Qui a dit que l’art contemporain n’avait pas de public ? La création de l’Association des Amis du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne en septembre 1996 prouve le contraire. Depuis cette date, les adhérents accompagnent de leur enthousiasme indéfectible les propositions qui sont faites au public, que le FRAC contribue à émouvoir, informer et former dans le champ toujours effervescent de l’art contemporain.

En 2006 l’Association des Amis fête le début d’une nouvelle décennie et initie une année d’Œuvres Nomades. Pour une soirée et entourés du cercle de leurs amis privilégiés, les membres de l’Association qui le souhaitent peuvent ainsi inviter une ou plusieurs œuvres de la collection du FRAC dans le lieu de leur choix : domicile, lieu professionnel, jardin ou autres décors surprenants... Ces moments festifs de rencontres et de découvertes ont alors suscité un dialogue nouveau et libéré autour des œuvres.

François Matton, artiste invité par l’Association, a accompagné cette série de soirées en apportant son point de vue artistique et décalé. Avec l’exposition De pièces en pièces, chroniques sur des Œuvres Nomades, il nous en donne aujourd’hui un compte-rendu personnel et volontairement subjectif. Ses dessins envahissent les murs du FRAC et instaurent un dialogue inédit avec les œuvres de la collection. A travers la fragilité de son trait et de son écriture, une réflexion sur le nomadisme dans l’art se mêle au récit de cette année de rencontres, dérivant du sérieux d’une discussion de passionnés à l’anecdote légère d’une fête entre amis!

Accompagnant François Matton dans cette exposition, les membres de l’Association en produisent la documentation, simple et érudite, témoignage de dix années de pédagogie douce et rigoureuse auprès de néophytes, d’amateurs éclairés et de collectionneurs dont le cercle convivial s’élargit, stimulé par la curiosité vive de chacun. Avec cette exposition l’Association donne rendez-vous à ses Amis et à ceux qui ne le sont pas encore...


Un livre de François Matton regroupant les dessins réalisés durant cette année d’Oeuvres Nomades paraîtra au mois de mars 2007 aux éditions P.O.L.

Chaque soirée Œuvres Nomades a également donné lieu à une pièce sonore réalisée par Radio Primitive, qui seront prochainement diffusées sur ses ondes (92.4 FM).

FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents états seconds, an exhibition of the recent works of artist and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. This project is produced in partnership with the musical creation studio Césaré.

Though Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has been exhibiting his works exclusively in contemporary art milieus for the past decade, he nevertheless considers himself first and foremost as a musician. From 1985 to 1994, he worked as the composer for playwright and director Pascal Rambert’s company, “Side One Posthume Théâtre”. He then decided to give his music independent form. Both open, yet contingent, his compositions are of an immersive, permanent nature. They are mostly produced live, and are generally liberated from the traditional notion of a musical discourse, inscribed within a fixed period of time and impervious to external events. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot maintains that his work as a composer consists of harmonizing the means of presenting his musical works with their content. He does so by creating a situation, both between the works themselves and in relation to a given place, favoring the listening experience. This is necessarily achieved through organization of the physical space. Auditory perception differs discernibly according to the position of the body, whether seated, reclining, or walking, and according to how the point of view is solicited. Artists sometimes remind us just how creation, always timeless, is free from preconceptions, established structures, and institutions separating the artistic disciplines.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has based his compositional method upon the act of listening, which he qualifies as distracted, and which he endeavors to achieve in his works. This disposition is not so much one of the listener’s being inattentive, but of being freed instead from the autocratic necessity of having to be silent, to be in place from beginning to end, and having to wait for the crescendo con espressione. The visitor can instead leave off or take up listening again according to will, to establish his presence while wandering within the perceptible perimeter and volume of the work, without this resulting in the least significant loss. In this sense, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works proceed from a sculptural unfolding of what can be qualified as, for want of a better word, installation.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot likes to play upon the disjunction or discontinuity of sources: video is treated as an audio signal; harmonicas are mounted on the mouths of a battalion of vacuum cleaners; a microphone is suspended from a ball. The production of sound is rendered visible through a technical system which, before our eyes, materializes the principle of composition, freeing up the audience from questions relating to “narrative” determination and provenance of the music, as though the musical score were entirely contained in the non-fortuitous encounter between the objects making up the installation. The sounds of our environment, the sonorous facts resulting from purely mundane actions are spontaneously produced by the mechanisms in which movement captivates the view. The tapping rhythm of a bird’s beak in a feeder, the sound of a car passing or of a chair scraping as it is moved, the clicking of a radiator in a museum or the clanging of intertwining metal hangers, a bowl of porcelain, the familiar sounds of breakfast. The fact of showing the concrete how, from what and from where the music originates, not only encourages the hearing of music, but also the openness to the experience of it. This work achieves above all an incredible trueness in its balance between the visible and the audible, in its accommodation of architecture, the environment, and the presence of visitors, who, momentarily, become an integral part of the work.

