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FROM HERE ON The manifesto is written by the five curators of the exhibition: Clément Chéroux, curator in the Cabinet de la Photographie, Centre Pompidou. Lives and works in Paris. Joan Fontcuberta, artist. Lives and works in Barcelona. Erik Kessels, founding member and artistic director of KesselsKramer. Lives and works in Amsterdam. Martin Parr, photographer of the Magnum agency. Lives and works in Bristol. Joachim Schmid, artist. Lives and works in Berlin. Prints by Picto and Janvier, Paris. Framing by Circad, Paris, Cadre en Seine, Rouen and Plasticollage, Paris, L’image collée, Paris. Exposition réalisée avec le soutien de l’ambassade des Pays-Bas en France et de la Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam. Exposition présentée à l’Atelier de Mécanique, Parc des Ateliers. TIME’S GOLD My car’s called Picasso A name that people getting born around the world just now are more likely to hear for the first time in connection with a car rather than one of the twentieth century’s most influential painters. Here we have a sign of the porousness of today’s boundaries between art and popular culture, itself a reflection of the High / Low yoyo that’s been going up and down for near on a century now. Soon we’ll be celebrating the hundredth birthday of Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade, since which the concept of taking some everyday consumer product and importing it into art has been all the rage. Most of the historical avant-garde movements—Dada, Surrealism, Pop, the Situationist International, the Picture Generation and Postmodernism—delved extensively into the visual resources of appropriation, to the point where it’s now become a medium in its own right. These days artists resort to appropriation the way their quattrocento predecessors did to the camera obscura, or a Sunday painter does to watercolour. Everybody’s on the bandwagon: the artist currently in the spotlight, the art student, the lady next door, my cousin—right down to the art directors of the big car companies. All mod cons—and images too The growth of the Internet and the proliferation of sites for searching out and/or sharing images online—Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Google Images, eBay, to name only the best-known—now mean a plethora of visual resources that was inconceivable as little as ten years ago: a phenomenon comparable to the advent of running water and gas in big cities in the nineteenth century. We all know just how thoroughly those amenities altered people’s way of life in terms of everyday comfort and hygiene—and now, right in our own homes, we have an image-tap that’s refashioning our visual habits just as radically. In the course of art history, periods when image accessibility has been boosted by technological innovation have always been rich in major visual advances: improved photomechanical printing techniques and the subsequent press boom of the 1910s-1920s, for instance, paved the way for photomontage. Similar upheavals in the art field accompanied the rise of engraving as a popular medium in the nineteenth century, the arrival of TV in the 1950s—and the coming of the Internet today. Digital appropriationism Across-the-board appropriation on the one hand plus hyper-accessibility of images on the other: a pairing that would prove particularly fertile and stimulating for the art field. Beginning with the first years of the new millennium —Google Images launched in 2001, Google Maps in 2004 and Flickr the same year—artists jumped at the new technologies, and since then more and more of them have been taking advantage of the wealth of opportunities offered by the Internet. Gleefully appropriating their online finds, they edit, adapt, displace, add and subtract. What artists used to look for in nature, in urban flâneries, in leafing through magazines and rummaging in flea markets, they now find on the Internet, that new wellspring of the vernacular and inexhaustible fount of ideas and wonders. For an ecology of images This is hardly the kind of phenomenon to be understood via the sole and unique filter of its newness, given that the works emerging from digital appropriation practices are not fundamentally new in the way Modernism perceived the term: originality and revolution are not their goals, but they still take the thinking of the last few decades a lot further. What they are after is intensity: by radicalising artistic stances they are beginning to make the boundaries shift. To take one example, artists in this category are part of a significant trend towards the demythologising of the artistic making that began with the early twentieth century, opting more for a celebration of choosing. Rather than adding images to images, they are all for recycling what already exists, for applying a kind of ecology of images. This makes the creative process something much more playful, with an accent on the unexpected, the serendipitous and the inadvertently poetic. And another thing these artists share is an urge to drive home the obsoleteness of criteria which were once the crucial factors in determining what was art and what wasn’t. 16
