Pierre Bismuth My Name Is Artist
Pierre Bismuth, or the art of misappropriation and paradox, to meddle with the history of contemporary art without redundancies, but not without references. An exhibition, Everyone Is an Artist but Only the Artist Knows It, is dedicated to him at the Centre Pompidou (October 20th, 2021—February 28th, 2022; curator: Jean-Pierre Criqui).
Should the artist’s name become a trademark in the primary sense of the term? Some of them, like Andy Warhol, have almost developed a brand strategy or have almost become common names, like those modelled on the surnames of certain famous inventors. Since Picasso’s name and signature were given to a major French car company, why couldn’t Pierre Bismuth’s be the brand name of a chocolate, especially since the French artist is the instigator and manufacturer? To do so, and after several attempts, he acquired a chocolate mill, thus following in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp and his famous mill. The unlikely grandson of these two grandfathers of contemporary art has never ceased to build on this paradoxical heritage, blurring the lines and references even in the title of his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which refers to Joseph Beuys: Everyone Is an Artist but Only the Artist Knows It.
His para-conceptual approach is empirical, in the sense of a process in action, moving very widely and refusing at the same time to lock himself into any model or paradigm whatsoever, particularly cinema, with which he has frequently been associated, often against his will. Although this aspect of his work is naturally present and also introduces his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Bismuth very quickly departs from it and tackles fields as numerous as they are varied, with this permanent desire to escape any summary classification by definition, even if convergences appear in this eclectic panorama of a work with unconventional developments.
The three themes evoked—the ambiguous relationship to cinema, the use of proper nouns, the vernacular aspect of the culinary element—in a way constitute the common threads of a body of work spanning more than twenty years. To this we must add a double attraction for graphic design and colour, a legacy of Bismuth’s studies at the Arts Décoratifs rather than the Beaux-Arts, which led him to say that he “found graphic design and communication more stimulating [than the Beaux-Arts], no doubt because he was not supervised by the right people at Beaux-Arts and, on the contrary, studied with interesting people at Arts Décoratifs”. It was there that he met Xavier Veilhan and Pierre Huyghe, with whom he would later collaborate on several projects.
A SAAB 900
Bismuth’s approach can be summed up in one sentence: “I like to start with something that doesn’t really fit into the artistic field, and in the end I manage to insert it.” (2) Examples are numerous, such as Confiture d’Artiste [Artist’s Jam, 2011], Double Vitrage au Jus d’Orange [Double Glazing with Orange Juice, 2021], Chocolat Pierre Bismuth (2019) or Portrait du Collectionneur (2021). The latter is a beautiful tribute to Herman Daled, who died just a year ago. The artist
got his old car, a Saab 900, from a collector, and had the interior upholstery completely restored with printed leather bearing the names of all the artists in his collection. It should be noted that this car had always had a legendary side, because, with the exception of one or two pieces, it had never been shown in its entirety before the exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2010, and was subsequently acquired by MoMA in New York.
All the big names in conceptual and minimal art are in it, mostly with major works. Daled always carried a small leaflet with all the names of the artists in his collection. This list had become almost the only tangible proof and the only material presence of his collection—to the surprise or disappointment of many, it depends—it was Herman Daled’s participation in the inaugural exhibition of the Maison Rouge in 2004, L’Intime. Le Collectionneur Derrière la Porte [Intimacy: The Collector Behind the Door]. With this pirouette, Daled barely opened the door, as Pierre Bismuth does, in a different register, but in the same spirit, by reappropriating this list to insert it into a context that is, to say the least, offbeat, without altering its character. At the Centre Pompidou, only the plaque makes it possible to understand the reason for the presence of this vehicle in the exhibition, and thus to relate it to other works dealing with references to the history of contemporary art, but always in a different context.
