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Marin Karmitz discusses his latest production, as the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg invites the cult film mogul to take on the role of curator.
A chance meeting in 2006 between Marin Karmitz and Fabrice Hergott – then director of Strasbourg’s museums – instigated an invitation to create an exhibition. Three years later the filmmaker finally makes his curatorial debut with Silences, un Propos de Marin Karmitz at Strasbourg’s Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain. An assembly of 15 œuvres from leading contemporary artists highlights new artistic practices emerging during key periods in recent history. Examples include Alberto Giacometti’s 1950 La Forêt (The Forest), a composition completed with a man’s bust, which prefigured the artist’s interest in face and bust motifs throughout the succeeding decade, and Bruce Nauman’s unnerving Shit in your Hat-Head on a Chair, an evocation of mental torture used in totalitarian regimes.
More than 45 years ago Marin Karmitz embarked on a cinematic career, cutting his teeth under the auspices of iconic directors Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda and Jacques Rosier. Throughout the following decade, Karmitz rose to fame for his avant-garde and often controversial films that have become arthouse classics, amassing a covey of honors from the Cinémathèque Française, New York’s MOMA and the Tel Aviv Film Library. In the 1970s, he founded his own production and distribution company, MK2, which has launched the career of many well-known international artists from the world of film, such as Lucian Pintilie and Hong Sang Soo. Today MK2 is one of the three main cinematographic groups in France, boasting a network of 10 movie complexes and a catalogue of more than 400 titles.
The guest curator spoke to Joëlle Pijaudier-Cabot and Estelle Pietryzk.
What incited you to organize this exhibition?
The origin of the project came from a chance meeting with Fabrice Hergott in 2006,
who was then director of Strasbourg’s museums. During our conversation, we talked about
certain historic artistic movements that had never – in my opinion – benefited from a sufficient
rereading, though they had definitely left an inventory of fixtures in France. This includes
part of the 1950’s and more particularly the period 1950-1965 when we saw the birth of a
new Constitution, a new magazine, L’Express, the Nouvelle Vague in cinema, the Nouveau
Roman, the Nouveau Theatre, thanks to Beckett and Ionesco, but also the arrival of new
movements on the artistic scene in the domains of painting and sculpture. I believe that
Giacometti did his most interesting work then. The other decisive period is the one following
‘68, more precisely 1968 to 1973. Here again, we find the creation of a new magazine,
Libération, the emergence of pictorial movements including narrative Figuration, the debuts
of artists such as Christian Boltanski. And it was also the time we find many intellectuals –
Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze – first take an interest in artists, writing prefaces for exhibition
catalogs. So I came up with the idea for an exhibition, which seemed interesting to me,
around the relationships that philosophers and writers had with art during these two
periods. If I agreed to be commissioner of the project – though I don’t like the term – it’s
because I wanted to distance myself from cinema.
How would you define your role in this exhibition project: as an artist, a well-informed
art lover, or a commissioner?
Certainly not as an artist. Having been a director myself, I perfectly understand the
difference between directing a film and producing one. My role would be more on the lines
of a commissioner, though, as I told you, I don’t care for the term: it implies police work in
art, adding a certain order, whereas art, in my eyes, is more of a creation of disorder than
order. In this project, I consider myself above all, a conveyor of ideas and emotions. When
you get a chance to speak out, you must seize it, no matter what the medium is, film,
exhibitions or anything else. My only goal is to try to understand and pass it on, passing on
an experience, or an idea through feelings. Understanding the past and transferring it to the
present seems essential in order to change the future. By keeping utopia in mind we can
change things, this allows me to create, and that’s how I developed the ideas for this project.
Which ideas? Is this a self portrait? Is it a philosophical view of the world?
