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Pierre Théron
Nérac, Lot-et-Garonne, 1918–Bordeaux, 2001.
Shell-Berre refinery
1957
4 drawings in Conté crayon
50 × 65,5 cm (each drawing)
Shell-Berre refinery
1957
18 preparatory drawings for the Shell-Berre poster
Gouache on paper
32,5 × 25 cm (each drawing)
Archives départementales de la Gironde
Pierre Théron is perhaps best known for a number of large-scale public and corporate commissions which include tapestries and a façade made in 1969–70 for the Maison du Paysan, Mutualité Sociale Agricole, at 13 Rue Ferrère, Bordeaux (nextdoor to the CAPC) and a monumental mosaic for the lycée in Marmande, Lot-et-Garonne (1974).
In 1956–7, Théron was invited to work at the Shell-Berre oil refinery in Pauillac, on the banks of the Gironde 50 km north of Bordeaux. He made a number of bold crayon drawings of the industrial structures in preparation for a relief sculpture as well as studies for a series of health-and-safety posters alerting employees to on-site hazards—a community of fifty houses for workers and their families had been built on the site. During this period the refinery was increasingly specialized in processing crude oil from Venezuela, a source that had gained critical importance as Middle Eastern oil imports had ceased due to the Suez crisis in late 1956. Shell stopped all refinery activity at Pauillac in 1986 and the site was transformed into a petroleum depot, now operated by the CIM-CCMP group.
Text: Latitudes
Courtesy: Latitudes/RK.
Stuart Whipps
Birmingham, United Kingdom, 1979. Lives there.
"Thin Section: Scottish Shale"
2017
Custom Geological Slide, AFM Reflecta, Unicol Stand
Courtesy the artist
The Musée des Beaux-Arts hosts this new projection work by the British artist Stuart Whipps as part of the exhibition "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (until 7 January 2018). "Le Vieux Carrier" (1878) by Alfred Roll and "Le Quai de la Grave à Bordeaux" (1884) by Alfred Smith, nineteenth-century paintings which usually hang in this gallery of the collection at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, join the exhibition at the CAPC in turn, along with three further works by Whipps. This exchange of contemporary and more historical works aims to create a meaningful dialogue between the past and the present around the subjects of geological research, mining and labour.
Whipps’s project for "4.543 billion" orbits around shale, the fine-grained sedimentary rock that forms from the compaction of the silt and clay-size mineral particles that we commonly call mud. It also deals with multiple histories concerning the surprising fact that thanks to shale, Scotland was at the centre of the global oil industry in the later part of the 1800s.
As the artist has written, “Thin Section: Scottish Shale presents a custom made geological ‘thin section’ of shale rock. A thin section is a slip of rock, mounted on a glass microscope slide, and ground very thin. 30 microns is the ideal thickness. (A standard piece of paper is 100 microns thick.) At this thickness virtually all rocks are transparent, and the individual minerals that make up the rock can be seen and identified. I have been working with geologist Andy Rees at the University of Birmingham in order to make custom sized thin sections that can be displayed using a conventional 35mm photographic slide projector.”
In companion to the three artworks exhibited at the CAPC, Whipps is presenting a new off-site work in the galleries of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. Two nineteenth-century paintings by Alfred Roll and Alfred Smith in turn join this exhibition at the CAPC.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes
Musée d'art contemporain (CAPC) de Bordeaux (France) ------- Modern art museum (CAPC), Bordeaux (France).
© Please don't use this picture on websites, blogs or other media without my permission.
Terence Gower
Vernon, British Columbia, 1965. Lives in New York City and Nièvre, France.
