EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MODEST ARTS AND THEIR MUSEUM
Françoise Adamsbaum, director of MIAM, and Hervé Di Rosa, artist, co-founder and president of MIAM
CAN WE DEFINE MODEST ARTS?
HERVÉ DI ROSA The modest arts are neither an artistic genre nor a movement; they shift the gaze.They are an opening up of this gaze, a disposition to curiosity. Modest arts concern both mass-produced objects and unique creations. They constitute a kind of supra-category that encompasses and connects the margins of each domain. At first, in the 1990s, for me people thought that Philippe Druillet’s comics and Michelangelo’s paintings were the same thing. The truth is they transport me just as much, but not in the same way. Modest art is a subjective classification that differs from the ordinary vertical classification, which consists in placing comics below Renaissance art. Instead, it’s about looking at the works horizontally. And to experience aesthetic emotions in front of things that aren’t supposed to provide them, for example the surprises found in chocolate eggs. I should point out these emotions aren’t linked to a nostalgic memory of childhood, which sometimes animates Bernard Belluc. The definition of modest arts is nourished by the work that’s done daily at MIAM. It becomes clearer with each exhibition.
FRANÇOISE ADAMSBAUM
First we experiment, only then do we analyse. Experience guides us. Hervé points out territories to be explored, such as prison art, psychedelia, etc.; then we put on our walking shoes: each exhibition takes us, often with the help of an external curator, to other regions of art.
WHY DOES THE MAP OF THE MODEST ARTS ALWAYS HAVE TO BE REDRAWN?
HDR Because it’s a tectonic system in perpetual movement. It’s far from fixed, which is why it’s so difficult to define modest arts. Everyday objects and works come out of it while others enter it: for example, all the imagery of video games for more than thirty years, the whole forming a “federation of the margins” with fluctuating contours.
FA Hervé talks a lot about the materiality of the works and less about theory, which is more a matter for our work in the museum. He focuses on experience, on “doing”, on the “concrete and practical” aspect. He is above all an artist.
HDR This is why we’ve created a prize with the National Institute of Art History (INHA), so that academics can work on our themes.
IS THERE A THEORY OF MODEST ART?
FA When the museum opened in 2000, there was no such theory, but today, after fortythree exhibitions, it’s possible to grasp all the domains of art together.
HDR First of all, it was a re-reading and re
thinking of the realms of art. More than a theory, it was an act.To reread, to re-evaluate what had been despised, but from which the learned arts had nevertheless been able to draw inspiration and even appropriate. Frankly, 20 years ago I didn’t think MIAM would still be necessary today. I imagined that a new generation of curators, with more open minds, would arrive in museums. But I see they haven’t, and there’s still a lot of territory to be explored on the margins. So there’ll always be a place for MIAM.
IS MODEST ART REALLY “MODEST”?
HDR Ambition’s important. “Modest” isn’t a criterion of values. “Modest”doesn’t mean “humble” or “poor”.A Superman can be modest. I’m an artist, and when I was younger I really suffered from a certain pretentiousness in the contemporary art world. The adjective “modest” is a reaction to that. At first, modest art was just a receptacle for my influences, but I had to name my sources. The exhibition Archipels Modestes (1) featured seventy artists who’ve influenced me at one time or another. For example, in the 1980s, long before I went to Africa, I’d started collecting painted hairdresser signs. And then the modest stance is the best way to approach the other, to open up to expressions outside our own field of action.
COULD MIAM HAVE BEEN CREATED BY PEOPLE OTHER THAN ARTISTS?
FA I don’t think so. There are two founders, Hervé Di Rosa and Bernard Belluc, who aren’t involved in the same way in the life of the museum. Hervé has been president since the creation of MIAM in 2000. At the same time, the team, along with the curators, needs Hervé’s vision at some point. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have ideas, but
De haut en bas from top: Anonyme. Alebrije
« Diable rouge ». 1999. (Coll. et Ph. MIAM).
Gilles Barbier. Le Monde Trou du cul. 2010. Exposition exhibition GROMIAM. Les 20 ans de Groland, 2012. (Ph. Pierre Schwartz)
there always comes a time when he has to take us elsewhere. It’s important that it’s an artist who moves our gaze, to use his expression.
HDR I feel as though I’ve made a body of work. I didn’t think I’d be able to do it (I learned a lot, especially about the world of work). But I recall that before MIAM there was the Galerie de l’art modeste and the Caravane de l’art modeste, the latter as part of the L’Art à la Plage [Art on the Beach] event; they already contained the idea of presenting something other than listed art. Then I met Belluc through Hélène Arnal, an artist from Sète, and this crystallised the project of a museum...
ARE THE MODEST ARTS POP?