At first, I wanted to use philosophers’ and artists’ relationships with contemporary art
as seen through their writing, choosing work that illustrated their ideas. That was a mistake
and I quickly reworked the project. (...) It seemed to me that the only way to speak about
painting – and it’s the same thing for film, literature or music – is to leave off from the
work itself, trying to respect the artist’s work in the most honest way possible. So I went
back to the work. The thing that makes an exhibition original is an ability to stage it and ask
yourself the following question: which story do I want to tell? Once I realized this, everything
evolved from there: I was surprised to notice that at some point artists were forced to leave
the “silence of painting” behind. Obviously, the status of painter had already been shaken up
by the Surrealists, but we saw an upheaval immediately after the first World War that
Dubuffet, Bacon, Tapiès seem particularly emblematic of. Then in the 1970’s a real
explosion of new techniques replaced painting, practices like installations, video or
performance. All of a sudden, a certain number of artists were speaking out in a totally
new way, something we’d never seen before, breaking the silence of painting by introducing
words, the spoken or the written, into their work. I took this speech act that the artists used
and became interested in all the different ways it manifested itself. I chose artists I like,
those who bring out a certain emotion in me and in some cases, ones I’d even had a chance
to meet.
The artists I chose all share a common concept about the world, whose range is universal. I
believe that thanks to their work, they attain the inexpressible, they are able to give us an
idea of God...But it’s also true that these artists move me personally, in my own story, in
what I am. Therefore, “Silences” is a very personal project.
How did you tackle the question of scenography?
I wanted to work with Patrick Bouchain, whom I knew, and who I asked to be very
careful about respecting the works themselves. The result is that the works are never
opposite each other, they always have their own space, their own “home”. This way each
work is surrounded by its own silence. Here again we find this notion of “building houses”,
that we talked about earlier, in the presentation. (...) Moving from one house to the next,
visitors don’t follow a layout that’s been traced out, s/he can always choose between
several possibilities, it’s up to them to decide the order of progression. At first, I even had
the idea of a scenography evoking a labyrinth, in the physical and the symbolic sense.
Finally, we were very careful about how we worked the lighting, but also sound. There are in
fact several sonorous pieces in the exhibition, especially Martial Raysse’s work and also
Kabakov’s. (...) We find whispering in Boltanski’s room as well as On Kawara’s endless
countdown. It all had to mesh together, while respecting the works. (...) The visit as I
imagined it has a beginning, a middle and an end, it has a narrative just as film taught me
to do. This experience did in fact teach me that a movie can be a simple illustration – images
spliced together end-to-end following a certain order, or even when you tell a real story and
you ask yourself which direction you should take. I wanted to build the exhibition like you write
a scenario, with the idea that it’s “necessary to tell a story” and the need to stage it in a
pertinent way, two “reflexes” I acquired directly from film. (...) But it’s true that in the
exhibition’s visit, not everything is offered up straightaway; in a certain sense everyone has
to bring something to it, it’s the idea of a Spanish hostel. The visitor can build upon it feely
choosing his/her path, even getting lost sometimes. (...)
Listening to your ideas about the exhibition and your words, you hint at a world view
taking shape. Is this a philosophical view?
Philosophical, without a doubt. An anecdote comes to mind that resumes my general
approach. I was on my way home from New York, where I had just left Kieslowski, and on
the plane I met up with Elie Wiesel for whom I have deep affection and admiration. We
would often bump into each other accidentally and were always happy to see each other.
So I usually had a story ready especially for these lucky occasions. In Hassidic tradition, it’s
a sign of affection to have a story in mind for someone we appreciate. I told him that I had
just spent some time with Kieslowski and that we had decided to create “the solitude
party”. I asked him if he wanted to join our party. He said he would “if we added the word
silence”. This request started me thinking and it unsettled me: because silence made me
think about Kieslowski, who never stops talking about how he craves silence; this brought
me to Bergman who stopped directing in 1984; he obviously made me think about Beckett.
Who brought me back to myself, my own silences. If we added “silence’, would there still be
dialogue? Besides, imposing silence is also learning how to listen, and these days we really
need to listen.
Silences, un Propos de Marin Karmitz is showing at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de la Ville de Strasbourg until August 23, 2009.