The Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC/VAL) has been displaying Mark Wallinger’s exhibit State Britain since February 28. Born in 1959, this English artist became known in the early 1990s at the Charles Saatchi gallery in London, joining the ranks of young British artists Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin and Rachel Whiteread, whose works deal with social struggle, nationalism, royalty and religion, through painting, installation art, sculpture and video. He represented the British pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale and in 2007 he won – for State Britain – the Turner Prize, awarded annually by the Tate Gallery for an emblematic artist under 50 years old.

The imposing exhibit reconstructs an amalgamation of documents – banners, photos, paintings, articles and toys – originally displayed across from the House of Parliament in London by the activist Brian Haw, who was protesting England’s participation in the war in Iraq by confronting members of Parliament with images of their wrongdoings. In 2005, Haw’s display was deemed illegal under a law condemning such demonstrations in front places of power, and was thus demolished. With the help of fifteen assistants, six months of work and a £90,000 budget, Wallinger recreated the display and installed it inside the Tate Modern, so that the work would lie outside the legal perimeter around the House of Parliament as defined by the law, and especially in so it could be preserved by its new legitimacy as art. Originally 40 meters long, State Britain has been adapted to the dimensions of MAC/VAL, where it is spread into three rows and occupies an entire room.

Clearly, it is a harsh indictment of the English and American intervention in Iraq: a sign at the entrance warns visitors of the monstrosity of certain images, broken or slashed dolls echo the fate of maimed children, and the word “unbearable” flashes somewhere on a sign. But the work also has an obvious impact on the world of art: Wallinger’s approach is in line with Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade sculptures: found and constructed objects transformed into art by the hand of the artist. But it is not a question of an upside-down wheel or a urinal: the gratuitousness that gave Duchamp’s work its force (turning a bicycle wheel upside down, signing a urinal) would be difficult to put in place today as is, given that a major part of contemporary art is already Readymade in nature. Here, the artistic decree is less an effort to bring into a museum a regimen of objects that were once forbidden there, than it is to preserve what have decided to keep outside. The museum is no longer a space reserved for cleanliness and good taste by the powers-that-be: the cities have perhaps themselves become museums.

State Britain is not dissimilar to Redacted, the great film Brian de Palma directed recently on Iraq by copying images taken mostly from Internet. It’s the same problem: horrifying, but true, pictures of the war are available all over the Web, and yet they’re kept away from places of power, whether they be public spaces or movie theaters. It’s also the same approach: the artist and the director admit that art today is being left behind by alternative medias in the race for representing the truth, and they simultaneously affirm a power born from Readymade sculpture: an artistic decree, in which esthetics cannot be separated from politics.

Bastien Hader

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick.

“I’ll never want to watch it on DVD or on TV. I have a 16mm copy that is very good. I could talk about it for three hours. The film is very important because all the form and all the content are merged. For example, in the music at the beginning, three notes, with an octave and a triad, are the same musical frequencies reflecting the geometry of the monolith: 1, 4, 9. Like the three steps of the film: apes, men and supermen. This is a mere detail, but there are other, very profound things that necessitate watching the film very closely. The film puts all visual cinematic forces in play, and there isn’t really a story.”

Read the interview

Born in New York in 1965, Pip Chodorov is both a director and a film music composer. After studying cognitive science in the United States, he studied semiology in Paris. A member of Light Cone, the distributor in charge of videos that led to the creation of Re:voir in 1998, he specializes in experimental, historical and contemporary films. In 2003, he received the Anthology Film Archives award in New York for his work as a publisher.

How did you come to create Re:Voir?
The first reason is that I was working at Light Cone, a cooperative of filmmakers distributing their own movies for galleries and museums, and many film programmers wanted to see the movies before renting them. Of course, showing the films meant the copies eventually got scratched. So we began asking filmmakers whether they had a videotape lying around on a shelf somewhere just in case someone wanted to see the film before renting it. But Maya Deren saw things differently, and thought they should be distributed. I thought it was a very good idea, and that if we didn’t do it, someone else would, perhaps not as well, and just for the money. It was important for a filmmaker to handle it for other filmmakers, and not a big company. I wanted to do it well and make quality editions.