Following upon the FRAC inaugurated artist residencies of Yan Pei-Ming in 2003, and Franz Ackermann in 2005, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot will reside in Rheims on several different occasions over the summer of 2006. Several installations will be presented, in conjunction with the “Flâneries Musicales de Reims”, in the rooms at the Collège / Frac Champagne-Ardenne, but also in the chapel at the entry of the old Collège des Jésuites, as well as in the splendid Gallo-Roman underground site of the Cryptoportique, place du Forum.

Among the new works to be produced for this monographic exhibition is index, an installation for an acoustic Disklavier piano, powered by a computerized network of keyboards. The project is based on the idea that all text, both potentially and literally, harbors music. It is noteworthy that in French, Italian and Spanish, the words naming music (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti) come from the first syllables of a medieval religious hymn. In English and German, the first letters of the alphabet are used to designate the notes. During the exhibition, therefore, the administrative activity of the FRAC will be spontaneously recycled in a musical composition. In addition, a new version of the installation, from here to ear, for birds and electric guitars will also be presented.

A studio set up in the very center of the exhibition will allow the artist to develop his works-in-progress. These include ballon (provisional title), in which a cordless microphone, hung from a helium-inflated balloon, floats and moves among eight speakers and four fans, thereby generating a feedback effect. This stridence is then harnessed through electronic and spatial manipulation to become music. Flamme (provisional title) is another research project. Here, part of a candle flame vacillates from the draft coming from the covering of a loudspeaker, which is itself playing the sound of the image being filmed by a nearby video camera.

The installation, untitled (series 4), will be presented in the semi-darkness of the Cryptoportique. This work was instrumental in the discovery of the work of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, as much in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, as at the capcMusée de Bordeaux. The version featured in this exhibition belongs to the collection of the FRAC Lorraine. It consists of a trio of blue, inflatable pools filled with porcelain bowls, accompanied by white chairs. The water is churned and heated at 30°C. This naturally amplifies the resonance of the white bowls and stemware, which float on the surface, gently bumping into each other, and filling the space with a music as bewitching as that of a Balinese gamelan concert.

In conjunction with the états seconds exhibition, a book offering a comprehensive survey of his artistic activity, will be published in partnership with the Arles publisher Analogues.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was born in Nice in 1961. He currently lives in Sète.

From March 3rd to May 7th 2006, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first monographic exhibition in France of the work of South African artist Robin Rhode. During the course of his residence in Reims between November 2005 and February 2006, he has created works marking an important and original stage in his development. He will present an ensemble of his films, videos and photographic series produced since 2000. He will also present « The Storyteller », a work created especially for this exhibition.

Robin Rhode works on the walls of the cities he explores, creating mini-narratives in which he himself often figures. He uses white chalk, charcoal, watercolor, industrial black paint or even, with the help of bricks, objects around which he develops a pantomime heavily imbued with street culture. His drawings are rapidly executed, reducing the objects - a phone booth, a jazz band, a skate-board - to their most essential, most elementary forms. Music is also a preponderant element in the very immediate universe he describes.

Rhode’s language derives from his own cultural experiences. Though ostensibly he doesn’t lay claim to them, they nonetheless build the codes of a personal mythology that is eminently sensitive and poetic. In this way, he recounts a formative experience in his work, an initiation rite of South African schoolchildren, which he assimilated as a form of artistic education. The tallest student drew on toilet walls, depicting everyday objects (a candle) or objects of consumer desire ( a bicycle), with which the new students had to interact, miming their usage.