The wallpaper that forms the back wall of the exhibition, Le Sommeil de la Raison Engendre des Monstres [The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 2007-17], follows the same principle. The first names and surnames of 20th-century artists appear on the wallpaper, but a progressive and cumulative shift in the strips dissociates the two entities. Thus Joseph Beuys becomes “Joseph Buren”, who becomes “Daniel Ruscha”, who in turn becomes “Ed Warhol”, who in turn becomes “Andy Nauman”, who is transformed into “Bruce Flavin”, etc. This process is not without humour and contributes to Bismuth’s reflection on the desacralisation of patronymics, as well as on the position and status of the artist, which he intends to “deflate”: “The artist is in a better position than anyone else to know that there is in fact nothing about him that distinguishes him from any other individual. What distinguishes the artist today, then, is his will to be an artist, and this is what can lead him to place in the field of art a series of operations that could otherwise be undertaken by anyone.” (3)
FREE IMMERSION
This is what Bismuth did when he made his own milk chocolate, since he could not find any to his taste in the shops. He therefore produced a “milk chocolate for dark chocolate lovers”, first for his own use and then as a gift for visitors to his exhibition, not without careful packaging. He was inspired by one of his previous works, Variations sur le Thème des Nations (2019-21), in which he combines, in various variations, the flags of France and Rwanda, recalling their painful history.The packaging of its chocolate comes in four versions, each referring to one of the countries from which the beans used to make it come: Haiti, Panama, Tanzania and Congo. The colours of their flags are intermingled with the black, yellow and red of Belgium, the country where the French artist lives and a former colonial “power”. His name is superimposed like an elegantly typed mark. This makes Bismuth say that “the flag echoes [my film] The Jungle Book, but also chocolate. The chocolate, with the artist’s name becoming a brand name, echoes all the other pieces on the proper name and then the car echoes all the other artists’ names.This allows me to traverse the exhibition in all directions”. (4)
By the staging of the different facets of his work in space, this exhibition can be considered a specific achievement in itself, provided that the visitor conceives and substitutes his own scenario based on the elements provided by the artist. There is no question of remaining passive here, or even of going too fast, but of wandering around with an eye for the sometimes elliptical resonances that link the works together. This free immersion in the work allows us to get a closer look at Bismuth’s non-linear thinking, his plural schemes and his deliberately non-hierarchical work. This is essential to grasp all the subtleties and the extraordinary chromatic range used in series such as Double Vitrage, Chocolat Pierre Bismuth or the vast group of flags in Variations sur le Thème des Nations.
1 Interview between Pierre Bismuth and Jean-Pierre Criqui published in the exhibition catalogue (Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 128 p., 32 euros). 2 Interview with Pierre Bismuth, Paris, October 18th, 2021. 3 Interview with Jean-Pierre Criqui, op.cit. 4 Interview with Pierre Bismuth, op.cit.
Bernard Marcelis is a qualified historian, art critic and exhibition curator. He has been a contributor to artpress for many years. He has just signed the introductory text of Bernard Plossu’s monograph, la Belgique, l’air de rien, published by Yellow Now.
Pierre Bismuth
Né en born in 1963 à in Neuilly-sur-Seine Vit et travaille à lives and works in Bruxelles Expositions personnelles récentes Recent solo shows:
2021 Tout le monde est artiste mais seul l'artiste le sait, Centre Pompidou, Paris 2020 Variazione sul thema delle Nazioni - Italia/Libia, Prato, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci 2016-2019 Where Is Rocky II?, Paris (Centre Pompidou), Londres (Tate Modern), Saint-Gall (Kunstmuseum), Bruxelles (Palais des Beaux-Arts), Los Angeles (LACMA), Monaco (Villa Paloma), New Heaven (Yale University Art Gallery, Taos (The Hardwood Museum of Arts)
2015 Der Kurator, der Anwalt und der Psychoanalytiker, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienne
2014 Ce qui n’a jamais été / Ce qui pourrait être, Musée régional d’art contemporain, Sérignan