Public Spirit
Esprit public
2008
Deux vitrines avec facsimilés et documents / Two display cases with facsimiles and documents
Dimensions variables / Variable dimensions
Wilderness Utopia
Utopie de la sauvagerie
2008
Copie d’exposition / Exhibition copy
Vidéo numérique / Digital Video
3:00 minutes
Courtesy the artist and LABOR, Mexico City
Wilderness Utopia and Public Spirit tell the story of the interplay between uranium and urbanism, money and modern art in 1950s Canada. Latvian-born mineral prospector Joseph H. Hirshhorn (1899–1981) used his uranium mining fortune to amass one of the world’s largest private collections of art, which later formed the basis for the opening, in 1974, of the museum and sculpture garden that bears his name on the National Mall, Washington, D.C. Terence Gower’s display-case installation and fictional promotional video were first exhibited as elements of a commission at the same Hirshhorn Museum in 2008. Yet long before the Washington museum was founded, Hirshhorn dreamt of a utopian community in Ontario that would integrate a permanent home for his art collection alongside his new uranium mine, its offices and worker-housing. In 1955, Hirshhorn hired the architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005) to develop plans, yet the project never came to fruition.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes/RK.
Anne Garde
Libourne, Gironde, 1946. Lives in Paris.
Waiting blocks of steel, Dillinger Hütte, Dilligen
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
View of the steel mill from the control booth, Dillinger Hütte
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Mechanical claws move the molten blocks, Dillinger Hütte
1990
Photographic print
32,9 × 48,3 cm
Transportation of molten blocks in the factory, Dillinger Hütte
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Laser cutting of steel slabs, Dillinger Hütte
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Cutting of the steel slabs, Dillinger Hütte
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Steel plates before finishing, Dillinger Hütte
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Preparations for the installation of Richard Serra’s “Threats of Hell” in the nave of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux
1990
Photographic print
32,9 × 48,3 cm
Excavation in the floor of the nave, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
32,9 × 48,3 cm
A concrete mixer truck with a huge conveyor arm for the installation of the slabs, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Metal sheets placed on the floor to move the slabs without scratching them, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Specialist workers adjusting the metal sheets, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Reflection in the water table, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Installation structures—frames and hoists, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Detail of the setup required for the erection of the slabs, CAPC
1990Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Silence in the nave once the installation is completed, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
32,9 × 48,3 cm
“Threats of Hell” stands in the nave of the Entrepôt Lainé, CAPC
1990
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Retitled “Hopes of Paradise”, the slabs are sited on the banks of the Dordogne
1991
Photographic print
21 × 29,7 cm
Courtesy of the artist.
Following extensive renovations, the CAPC reopened in June 1990 with an exhibition in the nave of the Entrepôt Lainé by the American sculptor Richard Serra. The photographer Anne Garde documented not only the process of installation of the three huge slabs of weatherproof steel that comprised Threats of Hell (1990), but the production of the work at Dillinger Hütte in Dillingen, Germany, a steelworks with unusually large heavy-plate rolling-mills. The three steel slabs (each weighing 43 tonnes) were later reconfigured for a private collection as the work Hopes of Paradise (1990) and are presently installed in a garden on the banks of the Garonne. Rather than focussing on Serra the artist, or the monumental nature of the finished sculpture, this selection of Garde’s photographs highlights the material transformations involved in the fabrication of the slabs and the almost archaeological proceedings in the nave.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes/RK.
Hubert Duprat
Nérac, Lot-et-Garonne, 1957. Lives in the south of France.
Cassé-collé
Broken-glued
1992
Grès rose / Pink sandstone
65 × 70 × 115 cm
Collection FRAC Bourgogne
Cassé-Collé (Broken-Glued) consists of a pink sandstone boulder, weighing over half a tonne, that the artist had split apart into several pieces before it was stuck back together again in a deliberately inexact way. This process of fracturing and recomposition alludes to an aspect of the work of the eminent archaeologist François Daleau (1845–1927), who spent his life working around the Gironde region and whose many finds are now part of the collections of the Musée d’Aquitaine and the Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Bordeaux. Led by his interest in prehistoric tools and how stones would have been shaped by early humans, Daleau created a number of composite lithic objects by gluing together shards of flint.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes/RK
—> LEFT
Alexandra Navratil
Zürich, 1978. Lives in Amsterdam.
Modern Magic
2013
162 slides, 2 carousel slide projectors, faders
Courtesy the artist and Dan Gunn, Berlin.