What is Light Cone?
Light Cone was founded in 1982 by two filmmakers, Yann Beauvais and Miles McKane. It’s a cooperative in which all the filmmakers are members, including me, and participate in the distribution of 16mm and Super 8 copies. We have general meetings regularly. There are three cooperatives in Paris, plus others in different towns: San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Toronto, London…

What problems does publishing experimental films pose as compared to mainstream movies?
Quality, audience, logistics… Filmmakers are very iconoclastic in their concept of cinema and they have particular demands. Filmmakers like Peter Kulbelka reject video; others, like Michael Snow, only reject it for certain films. When Kubelka makes a film, it’s a certain kind of work, it has to be seen in specific conditions: to understand it, you have to see it in a big, dark room with a big white screen and the projector behind your shoulder. In a little box, these works lose their meaning; you’re better off describing them in a book and reproducing photograms, rather than publishing a video, which gives a false idea.

Do you always prefer VHS over DVD?
MPEG 2 isn’t satisfying. The algorithms aren’t designed for unnatural and unpredictable images. When a car drives by or someone talks, there’s no problem. But when the image is painted or etched by hand, when it’s a film where each image is different from the others, details get lost.

Can Blu-Ray fix these problems?
Blu-Ray is much better because the data rate increases from 9 MB per second to 45 MB, and disc space increases from 5 GB to 45 GB.

At Re:Voir, how do you choose between VHS and DVD?
I don’t publish any experimental films on DVD, only less radical ones we’re offered that aren’t too jerky – for Philippe Garrel, for example, and for portraits of filmmakers. For the last three years, I’ve really enjoyed publishing them, but I don’t have a choice, because people don’t buy VHS anymore. So everything’s on hold for Blu-Ray. As a matter of fact, I asked for a subsidy for Blu-Ray in 2005, I was the only one, and the first one, in France, but they refused it because there was no market.

Speaking of which, why are the Fluxus films published on DVD?
We’ve only made a special edition for the FIAC, limited to a hundred numbered copies for €100 each. We could have made a lot of money with it, but didn’t want to put thousands of copies in circulation. We just wanted to make €10,000 with this project in order to implement Blu-Ray. For the time being, we’ve sold forty and are a bit behind on production. There are very few of us and we’ve got very little cash flow; it’s always difficult to put money up for each project. We’re struggling with five titles we should have released two years ago.

What are your upcoming releases?
Traité de bave et d’éternité by Isidore Isou, a film by Jean-Jacques Lebel, a documentary by Patrick Bokanowski, Hallelujah Hills by Adolfas Mekas…

Cinémas hors circuits : DVD and independant labels exhibition
saturday march 1st : from 2pm to 10pm
sunday march 2nd : from 3pm to 8pm
Point Ephémère 200 quai de Valmy 75010 Paris

1st show dedicated to independant DVD label but also books and magazines, Cinémas hors circuits will welcome more than sixty labels on a week-end in Paris.

Discover and find rare films, classics… Meet those who release your favourite movies on DVD and defend the cinema you like… Listen to presentations, discussions, assist to screenings… Share your passion for cinema !

Entrance is free

The whole program is there (in French) : Cinemashorscircuits.com

Since 1978, the Cinéma du Réel international documentary film festival has been an outstanding international meeting point, where the public and professionals discover the films of experienced authors as well as new talents, the history of documentary cinema as well as contemporary works. The festival programs some hundred films for its various sections, screened at the Centre Pompidou, the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, the MK2 Beaubourg film theatre, the Paris City Hall and several other theatres in the Ile-de- France area.

International Competition
28 French and international premieres, as well as encounters and discussions with the filmmakers.
See the films in competition

French Selection
28 French and international premieres, as well as encounters and discussions with the filmmakers.
See the selection

Retrospectives and Special Programmes

Americana
A selection of films where commitment and the driving forces of socio-political movements (against the Vietnam war, for Black empowerment or… for a different way of life) are translated into cinematographic vitality, narrative inventiveness, reinventions of documentary and fiction The programme includes tributes to Shirley Clarke and Jim McBride.

In South-East Asia
From Kuala Lumpur to Manila, from Bangkok to Jakarta, documentary films lend images and sounds to long-buried stories, as witnessed by the works of filmmakers such as Garin Nugroho, Amir Muhammad, Raya Martin. The programme includes a tribute to Lav Diaz, the great Filipino poet of cinema, whose powerful films blend documentary and fiction into a lyrical experience.

Images / Prison: visions from inside
In several European countries, film—especially the documentary—has become a focus for workshops on filmmaking, projections and writing, organised within penal institutions. Here we attempt to understand what they mobilise within their makers and the spectators who watch them on the “outside”.