The characters that he stages are evocations of strange attempts at living, like so many allegories of the human condition. He pulls an anchor from out of the water, awkwardly catches objects falling from the sky, dismantles a truck by effacing, one by one, the lines of its contours, shakes a flag made of bricks, takes shelter under black rain, cultivates plants intended to form his own deathbed, or gathers tree branches to then draw them tight like the strings of an instrument. Robin Rhode’s work belies an acute, nuanced awareness of the ambivalence of the contemporary world, wherein each tries to negotiate a place for themselves, if only a fragile one. While he seems to warn us of the illusion of systems of representation in a sweetly melancholic tone, tinged with irony and the burlesque, he does so only to remind us of the power of the imagination as both vector of resistance and a condition for taking action. The object is a sign which, freed from its utilitarian dimension, crystallizes another negotiation that links us to desire. All of Robin Rhode’s work subtly handles this complex shift, that of orienting us towards desire, towards the very distance separating us, and which paradoxically drives our capacity to act in the world.

Oeuvres de Liliana Bassarab, Isabelle Cornaro, Adriana Garcia Galan, Benoît Maire, Mihnea Mircan, Wagner Morales, Emilie Pitoiset, Koki Tanaka, Adam Vackar.

En partenariat avec le Pavillon, Laboratoire de recherches artistiques du Palais de Tokyo, Site de création contemporaine, Paris.

Cette exposition, dont le titre facétieux détourne un tube pop fameux, fait le constat d’une résurgence d’œuvres sonores dans la création plastique actuelle. Essentiellement composée d’œuvres récemment acquises par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, l’exposition interroge les nouvelles règles de composition et les nouveaux modes de création aussi bien dans le domaine musical que dans celui de l’art contemporain.

Cette rencontre entre la musique et les arts visuels résulte souvent d’une réflexion sur la notion même d’objet d’art mais également sur les limites des institutions auxquelles ceux-ci sont destinés. Musées ou salles de concert conditionnent des formes d’art qui n’entendent pas rester figées. Ainsi, des musiciens tels que Céleste Boursier-Mougenot ou Carsten Nicolaï, sans jamais se départir de leurs propres recherches musicales investissent de façon volontaire et naturelle des lieux d’exposition.

De grands artistes mènent également aujourd’hui une carrière de musicien : Par exemple, Christian Marclay, dont on verra bientôt un important projet autour de la collection du Musée de la Musique à Paris et qui dans une œuvre acquise cette année par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, conjugue le reportage photo dans la lignée des graffitis de Brassaï, avec l’ « interdétermination » et l’ouverture musicale que John Cage a apporté à la création contemporaine. C’est également le cas du jeune artiste Davide Balula dont le travail remarquablement silencieux et poétique n’en est pas moins le fruit des recherches musicales qu’il mène en parallèle.

Par ailleurs, d’autres artistes font des propositions qui questionnent de façon radicale et nouvelle la sculpture ou l’installation en tirant un parti inattendu des théories musicales les plus récentes. Ceal Floyer propose ainsi un dialogue entre installation sculpturale et technique du déphasage telle que Steve Reich a pu la définir et la développer.

Enfin, la musique est fortement liée à des contextes sociaux et culturels qui en font souvent la force. Caecilia Tripp dans sa relecture d’un texte de Gertrude Stein remet ainsi en perspective la créolisation de la culture afro-américaine au travers du rythme de la parole mais aussi de la musique hip-hop. Plus près de nous Danica Dakic dans un camp de réfugiés Roms au Kosovo utilise la musique comme un moteur de libération et de cristallisation des zones sombres de l’Histoire récente de l’Europe.

Sur une proposition de Laurence Hazout Dreyfus, à partir du 12 janvier, une dizaine d’artistes du Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo, formation post-diplôme internationale, présenteront au FRAC des œuvres inspirées de l’exposition et remettront en perspective les interrogations nées de ce dialogue entre arts plastiques et musique. Ce sera également l’occasion d’une nouvelle présence de jeunes artistes internationaux en Champagne-Ardenne.