Modern Magic is part of a series of works by Alexandra Navratil investigating the early history of industrial chemistry, the technology of colour in photography and the synthesis of consumer culture. Two sequences of projected 35mm slides show photographs taken for issues of the American trade magazine Modern Plastics between the years 1930 and 1970. We see all manner of plastic objects and samples being held or manipulated by human hands to demonstrate the characteristics of this novel class of matter.
Plastics are derived from petroleum. Spurred by excess industrial capacity following the oil-thirsty second world war, the petrochemical sector turned to civilian inventions and created a new realm of versatile materials and dazzling consumer goods. Yet the origins of these synthetic worlds go back to nineteenth-century Germany and another underground carbon derivative—coal. With few colonies to exploit and few natural resources except its coal fields, German chemists set about creating surrogates and substitutes for natural substances. BASF began producing coal-tar dyes in the 1860s, and the invention of synthetic rubber, tortoiseshell, ivory, and fibre took hold throughout the early 1900s.
—> RIGHT
Fiona Marron
County Monaghan, 1987. Lives in Dublin.
‘All surface expectations disappear with depth’
2010
Double projection sur zinc et un court prologue en boucle sur un moniteur adjacent / Dual projection on zinc and a short looped prologue on an adjacent monitor
Variable dimensions
Courtesy the artist.
The mine holds a powerful place in the imagination—a frontier site where human labour converges with the appropriation of ‘free’ geological value, created over millions of years. Fiona Marron’s ‘All surface expectations disappear with depth’ revolves around the mining of gypsum and zinc, yet moreover, the people and relationships involved in the labour of bringing these substances to the Earth’s surface. Her three-part video installation features extracts from a celebrated 1954 study of a gypsum mine by the sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920–1980). Gouldner’s fieldwork hinged on the bureaucracy of the mine—especially the relations between the workers toiling in frequently dangerous conditions underground and the mine management with its offices on the surface. Marron juxtaposes text from the study with often-clamorous footage filmed at a zinc mining operation in County Tipperary, Ireland (which has since ceased operations) and a static shot of a present-day gypsum mine near where the artist grew up in County Monaghan. Zinc is most commonly used as an anti-corrosion agent, while gypsum board, also known as drywall or plasterboard, is a building material that is often used to create temporary walls in exhibitions.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
522_110
Bordeaux, rue Ferrère, CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux - ancien entrepôt de denrées coloniales (Entrepôt Lainé)
522_100
Bordeaux, rue Ferrère, CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux - ancien entrepôt de denrées coloniales (Entrepôt Lainé)
Cap City (closed) [2,095 square feet]
4809 W Mercury Boulevard, Hampton, VA
Opened in spring 1977, closed in early 2018; it was originally Rich's Hamburgers (January 1962-early 1970s), later Morgan's Produce (1976)
This bathroom is located at the rear of the building and is only accessible from the outside, which was a popular set-up for fast food chains at the time (Arby's, Taco Bell, etc).
Stuart Whipps
Birmingham, United Kingdom, 1979. Lives there.
"Thin Section: Scottish Shale"
2017
Custom Geological Slide, AFM Reflecta, Unicol Stand
Courtesy the artist
The Musée des Beaux-Arts hosts this new projection work by the British artist Stuart Whipps as part of the exhibition "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (until 7 January 2018). "Le Vieux Carrier" (1878) by Alfred Roll and "Le Quai de la Grave à Bordeaux" (1884) by Alfred Smith, nineteenth-century paintings which usually hang in this gallery of the collection at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, join the exhibition at the CAPC in turn, along with three further works by Whipps. This exchange of contemporary and more historical works aims to create a meaningful dialogue between the past and the present around the subjects of geological research, mining and labour.
Whipps’s project for "4.543 billion" orbits around shale, the fine-grained sedimentary rock that forms from the compaction of the silt and clay-size mineral particles that we commonly call mud. It also deals with multiple histories concerning the surprising fact that thanks to shale, Scotland was at the centre of the global oil industry in the later part of the 1800s.
