Museum of Passion

At the request of the city council, the poet Jean-Louis Froment, then a young professor at the Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, created the Centre d’arts plastiques contemporains, or CAPC, in May 1973. The new institution, the brainchild of Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a great resistance fighter, the mayor of Bordeaux and a key figure in the 5th Republic, was born out of the lack of official attention paid to living art, on both local and national levels. The Centre Georges-Pompidou, we recall, opened its doors four years later, in 1977, at a time when very few venues in France were exhibiting contemporary art (ARC with Pierre Gaudibert and then Suzanne Pagé, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris).

Initially, Jean-Louis Froment did not have a “museum” project in mind. Bordeaux, an old colonial city and wine capital, has traditionally had little to do with contemporary culture. The Sigma festival, directed by Roger Lafosse, was certainly a local reference (and somewhat more), but there was too little room for the visual arts. In keeping with Chaban-Delmas, the ambition of Froment and his cohorts (the doctor Jean Tignol, his companion Josy Froment, and then Michel Bourel) was corrective: to create a local centre for contemporary art, or at least a missionary organisation whose apostolate would be to present “living” visual arts in the capital of Gironde.To begin with, the centre had no walls and, for many years to come, its only office space was a corner of the Entrepôt Lainé, a former municipal storehouse for colonial foodstuffs that had been abandoned for decades. The status of the new institution was that of an association (under the law of 1901). Its operation, which was largely voluntary at the outset, was modelled on that of the Germanic Kunsthallen: showing first, collecting as appropriate.

VARIABLE GEOMETRIES

Going through the doors of the sepulchral and austere Entrepôt Lainé, which now houses the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain in its entirety, enjoying the shade of its immense nave and wandering through its lofty corridors, which together give the impression of statuary solidity, should not make us forget that for a long time the CAPC was only conceded a back room, if that (for a time, the young institution even occupied part of the premises of the Fleuve bookshop-gallery in the city centre). This initial poverty was not an exceptional situation. The experiments underway, or soon to be launched, along similar lines (in Dijon, the Consortium; in Tours, the Centre de Création Contemporaine; in Grenoble, the Magasin; in Villeurbanne, the Nouveau Musée, etc.) were all distinguished by the same twofold characteristic: initial material poverty but a strong sense of determination.

The early years of the CAPC? A period of precariousness, an efficient one in its case. In what way? Because of the meagre resources available, it was necessary to do things differently, or even, for want of anything better, elsewhere. The first exhibitions took place “outside the walls.” In a van, the Artbus, which criss-crossed the region between 1975 and 1980 (“an old bus, with a very personalised aesthetic, serving as a mobile antenna of the CAPC’s educational section,” according to a book devoted to this adventure, published in 1982), a resolutely original format at the time. It travelled as far as Venice for the Biennale ( Commencements) and to Charleroi. This first CAPC was an ectopic organisation, not primarily matrix-based and “local” in the strict sense of the term, but foremost intentionally, inspired by the will to promote visual art come what may. With this in mind, we must emphasise the quality of the catalogues, which constitute real mines of information. Precariousness also had the happy consequence of commensality. Fruitful links were forged with artists (Claude Viallat, Richard Long, Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, Keith Haring, Philippe Thomas), with curators (Harald Szeemann), in France and beyond (arte povera, American art..., whose presentation in Bordeaux often anticipated national programmes), and with the world of experimental music and contemporary dance. The institution, which staged major “memory” exhibitions (such as those devoted to the Sonnabend collection and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, amongst others), also encouraged the donation of works from a museum perspective. It was heavily involved in the fight against AIDS, the scourge of the 1980s and 1990s. Making the great nave of the Entrepôt Lainé available for in situ creations soon became a real challenge for guest artists. In the early 1990s, JeanPierre Raynaud spectacularly laid out the debris of his Maison de la Celle-Saint-Cloud, which had been methodically destroyed, in a thousand surgical bins, as if in a vast field of urns ( La Maison exhibition, 1993).This unrivalled activism sealed the reputation of the institution, which was soon to become the “CapcMusée d’art contemporain” of Bordeaux in 1984. This is a unique name in France, the result of a truly extraordinary change in the institution’s statutes.

Why do we create museums? Because we collect, because we store, because we exhibit. It is important to distinguish between heritage museums, whose purpose is to preserve the memory of peoples, and whimsical museums, which are the brainchild of Maecenas. Museums are not homogenous. Most of the time, they are also tactical: one of those eminent “apparatuses,” as Jean-Louis Déotte said ( Le Musée, l'origine de l'esthétique, 1993), for the affirmation of symbolic and, by extension, political power.

MUSEUM OBSESSIVE

Was the creation of the CAPC first and foremost a public service or a private whim, given that Jean-Louis Froment acted as its jealous captain until he left in 1996? It was in fact anti-bureaucratic, firstly in terms of its unconventional management (Froment was not part of the sacred group of curators). Another original characteristic was the decisive role played by obsession, a strong term that heralds excess and folly, annexing an untamed subjectivity that had little to do, it goes without saying, with the cultural polish usually expected of a museum curator. As we know, the museographic order expects its executors to ward off obsession. Disciplined studies, calibrated cursus honorum, responsibilities distilled to the extent of subjecting to established norms—a conspiracy against deviant love. Jean-Louis Froment’s obsession, which constantly guided his choices, was based on feeling, desire and eroticism. Working from a Szeemannian perspective (in terms of the programme, it is useless to claim to objectify all his subjectivity), in keeping with his own exhibition project, which was a life project, Jean-Louis Froment was not just writing a museum. He made it a theatre. The choice of who and what to exhibit was a matter for the site commander, who had his regulars and a considerable following.The principle of friendship, of philia. A venue, an organisation, guests. A domestic economy always in keeping with the wishes of the master of ceremonies. (The dark clouds soon gathered, culminating in the 1990s with the abrupt end of the Froment directorship, which was not renewed by Alain Juppé, the new mayor of Bordeaux from June 1995). These criticisms are undoubtedly well-founded, but inadmissible. You can’t expect consistency from passion. The purpose of a museum—such is the lesson of the first CAPC, Jean-Louis Froment’s version—is not collecting, or not exclusively. It is, more certainly, the personal invention of a museum, and, beyond the emptiness of the fantasy characteristic of the imaginary museum dear to André Malraux, a passion turned solid museum.

Translation: Juliet Powys

nPaul Ardenne is a writer and art historian. In 1993, he published CapcMusée 1973-1993, a history of the genesis of this institution.