ll be nothing to stop a jogger from weaving through the red-robed procession. And the best view of the skydiver who kicks off the performance — a stand-in for the aerial perspective that’s key to understanding the original work — might be from a car on the Santa Monica Freeway.

And that’s cool with Albuquerque. “If the original was about utilizing the Earth as a blank canvas,” she says, “then this is about the movement of people in this extraordinary city.” Lita Albuquerque’s Spine of the Earth 2012, January 22, Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, 6300 Hetzler Road, Culver City.

2. America’s most-watched performance art

The similarities between performance art and sports aren’t lost on the Pomona College football team. Football games are elaborate stews of choreographed routine that are meaningless without an audience. So it didn’t surprise head coach Roger Caron when two dozen players volunteered to take part in John White’s Preparation F.

“This isn’t a Division I school, where kids are here just to play football,” Caron says. “For them, it’s a part of their day-to-day lives as mild-mannered college students.”

First performed in a campus ballroom in 1971, this new performance will take place in the gym. Audiences will watch from the bleachers as the team stretches and scrimmages and, after a shamanistic intervention from an audience member, changes back into street clothes and walks offstage. By moving a football practice onto a stage, White has moved the game out of the arena of entertainment and under the critical microscope of art. It will ask the question: Why does society condone violence if it’s committed while in uniform?

White’s performance precedes Judy Chicago’s A Butterfly for Pomona, a pyrotechnic display inspired by her fireworks performances of the 1970s, Atmospheres, to be held on the football field. Curator Rebecca McGrew says the pairing is coincidental but wrought with dramatic irony: taking the team off the field before creating the illusion of blowing it up. John White’s Preparation F and Judy Chicago’s A Butterfly for Pomona, January 21, Pomona College, Memorial Gymnasium, 333 N. College Avenue, Claremont.

3. Painting with a 12-gauge

In the early 1960s, L.A. was taking the piss out of action painting, the solitary practice of splattering paint all over a canvas. Behind a beatnik hangout on the Sunset Strip, the glamorous French émigré Niki de Saint Phalle hung bladders of paint and King Kong masks on a wooden canvas and shot it up with pals like John Cage and Jane Fonda. She called these communal paintings tirs — French for “gunshot.”

Meanwhile, in a studio in Pasadena, Richard Jackson was emptying buckets of paint and canvases into a washing machine. He dreamed of painting with a Cessna 150 for a brush.

Today staged violence is no cakewalk. For safety reasons, the re-enactment of Saint Phalle’s tirs will be invitation-only, held at an undisclosed outdoor shooting range in the foothills. “I’m open to reinterpretation,” says curator Yael Lipschutz, “but to do this with stuntmen or fake guns seems silly.”

And Armory Center curators had to promise Pasadena officials they’d keep spectators hundreds of feet away when Jackson flies and crashes a 15-foot model airplane, loaded with paint, into an enormous concrete wall in Arroyo Seco’s Brookside Park. “From very early in his career,” says curator Irene Tsatsos, “Richard’s been pushing the idea of how a painting can be made.” His brand of deliriousness might be up to code, but it’s still your best bet for catching a whiff of neo-dada funk. Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tirs: Reloaded, January 22, invitation only. Richard Jackson’s Accidents in Abstract Painting, January 22, Brookside Park, 360 N. Arroyo Boulevard, Pasadena.

4. Feminism via Twitter

To hear Suzanne Lacy talk about it, staging Three Weeks in May — her 1977 attempt to tackle issues of sexual violence in L.A. with visual art — was like running a grassroots political campaign. Small groups got together to discuss what couldn’t be said in public. Demonstrations and community organizing raised awareness.

For her reconceptualization of the project, now called Three Weeks in January, Lacy, inspired by the Obama campaign, has added another tool: social media. Like the original work, she is hosting demonstrations, classes and public forums around the city and stenciling the word rape on locations reported to LAPD on a map outside its downtown headquarters. But Lacy also is facilitating online forums and updating the map with data from Twitter.

“Over 30 years later, we can no longer say that rape is unspoken, nor that services and policies do not exist,” Lacy says. “But in terms of conversation and awareness, can something like a Twitter feed really compare to going door-to-door, or occupying public space?” Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in January, January 12-February 1. Candlelight vigil January 27, 7 p.m., Los Angeles Police Department, 100 W. First Street, downtown.

5. Musical hotel fun house

On the final night of the festival, experimental music collective Society for the Activation of Social Space Through Art and Soundcalls (SASSAS) will create a museum called the Welcome Inn Time Machine. The rooms of a homely motel in Eagle Rock will be transformed into what SASSAS curator Cindy Bernard calls “galaxies of work” — spaces that visually and sonically evoke the landmark music of the PST era. You might catch an all-star fusion combo ripping up a late-’50s Ornette Coleman musical score. Wander into another room to subject yourself to the laborious detuning and screeching of a violin, like a performance from conceptual artist Bruce Nauman in 1969. Or call a number to hear Robert Wilhite, locked in a room on the other side of the motel, performing a telephone concert written in 1975.

PST’s festival celebrates 40 years of art vanishing without a trace, and what better way to capture that than in an ephemeral hotel fun house? As Bernard notes, “There’s all kinds of one-night things that happen in hotels all the time.” SASSAS’s Welcome Inn Time Machine, January 29, Welcome Inn, 1840 Colorado Boulevard, Eagle Rock.

For more events and information, visit pacificstandardtimefestival.org.
 

 
— Sam Bloch, LA Weekly

Image: The Pomona College football team scrimmaged in a campus ballroom for artist John White’s 1971 performance Preparation F, being re-created this month.