Between 1975 and 1979, the North American artist Christopher D’Arcangelo (1955-1979) developed an artistic practice that was notable for its radicality and critical import concerning the role of the artist, the status of the art object and the institutionalization of art. A desire for a radical democratization of the production and reception of art motivated D’Arcangelo’s institutional critique, which he voiced in a statement on anarchism. Recalling the historical expression “anarchism without adjectives,” the statement, which accompanied in various forms the majority of his actions and interventions, contains an ellipsis between brackets in the place of an adjectival descriptor of the noun anarchism.
Although interest in D’Arcangelo has not been entirely absent over the last thirty years, to date, no posthumous exhibition or critical evaluation of his work has been undertaken. The written and visual documents that D’Arcangelo compiled to chronicle his practice, have been made available at the Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, following a donation in 2009 by Cathy Weiner and the D’Arcangelo Family Partnership to the library’s “Downtown Collection.”
Testifying to an artist engaged in a critique of the social conditions and repercussions of art, and whose work is accessible solely in the form of an archive, represents a challenge to both contemporary art history and curatorial practice. It is this challenge, along with the paradoxes and critical complexities D’Arcangelo’s work and legacy raise, that the exhibition considers and analyzes.
Since its inauguration at the CAC Brétigny, France, in July 2011, the exhibition Anarchism Without Adjectives has been presented at Artist Space (New York), the Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Espagne) and Extra City (Antwerp, Belgium). With the aim of being both retrospective and prospective, and as a form of ongoing research, each presentation of the exhibition has benefited from the contributions of an evolving roster of artists and of curators at each venue. For the current presentation, the curators, in collaboration with Michèle Thériault, have thus invited local and international artists, some of whom have previously participated, to contribute existing or new works as a means of generating further dialogue on the contemporary significance of the questions Christopher D’Arcangelo raised in his practice.
The exhibition is made possible by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle du Consulat Général de France à Québec with the support of the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Besançon/Franche-Comté.
The video interviews are co-produced by Solang Production Paris Brussels, the Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) and the Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny (France), in partnership with Artists Space (New York). Additional support was provided by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (France) and the Villa Médicis Hors les Murs program.
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Video interviews with Stephen Antonakos, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Daniel Buren, Ben Kinmont, Peter Nadin, Naomi Spector, Lawrence Weiner.
With the participation of Pierre Bal-Blanc, Sophie Bélair Clément, Simon Brown, Ben Kinmont, Silvia Kolbowski, Pierre Leguillon, François Lemieux, Rainer Oldendorf, Émilie Parendeau, Nicoline van Harskamp.
Curators: Dean Inkster and Sébastien Pluot in collaboration with Michèle Thériault
THE CURATORS
Dean Inkster, born in New Zealand, has lived and worked in France since 1990. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on contemporary artists, as well as a monograph on the photography of Valérie Jouve (Éditions Hazan, 2002). In 2009–10, he was co-curator, with Jean-Jacques Palix and Lore Gablier, of the exhibition Cornelius Cardew et la liberté de l’écoute, presented at CAC Brétigny, the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and the Culturgest de Porto (Portugal). More recently, he is curator, with Sébastien Pluot, of the exhibition Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo, 1975-1979, presented at CAC Brétigny; Artists Space, New York; Centre d’art Montehermoso; Extra City, Antwerp; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University, Montréal. He teaches art history and theory at the École supérieure d’art et design Grenoble-Valence. He is currently writing a book on the work of the American artist and musician Laurie Anderson.
Sébastien Pluot is an art historian and an independent curator. He teaches art history and theory at the École supérieure des beaux-arts (ESBA), Angers, where he and Fabien Vallos direct the In Translation research laboratory. He has contributed essays to magazines and catalogues, including Include Me Out, in Vides: une rétrospective (Centre Georges Pompidou and Kunsthalle Berne, 2009); Perturbation du régime indexical des images, in Cf (Rennes, 2010); Gap The Mind, in Imagodrome (Monographik, 2010); Obéir à L’invisible, in Uraniborg (exhibition by Laurent Grasso, Jeu de Paume, 2012); Parasite, in l’intervalle, La Revue (BAT, 2012); and I Would Prefer Not To, proceedings of the colloquium AC/DC (JRP Ringier/Mamco/HEAD, Geneva, 2008).
