François Morellet, réinstallations - Centre Pompidou

Invited to the Centre Pompidou, François Morellet has decided to show a specific aspect of his art: installations. For him, these are ephemeral works, created for his personal exhibitions or for the events in which he takes part. They are designed for a precise place and created there and then, with light methods. Designed to disappear or to be taken down at the end of the event, they are barely known, if at all, apart from being seen for each occasion, like during the Nuit blanche in Paris, in 2005, for several hours at nightfall on the banks of the Seine. This exhibition, bringing together and re-installing twenty six of these at the Centre Pompidou, is the first of its kind. François Morellet has created a large number of installations since the beginning of the 1960s as part of the activities of an association of artists, the Groupe de recherche d'art visuel (Visual Art Research Group, or GRAV), but also independently, in many different circumstances and using various supports, indoors, outdoors, on the floor, on the walls, in trees, in all kinds of locations – the Synagogue de Delme, the Saint Irene church in Istanbul, Furka pass, the Dijon museum, the castle park in Münster –, using the most varied methods – adhesive tape, neon tubes, pieces of wood, piles of salt, and metal sheets. These installations are often directly issued from his painting works, for which they constitute a development into another dimension, although here, they have a different purpose, namely to fill, and be in keeping with, a space: like the superposition of parallel lines on the facade of the Denise René gallery in Paris, in 1971, which is directly taken from the network of lines used by the artist in his paintings made from aluminium bars, like that at the Centre Pompidou, Quatre doubles trames traits minces 0° 22°5 45° 67°5 (Four grids with thin lines 0° 22°5 45° 67°5), from 1958. The works that he creates in architecture, as part of an order, and which, integrated into a building, are designed to last, are a result of the same method. Most remarkable, the latest work is that of the windows in the Lefuel stairway at the Louvre museum. For "Reinstallations", François Morellet has taken a selection of these works, retracing this history in a retrospective, from 1963 to the present: it highlights the diversity of the installations, which it reinterprets if necessary or which it recreates and adapts the spaces where they were previously located, or the supports upon which they were made. This will therefore be the successive discovery of some of his most surprising creations for the "labyrinths" of the GRAV, with spaces created from flashing neon tubes, at times of great visual aggressiveness, the walls decorated with adhesive tape arranged in a certain manner, a room filled with metal tubes, going from the ceiling to the walls and on the floor, making it difficult to move around inside, areas decorated with tubes of red or blue neon tubes covering the ground and running up the walls, wooden beams or branches set in all kinds of positions, completely blank paintings hung on the walls giving the impression of real disorder and the meaning of which we must work out for ourselves, arabesques made from arcs of circle made from neon tubes running up the walls, or a space filled with neon tubes hanging from the ceiling, some touching the floor and some horizontal. This is a real sight to see, emitting a party atmosphere. ALFRED PACQUEMENT – Why decide to focus on the installations? How do you situate them within your work as a whole, and why this title, "Réinstallations"? FRANÇOIS MORELLET – This 455th solo exhibition could have been an opportunity to look again at the most significant works over my long career, but I preferred to make it the very first retrospective of what I think of as my "installations". By this term I mean the ephemeral introduction of light elements variously arranged in response to the architecture of each exhibition space. Over forty-eight years, I've often had more pleasure in imagining and realising these installations than I've had from continually showing the same old works, so carefully yet cruelly torn out from other exhibition venues. These installations hardly ever featured in the catalogues of the exhibitions they were part of: printing deadlines meant that such shots in situ couldn't be included, and the same is true of the catalogue of the present exhibition. The title "Réinstallations" is entirely appropriate when you think that the most specific characteristic of an installation is its ephemerality. It has therefore to die before being able to be reborn, modified by the new space it occupies. It is this that distinguishes them from autonomous works and "integrations." When an installation like my "weeping neons" is bought, by the Centre Pompidou for instance, it then becomes a work, with a claim to immortality. As for the integrations, they can be thought of as permanent and less economical installations. Finally, these "reinstallations" are characterised by a major contradiction, to do with the fact that they are supposed to be adaptations to the constraints of the location. Here at the Centre Pompidou, constraints are conspicuous by their absence – an absence of walls and ceilings. So it's been necessary to construct constraints, partition walls that suggest the different spaces in which each of these reactivated installations first saw the light of day. AP – Neon tube appears constantly in your work. How did you discover it, and what qualities do you see in this industrial material? FM – By the early Sixties, my friends in the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel and I had become convinced that the age of painting, of canvases and sculptures had come to an end, over forever. We were passionate about modern materials that hadn't yet been "polluted" by traditional art. We particularly liked anything that could produce movement or light. Since 1952, in fact, I had been interested almost exclusively in straight lines. Neon tubes struck me as an ideal material. First of all because they are straight to start with, before being bent to the purposes of advertising. Secondly, because they can light up and go out suddenly. And finally, because I thought then that they had never been used in art, as I suppose Martial Raysse and Dan Flavin must have thought, too, in those days, although in fact a great Czech artist, Pešanek, had already used them in the 1920s. At the beginning, the control units I had to operate the neon tubes were very simple and I played a lot with out-of-phase rhythms of lighting up and going out. AP – How did you design the layout of the exhibition? Is it chronological? Some of the spatial works of the Sixties seem marked by a desire to involve the viewer. Was this a way of redefining the idea of the work of art? FM – The organisation is more or less chronological. The works of the 1960s were elements of the labyrinths and other environments created by the GRAV, whose chief goal was indeed to get viewers to react and to participate. Yes, we were political, and that with a degree of naivety typical of the time. We were several times invited to Germany, to Italy, and even twice to the United States. We rejected the stance of the individualist, inspired artist, and we thought of ourselves as organisers or facilitators. We were very popular among young people, but hardly at all among collectors. AP – The titles of your works are sometimes straightforwardly representational, sometimes enigmatic. There are also puns. Is this a literary element or input into your visual work? FM – For a long time my titles just indicated the system by which the work was generated. I wanted to show that my work involved nothing more than the invention and development of systems, and I noticed, somewhat ironically, that the titles would even allow art-lovers without much money to produce their own Morellets. Later, in the 1990s, I came to find these titles laborious, didactic and boring. It all started in 1991 with a set of neon tubes that was then titled 3 demicercles de néon inclinés à 0°-90°-45° (3 neon semi-circles inclined at 0°-90°-45°). This work, the first of a somewhat baroque phase, might have suggested to ill-intentioned viewers the figure of a blue and rather kitsch dancer. To stay a step ahead of such criticism, I changed the title to La Gitane (The Gypsy), which also suggested the cigarettes. Since then, and still today, I have preferred incongruous titles that free my works from the seriousness that can sometimes be attributed to them and which I detest. As for the palindromes, so difficult to come up with, I absolutely love it when I find one that can be applied to a work, like "no end neon" or "senile lines". And as for the titles' literary contribution to the work: indeed, why not? My titles can much more effectively carry a message than my works, which don't have one!

March 2 2011 - July 4 2011

11h00 - 21h00

12 €, TR 9 € / 10 €, TR 8 €, selon période

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
Paris 75004
Tel +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/

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