The simulated suicide of the author What the artists on show in this exhibition also have in common is an upgrading of the amateur at the expense of the auteur. Their hero is no longer the technician, the expert or the professional armed with their specific savoir-faire, expertise or métier and in quest of a certain quality, but much more the amateur or collector, the impassioned practitioner of a hobby. At issue here is no longer the ‘death of the author’ proclaimed by Roland Barthes in 1968, but his simulated suicide. For the appropriationist working in the totally digital age, the point is no longer to deny his status as author, but rather to play-act or feign his own death in the full knowledge that he’s not fooling anybody. Clearly, then, the issue is one not of newness, but of intensity. The small change of art The digital appropriationism surge that this exhibition only begins to map—and then gauchely—tells us one vital thing: we are sitting on veins of images, mother lodes that have been accumulating for almost two hundred years and are now expanding exponentially. Like the different resources that are a natural part of our planet’s composition, this form of energy embraces both the fossil and the renewable. It is also an extraordinary form of wealth. You only have to dig a little and sift gently for the water of the stream to bring the first nuggets to light. And the gold rush has already begun. On his grave in Batignolles cemetery in Paris André Breton’s epitaph reads, Je cherche l’or du temps: ‘I seek time’s gold.’ Breton was one of the first to realise that as an inexhaustible source of marvels, analog images constitute our greatest asset. His friend Paul Éluard, that passionate collector of photographic postcards, said that his finds were ‘at best the small change of art’, but that they ‘sometimes conveyed the idea of gold’. The artists making the most of digital technology resources in recent years have been working this vein. And working as trailblazers too, pointing us down the path to riches. Clément Chéroux CLÉMENT CHÉROUX Born in 1970. Lives and works in Paris. Clément Chéroux is a curator at the Pompidou Centre / Musée National d’Art Moderne. A historian of photography with a doctorate in art history, graduated from the École Nationale de Photographie d’Arles, he is the editor of the journal Études Photographiques. He has published several books: L’Expérience photographique d’August Strindberg (Actes Sud, 1994); Fautographie : petite histoire de l’erreur photographique (Yellow Now, 2003); Henri Cartier-Bresson : le tir photographique (Gallimard, 2008); and Diplopie : l’image photographique à l’ère des médias globalisés: essai sur le 11 septembre 2001 (Le Point du Jour, 2009). He also curated a number of exhibitions: Mémoire des camps : Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis, 1933-1999 (2001); Le Troisième œil : La Photographie et l’occulte (2004); La Subversion des images: surréalisme, photographie, film (2009); Shoot! Existential photography (<strong>Rencontres</strong> d’Arles, 2010). JOAN FONTCUBERTA Born in 1955 in Barcelona. Lives and works in Barcelona. With nearly four decades of prolific dedication to photography, Joan Fontcuberta has developed both artistic and theoretical work which focuses on the conflicts between nature, technology, photography and truth. He has done solo shows at MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and Valencia IVAM among others. He has been guest lecturer in several international universities and currently is professor at the School of Communication at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. His last books include Through the looking glass, La Oficina de Ediciones, Madrid; Indistinct Photographs, Edition Gustavo Gili, Barcelona; and Pandora’s box, Actes Sud, Arles. Artistic director of the <strong>Rencontres</strong> d’Arles in 1996, he was exhibited in 2005 and 2009 for the projects Miracles and co and Blow up Blow up. www.fontcuberta.com ERIK KESSELS Born in 1966. Lives and works in Amsterdam. Erik Kessels is a founding partner and creative director of KesselsKramer, an independent international communications agency located in Amsterdam. He works and has worked for national and international clients such as Nike, Diesel, J&B Whisky, Oxfam, Ben, Vitra and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. He has won numerous international awards. KesselsKramer comprises thirty-eight people of eight different nationalities and has been in operation since 1996. It believes in finding new ways for brands to tell stories using whatever media is most 17
Page 2 and 3: 42 ND EDITION Opening days: July 4
Page 4 and 5: PROFUSION, PASSION, PERDURANCE Jean
Page 6 and 7: So far I’ve been speaking on a sa
Page 8 and 9: And also, the friends of Roger Thé
Page 10 and 11: EDITORIAL / p. 7 PROFUSION, PASSION
Page 12 and 13: EXHIBITIONS
Page 14: his ‘desire to change the world
Page 19 and 20: REPUBLIC THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION PHO
Page 21 and 22: toys of his massive collection of m
Page 23 and 24: INAKI BONILLAS Born in 1981 in Mexi
Page 25 and 26: ROBERT CAPA Born in 1913 in Budapes
Page 27 and 28: Jacques Prévert. Three years later
Page 29 and 30: wide-ranging, drawing on the precis
Page 31 and 32: up by the Internet, the photographs
Page 33 and 34: The works on show explore the darke
Page 35 and 36: RUINS (SEASON 1) The first photogra
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Page 39 and 40: EDUCATION ÉCOLE NATIONALE SUPÉRIE
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Page 45 and 46: a specific set of criteria, as was
Page 47 and 48: THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES PRIZEGIVIN
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Page 51 and 52: The next year he was awarded ‘Men
Page 53 and 54: AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, THE RIGHT TO
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Page 57 and 58: 4 July - 18 September OPEN AIR GALL
Page 59 and 60: INFORMATION
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AN ONGOING BATTLE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY I
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BMW, PARTNERING EVERY KIND OF PHOTO
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ARTE PHOTOGRAPHS FASHION Arte, the
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THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES ON LCI INT
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Convinced of the need to promote di
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RENCONTRES D’ARLES BOARD OF DIREC
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