As the artist has written, “Thin Section: Scottish Shale presents a custom made geological ‘thin section’ of shale rock. A thin section is a slip of rock, mounted on a glass microscope slide, and ground very thin. 30 microns is the ideal thickness. (A standard piece of paper is 100 microns thick.) At this thickness virtually all rocks are transparent, and the individual minerals that make up the rock can be seen and identified. I have been working with geologist Andy Rees at the University of Birmingham in order to make custom sized thin sections that can be displayed using a conventional 35mm photographic slide projector.”
In companion to the three artworks exhibited at the CAPC, Whipps is presenting a new off-site work in the galleries of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. Two nineteenth-century paintings by Alfred Roll and Alfred Smith in turn join this exhibition at the CAPC.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes
Terence Gower
Vernon, British Columbia, 1965. Lives in New York City and Nièvre, France.
Public Spirit
Esprit public
2008
Deux vitrines avec facsimilés et documents / Two display cases with facsimiles and documents
Dimensions variables / Variable dimensions
Wilderness Utopia
Utopie de la sauvagerie
2008
Copie d’exposition / Exhibition copy
Vidéo numérique / Digital Video
3:00 minutes
Courtesy the artist and LABOR, Mexico City
Wilderness Utopia and Public Spirit tell the story of the interplay between uranium and urbanism, money and modern art in 1950s Canada. Latvian-born mineral prospector Joseph H. Hirshhorn (1899–1981) used his uranium mining fortune to amass one of the world’s largest private collections of art, which later formed the basis for the opening, in 1974, of the museum and sculpture garden that bears his name on the National Mall, Washington, D.C. Terence Gower’s display-case installation and fictional promotional video were first exhibited as elements of a commission at the same Hirshhorn Museum in 2008. Yet long before the Washington museum was founded, Hirshhorn dreamt of a utopian community in Ontario that would integrate a permanent home for his art collection alongside his new uranium mine, its offices and worker-housing. In 1955, Hirshhorn hired the architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005) to develop plans, yet the project never came to fruition.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes/RK.
Ilana Halperin’s new project for "4.543 billion" deals with geological intimacy and vivacity, and the uncanny fact that something as apparently inert and certain as the stone walls of the CAPC building were once marine life from a tropical ocean of the Oligocene epoch, around 32 million-years ago. This Calcaire à Astéries (asteriated limestone) characteristic of Bordeaux takes its name from the countless tiny fossil organisms of the genus asterias (a type of sea star) that can be found in the stone alongside fossil molluscs and coral.
Halperin addresses stone, not as dead matter or a mere resource, but as a story-laden substance that both surpasses and partners in humans’ view of the world. "The Rock Cycle" incorporates the reading of a letter, and the hosting of a number of the artist’s geological sculptures within the displays of the zoology collection of the University of Bordeaux. These ‘curios’ originated as fragments of sea-weathered brick from the Isle of Bute in western Scotland, as well as waterjet-cut sandstone, that the artist left for three months in Fontaines Pétrifiantes in Saint-Nectaire. For generations the mineral-rich waters that percolate through the rock at this site in central France have been used to create sculptures using the same process by which stalactites form, only one hundred times faster. Objects become rapidly encrusted with new layers of stone.
Off-site intervention at the Salle des Collections de l'Unité de Formation de Biologie, Université de Bordeaux Campus Talence. Limited spaces. Booking essential. Léo Correa: l.correa@mairie-bordeaux.fr / T. (+33) 05 56 00 81 60.
Rendez-vous at the entrance of the exhibition at CAPC musée.
Scheduled visits:
October 19, 2017, 2pm.
November 16, 2017, 2pm.
December 14,2017, 2pm.
January 4, 2018, 2pm.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes
Limestone, formerly part of White Rock Line (1990) by Richard Long
"White Rock Line" is an artwork by the British sculptor Richard Long that was commissioned on the occasion of the renovations of the CAPC in 1990. Sited permanently on the museum’s roof terrace, the work comprises a 40-metre long, 1.5-metre wide rectangle of pale micritic and bioclastic Turonian limestone fragments. The stone was sourced from the Malville quarry near the town of La Tour-Blanche in the Dordogne département, a site owned by Lafarge, a company that specialises in cement, construction aggregates, and concrete.
