Audemars Piguet, Basel, Venice Biennale
Strongly committed to contemporary art through their support of several art fairs, including Art Basel, Audemars Piguet watchmakers is present for the first time at the Venice Biennale (until 24 November). On this occasion we met Olivier Audemars, Vice President of the company.
L’OFFICIEL ART : Autumn 2018 marked another step forward in Audemars Piguet’s support for the world of contemporary creation as part of Tomas Saraceno’s exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. What do you remember from this experience and of the encounter with the artist?
OLIVIER AUDEMARS: The goal of our involvement in the field of contemporary art is to contribute to the realization of a project that surprises us, that allows us to discover new territories and that inspires reflection. This realization began with the photographs made at our request by Dan Hodlsworth, which gave us access to a totally different vision of the Joux Valley, where our factory is located. We wondered why people had settled in this very beautiful, harsh climate. We then understood the extent to which artists have the capacity to show reality in a new way, to dissect its depths and, as a result, to clarify it. This experience allowed us to broaden our network of knowledge and we allowed ourselves to collaborate more directly with certain artists. Up until that point, we had always called on our committee of experts from the Audemars Piguet Commission, set up in 2014, which each year presents a project within the framework of Art Basel, Hong Kong or Miami. I thus had the opportunity to further discover the work of Tomas Saraceno as part of the Berlin Gallery Weekend—of which we are partners—acquired one of his works and, as a natural extension, his gallerist invited us to a meeting in his Berlin studio. Saraceno was working on his exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, and it was there that the idea took shape of collaborating on this project. We were so excited that we also wanted to exhibit the work of the artist at Art Basel Miami Beach. It should be noted that this project, like that of Lars Jan (presented at the 2018 edition of Art Basel) devoted to the rising of waters in Florida, addresses environmental issues that are among the topics we are attentive to, and that are embodied by our Foundation, which was established in 1992 to work for the preservation of forests around the world.
A new milestone has also been reached in terms of the breadth of your support, because this year Audemars Piguet asked the musician and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda for a trilogy of works, the first of which was unveiled as part of the Venice Biennale. What was the genesis of this project?
Ryoji Ikeda’s work has long been our focus, his installations are impressive in many ways, including for their mathematics, a discipline that interests me personally. We had planned to organize a screening on the beach as part of Art Basel Miami Beach. In the end this did not materialize, but we have kept in touch with the artist. In addition, we have a special relationship with CERN, and at the 2018 edition of Art Basel, we presented Halo, a work created during the residency at CERN of the British duo Semiconductor.
Ikeda was also artist-in-residence at CERN, so we noticed that besides his work on sound and light, he developed an interest in cosmology, data collection and data processing... Our support for Ikeda’s project is thus a logical continuation. The artist indicates that after researching the data collected over the past fifteen years, he has reached a type of completion, and what he is presenting at the Venice Biennale is a way of concluding this stage of his artistic work. The exhibition of this work is constructed in three parts: after the infinitely small exhibited at the Biennale, the work will approach the human scale, then the infinitely large. This collaboration is therefore for the long term, and each demonstration will focus on presenting the totality of the experience, but with an evolution.
Continuing your series of collaborations with creators (artists, designers), you featured, at Art Basel Hong Kong (then in Basel) the collector’s lounge, made by Fernando Mastrangelo: how does this collaboration fit into the overall frame of your previous projects?
The backbone of our initiatives in contemporary art is our Art Commission, which each year selects a project. In general, it is an emerging artist, who has managed to reach a stage that allows him or her to master extremely complex projects: we accompany this person in the realization of work which remains their property, which allows the work to continue to have its own existence. In some cases, we then help the artist to circulate the work, or even to allow it to evolve. That’s what happened with Sun Xun, when in 2016, at Art Basel Miami Beach, we exhibited his 9-minute animated film: this project was subsequently selected by New York City to be shown in July 2017 as part of its program “Midnight Moment”: between 11:57 and midnight, the Times Square billboards broadcast an extract of the work, which gave him considerable visibility. Such an experience is doubly rewarding: it allows the artist to take an additional step, and gives us the ability to observe how a project in which we have participated in a significant way can have another dimension. Besides our Art Commission, we thus sought out established artists such as Tomas Saraceno and Yoshi Ikeda. And a third prong led us to ask an artist or a designer to spend a period of artistic residency in the valley of Joux, to later express their vision of the valley as part of our lounge. The first interpretation was entrusted to Matthieu Lehanneur, then we collaborated for three years with Sebastien Errazuriz who treated each element separately: ice, forest, and fire, and Davide Quayola. With Fernando Mastrangelo, the interest is focused on the geological aspect of the valley. Thus, each of these creators expresses a point of view, corresponding to their sensibility, of the region where our factory is located: a vision that we integrate into our lounge. Indeed, one of the goals of our lounges is to communicate to our visitors the essence and spirit of the place we come from.
Audemars Piguet is more specifically associated with Art Basel, which it has been supporting since 2013. Why and how did the link with the Venice Biennale take shape?
What interested us with Art Basel is the common cultural roots—since we are dealing with Switzerland—but also the international scope. So when we are in Hong Kong, we have the opportunity to meet artists from mainland China, Taiwan, Japan; at Art Basel Miami Beach, we come into contact with artists from Cuba, Mexico, California... Each edition allows us to better understand the reality of people living in these different regions. And this occurs at a deeper level than can be grasped through financial or economic ties... This is a way for us to understand our environment differently because, to a certain extent, we can to say that artists are cultural translators, who help build bridges between different cultures and better understand what’s going on. They thus help prepare the business for a world that is constantly evolving, and grant access to a deeper level of understanding of our environment. When the idea of the trilogy materialized with Ikeda, we thought it would be great to be able to present it at the Venice Biennale, but as part of a satellite space. Ralph Rugoff, curator at the Biennale, asked Ikeda for a work presented in the International Exhibition at the Arsenale. This made it possible to reach a new dimension, but one which was not part of the original plan. What we have seen is that our principle of sticking scrupulously to contemporary art as a way of learning a certain number of things, and not just looking for a marketing concept, has given us a credibility with artists as well as curators and gallery owners. This broadens our possibilities for presenting ambitious projects in spaces that were previously inaccessible to us. As for the evolution of our initiatives in the artistic field, it is impossible for me to say precisely what will happen, but this is also the beauty of the thing... The key element in my view is to create as many opportunities as possible, then, depending on the stage we have reached and the state of our thoughts, to make the decision to tackle one particular challenge rather than another... We have guidelines, but we keep for ourselves a certain margin of freedom.