BILL BECKLEY To Express Conceptual Content

“The exhibition Ils se disent peintres,

ils se disent photographes was an important show not only for France, but for the history of western art. It defined the atmosphere as well as it alluded to the perplexity of that time. The show took place when photographs were being recognized along side painting as art. (Of course a major precedent was set by Man Ray and Duchamp.) I think photography as art snuck in art history through the back door. In the late sixties and early seventies photography (in the art world) was first used as documentation of land and body works. For us, the medium of anything even photography was less important than the concept or idea. With a few exceptions (in particular, the paintings of Neil Jenny) conceptual content was expressed through photography which seemed to be a more expedient way to express this kind of ideas. You click, and get the idea. No mucking about with brushes and paint. When people asked me what I did, however, I was hesitant to say “I am a photographer” because at the time that implied the so-called “fine art photography” of Alfred Stieglitz and Dorothea Lange. I respected these artists/photographers a great deal, but I felt my photographs, and the photographs of friends and artists like Peter Hutchinson, Dennis Oppenheim and John Baldessari, to name a few, existed in a different aesthetic cloud.”

DAVID HAXTON Photographs That Referenced Themselves

“This exhibition was a continued affirmation of my interest in making photographs that referenced themselves rather than creating a literary narrative, much like the selfreferential nature of non-objective painting. […] In 1976 I became interested in applying the concepts that I was working with in the films to photography. The first photographs utilized materials that had been set materials from the films. These photographs were diptychs, where one side was lit differently than the other side. The diptychs acted as a transition between the films and the single image photographs. The diptychs were more like a two-frame film, whereas the single image photographs conformed to a photographs ability to capture a single moment in time.” Page de gauche / left : Bill Beckley. « Indiscretion ». 1979. C-prints et textes / and texts. 220 x 650 cm. Vue de l’exposition / exhibition view « Ils se disent peintres, ils se disent photographes ». ARC / Mam-VP, 1980. (Ph. Gilotte)

MICHELE ZAZA Outside of Technical Specificities

“The exhibition Ils se disent peintres.

Ils se disent photographes represented an important opportunity to reflect on the potential of the sculptural and pictorial use of photography, a medium that introduces us outside of technical specificities and any stylistic exercise, but in the experimentation of a world that is intentionally oneiric and foreign. My photographic triptychs chosen for this exhibition, entitled Itinerario (1980), are a representation of the human image (my mother and my father) progressively distancing from the terrestrial realm by coloring its face until its carnal physicality can be deciphered. The link to this metamorphosis is offered by the photos representing white cotton-clouds in all their warm rotundity. The encounter with the clouds becomes secret, celestial, intimate, one of complete osmosis. The photography for me—in accordance with the perspective indicated by the exhibition Ils se disent peintres. Ils se disent photographes —is not a manifestation of my own “interior world” but is intended to create a joyful dynamic, formed with my own hands, with the manipulation of card, colors and cotton wool. It becomes a simple dream of liberty-desired. […] At the end of the seventies and early eighties I felt the need to create a “pictorial” photographic image, more direct relationship with the idea: so the idea becomes more concrete, more physical, and isn’t intellectualized any more. The work becomes richer on a tactile and emotional level. The photography is an efficacious and faithful tool for visualizing my questions (and desires) about human existence. It allows me to manifest spaces and contents of spirituality means, a new physical and mental life: to be, immediately, time, space, birth, death, finite, infinite, contingency, transcendency.”

ANNETTE MESSAGER The Mismatch

“The exhibition by Michel Nuridsany was important because it showed that photography is also sculpture and painting. I had installed a series, Les Variétés, which was a mixture of black and white photographs that had been painted, combined with black and white acrylic paint pieces, all very cut out and spread out over the whole space of the wall. I wanted this mixture to be impure, ‘a mismatch’, because painting is timeless and photography, on the contrary, is linked to time, to the moment.”