By 2014, "White Rock Line" had turned a dull cinereous colour due to general airborne dirt combined with algal growth and pollen. With the artist’s consent, it was decided to replace the stones with fresh white ones. The greyed stones were retrieved by Lafarge and later used for road foundations. Yet the CAPC head of collection Anne Cadenet kept one of the old fragments on a bookshelf in her office as a memento. No longer art, this decommissioned stone has gone back to being ‘merely’ geological matter, between 89.8–93.9 million years old.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
Jannis Kounellis
Piraeus, Attica, 1936–Rome, 2017.
Sans titre
Untitled
1985
Acier, cuivre, sacs de jute et 3 bouteilles de gaz / Steel, copper, gunny bags and 3 gas bottles
250 × 950 cm
Collection CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux
An imposing work comprised of humble materials, Jannis Kounellis’s Sans titre (Untitled) bookends the exhibition at its southernmost point. It was first shown as part of a large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work at the CAPC in 1985. A series of fused steel panels are perforated by seven copper gas pipes that continuously throw live flames, while Hessian sacks once used for cacao seeds are draped over the top. Kounellis’s work speaks of longue durée movements of power, commodity production and exchange forged across the great expansions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—history violently formed through a fundamental reordering of the relations between humans and the rest of nature with regards to food, labour, energy and raw materials. The cacao sacks that hang over the panels were sourced for the original exhibition from Touton, a Bordeaux-based company that has been a major player in cocoa production and trade (as well as that of coffee, vanilla, and spices) since the mid-nineteenth century. To conform to today’s safety norms, the work has been adapted to run from the building’s mains gas system rather than bottled propane.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier.
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
Ilana Halperin’s new project for "4.543 billion" deals with geological intimacy and vivacity, and the uncanny fact that something as apparently inert and certain as the stone walls of the CAPC building were once marine life from a tropical ocean of the Oligocene epoch, around 32 million-years ago. This Calcaire à Astéries (asteriated limestone) characteristic of Bordeaux takes its name from the countless tiny fossil organisms of the genus asterias (a type of sea star) that can be found in the stone alongside fossil molluscs and coral.
Halperin addresses stone, not as dead matter or a mere resource, but as a story-laden substance that both surpasses and partners in humans’ view of the world. "The Rock Cycle" incorporates the reading of a letter, and the hosting of a number of the artist’s geological sculptures within the displays of the zoology collection of the University of Bordeaux. These ‘curios’ originated as fragments of sea-weathered brick from the Isle of Bute in western Scotland, as well as waterjet-cut sandstone, that the artist left for three months in Fontaines Pétrifiantes in Saint-Nectaire. For generations the mineral-rich waters that percolate through the rock at this site in central France have been used to create sculptures using the same process by which stalactites form, only one hundred times faster. Objects become rapidly encrusted with new layers of stone.
Off-site intervention at the Salle des Collections de l'Unité de Formation de Biologie, Université de Bordeaux Campus Talence. Limited spaces. Booking essential. Léo Correa: l.correa@mairie-bordeaux.fr / T. (+33) 05 56 00 81 60.
Rendez-vous at the entrance of the exhibition at CAPC musée.
Scheduled visits:
October 19, 2017, 2pm.
November 16, 2017, 2pm.
December 14,2017, 2pm.
January 4, 2018, 2pm.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes
Fiona Marron
County Monaghan, 1987. Lives in Dublin.
‘All surface expectations disappear with depth’
2010
Double projection sur zinc et un court prologue en boucle sur un moniteur adjacent / Dual projection on zinc and a short looped prologue on an adjacent monitor
Variable dimensions
Courtesy the artist.