Figures of tourism : for a history of the “view”
It is well known that one part of the world makes a spectacle of the other part, and this does not date from the advent of digitalisation or miniaturisation of “picture-taking”. From the beginnings of cinema to the present day, what is being played out is a history of the “never seen” and the “already seen”. Modern tourism, with its desire for “authenticity” and “discovery, is the central theme of many films bearing the impossible dreams of the “first times”. Filmmakers take possession of tourist images, re-examine and re-compose them. The tourist as a character and tourist images as material for critical analysis guide a programme that mingles documentary and fiction, past and present, films and videos by plastic artists… to call into question the contemporary “view”.
In partnership with MNAM (Collections Cinéma et Nouveaux Medias), and in association with MK2 Beaubourg and ACRIF.

The Theatre of Reality
La Tentation du Paradis
by Vivianne Perelmuter and François Christophe, with Bruno Putzulu.
The staging of a semi-improvised piece of theatre; the play writes itself in the moment : a lost tourist, images of islands, the ghost of Christopher Columbus, tropical storms…

Special screenings and events Bernardo Bertolucci’s “La Via del petrolio”, Hartmut Bitomsky’s “Staub” etc

See the whole program on the Film Festival website

The Fondation Cartier is hosting a major solo exhibition of the visual work of American artist and performer Patti Smith. Drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, it strives to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. Her expressive voice serves to magnify the installations created specifically for the exhibition: a synthesis of photographs, drawings and films.

While the name Patti Smith evokes an image of a founder of the New York punk-rock scene, she has explored the visual arts and poetry since the late 1960s. The exhibition at the Fondation Cartier embraces the various facets of her creative process. Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to photography using a vintage Polaroid Land 250: “The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of drawing, recording, or writing a poem.” Many of Smith’s photographs embody significant personal meaning: Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils. Others serve as a visual record of her well-traveled life. The exhibition also features a selection of the artist’s drawings, several of which are borrowed from prestigious institutions such as the MoMA and the Centre Pompidou or from private collections.

The powerful yet subtle drawings have been executed with a calligraphic sense of line entwined with poetry and text. They represent her solitary side. Her collaborative side is represented in films directed by Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jem Cohen and the audio performance of The Coral Sea with Kevin Shields. She will shoot a short film, specially commissioned for the exhibition. The exhibit also includes cherished belongings taken from her personal archives. Among them original manuscripts, a photograph taken by Constantin Brancusi and a stone from the river in which Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

Inspirations

The source of much of her inspiration has been key figures of French culture, including Arthur Rimbaud, Nicole Stéphane, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud and René Daumal. Paris echoes throughout, from drawings executed in the Montparnasse district, where she lived during her first Parisian sojourn in 1969, to recent photographs taken in the garden of the Fondation Cartier, situated nearby.

A Comprehensive Project

To reflect the multitude of fields explored by Patti Smith, the exhibition is intended to be a comprehensive project that expands beyond the exhibition space. The Fondation Cartier is giving free rein to Patti Smith to oversee the
programming for the Nomadic Nights as well as performing herself, offering solo and band performances as well as informal poetry readings. The Fondation Cartier’s bookshop will, for a time, become the artist’s personal library. Her choice of books, CDs, films and objects will enable visitors to further penetrate the rich universe
of this iconic artist.

BIOGRAPHY

Patti Smith was born in Chicago and grew up in New Jersey. A maverick teenager with a passion for Rimbaud, she moved to New York in 1967, where she met Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1969, the pair moved into the Chelsea Hotel and befriended such artists and writers as Sam Shepard, Brice Marden, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Absorbing herself in performance and poetry, she was inspired to create a fusion of improvisation, politics and rock’n’roll. She released her first single “Hey Joe/Piss Factory” in 1974, and along with the group Television helped create a strong protopunk movement at the legendary CBGB. In 1975, her first album Horses, graced with the iconic portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, received international recognition, including the Grand Prix du disque Charles Cros (1975).

In 1977, a serious accident forced her into a long convalescence, during which she immersed herself in poetry and published Babel. The following year, her drawings were shown for the first time in New York at the Robert Miller Gallery. She also released the album Easter, which featured the single “Because the Night,” co-written with Bruce Springsteen.

In 1979, she left New York City and career behind, and moved to Detroit, Michigan to marry musician Fred Sonic Smith from the group MC5. They had two children and recorded Dream of Life, which included the anthem “People Have the Power.” In 1995, after the untimely death of her husband, she returned with her children to New York City and resumed her public life. In 2005, Patti Smith was awarded the Insignes de Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, the highest accolade awarded to contemporary musicians.

FONDATION CARTIER pour l’art contemporain
261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris
Tél. 01 42 18 56 50 / Fax 01 42 18 56 52
fondation.cartier.com
Open from tuesdays to sundays, from 11am to 8pm.
Late nights on tuesdays to 10pm.