Review
“(re)Orient plays with the double meaning of Orient and orient: “You’re running through the Louvre,” reads the printed guide, an important part of the project, accompanying a first, recurring video projection from Jean-Luc Godard’s film Bande à part , in which actors actually run through the Louvre. “No, you’re not,” the text sharpens the perception of being part of a multiply filtered process of representation and perception: “You identify: people running through the Louvre. You identify: actors playing ‘running through the Louvre.’” Armaly’s exhibits are not autonomous works of art in the white cube of the gallery. They are points of reference with the guide’s help, allowing one to readjust one's perception to keywords such as truth, description, observation, memory, timelessness: to reorient oneself. The gallery is a camera in the Greco-Arabic-Latin sense of the word: an apparatus for image production. It sheds light on the objects and thus on the theme, the Orient, which is first constituted through the pictorial representations.
The timing of the exhibition was marked by the epochal shift from a bipolar to a multipolar world order. The House of World Cultures opened in Berlin in March 1989, and the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from May to August. It expanded the canon of Western contemporary art to include other regions of the world for the first time, while both maintained a concept of regionally limited cultures. A few days after the exhibition closed, the Berlin Wall fell.”
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“Orphée 1990 was Armaly’s first exhibition at a cultural institution: the Maison de la Culture et de la Communication (MCC) in Saint-Étienne in the Rhône-Alpes region. It was also an exhibition about this institution, founded in the late 1960s as part of the large-scale cultural center program of the Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux, who wanted to establish temples of high culture throughout the country. Like a modern Acropolis, the voluminous Brutalist building sits enthroned on a hill in the center of the city. Originally built for cultural events of all kinds, the building now serves only as an opera house: with a hall seating 1,200 people, astonishingly large for a city of 200,000 at the time. The opening, as a center for culture and leisure, took place in February 1969, shortly before the end of Malraux’s term in office, who had little interest in the local conditions in the individual municipalities. During the 1968 era, the Maisons de la Culture continued to come under criticism. It was such contradictions that interested Armaly.”
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“On the walls of the gallery’s anteroom hung, neatly framed, not his own works, but children’s drawings. The exhibition space itself remained inaccessible, barricaded by a glass door dating from the construction of the cultural center, which Armaly retrieved from storage: impenetrable like Cocteau’s mirror, whose form reappeared as an empty frame further back. The exhibition thus repeatedly counteracted the lofty ideals of high culture with the opposing local, Marxist, and pedagogical approaches of the post-1968 era.
If there’s one thing that connects Malraux—who also coined the term Musée imaginaire—with the 1968 students, it’s their emphasis on imagination. “Forget all you have learned. Begin dreaming,” the exhibition guide states: an invitation not to view cultural institutions like the MCC as given, immutable, but rather to draw one’s own conclusions and develop new perspectives from the contradictory approaches they embody.”
(Excerpt)