The mine holds a powerful place in the imagination—a frontier site where human labour converges with the appropriation of ‘free’ geological value, created over millions of years. Fiona Marron’s ‘All surface expectations disappear with depth’ revolves around the mining of gypsum and zinc, yet moreover, the people and relationships involved in the labour of bringing these substances to the Earth’s surface. Her three-part video installation features extracts from a celebrated 1954 study of a gypsum mine by the sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920–1980). Gouldner’s fieldwork hinged on the bureaucracy of the mine—especially the relations between the workers toiling in frequently dangerous conditions underground and the mine management with its offices on the surface. Marron juxtaposes text from the study with often-clamorous footage filmed at a zinc mining operation in County Tipperary, Ireland (which has since ceased operations) and a static shot of a present-day gypsum mine near where the artist grew up in County Monaghan. Zinc is most commonly used as an anti-corrosion agent, while gypsum board, also known as drywall or plasterboard, is a building material that is often used to create temporary walls in exhibitions.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Latitudes/RK.
CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.
Echec et mat. Obsession de ses débuts, les échecs. On les trouve partout et sous toutes leurs formes, comme ces échecs volants…
(Left)
Pep Vidal
Barcelona, 1980. Lives there.
Algunos cambios infinitesimales en un sistema
Quelques infimes changements dans un système
Some infinitesimal changes in a system
2017
Dessin sur papier / Drawing on paper
21 × 29,7 cm
Courtesy of the artist and adn galeria, Barcelona.
Pep Vidal is an artist and a mathematician with a special interest in infinitesimals (things that are so small that it is not possible for humans to measure them) and false randomness (things that only seem variable and unpredictable, yet can be explained by very complex or as yet unknown laws). A poplar tree had been cut down on the property of a friend of the artist near Lleida, Catalunya, as it was at risk of falling onto the house. Surprised by the sheer mass and intricacy of the tree’s forms, Vidal decided to develop a more reasoned way to perceive it—by ‘knowing’ it as rigorously as possible from a do-it-yourself empirical perspective. During six days, Vidal and a colleague calculated the volume of every branch of the tree using measuring tapes and calipers, accepting an allowable 3% error. This information was fed into software to create a 3D model of the tree that was used to determine the position of six cuts that divided its bulk into precisely equal volumes.
This somewhat absurd exercise addresses the paradox that the practices of standardization, quantification and mathematization that have given rise to extraordinary value and knowledge over the last centuries, also represent the advance of a perspective that has allowed the commodification and management of nature. Vidal’s wooden sculpture exhibits the results of applying classical geometry to nevertheless try to compute something largely immeasurable and unexplainable. His analysis of an otherwise unremarkable tree ends up confronting the plant’s utter uniqueness. The cleft poplar was first exhibited in a gallery in Barcelona in 2015, and has since been lying in the open air in a woodland near Girona, Catalunya, before being transported to Bordeaux for this exhibition.
(Right)
Lucas Ihlein and Louise Kate Anderson
Sydney, 1975. Lives in Wollongong, New South Wales; Sydney, 1987. Lives there.
Lucas Ihlein
Under Ground
Sous Terre
2010
Lithographie Offset sur papier / Offset lithography on paper
37 × 39 cm
Courtesy the artist and Big Fag Press, Sydney
UNDER GROUND was drawn for the cover of the June 2010 edition of the Australian art magazine Artlink that was guest-edited by Ihlein. It maps the historical and symbolic crossovers of ‘the underground’ as a term describing both unofficial, illicit, anti-establishment culture, as well as a literal subterranean space or network.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
Alexandra Navratil
Zürich, 1978. Lives in Amsterdam.
‘Modern Magic’
2013
162 slides, 2 carousel slide projectors, faders
Courtesy the artist and Dan Gunn, Berlin.
‘Modern Magic’ is part of a series of works by Alexandra Navratil investigating the early history of industrial chemistry, the technology of colour in photography and the synthesis of consumer culture. Two sequences of projected 35mm slides show photographs taken for issues of the American trade magazine Modern Plastics between the years 1930 and 1970. We see all manner of plastic objects and samples being held or manipulated by human hands to demonstrate the characteristics of this novel class of matter.
