• Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot (stand) (détail), 2018 © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (photo : Florian Kleinefenn)
    Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot (stand) (détail), 2018 © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (photo : Florian Kleinefenn)
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie, Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie, Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie, Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie, Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • Henri Matisse, Polynésie, la mer, 1959. Woolen tapestry, 196 × 314 cm. Mobilier national, Paris © Succession Henri Matisse; image © Mobilier national, Paris / I. Bideau
    Henri Matisse, Polynésie, la mer, 1959. Woolen tapestry, 196 × 314 cm. Mobilier national, Paris © Succession Henri Matisse; image © Mobilier national, Paris / I. Bideau
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
  • Vassily Kandinsky, Arabische Stadt [Ville arabe], 1905. Tempera sur carton, 67,3 x 99,5 cm. Centre Pompidou - Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle, Paris © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI
    Vassily Kandinsky, Arabische Stadt [Ville arabe], 1905. Tempera sur carton, 67,3 x 99,5 cm. Centre Pompidou - Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle, Paris © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
  • Paul Klee, Kairouan, devant la porte, 1914. Aquarelle et crayon sur carton, 13,5 x 22 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm © Moderna Museet / Stockholm
    Paul Klee, Kairouan, devant la porte, 1914. Aquarelle et crayon sur carton, 13,5 x 22 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm © Moderna Museet / Stockholm
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
  • Leila Alaoui, No Pasara, 2008. Tirage photographique noir et blanc, 73 x 102 cm. Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, Habana © Courtoisie Fondation Leila Alaoui & GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana
    Leila Alaoui, No Pasara, 2008. Tirage photographique noir et blanc, 73 x 102 cm. Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, Habana © Courtoisie Fondation Leila Alaoui & GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © François Deladerrière, Mucem
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • On Kawara, I Got Up, 1972. 52 cartes postales de la série I Got Up (1968-1979),© One Million Years Foundation ; photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Audrey Laurans
    On Kawara, I Got Up, 1972. 52 cartes postales de la série I Got Up (1968-1979),© One Million Years Foundation ; photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Audrey Laurans
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • On Kawara, I Got Up, 1972. 52 cartes postales de la série I Got Up (1968-1979),© One Million Years Foundation ; photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Audrey Laurans
    On Kawara, I Got Up, 1972. 52 cartes postales de la série I Got Up (1968-1979),© One Million Years Foundation ; photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Audrey Laurans
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages
  • Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
    Voyage Voyages, Scénographie Studio Matters, Janvier 2020 © Julie Cohen, Mucem
  • Martin Parr, ITALY, Venice, 2015. Impression pigmentaire contrecollée sur aluminium, 60 x 86 cm. Magnum Photos, Paris © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
    Martin Parr, ITALY, Venice, 2015. Impression pigmentaire contrecollée sur aluminium, 60 x 86 cm. Magnum Photos, Paris © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
  • Voyage Voyages
    Voyage Voyages

Voyage Voyages


| From Wednesday 22 January 2020 to Monday 4 May 2020

  • With Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Richard Baquié… A voyage of discovery to new artistic worlds!

With Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Richard Baquié… A voyage of discovery to new artistic worlds!
Whatever its starting idea (or point), whether that be a desire for sunshine or a wish for escape, flight, wandering, or exile, travel has always been a source of inspiration, influence and exchange for artists. The exhibition “Voyage
Voyages” offers a journey through these movements and their stories.

In this way and following in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin who, driven by a terrible need for the unknown, embarked on a voyage to Tahiti in 1891, we discover the inspiration that so many artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Camille Henrot, Marcel Duchamp and Andreas Gursky have taken from this attraction for the unknown and the elsewhere that led them to renew their way of seeing the other and of representing the world.

Borders, migration, mass tourism… these days, questions about travel, exile and getting from one place to another are recurring themes in the act of creating art. The exhibition “Voyage Voyages” invites us to feel the creative immensity that finds a natural home at the Mucem and which, since it opened, has favoured a dialogue between cultures.
The exhibition presents some hundred works (paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, videos) from private and public collections, in particular from those of the Centre Pompidou / Musée national d’art moderne and the modern and contemporary collections of the museums of Marseille.
 

