Quiz

In 2013, a year after the inauguration of the public commission "Traits d’union" created for the Poirel Ensemble in Nancy, I was invited to exhibit there. Rather than showing my works, I preferred to explore a subject that I had been thinking about for a while. For the occasion I reinvented myself as an exhibition curator and decided to bring together for the occasion objects that resist pre-established typologies.

In order to elaborate the content of QUIZ, I asked Alexis Vaillant, Chief Curator at CAPC Contemporary Art Museum of Bordeaux, to join forces with me. His well-known interest for hybrid and recalcitrant objects from the field of contemporary art seemed to correspond well with the nature of this enterprise. Our different backgrounds quickly fuelled the dialogue and considerably enriched the project.

As part of my practice, I have often been questioned about the boundaries between art and design. The recurring nature of this question made me realise that it wasn’t the idea of belonging to one field more than another that was important to me; it was the ambiguity that could stem from their correlation. In contemporary art, there are many pieces that are considered unclassifiable and that can take on any shape. In design, they are rare, as design implicitly has to answer to a practical function that the shape communicates to the user. In the design industry, this is a logic that is becoming increasingly important as investments are strong and public information is generally reduced to a presentation on a shelf display or in a brochure. There is little room for enigmatic appearances that shade the object’s function and would unsettle the consumer.

In a time and age that advocates the permeability of these boundaries, the attempts to mix art and design often refer to this practical function. Art is most certainly free to take possession of this practical functionality, but design really needs to take it into consideration, as an essential notion. Not occupying the same space in the two fields, the practical function cannot become a pivot that would allow us to look into the porosity of design and art, whether it be to show the things they have in common or their divergences.

Do the expressions ‘art or design?’ and ‘art and design?’ still have a meaning? Has the question of an object’s status become obsolete? This is what all the pieces selected for the project question, with shapes that seek to explore the thing status today. A thing doesn’t give any clues as to who its author is, it can even question as to the very existence of an author. Whether it looks like a sample, an off-cut, an improbable construction or whether it may seem unfinished, it remains available, that is to say able to constantly renew itself to our gaze.

Large blue zones outline sub-spaces that feature the pieces of the exhibition. The colour blue, used for video compositing, strengthens the decontextualizing position of the project. On the mezzanine, a consultation area uses the same formal principles as the ground floor display. Objects, catalogues and visitors cross each other’s paths without hierarchy, creating continuity between the two galleries."

Robert Stadler, curator