Plastics are derived from petroleum. Spurred by excess industrial capacity following the oil-thirsty second world war, the petrochemical sector turned to civilian inventions, and created a new realm of versatile materials and dazzling consumer goods. Yet the origins of these synthetic worlds go back to nineteenth-century Germany and another underground carbon derivative—coal. With few colonies to exploit and few natural resources except its coal fields, German chemists set about creating surrogates and substitutes for natural substances. BASF began producing coal-tar dyes in the 1860s, and the invention of synthetic rubber, tortoiseshell, ivory, and fibre took hold throughout the early 1900s.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
(Wall)
Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck in collaboration with Media Farzin
Caracas, 1972. Lives in Berlin; San Diego, 1979. Lives in New York.
Mobile for the Hotel Ávila, 1939–1942 and The Larger Picture, 1939–42, From the series “Modern Entanglements, U.S. Interventions”
2006–2009
C-print digital reproduction
113,66 × 151,76 cm.
Mock construction plan of Calder’s mobile for the Hotel ballroom; C-print digital reproduction
88,9 × 152,4 cm
wall labels with narrative texts
Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Wien
Model of Alexander Calder’s Tower with Mobile, 1943 from the series “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect”
2007–9
Wall label with narrative text, brass rods, ink, polyester thread, Plexiglas, wire, AC glue
111 × 54 × 76 cm
Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Wien
R.S.V.P., 1939
From the series “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect”
2007–2009
C-print digital reproduction (framed); Time magazine cover May 22, 1939 (framed);
wall label with narrative text
Entire installation: 90 × 120 cm
Edition 5 + AP
Courtesy of the artist and Henrique Faria, New York
Four works in the exhibition by artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck and art historian Media Farzin are parts of two series dealing with the interpenetration of art history in the global politics of petroleum and conflict, and vice versa. Each incorporates its own wall label texts as an integral part of the work, juxtaposing factual evidence with quotations to suggest what are sometimes deliberately tenuous connections between the sculptures of Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Venezuelan and American oil interests, the Cold War, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and its trustee from 1932 to 1979, the businessman and politician Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979).
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Fréderic Deval.
© CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
Capc F.R.B. Painchaud, CD
Commandant Division Bravo, École de leadership et de recrues des Forces canadiennes
LCdr F.R.B. Painchaud, CD
Commandant Bravo Division, Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School
Amie Siegel
Chicago, 1974. Lives in New York City.
Dynasty
2017
Mixed media including marble from Trump Tower
Variable dimensions
Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York
Amie Siegel’s three-part work Dynasty centres on a pinkish-brown marble quarried in northern Italy that is commonly known as Breccia Pernice. Two 1:1 scale photographic prints of glossy slabs represent the marble’s crystalline composition with great veracity and uncanny precision. Siegel has observed the use of polished metamorphic rock as a status symbol in luxury interiors and real estate in Manhattan, and its symbolic aspirations to affluence and opulence. In Dynasty she mines what is Breccia Pernice’s most notorious application—in the flamboyant lobby of Trump Tower, the skyscraper built in 1983 on New York City’s Fifth Avenue by Donald J. Trump, President of the U.S. since January 2017. An image depicts a trench in the floor of this burnished headquarters of commercial and political power. A fragment of marble from the lobby itself is presented as if a talismanic object, a lump of matter once formed through immense metamorphic shock and now charged with planetary disquiet about the future.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier.
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
Documentation of Steam (1967/1995) by Robert Morris.
Vidéo / Video
2:00 minutes
Archives du / of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux
From March to June 1995, the CAPC nave hosted Steam by the American artist Robert Morris, a sculptural installation originally conceived in 1967. In the work, clouds of water vapour continuously rise from a field of fluvial stones, which had been sourced from the Gave de Pau river in south-eastern France. The planned duration of the exhibition had to be cut short as the high humidity in the nave began to cause mould on the walls.