The title of the exhibition is freely inspired by the song “Voyage, Voyage” (performed by Desireless in 1986). We thank its author, Jean-Michel Rivat, who kindly authorised its use.

—Curation :
Christine Poullain, Honorary director of Marseille museums
Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff, Art historian and exhibition curator

—Scenography :
Floriane Pic and Joris Lipsch—Studio Matters

Interview with Christine Poullain and Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff, exhibition curators

 
Mucem (M.)

Why did you choose to explore art history through the theme of travel?

 

Christine Poullain (C.P.)

It is exciting to show how a theme has inspired artists, and what forms and interpretations it has given them. Travel has always been a source of influences, exchanges and artistic developments. From the 16th century onwards, the Grand Tour of Italy was the first and most decisive in Western art. Made by travellers from Northern Europe, France and Spain, it had a profound impact on artistic movements throughout Europe. In the 20th century, the massive development of media, two world wars, migration and globalisation have transformed the notion of travel and the journey, thus becoming a central issue in the act of creative artistry.
From the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa at the beginning of the last century by the likes of Matisse, Klee, Kandinsky and many others, to recent migratory phenomena, our aim is to study how the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries have been marked by multiple movements brought about for very different reasons. These have led artists to invent a new conception of art and a new vision of the world, exploring all possible techniques and transforming the artistic landscape.

Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff (P.-N. B.)

There are many ways of travelling today, ranging from business travel to straightforward tourism, and these trips are seen as an important part of globalisation. In this context, it seemed pertinent to us to pause for a moment and consider what last century’s artists said about travel and what their contemporaries say of it today. In the collective image we have of it, it is quite common to associate an artist with a studio, in which we imagine them working alone and shut away. Our exhibition aims to show a very different reality.
When Matisse set off to discover Polynesia, it was above all because of a need to renew his work by seeking out new sources of inspiration. The idea of an exhibition on travel comes from this story, among many others. We wanted to research and show what the journey informs beyond the unvarnished biography of artists. If it is interesting to know that Marcel Duchamp left for New York in 1915, and that On Kawara was there in 1972, what we wanted to take up here is above all the tangible works that resulted from these travels. For On Kawara, these were daily postcards that followed the rhythm of life, while for Marcel Duchamp, they were provocative works for US social circles.
In following these works, it becomes clear that the travels that inspired artists are at the origin of great advances in modern and contemporary art, which would never have taken place had they quietly stayed at home.

 

M.

From Matisse to Zineb Sedira, the exhibition presents works created between the late 19th century to the present day. How has the perception of travel changed over this period?

C.P.

Is it a question of evolution? Or rather one of transformation, linked to very diverse ways of thinking, as well as the historical upheavals that took place during the 20th century? Gauguin, in his fascination for Polynesia, then the French Fauvist artists and the German founders of the Blaue Reiter (Klee, Kandinsky, Macke, etc.), who crossed the Mediterranean in search of other forms and a different kind of light, were driven by their desire to disrupt classical pictorial codes and to invent other ways of representation. Meanwhile, travel in the opposite direction from North Africa to France in the late 20th century was a response to a need to escape misery, poverty, lack of freedom, and political instability, in the hope of finding a different place, a future with opportunity, briefly a new and acceptable life.
 
The Second World War forced many artists and intellectuals, who had sought refuge in the south of France, to flee the German invasion and head for the United States. There, the shared influences of surrealists and young American painting played a decisive role on both sides of the Atlantic, with the theme of the suitcase, a symbolic attribute of travel, becoming a source of metaphorical inspiration for certain artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his Box in a suitcase, designed as a portable museum around the condensed universe of the surrealist box or a cabinet of curiosities. Meanwhile, for her part, the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has seized this banal material to create a moving and poetic wave composed of a hundred second-hand suitcases suspended in space, which raises a recurring question in her work: do the memories we keep of the past build us up or rather do they prevent us from moving forward (From where we come and what we are)?

