Events
Friday, 19 January, from 4pm to 9pm: Opening of the exhibition
Saturday, 27 January, from 5pm to 6pm: Discussion between Jean-Noël Herlin and Émilie Renard
Friday, 9 February, from 3pm to 6pm: Béton Book Club: collective arpentage session of Mal d’Archive by Jacques Derrida (1995)
Saturday, 2 March, from 5pm to 6pm: Conference with Benjamin Thorel, author, editor and curator, co-founder of the bookshop After 8 Books
Between 1972 and 1987, Jean-Noël Herlin was a bookseller in New York, under the name J. N. Herlin Inc. From 1980 to 1987, he even organised several exhibitions in the window of his bookshop. Specialising in exhibition catalogues and artist books, J. N. Herlin Inc. is the source of his work as an archivist and of the Jean-Noël Herlin Archive Project.
Benjamin Thorel is a publisher, curator and co-founder of the Parisian bookshop After 8 Books. In this presentation, which is intended to be open to discussion, he proposes to place Jean-Noël Herlin’s career in the context of a study of independent art bookshops. Beyond being places for emerging counter-cultures, art bookshops are also social, experimental and activist spaces. On the fringes of institutions, they represent alternative places closely linked to the artistic scenes that frequent them. Benjamin Thorel will present historical and contemporary cases from Paris and New York to Mexico and Amsterdam, making references to François Maspero’s work and to the "Vitrine pour l’art actuel" episode led by Michel Claura, Brigitte Niegel and Anna Ptaszkowska.
Thursday, 7 March, from 12pm to 2pm: Midi-deux: Flash visit of the exhibition, with hot drinks and treats
Saturday, 23 March, from 5pm to 6pm: The Spur of the Moment [L’impulsion du moment], sound concert/performance by Cengiz Hartlap.
In the exhibition and via a spatial broadcasting device, Cengiz Hartlap, sound artist, composer and musician, will offer a 45-minute live sound immersion based on a selection of original pieces produced for the film The Spur of the Moment along with previously unreleased extracts from interviews with Jean-Noël Herlin. It will explore lesser-known dimensions of the work and sensibility of this ’papivorous’ artist, who rightly explains that for him "the number is the only universal language... and so is music. Music nourishes my soul, while language, through reading, nourishes my intellect and my heart. What can I say? I feel better, I feel more liquid...".
Friday, 5 April, from 3pm to 6pm: Parties prenantes: retroperspectives on the history of Bétonsalon around the exhibition “They remember only the photographs”, 2013
Saturday, 20 April, from 5pm to 6:30pm: Launch of Le Monde en situation. La révolte sensible de l’Internationale situationniste by Vanessa Theodoropoulou, with the author and Fanny Schulmann
This book proposes an in-depth historical study of the artistic and political project of the Situationist International (1952-1972).
For two decades (1952-1972), the SI and the avant-garde groups from which it emerged (Internationale lettriste, MIBI), experimented the extension of the domain of artistic practice so that it could modify everyday life (construction of moving situations), beyond the separation into distinct practical, disciplinary or epistemological fields. Active in various countries, they criticized the institutionalization of art in their numerous publications and events, and supported all forms of struggle and resistance to the ideological and sensitive/sensorial hold of the "spectacle" on the lifestyles and imaginaries of post-war capitalist societies, marked by the wars of decolonization and the establishment of consumer society and cybernetics. Their artistic projects and achievements are catalogued, reconstructed, historicized and analyzed from the perspective of the "integral construction of the framework of life" referred to by the SI at the moment of its foundation, and always in connection with their famous critical stances on the art, culture and politics of their time. "Expériences" and accounts of experience on the urban terrain, maps, manifestos, magnetic recordings, radio broadcasts, films, collages, paintings, models, ambiences, situations, "actions" of institutional critique and detournements are all studied as situations in which language, bodies and human settings are mobilized in view of the collective production of "free" forms of life.
Vanessa Theodoropoulou is an art historian and art critic, PhD in Art History. She teaches Art History and Theory at the École supérieure d’art et design TALM-Angers. Her research includes studying the Situationist International’s esthetics and politics, the idea and practice of art as transepistemological praxis, care ethics, feminist pedagogies, sensibility as agency.
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