“Dig deep enough beneath the very spot of which Steam is installed and what would be found?”, the artist has written. “Old pottery, broken, once polished stones from forgotten settlements... But dig deeper still and see a broken oil lamp, a Roman bronze strigil. Go deeper, beyond every human artefact and into the Earth’s crust and heat rises. Smoke and the churning innards of the grumbling gut of the Earth itself belches up its indigestions in sulphurous clouds”.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
Capc F.R.B. Painchaud, CD
Commandant Division Bravo, École de leadership et de recrues des Forces canadiennes
LCdr F.R.B. Painchaud, CD
Commandant Bravo Division, Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School
Peinture murale Les murs de séparation par Julie Maroh et Maya Mihindou.
Exposition Procession, mise en scène par Julie Maroh et Maya Mihindou, CAPC musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux.
Fiona Marron
County Monaghan, 1987. Lives in Dublin.
All surface expectations disappear with depth
Toute attente de surface disparaît avec la profondeur
2010
Double projection sur zinc et un court prologue en boucle sur un moniteur adjacent / Dual projection on zinc and a short looped prologue on an adjacent monitor
Dimensions variables / Variable dimensions
Courtesy the artist
The mine holds a powerful place in the imagination—a frontier site where human labour converges with the appropriation of ‘free’ geological value, created over millions of years. Fiona Marron’s All surface expectations disappear with depth revolves around the mining of gypsum and zinc, yet moreover, the people and relationships involved in the labour of bringing these substances to the Earth’s surface. Her three-part video installation features extracts from a celebrated 1954 study of a gypsum mine by the sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920–1980). Gouldner’s fieldwork hinged on the bureaucracy of the mine—especially the relations between the workers toiling in frequently dangerous conditions underground and the mine management with its offices on the surface. Marron juxtaposes text from the study with often-clamorous footage filmed at a zinc mining operation in County Tipperary, Ireland (which has since ceased operations) and a static shot of a present-day gypsum mine near where the artist grew up in County Monaghan. Zinc is most commonly used as an anti-corrosion agent, while gypsum board, also known as drywall or plasterboard, is a building material that is often used to create temporary walls in exhibitions.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Lysiane Gauthier.
© Capc, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux
The kids are watching a video which I think belongs to the installation "Landscape with the Beginning of Civilization" by Michael Stevenson. Could also have been part of an artistic impression of the lab of Niels Bohr: 'Particle, Mind and Void' by Tony Carter which was also nearby.
A poster abstract I had written this past summer was accepted and the Palliative Care team in which I am a member was invited to present it last week in San Antonio for the Center to Advance Palliative Care National Seminar. Really proud to be part of this team.
Cap City (closed) [2,095 square feet]
4809 W Mercury Boulevard, Hampton, VA
Opened in spring 1977, closed in early 2018
This boring sign replaced Rich's original googie sign, which looked like this.
(Right) Terence Gower
Vernon, British Columbia, 1965. Lives in New York City and Nièvre, France.
Public Spirit
2008
Two display cases with facsimiles and documents
Variable dimensions
Wilderness Utopia
2008
Exhibition copy
Digital Video
3:00 minutes
Courtesy the artist and LABOR, Mexico City
Wilderness Utopia and Public Spirit tell the story of the interplay between uranium and urbanism, money and modern art in 1950s Canada. Latvian-born mineral prospector Joseph H. Hirshhorn (1899–1981) used his uranium mining fortune to amass one of the world’s largest private collections of art, which later formed the basis for the opening, in 1974, of the museum and sculpture garden that bears his name on the National Mall, Washington, D.C. Terence Gower’s display-case installation and fictional promotional video were first exhibited as elements of a commission at the same Hirshhorn Museum in 2008. Yet long before the Washington museum was founded, Hirshhorn dreamt of a utopian community in Ontario that would integrate a permanent home for his art collection alongside his new uranium mine, its offices and worker-housing. In 1955, Hirshhorn hired the architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005) to develop plans, yet the project never came to fruition.
Text: Latitudes
Photo courtesy: Fréderic Deval.
© CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux.
CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.
Les échelles de Takako Saito se démultiplient à l’infini comme autant de support à l’ascension poétique. Elles sont partout.