Study at ENSAPC

« BECOME THE MEDIA » – HISTOIRES DE L’EXPOSITION

Gallien Dejean
Guests: Sandra Alvaro de Toledo, Centre Simone de Beauvoir, + mystery guest 

In the modernist tradition, every medium – starting with painting- has to be self-referential in order to reach its essence. In this context, the curatorial medium, as embodied in exhibition, is impure because it is composite and its supports are multiple. It is therefore to guarantee the purity of its exhibitions that modernism has created the aseptic environment of the “white cube”. In opposition to this concept, media theory enables us to consider the curatorial platform as the ultimate medium because its intrinsic purpose is diffusion.

In this workshop, we will study this very function of diffusion by treating, on the one hand, the curator’s role through a critical analysis of their status. On the other hand, we will observe, through a number of historical and contemporary examples, how artists have themselves seized this curatorial function in its broadest sense (exhibitions, magazines, publishing houses, bookshops, tv channels, etc…) in order to reclaim and reinvent essential prerogatives (such as diffusion, theory and economics) often taken away from them.

CHAMPS DE FORCE

Luc Lang

“Champs de forces” (“force fields”) is a wording used by Deleuze that I am reclaiming for myself to evoke the meeting by magnetization or opposition of all the media (literature, philosophy, cinema, fine arts, video, performance) that are concerned with a specific problematic; each medium responding to it in its own manner, its own poetic and technique, its tools and its points of view linked precisely to its techniques and processes. Enough to create a force field, a magnetization field, within which every media interact, polemicize together on a same subject. We have already reflected on what is an image and its nature according to the medium that produces it. In 2020, it was a reflection on human gender; in 2021 on the nature of the art object and that of the artist’s work in relation to everyday items and the organisation of work as proposed in contemporary companies. In 2023, in the light of Gunther Anders’ essential reflection on human obsolescence (on the destruction of life in the third industrial revolution era), and Byung-Chul Han’s reflection on the end of things, we worked on the object and the loss of its substance (de-substantialising) in our contemporary world. Indeed, what are the artistic proposals and what are the pragmatics induced by the works offered by a number of artists of the second half of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st century to resist this destruction? In 2024, we take up the issue of the object again, its dematerialisation and gradual disappearance, in favour of access to functionalities and applications, adding the idea of the body, not just in the inanimate of materials, but in the living, particularly the human body, in an oscillation between the body-object and the object-body.

FACE A FACE

Luc Lang

Too often, students have an abstract relationship with the arts via the electrically generated images on their screens. The project is to bring them face to face with the unique physical reality of the works presented at Beaubourg. The idea is to literally come face to face with the work, on a real scale, and to pay special attention to it head on, rather than coming to the museum to check that the work matches the photograph as if it were the original electric image… Each student is asked to select one or more works and present them to the whole group, building up their critique of the body of work. They may pick works because they find them important, interesting or powerful, or because they find them weak or uninteresting. The aim is to develop a personal point of view on the work that is both well-argued and sensitive.

IMAGINAIRES POLITIQUES

Marielle Chabal
In partnership with the DOC

Our relationship with the world is affected by the narratives projected into our realities, narratives about the history of humanity that shape our lives. Narratives – all narratives – as much in their fantasising and their truths as in their structures, are powerful decentring machines. They can question, reveal or invent other possibilities of existence, and in so doing, these stories help to construct the ways in which we inhabit the world. Since reality is a construct, fiction is by no means fictitious: it maps out the paths we can take and sketches out the possibilities of our shared futures. This seminar covers dimensions that are both formal and political. We will be asking which narratives we need today to infuse our times, and how to tell them. We will invent everything we can and assert the need to implement transformative narratives that conjure up and make possible desirable changes, enviable futures that we will formalise to make them conceivable.

MANIFESTES LES ÉCRITS D’ARTISTES ?

Carole Boulbès

Artists’ writings are at the crossroads of several disciplines: literature, visual arts, art history, art sociology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics. It’s this particular combination that makes them such unusual bodies of work, difficult to grasp but full of lessons to be learned. From Raoul Hausmann to Andrea Fraser, via Asger Jorn and Krzysztof Wodiczko, the corpus of texts to be discovered unfolds almost endlessly… Artists’ writings either say a great deal about their practice or they say nothing at all. Some give lectures and interviews, others write notes in the greatest secrecy. Some prefer brief formulas such as poems, political slogans or aphorisms to self-analysis. Artists’ writings are increasingly becoming exhibition objects or film synopses. This year, the focus will be on 20^th century artistic manifestos, expressions of protest and more recent artists’ writings that deal specifically with economics.