Pluot has organized a number of exhibitions, including Fragmentations (Villa Lemot, Saint Brieuc, 2011); Une traduction d’une langue à l’autre (Cneai, Paris, March 2011); Double Bind, Arrêtez d’essayer de me comprendre (Villa Arson, Nice, 2010); Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo, 1975-1979 (with Dean Inkster) (CAC, Brétigny; Artists Space, New York; Centre d’art Montehermoso; Extra City, Antwerp; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal); Art by Telephone Recalled (with Fabien Vallos) (CAPC, Bordeaux; Cneai, Paris; Emily Harvey Foundation, New York; ESBA, Angers; San Francisco Art Institute, 2012); and La Panacée (Montpellier, 2012–13; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2014).
With Renée Green and Cneai, Pluot developed the project Living Archives (ESBA TALM, Angers/San Francisco Art Institute).
VIDEO INTERVIEWS
Interview with Peter Nadin
New York, September 2005. Video. 26 min. 50 sec.
Directed by: Sébastien Pluot
Edited by: Dean Inkster, Julien Loustau + Sébastien Pluot
Technical assistance by: Joachim Delgado
French subtitles by: Lore Gablier
Interview with Ben Kinmont
Paris, December 2010. Video. 45 min. 23 sec.
Directed by: Sébastien Pluot (assisted by Hugo Brégeau, Nicolas
Davenel + Clémence de Montgolfier)
Edited by: Dean Inkster, Julien Loustau + Sébastien Pluot
Technical assistance by: Joachim Delgado
French subtitles by: Lore Gablier
Interview with Lawrence Weiner
New York, September 2005. Video. 13 min. 04 sec.
Directed by: Sébastien Pluot
Editing by: Dean Inkster, Julien Loustau + Sébastien Pluot
Technical assistance by: Joachim Delgado
French subtitles by: Lore Gablier
Archives: Lawrence Weiner
Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Paris, December 2010. Video. 52 min. 58 sec.
Directed by: Sébastien Pluot (assisted by Hugo Brégeau, Nicolas
Davenel + Clémence de Montgolfier)
Edited by: Dean Inkster, Julien Loustau + Sébastien Pluot
Technical assistance by: Joachim Delgado
French subtitles by: Lore Gablier
Archives: Cathy Weiner, D’Arcangelo Family Partnership, Fales
Library & Special Collections, New York University Libraries
Interview with Daniel Buren
Varenne-Jarcy, January 2006. Video. 37 min. 02 sec.
Directed by: Sébastien Pluot
Edited by: Dean Inkster, Julien Loustau + Sébastien Pluot
Technical assistance by: Joachim Delgado
English subtitles by: Dean Inkster
Archives: Daniel Buren, Peter Nadin
Interview with Stephen Antonakos and Naomi Spector
New York, November 2010. Video. 19 min. 52 sec.
Directed by: Sébastien Pluot
Edited by: Dean Inkster, Julien Loustau + Sébastien Pluot
French subtitles by: Lore Gablier
Archives: Stephen Antonakos, Cathy Weiner, D’Arcangelo Family
Partnership, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University
Libraries. Photography © Cathy Weiner
With thanks: Stephen Antonakos, Xabier Arakistain, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Beatriz Herráez, Gregory Lang, Jean-Jacques Palix, Raphaele Shirley,Naomi Spector, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Annick Boisnard, Daniel Buren, Sophie Streefkerk, Ben Kinmont, Lore Gablier, Peter Nadin.
The video interviews are co-produced by Solang Production Paris Brussels, Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) and Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny (France) in partnership with Artists Space (New York). Additional support was provided by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques and the program Villa Médicis Hors les Murs (France).
In memory of Stephen Antonakos (1926-2013).
THE ARTISTS
Pierre Bal-Blanc is an art critic and curator. He is the director, since 2003, of the Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny (CAC Brétigny).
THE WORK
Tomorrow I Go to the MoMA, 2012
Video documentation of a presentation within the framework of the symposium, How Are We Performing Today? New Formats, Places, and Practices of Performance-Related Art, MoMA, November 17, 2012. 26 min. 47 sec.
Video Recordings of Museum-Related Events, 2013-3. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
A presentation that addresses challenges encountered in exhibiting (and speaking about) undocumented performances and actions. Christopher D’Arcangelo’s MoMA Action (28 February 1975) is one example of such an action which Bal-Blanc expands on through a reinvestigation of the context in which it was produced.
EXPLORE
- the means by which Pierre Bal-Blanc presents two undocumented actions by two different artists;
- notions of reiteration and repetition and why Bal-Blanc considers these to be important in thinking about, presenting, and discussing actions and performance.
