Numéro 72, juin 2006 Photo performance

EN :

The situations in which Erwin Wurm involves us can be fully inscribed under the sign of potentiality. Beyond metaphysics, Wurm is interested in making the actual physique of bodies speak. The physique conveys sloth, idiocy, and depression as forms of resistance, blockage, withholding, and play. Wurm's works, in presenting rather than, perhaps, representing the human figure, seem to suggest the possibility of short circuiting the image of the world that comes to us through convention as well as the behaviours that we are supposed to adopt.

EN :

In today's generalized culture of screen images, new "nondisciplines" are entering the visual arts, media arts, action art, and art theory. Digital technologies, in particular, are multiplying in inventiveness and creating experimental zones between images, sound, and text. Art photography oscillates between "reality-fiction," photographic sculptures, and allegorical narrativity. Annie Baillargeon's stunning photomontages luxuriantly construct this third type, the photographic narrative. Inspired by the codes of action art (solo performances and collective movements) and "movie" scenarios (photo and video), her large works revamp the venerable genre of allegory. An elegant mystery floats in her settings, in which she is the body-material and the character with multiple identities. Tension is created between the sacred and the libido in a pop subculture iconoclasm of undefined ethical zones. In fact, allegorical photography such as this, at the beginning of a new millennium, paradoxically speaks to the hermeneutic analytical gaze as art criticism.

EN :

Manon De Pauw's photographic and videographic work stands out for its ludic liveliness, the richness of its formal compositions, and its poetically evocative power. De Pauw explores the playful relationship between the body and space in a formalist approach through which the work is constructed by doing, by touch, by experiment. Although her works are self-referential, they are not predominantly psychological or emotional; the body functions, rather, as a "motif of the work." They evoke the need to go "off the clock" from routine, to reflect on one's position in the social corpus and on the room left to the imagination.

EN :

This article addresses the new work by Edward Burtynsky as it was presented, in part, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In this exhibition, twenty-four images on contemporary China were added to the touring exhibition Manufactured Landscapes, at the Charles Cowles Gallery in New York City in the fall of 2005, and in a book called China published simultaneously by Steidl. The project China, on which Burtynsky's efforts have been concentrated for the past five years, encompasses the characteristics of Burtynsky's style as they have been sketched out over the past two decades. China confirms the concerns developed in Manufactured Landscapes; striking in this work, however, is the emergence of a humanist and social conscience.