Arles Diary, part 3
Day three of the Rencontres d'Arles: the photobook as catalog, the celebrity-cult shows, the standouts (Cannibal Image, CTRL), and the tricksters at the Fondation van Gogh.
The natural form of the photobook is the catalog.
There does not seem to be a lot of curation going on here.
Park Chan-wook is an excellent director and a mediocre photographer. So many shows circulate around some kind of celebrity cult: Charlotte Gainsbourg, who I love as an actress, eventually picked up a camera: She photographed her dad and ashtrays full of cigarette butts: There is no smoking allowed in here (which is by itself a kind of irony), but you still think you can smell the reek of cigarettes. There is not much else to that. Lara Thabet & Yasmine Chemali are high on concept, but once you have read through the concept there is only decorative arts left...
CTRL and Cannibal Image are notable outliers here: While there seems to be not so much new in CTRL's "New functions of images", at least they are trying to have a concept along which they string their images, an idea that the size of an image has a function in an exhibition. Cannibal Image is more interesting: Group images that use the body as some kind of raw material the image can then devour and de-structure into something else. The lingering image-objects of Eli Craven, the body and its abjections of Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen and do yourself a favor to sit some time in front of Aapo Huhta's "Gravity": I welcome this curatorial break and not walling off his video behind a curtain, but making it part of the circle of images.
And then there is much curating being structured on the idea to cram a lot of images into a small space. I find myself having a hard time with this, I often cannot differentiate if I am bored by the hanging or just bored. Alex Webb has a very obvious appeal and the non-descript hanging doesn't obfuscate this very well.
The best about «Nos rêves lointains» (Distant Dreams) is being located at the backside of the Monoprix and you have to walk through the whole supermarket to get to the picture: That gesture alone could have been the setting for a different take on images. Alas, this is a more or less arbitrary selection of pictures from the collection photographique de la Fnac, garnished with some non-descript, non-memorable poetry that groups images under the very forgiving umbrella of fernweh & dreams. Some great pictures though, again big names like Koudelka and Sergio Larrain that have to pull the weight for this one.
The most memorable exhibition though was not even part of the Rencontres: "Tricksters" in the Fondation van Gogh brought together images and videos grouped around a single painting by van Gogh (a skeleton smoking a cigarette) that brings together artists who prank art, make fun of the artworld and themselves, forcibly try to remove themselves from the rituals of the gallery. Not everything works, but there are so many great things in here from Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman, Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley and others, brought together by a curator who actually cared about instilling some conversation between canvases and screens...
