Crash Taste - off-site
Collective show with Boris Achour, Agathe Alberti Bock, Fayçal Baghriche, Charlotte Benedittini, Karina Bisch, Mireille Blanc, Aurélie Bourguet, Emilie Caldieron, Colin Champsaur, Grégory Cuquel, Elodie Garrone, Alexandre Gérard, Justine Giliberto, Natacha Gomet, Mahjoub el Hassini, Seong-Hye Hong, Anthony Jacquot-Boeykens, Guillaume Linard-Osorio, Guillermo Moncayo, Samuel Montcharmont, Olivier Muller, Catalina Niculescu, Yannick Papailhau, Kirsty Roberts, Thomas Royez and Arnaud Vasseux
November 5 - 20, 2010
Buy-Sellf Art Club, 101 rue Consolat, 13001 Marseille
November 11 - 27, 2010
Fondation Vasarely, 1 avenue Marcel Pagnol, 13090 Aix-en Provence
In partnership with the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, the École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Triangle France and Rond-Point Projects, the Vasarely Foundation, and Buy-Sellf Art Club, with the support of the cities of Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.
Crash Taste is a group exhibition in the sense that it brings together works by different artists, but also in that it is the result of a collaborative process carried out by the eight members of the C.A.K.E. collective. More profoundly, the term “collective” also informs the exhibition not as an overarching or thematic label, but in a more underlying way: in the confrontation between a regulatory ideal and the intense, provisional experience of each participant. This open-ended question, constantly being re-evaluated, is refracted through the prism of the exhibition, offering a certain perspective on reality.
The exhibition was our starting hypothesis, the pretext for a first meeting. The process was fueled directly by the works—initially, those discovered together during encounters with the artists in residence at Triangle France. The artworks sparked conversations, which led to other meetings, other works. Meaning did not impose itself but wove together through the plurality of our intersecting readings—complementary or discordant. What emerges is not a fixed answer, but a provisional balance within this play of resonance and displacement.
The works on view unfold into a branching set of themes. Beginning with an attention to everyday materials and gestures that draw from the poetics of their forms and forces, emphasizing the plasticity of signs and their contextual permeability, our focus shifted to the body’s relationship with architecture. The individual’s confrontation with an environment built by and for them raises, along with the associated social concerns, the ambiguity of objects and spaces. Between function and usage, cracks appear—spaces where the artworks operate, unsettling obvious definitions and categories. Shifts in scale lead us through a cinematic movement—from the domestic interior to the building, to the city, and beyond—heightening the tension of moving from the personal to the general, from the singular to the collective. A question of scale and orientation.
Significantly, the two sites referenced in the exhibition—the Cité Radieuse and the city of Brasília—are emblems of a utopian endeavor based on the rational extrapolation of an archetypal individual. Both stand in an uncertain time, suspended between future and past, construction and ruin. If these ghostlike appearances suggest the erosion of past ideals, they also offer a memory to be reclaimed in the present. Fragmented by the devices employed by the artists and refracted through imagery, their monumental authority gives way to the immanence of materials and forms, sketching the outlines of a territory to be explored.
The city, in its horizontal dimension, takes shape through detours and imperceptible accidents that blur the boundaries between action and fiction. Figures appear and cross paths—actors or involuntary participants—but identifications remain fluid, subject to the shifting perspectives that multiply across the exhibition.
Apparitions and metamorphoses are reflected in the stream of images that continually reshape the identities of people and things through their variations. Acceleration is met with extreme slowing down—spatial and temporal dilation, or the dissolution of representation in the tremor of the freeze-frame. The proliferation of image-fragments allows the emergence of a collective, fragmentary memory out of the anonymity of private recollection. A vast memory of a past crisis, an apprehension of a coming one—crash tests are used to anticipate impact. Crash Taste is a foretaste of a world already drifting away.
Spread across two venues, Crash Taste unfolds in two parts. Conceived as a whole, these sections refer back to one another but can also be experienced independently. Their overlapping timelines highlight the diversity of these possibilities. Through its spatial and temporal arrangement, Crash Taste is both one and many—like the thought it embodies: a collective proposition, generated through the intersection of eight singular perspectives.
These two group exhibitions are the result of a workshop with the C.A.K.E group, composed of students from the art schools of Marseille Luminy and Aix-en-Provence. Taking as a starting point the practices of the three Triangle France residents from January to April 2010 (Mireille Blanc, Kirsty Roberts, and Catalina Niculescu), they conceived a collective exhibition based on the residents’ working concerns, incorporating works by local artists as well as their own.