Review
A young generation of artists seems to be reacting against a certain form of sculpture-making based on the aestheticizing effect of autonomous, content-enigmatic objects. The sculptures of artists such as Jan Vercruysse, Nick Kemps, and Harald Klingelhöller are inward-turned material relics of a highly personal engagement with (art) history and surface beauty. Reflection (contemplation) is turned inward and becomes ostentatiously visible through the literally impenetrable character of the surface (skin) of the object. Mirroring and reflection function as magical concepts for the broad display of the bankrupt belief in reality and dogmas.
The exhibition of Fareed Armaly (*1957) in Saint-Étienne can perhaps be considered exemplary of a renewed way of making art, in which content-oriented engagement with reality confronts the value-free “art for art’s sake” view of art. However, the content is not (as in the 1970s) reduced to a glorified pamphlet, but is instead integrated as a fully-fledged component in a spatially engaged installation, in which the “history” of the exhibition site is an important element.
Fareed Armaly shares with artists such as Mark Dion and Christian Philipp Müller an artistic attitude grounded in an empirical, process-based development of artistic intentions. In the Maison de la Culture et de la Communication, his point of departure is a thorough study of the implantation and realization of this cultural center. The policy of cultural decentralization in France in the 1950s is recalled by Armaly through references to the entrance area—restored to its original state—featuring 1950s design furniture and the film Orphée by Jean Cocteau, which functions as a guiding scenario throughout the installation.
In the first room hang several children’s drawings: they are beautifully framed, referring to the prompt to imagine and draw an entrance to the cultural center, and more generally allude to the importance of children’s workshops within the operation of the center. The magical mirror in Cocteau’s Orphée is presented in the second space—closed off by a glass door—as a transparent triptych. The “mirror” is also rendered as a mural on the partition wall between the exhibition and the workshop/studio space.
The illusion of cultural freedom is here literally realized by illustrating the underlying ideological circumstances surrounding the founding of the cultural center: the decline of industry and its accompanying loss of employment in the Saint-Étienne region is bitterly linked to the idealistic and utopian thinking behind the concept of “cultural decentralization.” In the workspace and in the large entrance hall, video monitors are installed showing, respectively, fragments from Cocteau’s film and images of the desolate corridors of the cultural center—channels that lead to the “makers” of the cultural industry.