HDR I imagined modest arts partly as a reaction to pop culture, which includes everything underground, rock, etc., but mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world. But nowadays, there’s pop culture in every corner of the world, and its diverse variations are included in the modest arts. We’re preparing a show on modest architecture that’ll take into account both the shacks built out of necessity on the edge of the ring road and the hotels in Las Vegas, where everything is fake and real at the same time, like Caesars Palace made of marble. Usually we classify creations according to their historical or market value. For my part, I’d like to see other, more emotional criteria used, such as feelings, desire, everything that has no place in a theoretical context.
HOW DO YOU JUDGE WHAT MODEST ART IS?
HDR Fundamentally, there’s always a personal criterion, the creator’s need to make the object. The second criterion is there’s no preoccupation with art history, in the sense of doing something new, or even being recognised. And the third criterion is the creator must have a feeling of embellishing life, of making something pretty, rather than beautiful, and the one of doing good, even if it’s badly done.
ARE THERE ANY FORMAL DISCOVERIES THAT CAN BE MADE IN THE MODEST ARTS?
HDR Yes, for example, some Japanese figurines have a new way of representing water and clouds in volumes, which I’d never seen in contemporary art.
FA Many people contact us to donate collections. We therefore ask ourselves what the criteria are for accepting or not accepting these donations. For example, we recently received an offer of a collection of clementine papers, and the way it was presented, in boxes, was impressive. In this case, the need is less that of the craftsman who produced the clementine paper than that of the collector.
HDR There is indeed a fourth criterion, that of number. Often productions become modest art when a collection has brought them together. I classify the collection as a form of expression. Moreover, in its exhibitions, MIAM interrogates this question of the relationship between the work and the collection, the part and the whole.
WHAT QUALITIES DOES A MODEST ART LOVER NEED?
FA The answer is very clear: when I meet vi
sitors to the museum, I notice they want to discover things they don’t know. So I’d say curiosity, generosity and availability, which we ourselves favour in our approach.
HDR I find it very difficult to answer this question, because a lover of modest arts can’t be confused with an art lover. I think to be a lover of modest art, you have to be a collector. Everyone has a sort of personal altar at home, which they sometimes call their museum of horrors.
CAN A COLLECTION OF SNOW GLOBES BE PART OF MODEST ART?
HDR It’s not as interesting as it was twenty years ago because it’s a very well-known field now. It needs an unexplored terra incognita. With time, things leave the modest arts.
DO ALL COMICS COME UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF THE MODEST ARTS?
HDR When I discovered Corto Maltese in Pif Gadget magazine, the newspaper itself was “modest” at the time. But today, Corto Maltese can’t be said to be modest art.
COULD THE MIAM HAVE BEEN CREATED ELSEWHERE THAN IN SÈTE?
HDR Historically, the museum is the result of a joint proposal by the Sète council and the Ministry of Culture.The Musée de l’Objet in Blois was a kind of prefiguration. I wasn’t the ideal person to carry it out, but I became
Bernard Belluc. Entre chien et loup. 2009-2019. Exposition exhibition La Part modeste. Bernard Belluc, Delphine Coindet, Gérard Collin-Thiébaut & invités, 2019-20. (Ph. Pierre Schwartz) the one by force of circumstance. And once the museum was created, it had to be made to work. There are many cultural structures in Sète for the 45,000 inhabitants, with a particular mix of learned and popular cultures, the Paul Valéry Museum, MIAM...
CAN WE IMAGINE MIAMS ELSEWHERE?
HDR We’re going to start presenting our collections off-site, notably at the Villa Beatrix Enea in Anglet, in 2022.
WHAT IS THE GRAND MIAM?
FA It’s the project for a new building outside the city, renovated by Rudy Ricciotti, which should enlarge the exhibition space by a factor of five, and allow, alongside temporary exhibitions, the display of the permanent collection. We’re very much in demand, people offer us quality exhibitions and also donations, but for the moment we lack space. In the Grand MIAM there’ll also be a place for Hervé’s work. We’ve a lot of ideas for this Grand MIAM, and we’re already working in that direction.
HDR But we shouldn’t devote more space to temporary exhibitions, for which we’re particularly careful with the layout. We still have lots of projects to complete.
WHAT IS THE MIAM GRANT?
FA The museum’s twentieth anniversary is leading us to think more about education, transmission and research. These are areas we’ll develop in the coming years.
HDR And theory... We initiated this grant with INHA, the Antoine de Galbert Foundation fully supported it, and we awarded it for the first time to Jean-Baptiste Carobolante, who works on the subject of commercial art, in particular the work of Thomas Kinkade. The aim is to understand why this art, which is of interest to many contemporary artists such as Jeffrey Vallance and Jim Shaw, is so little known. And yet it represents about half of the world’s art market. Bernard Buffet can also be part of it, as can Lorjou, Toffoli, etc., and also the Place du Tertre.
We realised that in order to deal with certain subjects, such as prison art, and in this case commercial art, we needed a solid academic research base. The reason we want to turn to researchers is because there are no curators at MIAM. There are still many subjects to explore, and this grant, which will be awarded every two years, is a way of working on them. In a way, this is a means of outsourcing.