In the Stream of Life

View of the exhibition "In the Stream of Life", Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2007 - 2008. Image: Aurélien Mole

Patrick Bernier, Olive Martin et Myriame El Yamani, Simon Dybbroe Møller,
Maria Eichhorn, Michel François, Aurélien Froment, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres, Loreto Martinez Troncoso, Falke Pisano, Clément Rodzielski, Günter Saree, Yann Sérandour, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson, Jordan Wolfson

Curators: Mélanie Bouteloup and Christophe Gallois

Through an exhi­bi­tion, per­for­mances, lec­tures, talks and pro­jec­tions, In the Stream of Life explores the modes of cir­cu­la­tion of an art­work: How can a work be under­stood in terms of the cir­cu­la­tion of an expe­ri­ence? The exhi­bi­tion’s title is bor­rowed from Lawrence Weiner’s film Plowman’s Lunch (1982), in which one char­acter states: “An idea only has meaning in the stream of life.” Through these words, Weiner sug­gests that an idea, or an art­work, must be con­fronted with the world, and must cir­cu­late within it, in order to make sense. In Weiner’s film, the work-as-cir­cu­la­tion is exem­pli­fied by the inclu­sion of sev­eral of his works, his well-known “state­ments” within the dia­logue: these are read, recited, and even painted in public space. These var­ious pos­si­bil­i­ties acti­vate the work “in the stream of life.”

The cir­cu­la­tion and acti­va­tion of these works can be likened to the notion of sto­ry­telling as devel­oped by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Storyteller, in which he defines the sto­ry­teller as the one who “takes what he tells from expe­ri­ence-his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the expe­ri­ence of those who are lis­tening to his tale.” Benjamin dis­tin­guishes between the cir­cu­la­tion of the sto­ry­telling, based on a shared expe­ri­ence and a mul­ti­plicity of inter­pre­ta­tions, and the non-cir­cu­la­tion of infor­ma­tion, which is always deter­mined by an expla­na­tion that nar­rows its meaning and its reach. For Benjamin, these two modes of trans­mis­sion can also be dif­fer­en­ti­ated by the specific tem­po­ral­i­ties that they entail. While infor­ma­tion does not “sur­vive the moment in which it was new,” sto­ry­telling, on the con­trary, is char­ac­terised by an ever-renewing tem­po­rality. Storytelling “pre­serves and con­cen­trates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”

View of the exhibition "In the Stream of Life", Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2007 - 2008. Image: Aurélien Mole

Transposed into the field of visual arts, the notion of sto­ry­telling devel­oped by Benjamin raises sev­eral ques­tions that we hope to address in this pro­ject. The first con­cerns the use of speech as a mode of cir­cu­la­tion. How can a work be acti­vated? How can it be told? Aside from orality, sto­ry­telling may also con­cern works that are not directly con­nected to the voice. In The Storyteller, Benjamin shows that sto­ry­telling is not lim­ited to oral trans­mis­sion : what is at stake is a specific rela­tion to the work, approached in terms of cir­cu­la­tion and acti­va­tion in time. The exhi­bi­tion In the Stream of Life assem­bles works where nar­ra­tive is at play, con­ceived as the nexus of a net­work of con­nec­tions and com­plex ref­er­ences. In rela­tion to this idea of sto­ry­telling, we envisage the exhi­bi­tion as a “the­atre of oper­a­tions”, an expres­sion bor­rowed from artist Michel François, as a space and time for cir­cu­la­tion between the works.

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