Installation view, UFO – NAUT JK. (Julius Koller) Orchestrated by Rirkrit Tiravanija at Galerie Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2012. Photo copyright Michel Zabe?, 2012, Courtesy of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris et Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2012
At the Centre Pompidou, the sixth edition of the “Nouveau Festival” is more interdisciplinary than ever. This event, entitled “Air De Jeu” is based on a French play of words: “air”, “ère” (era), “aire” (area) , while the performers aalliccelleessccaannnnee&s- soonniiaaddeerrzzyyppoollsskkii, also added “hair” to the pun. The title also means “playground”, “looking like a game” or “air of the games”, and references Marcel Duchamp’s piece “Air de Paris”. This year, the “Nouveau Festival” is entirely dedicated to the sphere of the games in the arts, offering a moment for everyone to play, alongside an excellent curatorial roster.
Four exhibitions have been programmed, all of them with a strong relationship with popular culture. Only one, “The Beauty Of The Game”, covers the whole three-month-long festival period, and has been curated by the museum’s curator Michel Gauthier with the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux and the young artist Julien Prévieux. In total, the event presents a mixture of 150 artists from different backgrounds, from a selection of young graduates from fine art schools, to noted artists such as Dan Rees, Jonathan Monk and Simon Starling, Evariste Richer and Zhana Ivanova.
“The Beauty Of The Game” first introduces the public to a gallery dedicated to the echoes in contemporary arts of the famous poem “Un coup de dé jamais n’abolira le hasard” by Mallarmé. For example, “L’avalance de dé” by Evariste Richer, and the performance of Esther Ferrer with a May 1968 cobblestone thrown like a die, are two extraordinary pieces. The visitors continue the section curated by Julien Prévieux, a humorous archive of technical bugs in video games – mostly from the 1990s. Further into the gallery, an entire gallery shows replicas of games invented by the group Fluxus as games to play with, for instance, the white chess game, “Play By Trust” by Yoko Ono and the poetic game with two bicycle wheels by Robert Filliou, “Movie Re-Invented-Hommage à Méliès”.
Zhana Ivanova, Now we do it for real, 2011. Copyright Zhana Ivanova / Hans Bryssink
A platform inspired by Tangram has been set up by artist Anna Barham to host performances. There are no winners in most of the games presented in the whole show. And as Julien Prévieux says: “let’s play the game!”.
The first section of the three other exhibitions was inaugurated in April. This exhibition deals with the art of the stand-up with a selection of one-person shows, or other art pieces, for example by Jan Bas Ader or Vito Acconci, and dance films extracts, presenting also the brilliant dancer Eugénie Rebetez.
The backdrop is what you would expect for stand-up: a simple microphone and a spotlight disc of red New York bricks. The show of Bettina Atala, and the performance of the artists Esteban, Benoît Forgeat and the comic Nora Hamzaoui were hilarious, questioning the rules of the stand up, comic injunction and self mockery, that can be also seen in contemporary art pieces and the relationship between popular culture and the arts.
Michel Aubry, “La Roulette francaise”, 1992. Collection FRAC des Pays de Loire, copyright Michel Aubry
The second exhibition, opening at the end of May, deals with dance. It questions the play, or game, in choreographies, with the meaning of “events”and the “tasks” of postmorden dance. It also shows the relationship between dance and visual artists, such as Ulla von Brandenburg, Valérie Belin, or Hélène Delprat. Chloé Quenom conceived the scenography with seven sculptural elements that can be used as furniture. Folkloric dances and role-plays were also essential in this exhibition.
From mid-June, the last and third exhibition returns to the visual arts and deals with the social and political limits of the games. For example, in the film “There is nothing there”, Katerina Seda asked the inhabitants of a Czech village to synchronise their actions during the day, so that they sweep or they cook at the same time. Similarly, the video “Players” by Pilvi Takala is set in a community of poker players in Bangkok whose everyday actions depend upon the result of various games. Meanwhile, “Justified Beliefs” by Christian Falsnaes offers the audience five sets of headphones. Only two of them are used by performers, while the visitor is invited to put them on, and perform the actions indicated by the voice inside them. Finally, you can’t miss out on a game of ping pong indoors at the museum, with Rirkrit Tiravanija’s reanactment of the “Ping Pong Club” by Július Koller, first created in 1970 in Prague.
The Nouveau Festival proposes a mirror of leisure, and of the games where visitors can recognize themselves. It refers to the process of gamification in our societies, a critique of utilitarianism, and popular rituals animating the exhibited pieces by artists working mostly on everyday life and the non-spectacular. The play in arts here questions the traditions and the conventions of societies by integrating civil values and creating new codes.
Text by Juliette Soulez
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