Projects developed by Sophie Bélair Clément address questions related to historic strategies of presentation (spatial layout, narrative form) through the larger issue of artistic licence, historiography and translation. She lives in Montréal and works in Gatineau.
THE WORK
Reads Plato’s Parmenides? 1978, 2005, 2013, 2013
Wall paint, self-adhesive vinyl, monitor, DVD, audio, vinyl digital prints, chair. Courtesy of the artist.
At the very end of the file brought together by the curators, my reading was interrupted by a series of questions at the bottom of the last document, Chronology (from archives established by Gideon d’Arcangelo), on page 92.
Questions: worked for artist Robert Mangold? Meets Ian Wilson? Reads Plato’s Parmenides? Moved into 119 Elizabeth Street? Proposes collaboration with Allan McCollum?
This break in the historical narrative was the starting point of my speculative research, contextual to the content of the exhibition Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo (1975-1979). The Chronology traces a portrait of the artist from a series of events – a relational and professional networks, trajectories; so many contingencies guiding a posteriori a reading of the work in its absence. However, Plato’s Parmenides, as an un-situated event, opens the possibility of a second narrative: that of the content of knowledge that is acquired and exchanged, dialogical; that of the history of a mediation and its translations.
Sophie Bélair Clément, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
EXPLORE
- mediation of one artist’s work by another or others and how this is addressed in Bélair Clément’s work;
- the ways in which this work takes into consideration knowledge, its acquisition and exchange, and how it contributes to the development of artistic (and curatorial) research.
Simon Brown is interested in language, failure, and the varyingly perceptible connections between things. His obscurely humorous and painstakingly constructed texts and interventions have been presented in various forms and contexts, including performance events, books of poetry, billboards, newspapers, and conferences. He lives and works in Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Rouville, near Montréal.
THE WORK
Chris, Simon & Jennifer, 2013
Photocopied publication.
Courtesy of the artist.
Sometimes you find what you’re looking for. Sometimes research is a dead end. Sometimes you find the connections by following your first instinct. Sometimes you find them accidentally. Sometimes there aren’t any connections. Sometimes you have to make them up. Sometimes you are the connection.
EXPLORE
- notions of reference, connection, and transformation and how they reveal themselves in this work;
- self-effacement.
Ben Kinmont is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller. He is interested in interpersonal communication as a means of addressing the problems of contemporary society. His sculptures and actions attempt to establish a direct, personal relationship between the artist and the viewer, using the work as a mediator. Kinmont lives and works in Sebastopol, California.
THE WORKS
Project Series: Christopher D’Arcangelo Distribution (March 5, 2005, Paris), 2005
Video documentation of an action at the Louvre, Paris. 17 min. 10 sec.
Courtesy of the artist.
Project Series: Christopher D’Arcangelo, Paris: Antinomian Press, 2005
A4 publication (originally written in 1997). Document downloaded, 2013: www.antinomianpress.org.
Reprint, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2013.
Courtesy of the artist.
On Saturday, March 5th, 2005, Ben Kinmont and the Antinomian Press conducted a public publishing project from a van in front of the Louvre. This one-day publishing event produced a small book concerning the work of Christopher D’Arcangelo and his action inside the Louvre.
EXPLORE
- the ways in which this work addresses questions about how an artist functions in a market-based art system;
- where the boundaries lie between Christopher D’Arcangelo’s work and Ben Kinmont’s work.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Silvia Kolbowski’s scope of address includes the ethics of history, memory, sexuality, and the unconscious. She is based in New York.
THE WORK
an inadequate history of conceptual art, 1998/1999
Video and sound looped 55 min.
This presentation is an excerpt of the work that combines audio and video. The original work is longer and separates the audio and video into separate but interconnected rooms.
Courtesy of the artist.
In 1998, I sent letters to sixty artists, asking them to participate in this project. Forty artists agreed to respond to the following statement: “Briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed / experienced at the time. For the sake of this project, the definition of conceptual art would be broad enough to encompass such phenomena of that period as actions documented through drawings, photographs, films, and video; concepts executed in the form of drawings or photographs; objects where the end product is primarily a record of the precipitant concept, and performative activities which sought to question the conventions of dance and theater.”
EXPLORE
- official and unofficial histories, memory and its failures;
- the impact and effect of non-synchronous sound and image.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Pierre Leguillon stages performative slide lectures and film screenings that explore the reproducibility of the image, in both moving and static forms, via the variable medium of the screen. His experimental manipulation of screening formats emphasizes the production of unique sites of aesthetic encounter. He lives and works in Paris.