The wandering, which became an artistic posture in the 1960s and 1970s and that was searching for a “nowhere” (“Always go where the roads on maps stop, where there is nothing left” – Bernard Plossu), was probably intended to find other avenues beyond utilitarianism. It inspired many artists to defend a type of art, where the concept of travel without purpose or precise destination, was in itself synonymous with an asserted freedom of artistic expression.
Later, and motivated by migratory reasons linked to the political and economic situation in their countries of origin, some artists such as Barthélémy Toguo took refuge in an endless exile – one founded on the idea of transit, an unceasing, open and altruistic movement; the fate of man; and the world marching forward.

P.-N. B.

For artists, as for us all, it seems to me that the perception of travel has evolved in parallel with the perception of the planet in general. And this evolution follows two opposite directions. On the one hand, we have the possibility of discovering a world that has become bigger thanks to modes of transport capable of reaching anywhere, anytime. Plus, we have information that tells us of fires in the Amazon and diplomatic problems in Korea. And on the other, many distances have shrunk thanks to Internet networks that can instantly circumnavigate the globe. This is the ambiguity of a world that is becoming both larger and smaller.

Umberto Eco would say to his students that whereas research at the beginning of the last century consisted in searching libraries to find texts that would be useful to them, nowadays these are available everywhere in large quantities and that research today mainly involves sorting them. It seems to me that this advice corresponds quite well to the evolution of the artists’ work. While at the beginning of the century, travel was about exploring other places and cultures, and that the works of Klee and Kandinsky formed a part of their discoveries, today, Camille Henrot’s videos show the enormous influx of information available everywhere, testifying to the way in which she sorts and combines them to establish her own vision of our epoch.
What inspires artists and feeds their works has become an increasingly complex mix of views, people and places, thanks in part to travel.

 

M.

What surprised and questioned you the most during your research for this exhibition?

 

C.P.

Even if this is often the case during research carried out around a theme, the most surprising thing about this exhibition is the incredible diversity of its visit route and the works that are exhibited along it. It is true that the subject and the period open up onto particularly rich historical, geographical and artistic perspectives. These offer an abundance of metaphorical evocations that show us to what extent travel in all of its forms has become a central issue in our civilisation. Artists have interpreted it in a thousand ways: what is the relationship between Marcel Duchamp’s Air de Paris and Henri Matisse’s Polynesia – between a pharmaceutical ampoule emptied of its contents and filled with the light and joyful air of the French capital, and these tapestries where large white birds surrounded by algae and corals symbolise the poetry of the Pacific archipelago? What are these if not two visions, two versions of the concept of the journey and of travel?
It is these symbolisations and inspirations that are so different from each other, which aroused our interest and often raised questions for us. From the beginning, our idea was to make visitors travel in space and time via artistic creativity. And undoubtedly, the geographical location of the Mucem in Marseille, built at the entrance to one of the largest ports of the Mediterranean, played a decisive role in the ideas we are aiming to convey.

 

P.-N. B.

More than a surprise in the strict sense of the word, the setting up of this important series of works, which span over a century, across seas and continents, reveals a form of observation of the world, which can now be studied in retrospect. At a time when reflection on cultural appropriation is widely debated, the journeying in travel makes it possible to add many elements to this broad question. For example, how can we define the culture of a person such as Kandinsky, a graduate of Moscow’s Law School, who became an artist involved in Bauhaus in Germany and produced his later works in Paris? His work in Tunisia shows an artist with eyes wide open, who was inspired and influenced by everything he discovered wherever he went.

And Kandinsky is by no means the only one of the artists represented in this exhibition to have mixed several bases with his artistic culture. Before Polynesia, Gauguin was largely inspired by the discovery of Brittany and then Martinique. Barthélémy Toguo, who studied in Abidjan, Grenoble and Düsseldorf, now works half the time in Paris and the other in Bandjoun. Rather than appropriation, which is now violently criticised, it seems to me that this is a form of open sharing between all those who inhabit the same planet.

