French version
The concept of Don’t try this at home is simple and ambitious: to invite twelve international artists or collectives to make an installation from existing works or works in progress at their “place of quarantine” (their home, garage or atelier), then to photograph it and send the picture to the gallery with a brief description. All documents will be published online during the opening. The invitation to the artists specifies that the photographed installation must be thought of as a “mini-exhibition” – artists shall transform their private space into a gallery or a museum, which will be made accessible to the public virtually on the dedicated website displaying the photographs.
At first, one might believe that the interest of the exhibition lies in this transfer from the private to the public sphere: the intimate place where the artists are currently taking shelter suddenly becoming the center of attention, an “authentic” state of things (a certain routine, a work in progress, a daily life) suddenly revealing itself to everyone. However, this is not the case: Don’t try this at home does not claim an aesthetics of interiority, nor a poetics of the unveiling. The space chosen by the artist to create is not exhibited randomly: it is a question of organizing and staging it, framing and interpreting it before submitting it for publication. The twelve “intimacies” proposed here are not authentically intimate: they are constructed and declare themselves as such, which is what makes them fascinating.
The exhibition questions our eye: when we contemplate a photograph of Francis Bacon’s atelier (or its “life-size” reconstruction in a museum[1]), when we look at the YouTube tutorial of an “influencer” or watch a reality show, it is not only the content of these documents that we appreciate (the disorder of Bacon, the advice of the influencer and the ordinary routine of the reality show), but their very construction. Behind each installation, video or program, however realistic or spontaneous they may seem at first glance, there is a unique point of view, a specific technique, at set of strategic and artistic choices. The pleasure we experience in front of the exhibited “intimacy” of others is therefore undoubtedly distinct from the guilty excitement of a voyeur or the relief that a cliché or shared simplicity can cause. What rejoices in the spectacle of the intimate is the spectacle and not the intimate, that is the discovery and analysis of a new construction. The “deep self” of an individual has no interest per se, and confessed secrets are often disappointing; more thrilling are the reverse side of a story, the principles of a work and the mechanisms of an installation.
Contemporary artists have often staged their place of creation, like Andy Warhol transforming his studio into an artistic “Factory” open to everyone, Bruce Nauman declaring that “whatever [he] was doing in the studio must be art”[2] – even the perimeter of a square walked “in an exaggerated manner” by the artist[3] –, or Bruno Munari “seeking comfort in an uncomfortable chair” of his living room[4]. These practices do not “reveal” the intimacy of their authors: they rather express these artists’ conception of art, their talent or their humor. Self-portraits and selfies, before they “reveal” anything, transmit the lucid thought of their authors.
“Don’t try this at home”, the title of the exhibition borrowed from the famous television warning, therefore sounds like a reverse recommendation: “This time, dear confined audience, try this at home, that’s all you have left; build and communicate the ordinary pleasures of your days, get inspired by the artists, crop the image, change the filter and the intensity. Then, once the quarantine is over, go out … and leave forever the horror of an assigned home and the terror of everyday life!”
[1] Bacon en toutes lettres, Centre Pompidou, Paris, exhibition from September 11 2019 to January 20 2020.
[2] Bruce Nauman: “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”
[3] Bruce Nauman, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-68.
[4] Bruno Munari, Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair, 1944.