ART IN POP
The "Belle Electrique", Grenoble's new amplified music hall, is scheduled to be inaugurated in just a few months; it is conveniently located next to the hall built by Eiffel that today houses the MAGASIN.
To coincide with this opening, the National Centre of Contemporary Art is dedicating one of its autumn 2014 exhibitions to music's relationship with the arts, a theme a!lready touched upon in a few previous exhibitions.
In 1989, the exhibition "Broken Music" by Ursula and René Block gathered together over 800 artists and designers, while the exhibition "Replay – the punk sphere" (hosted from 4 June to 3 September 2006) presented for the very first time the collages by Linder and the painted banners of "Destroy All Monsters" by Jim Saw, Cary Loren and Mike Kelley next to "Reverse Karaoke" by Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether. The MAGASIN also presented, from 28 May to 10 September 2000, the graphic and painted oeuvre of Gary P!anter, a central figure of the Austin music and comics scene.
In the wake of these previous events, the "Art in Pop" exhibition, which opens October 10th, is born of a few simple, commonly shared observations. Indeed, while it is true that up until the 1960s numerous musicians and singers practiced art as a leisure activity, as something akin to their "secret garden of creativity", it is equally true that beginning during this same decade numerous pop musicians benefitted from art school training, this being especially the case in England. Music and the fine arts became intermingled under the combined influence of the breaking down of the borders between high and low culture and the shifting of the production, identity and style codes of the former (the "high culture" of art and the scholarly disciplines) to the second (the "low culture" of television, comics and industrial cultural production in general).
Pop music would become a two-fold scene straddling art and music in which the musician was also an artist and vice versa, and from which would notably emerge figures producing not only structures but also meanings and aesthetics.
DOOM : SURFACE CONTRÔLE
The art centre’s atrium ("La Rue") will welcome a collective exhibition co-organized with Renaud Jerez, a French, Berlin-based artist belonging to the post-Internet, or post-materiality, generation of artists, which includes such now- famous figures as Ben Schumacher and Tobias Madison.
He also most certainly belongs to those influenced by the Stadelschule of Frankfurt, where the combined effects of the instruction provided by Michael Krebber and Douglas Gordon have marked a generation of emerging artists, such as the Basel-based exhibition space New Jerseyy and the publishing house Used Future Publications, also located in Basel.
The walls of this central exhibition area (totalling nearly 100 metres in length) will be divided into 6 to 8 work surfaces for wall paintings or any other form of desired expression, with each separate work surface being entrusted to an artist of this same generation for an on-site production during the month of September.
!The group exhibition will gather a selection of artists including Mathis Altmann, Aleksander Hardashnakov, Veit- Laurent Kurz, Jared Madere.