ONE + ONE (ÉLOGE DU PARTAGE, DE L’ÉCHANGE ET DE LA TRANSMISSION)

Boris Achour

This course is played by two teachers and a number of students. Although proposed by Boris Achour, this game can be played without him but be led by two other teachers. The course lasts between two and three hours, or even longer depending on the energy and commitment of the participants. Teacher A introduces the students to a work they particularly like (film, text, sound, artwork, etc.) through a short introduction designed to put it into context. Teacher B then does the same with another work of their choice. As the two teachers have not been informed beforehand of the works selected, each discovers the other’s work at the same time as the students. Taking as their starting point the works presented, their creative contexts, their authors or any other parameter deemed relevant, the two teachers will engage in a discussion combining analysis, commentary, criticism, references, digressions, ramblings and odd tangents. Student participation is possible but not compulsory.

PROXIMITÉ, IDENTITÉ, DIFFÉRENCE (POUR PRATIQUER LE MOUVEMENT ET SORTIR)

Claudia Triozzi

In collaboration with Aware, we will draw inspiration from and share readings by artists engaged in feminist and gender performance and activism. We will reinterpret, reactivate and rethink a REFLECTION between women and art, noting its historical, political and gender implications. In this way, we are reactivating archives to reveal the different moments in women’s emancipation through performance, writing and the visual arts. Again, rethinking the integration of women artists into institutional dynamics. Rethinking the immediate, the ‘micro-stories’, the everyday, the intimate to reaffirm what constitutes a body: PROXIMITY, IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE. To do this, we’re going to revisit the autobiographies of women artists and choose different re-readings of the works. We will be present at the Aware venue to share in-situ workshops. A restitution -presentation of the work produced over the course of the year is planned for May.

SÉMINAIRE DE MÉTHODOLOGIE

François Aubart, Gallien Déjean, Nadine Le Rigoleur, Laure Limongi

The methodology seminar is designed for 3rd year students to initiate, extend and enrich a cross-disciplinary reflection on the media and tools favoured by each student, focusing on methodological questions with a view to the dissertation to be produced in 4th year. Rather than understanding methodology as a set of rules to be applied at all times and in all places, the intention will be to grasp it as a set of tools to be invented, criticised and/or diverted, according to the circumstances of production and thought, just as the method will be understood as the aim of artistic work and/or research itself.

SÉMINAIRE DE PROFESSIONNALISATION

Camille Kingué

The aim of the professional development seminar is to provide an overview of the various people involved in the field of contemporary art, from gallerists to art critics and curators. The professionalisation seminar will link them with the school’s students. The latter will be able to understand the environment in which each of these actors operates.

THÉORIE ESTHÉTIQUE ET CONSÉQUENCES PRATIQUES – ATELIER DE LECTURE

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie

This course will take the form of a group workshop of readings and discussions of texts on art and image theory. Each session will consist of a presentation of a text by one or more students, followed by a discussion of the theoretical, political and historical implications and the consequences that you may draw from them for your practice. This course therefore requires regular attendance and a willingness to take part in a group discussion.

TRANSFORMER LE MONDE, CHANGER LA VIE

Carole Boulbès
Alejandra Riera
Guests : Stéphanie Jamet, art historian and Julien Tibéri, artist

« “Transform the world,” said Marx; “change life,” said Rimbaud. These two watchwords are one for us. André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme, Speech to the Writers’ Congress, 1935.

Transforming the world and changing life: these imperatives are at the heart of the catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition that opened in Paris in September 2024. Rimbaud’s poetry is echoed in the themes of the monster, the forest and the night. Political activism is addressed through anti-colonialism, ‘Black Surrealism’ and a critical stance towards modern consumerism. Why 2024? We’ll be commemorating the hundredth anniversary of André Breton’s First Manifesto, the publication of Louis Aragon’s Une Vague de rêves and the launch of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste. In a collaborative class with art historian Stéphanie Jamet and guest artists, we invite participants to discuss a number of questions: what is the place of poetry today? Can art be politically engaged? Can exhibitions be? Do the political positions of Surrealism still have an impact? What was the place of women in this movement? What about the Surrealist revolution on a global scale?