Art of the 1990s > typology > collaborations and contracts
Those artists proposing as artworks:
a/ moments of sociability
b/ objects producing sociability,
also sometimes use a relational context defined in advance so as to extract production principles from it. The exploration of relations existing between, for instance, the artist and his/her gallery owner may determine forms and a project. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, whose work deals with the relations which link lived life with its media, images, spaces, and objects, has thus devoted several exhibitions to the biographies of her gallery owners.
Maurizio Cattelan has also worked directly on the physical person of his gallery owners: by designing a phallic rabbit costume for Emmanuel Perrotin, which he bad to wear throughout the exhibition, and by earmarking clothes for Stefano Basilico creating the illusion that he was carrying gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend on his shoulder... In a more circuitous way, Sam Samore asks gallery owners to take photographs which he then selects and reframe. But this artist/curator pairing, which is an intrinsic part of the institution, is just literal aspect of inter-human relations likely to define an artistic production. Artists take things further, by working with spectacle figures; whence Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's work with the actress Maria de Medeiros(1900); the series of public activities organised by Philippe Parreno for the imitator Yves Lecoq, through which it was his intent to refashion, from within, the image of a television person(Un homme public, Marseille, Dijion, Ghent, 1994-1995).
Noritoshi Hirakawa, for his part, produces forms based on set up meetings. So for his show at the Pierre Huber Gallery in Geneva(1994) he published a small ad to recruit a girl who would agree to travel with him in Greece, a visit that would be the material for the show.
For a series titled Wedding Piece(1992), Alix Lambert investigated the contractual bonds of marriage: in six months, she got married to four different people, divorcing them all in record time.
Some artistic events, with unité still the best example(Firminy, june 1993), enabled artists to work in a fromless relational model, as the one offered by the residents of a large housing complex.
引用されているアーティスト
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Maurizio Cattelan
Sam Samore
Noritoshi Hirakawa