CAREERS — JULY/AUGUST 2010
Omnipresences — Genève
Josiane Guilloud-Cavat, July 2010ALMA DOLL
The first day, without thinking about it, he took the doll with him during his walk by the sea. A stunned double of she who had been his mistress, she was a silent link to a life less ordinary. Now that the irrevocable had happened, this fabric was the thin frontier separating him from madness. In the past, the vulnerable body of his sleeping friend had reminded him of a corpse and he was surprised to find himself thinking of her in an urn.
Seen from the sky, his little game appeared laughable.
“Ha, ha, ha… sleep now,” he said. “This marital farce isn’t for you. Like your faithful star I followed you blindfolded, and here I am now single, while you have disappeared to Saint-Malo or to Venice.”
Now and again in the grip of a hallucination, it seemed to him that he saw the eyes of his inanimate idol blink.
“Touch me, now or never!”
And it was only when hands left the doll’s white fur that his soul found a measure of lightness once again.
A year and 11 months later, her presence began to disappear.
As if the devil who had bitten his heart as a leopard bites its prey had finally gone away.
[IMAGE]
Vinpanthère
Yvan Salomone
Watercolour
ALMA
The summer session at the Geneva Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO), Au verso des images (behind the images), owes its title to a book by Michel Leiris and consists of eight exhibitions and other “summer collections”. In a vast space on the 1st floor, a selection of small, orphaned objects from the institution’s collection is on display, regrouped under the title Modèle, modèle. To provide a form for the presentation of these objects, MAMCO has used the layout of a Piet Mondrian painting “Boogie Woogie” to position the works’ nine bases. Aware that this layout represents the plan of Manhattan, the exhibition is viewed from above, like a virtual, abstract map which only a bird is capable of grasping in its entirety. The visitor thus strolls around the works like a kind of Godzilla. And, while he’s strolling around, he finds himself suddenly confronted by an enigmatic vision: on a bench by Frank West, Denis Savary’s Alma – half-woman, half-monkey, endowed with a thick white fur and a human face – reclines lasciviously. A 1:1 scale doll among mainly miniature works, she represents the surprising, grotesque and imposing reproduction of the doll that Oskar Kokschka had made by a puppeteer in an effigy of Alma Mahler after their separation. A few metres away, facing Alma, is the doll’s house which was Denis Savary’s starting point for his parallel exhibition at the Villa Bernasconi.
[IMAGE]
Alma, 2008
Denis Savary
THE VILLA
A box made of wood
On the ashes
Of a box made of wood (1)
The doll’s house comes from a New York toy store where Robert Gober used to work. It is reminiscent of landscapes à la Hopper and reminds one of old movies, as well as of the Villa Bernasconi, with the same red façade. With Hélène Mariéthoz, the exhibition’s co-curator, Denis Savary thus weaves the dramatic thread of a story around the villa, which comes to life from room to room. By reversing temporal and spatial scales in the manner of Gober, the Villa almost becomes a film set for the realisation of the puppeteer’s inner fantasies.
The result is an exhibition in which inside/outside and here/there are reversed in an imaginary dialogue between art history, history and fantasy, where a magnified detail can reveal the presence of something which until then had been imperceptible. The visitor is thus immersed in the labyrinth of the artist’s mind via ingenious contraptions spread across the three floors of the villa. From this childlike, romantic and terrifying story, a strangeness emerges in which the objects appear as the tiny, visible parts of a vast quest.
A catalogue accompanies, precedes and completes the exhibition. This book presents the interiors of the doll’s house in which we wander from room to room, a true programme of the exhibition. Are we in the villa or in the little house?
[IMAGE]
Denis Savary
Rue
Print on micro-perforated paper, mounted on aluminium
Five photographs depict Captain Ferdinand Ferber launching himself from the window of the family castle in the village of Rue in the canton of Fribourg. A true aviation pioneer, Ferber is unusual for having died in a plane accident on the ground.
(1) Autopsy Photographs, Maud Fessler
(2) Vinpanthère, Yvan Salomone
(3) Lawrence Widmer, Statement, 1987, MAMCO collection
EXHIBITIONS
MAMCO
Modèle, modèle – 1st floor
Yes I will, Yvan Salomone – 3rd floor
From 2 June to 19 September 2010
10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers
CH-1205 Geneva
www.mamco.ch
Villa Bernasconi
La Villa
From 29 May to 4 July 2010
Route du Grand-Lancy 8
1212 Grand-Lancy
+41 (0)22 794 7303
www.villabernasconi.ch
Centre Pasquart
Le Narrenschift
Du 13 juin au 29 août 2010
Faubourg du Lac 71-73
CH-2502 Biel
www.pasquart.ch
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