Originally published by Cluster, written by Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni

Photomontage bétonsalon/St Jerome in his studio (Graeme Thomson)

Over the past few weeks we’ve been participating in an open-ended art-archive project, a fairly exhaustive attempt to document the multi-faceted ‘idea’ of the artist’s atelier in all its manifestations. Conceived by two young artist-curators, Maxime Thieffine and Cécilia Becanovic, who together form L’Ambassade, L’Atelier (making of) was born out of a shared passion for collection. But here collection, normally the last term in the artistic production chain, becomes the motor for a new process, related to a perceived climate of overproduction (or reproduction), for which the atelier is both the subject and conceptual image. A somewhat modest art of classification, mobilization & montage of what is already ‘out there’, rather than a desire to add to the vast surfeit of works. But one which, collapsing onto a single plateau the two incommensurable planes of Holbein’s Ambassadors, performs an anamorphosis of the archive through the skullwarp of multiple subjectivities. Rather than a space of production, the atelier becomes a moment of intense hesitation, reflection, gathering and regrouping of its own partly hidden forces. An intriguing process, the complexities of which are difficult to describe. Here we’ve limited ourselves to a short itinerary of four words that lie half-buried in the term itself – L’ATELIER – crystallised in four images.

ATE

ATE: The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)

The atelier as a space of phago-citation, a matter of personal taste perhaps, but to the researcher, enamoured of postcards and prints the atelier is equal to his vast appetite. A somewhat paradoxical form of collectionism/cannibalism this offering on a plate of something you’ve already eaten or haven’t yet prepared. In fact one is always either too early or too late for the atelier’s restless repast

LIE

LIE: Duchamp playing chess with a woman in front of The Large Glass

The atelier as a phantasmaticmise en scène protecting our innocent gaze from the ‘real’ of art : the fact that the thing itself amounts to very little, presque rien…avec filles parfois. Artists are a bit like parents who have to hide the nullity of the primal scene from their kids. Duchamp, on the other hand made an art out of this very nullity, that was his scandal, the stalemate of the ready made, playing chess in order to lose elegantly while the bride lay abandoned, let lie to gather dust, the seasoning of a temps perdu.

LATE

LATE: Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette)

Collecting is always a too late blues, but L’atelier aims to make this very lateness the reception room of a new beginning. Without regret. ‘The work in progress’, ‘the prisoner’, ‘dust,’ ‘artist and model’: new series are always popping up on the horizon before there is time to complete or exhaust the current one, an unending flight of signs that always manage to escape the plans we have made for them. But sometimes, revenants too, the untimely generosity of images that keep to their own out-of-synch timetable, vertigo of a ‘pure’ time spared from the fatality of history.

TELL

TELL: Canterbury Tales (Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Images are essentially mute. It takes a work of montage to make them speak, since one generally speaks to/for/on behalf of others. Yet unlike oral narrative, the fiction being spun here is entirely a question of false continuity, the lie in lier. It isn’t for but amidst images that traces of narrative and lines of thought emerge. The above image of Pasolini playing Chaucer in his version of The Canterbury Tales was the last discovery of this process which began from Antonello Da Messina’s painting of St. Jerome’s studio. The atelier is the same.

The process of L’Atelier will be presented in definitive form in the exhibition “La forme théorie” organised by Manuel Cirauqui at the “Laboratoire Artistique International du Tarn” (LAIT), Albi, which will open in April.

LINKS:
http://www.lambassade.com/
http://www.betonsalon.net/
http://www.dca-art.com/fr/centre/index/id/42