How to go about exhibiting a book well? In 2012 Foto / Grafica, a history of Latin American photography books, What are the methods?
Opened in 2010 in the north of Paris, the Bal has made its mark by the singularity of its exhibitions. But its action is also deliberately not in the spotlight. Diane Dufour, founder and co-director of the space, here specifies its ambitions and methods. ——— Can a place like the Bal be created without a vision?
In 2010 the founding impetus was to place the Bal in the very broad spectrum of the visual document, from Jeff Wall’s “almost documentary” to Walker Evans’ “documentary style” and Gilles Peress’ “visual anthropology”. It was a question of highlighting works which are formally innovative while, at the same time examining the world in which we live: an ambition of an aesthetic and political laboratory. This remains the case, with an even more pervasive attention now given to experimental forms. How is the work of Alex Majoli, exhibited until April 28, situated regarding documentation? He is a member of Magnum, but theatricalizes the real and artificializes the image.His practice for 10 years has been anchored in an adolescence marked by Italian avant-garde theatre and major texts like Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Majoli operates by treating the scene of events (Sangatte, Golden Dawn, the crisis in Athens ...) or non-events, seen in full view and awareness of the subjects photographed, with powerful flashes that plunge the scenes into the darkness of “day for night” [simulation of night in daytime used on film sets]. His modus operandi challenges the idea that to claim “authenticity”, a photographer must be present in the world without interaction with their subject. Photography is always, to varying degrees, an illusion, an artifice, and Majoli takes Shakespeare at his word: “The world is a stage”. This is an approach that induces its own quest for truth and its own relationship with illusionism.
How do you analyze the need of photographers coming from reportage to create new forms?
Bertolt Brecht said: “Our idea of realism must be broad and political, and sovereign with regard to conventions.” Forms of realism are constantly being adapted, mutating. If reality can’t be grasped in all its grandeur or distress, in all its polyphony, then to represent it necessarily entails a doubt, a stuttering, a decoy. Inventing new forms that show both the complexity of the world and the biases of representation is the vocation of great photographers.
HISTORY’S FORGOTTEN
The Bal shows unknown figures. Is it important to question the canons of the history of photography?
The Bal exhibitions follow three lines: young creation, “history’s forgotten”, and major thematic exhibitions. Not all of history’s forgotten are there. Among them are authors recognized internationally but little shown in France when the Bal exhibited them, such as Mark Lewis, Takuma Nakahira and Lewis Baltz. And then there are the real forgotten ones, like Mark Cohen, Bas Jan Ader and Dave Heath. In any case, I make a cut in a work by choosing an angle, a period
or a theme. The retrospective approach doesn’t suit me because it constrains by its ambition to be exhaustive. Moreover, all museums show retrospectives. The Bal isn’t a museum, but a place that seeks to establish a narrative, in the sense of the unprecedented encounter of a form and an experience of the world. Many of the photographers exhibited are European or American. Is it difficult to get out of a Western reading of photography?
Provoke in 2016, the biggest exhibition at the Bal (and a thousand-page book), revealed photography and performance in Japan in the 1960s. In general, I am reluctant to impose exogenous criteria (nationality, gender, age of creators) on the programming, which would seem to me to go in the direction of a labeling of the world more simplifying than visionary or militant. The Bal exhibitions are very much linked to discoveries, questioning, encounters, so inevitably random and eminently subjective. I was surprised by the Noémie Goudal exhibition. She practices a very constructed photography that establishes a distance from reality by playing on the illusion of truth and falsehood.
This was already the case in the inaugural Bal exhibition, Anonymes (Anonymous), with Jeff Wall, Sharon Lockhart and Standish Lawder. Sigmar Polke, Barbara Probst, Wang Bing will soon be shown at the Bal.Today, the Bal is no longer only associated with the vast and polymorphous idea of the documentary or post-documentary, but with that of the invention of a form to speak of the world, which seems to me less restrictive, and embraces all types of experiments, formats. The question of the document was preponderant in the years 1990-2000. It seems to have become secondary today, as artists are turning to more experimental practices. Is expanding the Bal vision a way of following the evolution of practice?
The most relevant practices have always been experimental in their time. I would say that the limits of representation have reached a climax today and are pushing creators to find alternatives. It is about giving a form to a nonsensical world, and the fact that this form becomes a world in itself that makes sense. There is doubtless a generalization of doubt and the autopsy of doubt involves the question of the medium and that of the viewer.
