Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

42
Les Prairies's artists
LUIS CAMNITZER
Two Parallel Lines, 1976. Collection 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz.
Photography : Frac Lorraine.
DUNCAN CAMPBELL
Duncan Campbell maintains that documentary is
a fictional form and he interrogates the nature of
it in works in which archives and old images are
reformulated within narratives to show how much of
what they contain is imagined. One of Campbell's
specialities is portraits of emblematic characters from
20th century history. Make it new John (2009) is the
story of John DeLorean and his invention, the DeLorean
DMC-12, a sports car. DeLorean was a talented engineer
and a vice-president of General Motors, which he left
in 1973 in order to start his own company. He received
subsidies from the British government to build a factory
at Dunmurry in the suburbs of Belfast. Being located
on the front line between Catholics and Protestants, it
was hoped that the factory would help reduce social
and political conflict by providing work for members
of both communities. But the DeLorean was not much
of a success and, almost immediately, John DeLorean
ran into financial problems. The factory, which had
a workforce of two thousand, closed in 1982, having
produced no more than nine thousand cars. Ironically
enough, the car became a symbol of the American myth
and achieved iconic status in the film trilogy Back to
the Future.
M. C. tr. J.H.
Born in 1972 in Dublin (Ireland), lives and works in
Glasgow (Scotland).
Two horizontal, parallel lines on a wall. These poetic
cum philosophical fragments, which are both footnotes
and the formalization of ideas at work, evoke by turn
the horizon, a frontier, exclusion, a trajectory and also
flatness and death. Two lines, parallel in space but also
in their essence, lines that will never meet – words and
things. An irreducible distance between the visual and
the discursive, between the artwork and discourse about
it. This hybrid piece reflects all the singularity of the
Uruguayan born, US immigrant artist, Luis Camnitzer.
There is a fundamental tension between the poetic and
the conceptual. And yet, this piece is not folded in on itself
with purely artistic concerns; it is far more open to the
world at large. Beyond its subtle interrogation of matters
of representation, there are, as always with Camnitzer,
hidden and profound signs to be unearthed about the
links between art and politics. The work displays certain
clandestine, autobiographical motifs such as frontiers,
cross-cultures, and imprisonment. The straight line is by
nature an inevitable separation, a shape from which there
is no escape. The work has particular resonance in the life
of this artist who has long been an exile against his will
in the United States, and someone very affected by the
dictatorships of the 1970s.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1939 in Lübeck (Germany), lives and works in
New-York (United States).
Make it new John, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Photography : Seamus Harahan.