Group Show: Objects
In 1913, by inserting a bicycle wheel on a stool, Marcel Duchamp radically redefined the status of the work of art and opened a vast field of possibilities to all his successors.
Thus was born the ready-made that André Breton will define as a "usual object promoted to the dignity of work of art by the simple choice of the artist". This Duchampian concept desacralizes at the same time the work by returning it to the world of the ordinary objects but also "the hand of the artist" which does not intervene any more directly in the development of the work. Duchamp is no longer interested in the retinal perception of the pictorial tradition, but rather in the intellectual reflection that his ready-made provokes in the spectator.
As heirs to the Duchampian revolution, the American artists of the Pop Art movement and their French counterpart, the New Realists, placed the object at the heart of their artistic production, both as a means of expression and as a symbol of a society advocating mass consumption. Artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein will paradoxically orient their work towards a critique and a proclamation of the commodification of the world. We find a wide range of objects from the very popular Campbell Soup (1962) to the luxurious perfume bottles of Warhol (Perfume Bottles, 1985) while Claes Oldenburg will produce caricatured sculptures of Hamburgers, Ice Creams and other cakes (Study for Giant Cake, 1963). Unlike Duchamp or the New Realists, Pop Art artists rarely introduce the object as such in their works. They privilege the copy, the imitation of the everyday object.
On the contrary, the New Realists will make their practice a permanent use of imagery and the mass object. In their inaugural statement, they defined their approach in a clear manner: "New Realist = new approach to reality". If all the artists gathered in this movement have very different approaches, they nevertheless share a claimed appropriation of the objects that surround them. As Martial Raysse said, "Prisunics are the museums of modern art". Thus, Arman produces sculptures by accumulating objects as shown in Barbecube (1970) which is symptomatic of the beginnings of the standardization of electrical appliances. It is also the case with Gérard Deschamps who accumulates underwear on canvases (Sans-titre, 1960) and thus sends us back to the beginning of ready-to-wear clothing on a very large scale. Other artists like Daniel Spoerri will persist in meticulously assembling objects (Luminous surgical instrument, 1989) or, with Jean Tinguely, in playing poetically with objects assembled in a precarious machine (Lampe Coq, 1973).
These methods of appropriating and diverting real objects are now part of the vocabulary of all artists evolving at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. Major artists such as Mike Kelley, John Miller, Tony Oursler and Laurie Simmons have used objects that reveal important socio-psychological tensions in stagings or works that testify to the alienation of hyper-consumerist societies.
The exhibition Objects presented at the JGM. Galerie from September 16 to October 13 is an opportunity to rediscover this recent history of the object in art history through major works from various private collections.