Autopsy of doubt?
The Bal is a place of reflection on the contemporary image. “Can we still represent the world starting from its surface?” is a legitimate question. So many things rule the world, such as financial flows and data manipulation, without its being possible to capture them in an image. There is also the question of the self-representation of the world as stated by Marc Augé: “How to represent a world that is defined by representation, which never stops recording itself recording itself?” And what about the omnipresence of “visual journalism citizen” since September 11, Tahrir Square and the war in Syria? The sensation of the absurdity of a world buried beneath the images that it produces and which no longer manages to link the image to a regime of truth, and even less to be indignant at what it sees, permeates many works exhibited at the Bal, from Walid Raad to Eyal Weizman via Antoine d’Agata. One of the things that really struck me was Alan Clarke’s film Elephant, made for the BBC in 1989. It’s a litany of seemingly meaningless murders, a masterly expression of the absurdity of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Pushed to the extreme, the absurd becomes grotesque.
GAZE MANUFACTURER What evolutions have you noticed in the way of exhibiting photography?
I notice more transversality, intelligence of the process and object presented.This moves works from an exhibition scheme to an installation scheme, adding another dimension to their reception. I am thinking, among other things, of Dirk Braeckman’s exhibition at the last Venice Biennale. One of the singularities of the Bal is to have immediately placed prints, films, videos and books on the same level. Unlike the moving picture, the book is hard to exhibit. It’s often reduced to document or archive. Has the Bal managed to give it another status?
I hope
so. In Dust, histoires de poussière d’après
Man Ray et Marcel Duchamp (Dust, stories of dust after Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp) in 2015-16 with David Campany, there were two books by Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, in their entirety laid flat, like a map, or on the wall. With the exhibition Again and Again by Stéphane Duroy in 2017, we wanted to show the “attempt at exhaustion” of a book: the addition of successive layers, collages, press clippings, anonymous photographs, paintings, erasures and tears came to feed and abuse dozens of copies of his book Unknown.
was a great laboratory. With the scenographer Jasmin Oezcebi we explored all the possible ways to show a book in a space: they were boned, placed alongside texts, transformed into wallpaper, sculptures, video sequences, they were photocopied ... Independently of the content of the books, which allowed the relation of the history of photography in South America in an unprecedented way. This exhibition made a lasting impression on visitors. But I have noticed that exhibitions of books find only a small audience of enthusiasts because they still appear elitist or counter-intuitive. That’s why we even made the book manipulable by the visitor. On an idea from our bookseller, Émilie Lauriola, Performing Books is a series of events around book collections that visitors are invited to perform. The book thus occupies a prominent role in the Bal: from book object, very present in the bookstore, which focuses on self-publishing and independent publishers, to a more theoretical approach in the cycles of meetings organized with the EHESS or ENS within the exhibition spaces. This link to the book is undoubtedly one of the singularities of the Bal in the Parisian context of places dedicated to the image. What would be the others?
First, I would say the extreme attention paid to the scenography. Wanting to do great things in a small place requires, each time, the reinvention of the space. As with the book, the exhibition medium must be the object of a reflection that structures and reveals what is shown. Our team includes a remarkable scenographer, Cyril Delhomme. For the exhibition dedicated to Dave Heath, he had the idea of evoking a street in New York that echoed the Baudelairian flâneur that was this huge American photographer. The other singularity of the Bal is the Fabrique du regard (The Gaze Manufacturer), an educational platform that affirms a deep political and social territorial anchorage. In 10 years we have trained 20,000 young people in priority education to read images and develop a critical, therefore active and concerned, way of looking at the society they inherit.
Christine Vidal, codirector with me, has invented over the years an innovative teaching method. Field workshops and a platform of citizenship awareness education via images, ERSILIA, foreshadowing the education of tomorrow, involve hundreds of teenagers, artists and teachers. The Bal strives to be visionary and engaged in an area. In general, the Bal is pervaded by multiple talents that come together around a project: an exhibition, a book, a seminar, a workshop, a programme. It is a platform, anti-institutional, independent, open to confrontation, to sidesteps, the improbable, the unknown, the unthought-of. What matters is to call into question and rethink the world in which we live, to multiply the different lights shed on it. The Bal must be integrated because our thinking must be integrated.