 

M.

What are the most remarkable works among the hundred or so pieces presented?

 

C.P.

The bringing together of the two tapestries by Henri Matisse – Polynésie le ciel and Polynésie la mer, which has never taken place to my knowledge, is one of the remarkable events that we are delighted to offer visitors to the exhibition. The artist was inspired to create the cardboard boxes of these late woven works 18 years after his trip to Tahiti They reveal the freedom of pure fantasy and happiness in life that Matisse always endeavoured to convey.

The paintings by Wassily Kandinsky (Arabische Stadt), Paul Klee (Before the Gates of Kairouan, Dünenlandschaft) and Henri Matisse (The Bay of Tangier) show the tremendous inspiration that travel in North Africa gave these artists, thus enriching their pictorial vocabulary.
Finally, mention must be made of the impressive and theatrical work of the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (Accumulation - Searching for the Destination), which occupies a space at the Mucem thanks to a network of intertwined red threads from which she hangs a hundred suitcases that are animated by a stormy wave.

P.-N. B.

All these works are truly remarkable! They all correspond to genuine types of reflections, brought together under the theme of travel. Then, there are items that speak of what is personally attractive and specific to each artist. For instance, Victor Brauner’s work, Le Dernier Voyage, despite its small size, leaves me feeling deeply pensive. Brauner often worked on the image of the isolated or distorted eye, found here, before actually losing his left eye in a fight in 1938. He was therefore considered a premonitory artist and Le Dernier Voyage, produced just before the Second World War, seems to confirm this idea. There is a straight road towards an uncertain sunset, a barren land where only a factory chimney remains, and a traveller no longer knowing where to go. Brauner produces a hard, yet lucid, image of what threatens the world of his time. In a period of climate change, it seems to have found a new meaning.

But one needn’t always be pessimistic, and fortunately there are many more happy works in this exhibition, such as Richard Baquié’s Cockpit, which invites us to let our thoughts fly in the air, or Giorgio De Chirico’s The Return of Ulysses, which seems to make fun of both Homer’s Odyssey and his own artistic journey – both seemingly stagnating on the living room floor.

 

 

 


Videos


Exhibition itinerary

In a suitcase

An artist, who is travelling, cannot walk around with their hands in their pockets. Wherever they may be, they maintain their uninterrupted dialogue with the objects they need and find, as with those they produce. However, where there is much content, there must also be some kind of container. This is how the ambiguous precedence of the suitcase was born. A tool of travel, its recurring appearance could not leave its users indifferent. When, in a moment of inspiration, the Box in a suitcase allows Marcel Duchamp to transport his entire work, the cabin luggage itself acquires a new status. It is a reduced model of the artist’s thinking that is tidy, packed and transportable.

In less organised circumstances, the suitcase may also simply become empty – i.e., out of service. Then Duchamp’s irony gives way to Chiharu Shiota’s poetic reflection, in which the memories of those who carried suitcases gather like a wave, and whose installation takes on the form and regular, endless movement.

From 1936 onwards, Marcel Duchamp produced many copies of Box in a suitcase, which contained small-scale reproductions of his works. While widely disseminating his work to interested collectors, Duchamp also wanted to play with the authenticity that was supposed to give value to a work of art, by producing copies of his own work himself at a time when technology made this easy.

The Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota marks the contemporary artistic landscape with her monumental installations composed of intertwined wool yarn, and which demonstrate a rare poetry. The theme of travel, which she threads as a metaphor here, is represented by many worn, empty suitcases, suspended from red threads and animated by a slow wave-like movement. The work symbolises a questioning often present in her work. What material and psychological memory does she preserve of her past to make it emerge today? Do the memories carried by these suitcases build us up or rather prevent us from moving forward?

On the other shore

Vassily Kandinsky, Arabische Stadt [Ville arabe], 1905. Tempera sur carton, 67,3 × 99,5 cm. Centre Pompidou - Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle, Paris © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI
Vassily Kandinsky, Arabische Stadt [Ville arabe], 1905. Tempera sur carton, 67,3 × 99,5 cm. Centre Pompidou - Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle, Paris © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou

From the north of the Mediterranean to its south, either shore faces the other and interacts. Their history lives on in agreements and conflicts – and art is no exception.

In the 1910s, European artists, seeking powerful and unusual light, found them far from their own homelands, to the south, attracted by its dazzlement. Albert Marquet experimented there with the shape and lines of cities. Wassily Kandinsky let the whiteness of light simplify the image of streets – silent and smooth. Paul Klee fed on a palette of colours that moved towards abstraction.

When a new generation came to represent the crossing in the opposite direction a few decades later, it was in pursuit of diametrically opposed motivations. The luminous image was the response to a daily experience of dreams and shortages. Leila Alaoui and Zineb Sedira speak on behalf of all those to whom the materiality of borders continues to be opposed. From an impalpable reality, art moves on to aspirations for a living freedom for all. No matter what the canvas or watercolour, what you need is to be a passport holder.

Between 1902 and 1907, Wassily Kandinsky’s early works are often multicoloured and inspired by the Russian tales from his childhood. During a trip to Tunisia at the end of 1904 with Gabriele Münter, and after a stint in Lyon and then Marseille, Kandinsky created a number of works in which his use of coloured spots to represent trees and fabrics is clearly recognisable. But the play of colours temporarily fades and the presence of characters becomes more discreet, while the traditional Tunisian whiteness of facades becomes omnipresent.

In 1914, Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moillet made a long journey together to Tunisia. Klee was deeply influenced by the light and colour he discovered there. At the entrance of Kairouan, he wrote in his diary: “Colour possesses me. I don’t need to look for it anymore. This is what this happy moment means: I and colour are one.” Colour then becomes a constituent element of his works, in increasingly simple and geometric forms, until it reaches abstraction.

The title of this series of photographs is based on the famous slogan of the Republicans during the Spanish War: “No pasaran” (“They will not pass”). Taken in various places in Morocco, the country from which Leila Alaoui’s father originated, these photos follow the story of local youths who dream of another life elsewhere, each telling of the daily difficulties of the characters represented and their desire to emigrate, to leave these lands and seek a better future. But as the title No Pasara indicates, this migration is often impossible.

The panicked planet

To travel is also about travelling in time, with no possibility of return. To look forward is to look at the future. Thus, Victor Brauner’s last voyage did not evade any divinatory intention, even dark ones. When it took place in 1937 at the dawn of the historical abyss that was about to swallow humanity, it can be seen today as a palpable visionary moment, symbolically spread over a wooden panel similarly to the religious paintings of the Middle Ages.

The Second World War then pushed Max Ernst to cross the ocean to America, then to travel almost the entire breadth of the continent to land in Arizona, where he could appropriate the slow calm that only the desert had and make it a lighter, much less detailed work than what he had previously been accustomed to. Without dematerialising surrealism, Ernst reduced it to the simple expression of a horizon between dog and wolf, that time and mankind watch, without ever being able to reach.

After having joined the surrealist group in Paris, Victor Brauner returned to Romania from 1935 to 1938, where made Le Dernier Voyage. The disturbing aspect of the landscape and the fantastic characters that appear there, along a road running towards the setting sun, recalls what André Breton already said about Brauner in 1934: “Desire and fear preside par excellence over the game he leads with us, in the very disturbing visual circle where apparition is in a twilight battle with appearance.”

Max Ernst fled to the United States in 1941 and moved to Arizona in 1946 with the artist Dorothea Tanning. It was there that he created Coloradeau, inspired by the deserted landscape of the American West. While the title refers more to the neighbouring state of Colorado, Ernst’s main concern is a play on words between the colour of the landscapes, particularly their reddish coloured stones of Red Rock near Sedona where he lives, and The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, which he admires.

On the road

“Always go where the roads on maps stop, where there is nothing left.” (Bernard Plossu)

The great era of the road made cars its visible sign of modernity, a barrier-free path to a future that promised happiness and a way to detach oneself from everything, losing oneself voluntarily. The road is everywhere, yet no one lives there.

For On Kawara, this journey is a travelling workshop. His postcards sent from the distended places where he was, were his logbook. Martin Kippenberger, on the other hand, destabilises geography by using hotel stationery – never the same – during a journey that is more imaginary than real.

But these paths can also represent a world that no longer knows how to detach itself from the movement of machines. For Richard Baquié, an airliner becomes a strangely incomplete object at ground level, which only moves by the words it carries. Andy Warhol only looks to the rolling bodies of the automobile to note their terrible and deadly end; and once rid of its gasoline and interior, Caesar destroys them by reducing them to the only existence that their material can contain. Without a point of arrival, can the road still be an end in itself? 

The works of the Japanese artist On Kawara testify to his interest in the everyday passage of time, which became a recurring theme for him. Between 1968 and 1979 for the series I Got Up, Kawara sent postcards that simply indicated that he has woken up, and at what time. There are 1,500 of them. Through these postcards, the artist is also compiling an archive of his many journeys, given that each one indicates the place from where it was sent and the postmark confirming both its date and provenance.

This work is part of a series known as Death and Disaster, with which Andy Warhol launched his career in 1962, and is inspired by the image of a plane crash published on the front page of the New York Mirror newspaper. Setting aside for a moment images of Coca-Cola and Campbell’s soup that had made him famous, he took up the dramatic photographs he found in the press in a bid to cancel their macabre effect by repeatedly reproducing them across numerous copies.

Having obtained the drift, nose and cockpit of a caravel, Richard Baquié would go on to use the front part of this 1960-1970 airliner to produce The Cockpit. While taking up ideas akin to his first works made of assemblies, through this installation Baquié invites us to reflect on what our thoughts and dreams represent, combining a modern means of transport with the romantic, nocturnal, starry sky that neon lights symbolise.
 

Maps and traces

Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot (stand) (détail), 2018. Tube néon et acier, 172 × 83 × 80 cm © Mona Hatoum. Courtoisie Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (Photo : Florian Kleinefenn)
Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot (stand) (détail), 2018. Tube néon et acier, 172 × 83 × 80 cm © Mona Hatoum. Courtoisie Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (Photo : Florian Kleinefenn)

Observing land, the traveller’s need to touch and manipulate it slowly becomes all-consuming. This is the idea from which that Land art is derived, and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty symbolises its abstraction, given that no boat will ever dock there and following it to its end, in fact, leads nowhere. As with prehistoric cave art, here is the mark of those who only passed through and have left.

Everywhere, humans appropriate geography. This is the case with lands and the sometimes fictitious boundaries of their contours. Rather than taking inspiration from them, Andreas Gursky photographs them with a technical coldness that aims for impossible perfection, as if to better highlight their lack of meaning. Mona Hatoum, on the other hand, weaves them into a carpet, bending them along neon tubes, underlining their belonging to the act that draws them. With a single look, everyone is called upon to remember the good or bad faith of those who hold these positions.

Located on the Great Salt Lake of Utah, Spiral Jetty is one of the most important works of Land art, a movement that began in the late 1960s. Built from local rocks, the spiral is over 450 metres long. The film, shot by Smithson and Nancy Holt, combines the construction of the work with elements of prehistory, geology, astronomy and mythology, disorienting the viewer while evoking what Smithson called “the history of the earth”.

Andreas Gursky’s photographs are often part of a critical vision of our era marked by globalisation and capitalism. Starting from the artificial islands produced in Dubai as sites for luxurious villas, Gursky offers here an image of unreal perfection, which no element can locate, with the large dimensions of the print still coming to contradict the documentary aspect of photography.

On a globe the meridians and parallels of which form a metallic cage, the contours of the continents drawn by an incandescent red neon light produce a disturbing cartography. Starting from a simple object supposed to teach the basics of geography, Mona Hatoum thus represents a world where conflicts are no longer only linked to borders, but rather extend to cover the entire planet. 

Sea and Sun

Martin Parr, ITALY, Venice, 2015. Impression pigmentaire contrecollée sur aluminium, 60 × 86 cm. Magnum Photos, Paris © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
Martin Parr, ITALY, Venice, 2015. Impression pigmentaire contrecollée sur aluminium, 60 × 86 cm. Magnum Photos, Paris © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

In their annual migration for sun and sea, mass tourism consumers and the artists who make them their models are far from Rimbaud’s eternity. And these artists mock in their own way, as does Duane Hanson, who adorns artificial characters with an exotic print, making holidaymakers become lifeless presences. Or Martin Parr, who notes the same attitude everywhere, that of travellers reacting in exactly the same way in Venice, Cuba or India.

The South Seas contain more than a postcard image can express. For Sigalit Landau, the Dead Sea and its history follow the turn of a life that begins again and again. For Camille Henrot, the Pacific is the one-way mirror where distant, animist traditions face the barely swallowed remains of human madness and the wrecks that our war has left on its foundations.

Martin Parr’s work, both an artist and a press photographer, has always focused on social life as it evolves in our time. For the series The Selfie Stick, the aim is more particularly a question of examining tourism and consumption through the practice of the selfie, this self-portrait produced by means of a cellphone in many tourist spots around the world. Beyond the postcard image, Parr questions the utility of photography by immortalising those who photograph themselves.
 

Exile

Exile is a great flow of the world’s movement. It represents the current of many human rivers that are trying to find new lands to settle in when those from where they originate have become too dry, whether in a bid to escape the aridity of a soil that no longer wants to feed, or that of spirits that no longer want to leave life to others. Born in Cameroon, Barthélémy Toguo knows these issues in the most immediate way possible.

But without ignoring the drama of leaving one’s place of origin, Road to exile refuses to sink into absolute pessimism. With its fabrics in very vivid colours, the simplicity of its boat and its journey over bottles into the sea, the installation also tells us that sometimes exile leads to a good port, and encourages us to reflect for a moment on a life where the impossibility of exile would be experienced as a confinement.  

Barthélémy Toguo’s installation consists of an improbably assembled wooden boat, carrying a pile of fabric over recovered bottles. Born in Cameroon, Toguo thus symbolically evokes the dangers of emigration into which many young people from Africa are embarking. But the work is not entirely dramatic, and its multicoloured, almost playful aspect reminds us that exile can also be the path to a better life.
 

Matisse

Henri Matisse, Polynésie, la mer, 1959. Tapisserie en laine, 196 × 314 cm. Mobilier national, Paris © Succession Henri Matisse ; image © Mobilier national, Paris / I. Bideau
Henri Matisse, Polynésie, la mer, 1959. Tapisserie en laine, 196 × 314 cm. Mobilier national, Paris © Succession Henri Matisse ; image © Mobilier national, Paris / I. Bideau

Memories of a trip can be just as memorable as the trip itself. Thus, while his stay in Polynesia in 1930 did not seem to have given him much satisfaction, Henri Matisse returned to it in his mind more than 15 years later. Polynésie, la mer and Polynésie, le ciel, which stem from his distant memories, evoke the elements between which the Pacific islands are in balance, yet also the infinite spaces that are open to anyone who wants to embark on them.

Henri Matisse left Paris in 1930 for New York, crossed the United States by train and then from San Francisco sailed to Tahiti where he arrived on 29 March. With this journey, he wanted to renew his inspiration and search for new spaces and a different light.

All these Polynesian sensations would contribute to the emergence 18 years later of a new oeuvre, the exhibition of which focused on the late extension of its remanences. The result would be the creation of two turquoise blue and dark blue tapestries, where large white birds set to seaweed and corals and surrounded by an edge that evokes the lagoon, symbolise the poetry of the archipelago, thanks to the softening and fluidity of line, an ease of contour, and the decantation of shape.
 


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