THE WORK
Untitled, 2008
Digital transfer of an original slide (60 x 60 mm), photographic inkjet print.
Courtesy of the artist.
Photograph taken at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, June 2008. The slide shows a double-page spread from Christopher D’Arcangelo’s “LAICA as an Alternative to Museums,” published in LAICA: Journal of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, no. 13, January/February 1977.
EXPLORE
- modes of representation and how they are addressed in this work;
- the notion of reenactment and how it might apply to this work.
François Lemieux’s work demonstrates a profound commitment to a transversal and pluralistic artistic approach anchored in social reality, gesture, and ways to interpret these. Within the domain of art, his exhibition practice stems from collective mechanisms of the production of meaning that shed light on the specifics of the site in which they take place. His recent exhibitions include The (dis)Enchanted Display (2012) presented in Leipzig and Amsterdam, where he examined the impact of the Weimar Republic’s politics on the links the Bauhaus held with the world of commerce and industry. He also produces Le Merle, a journal published twice a year. He is based in Montréal.
THE WORK
Et la télévision inventa le samedi matin, 2013
Framed bibliography, poem available at the reception desk.
Courtesy of the artist.
François Lemieux is inspired by surrealist language games drawn from a cartography of contemporary anarchist and communist speeches. The poem he presents underlines how many worlds there are that demand – in order to adequately take them into account – that one must let go, remain enchanted or shut up.
EXPLORE
- the function of language in this work;
- sources and references, the musings they generate, and how all of these are revealed in this work.
Rainer Oldendorf involves both the community that takes him in and the spectator in an exercise that might be called “Mimesis, portraiture, and the errancy of being-in-common: responding to art as political allegory” (title of a text on Oldendorf’s work by Dean Inkster). He lives in Lörrach, Besançon and Paris.
THE WORK
We Intended to Provoke Them, Didn’t We? They Just Wanted to Try Something Out. Reading Reading Notes, 1974-2013
Contribution to “Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo, 1975-1979”. Sculpture and painting.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels.
Struc-Tube exhibition system
George Nelson Office, 1947
(reconstruction by Martin Beck, 2005). Aluminum.
In producing this work I used my personal archives, including documents I kept from the time when I was 13 to 17 years old. These cover Christopher D’Arcangelo’s working period, 1975-79, exactly. The result is a tableau of photocopied texts and images.
EXPLORE
- notions of frame of reference and historical interest: how they operate in this work and how they contribute to a deeper understanding of the exhibition;
- the display system, the types of materials used, and their narrative function or value.
Émilie Parendeau’s A LOUER project, which she began in 2008, consists of activating works by other artists. Activating, in this case, refers to the material realization of existing statements in the form of language. Considered a kind of score, their activation therefore becomes an ad hoc and subjective performance in direct relationship with the context of their occurrence. The website www.alouer-project.net includes each of these documents – scores and documentation – produced during the various implementations of this project. She lives and works in Paris.
THE WORK
Artist as Assistant, 2013
Books and photocopies
Courtesy of the artist.
Émilie Parendeau offers a selection of exhibition catalogues and books for consultation. These refer to the work of Stephen Antonakos, Daniel Buren, DeWain Valentine, Alex Katz, Mario Merz, and Ian Wilson. Christopher D’Arcangelo worked for each of these artists, occasionally for exhibitions or on a more regular basis in the studio. Opening these books reveals the activities of an artist’s assistant and retraces the path of encounters, exchanges, and friendships that contributed to his journey as an artist.
EXPLORE
- the narrative constructed about Christopher D’Arcangelo;
- the scope and provenance of the materials used in constructing this narrative.
Nicoline van Harskamp’s work investigates the relationship between politics and personalities, and speech as a political act. Her work questions issues of authority, power, and organized political systems. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
THE WORK
Yours in Solidarity, 2013
80 framed notes on A4 paper, 2 subtitled audio tracks (21. min 30 sec. and 28 min. 19 sec.), 1 video track (43 min. 46 sec.)
Made possible with the generous support of Netherlands Film Fund, Mondriaan Fund, Rijksakademie, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.
Courtesy of D+T Project, Gallery, Brussels.
In Yours in Solidarity, Nicoline van Harskamp tells the story of a global network of anarchists in the 1990’s, through the analysis of the correspondence archive of the late Dutch anarchist Karl Max Kreuger, now housed in the International Institute for Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam.
EXPLORE
- the various elements of this work and how they relate to each other and function as a whole;
- the political content of this work communicated and how it is communicated.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION