Professional relation: clienteles
As we have seen, these various ways of exploring social bonds have
to do with already existing types of relations, which the artist fits into, so that he/she can take forms from them. Other practices are aimed at recreating socio-professional models and applying their production methods. Here, the artist works in the real field of the production of goods and services, and aims to set up a certain ambiguity, within the space of his activity, between the utilitarian function of the objects he is presenting, and their aesthetic function. It is this wavering between contemplation and use that I have tried to identify by the term: operative realism with artists as diverse as Peter Fend, Mark Dion, Dan Peterman and Niek Van de Steeg in mind, as well as more or less parody-oriented "businesses" like Ingold Airlines and Premiata Ditta. (The same term might be used for pioneers such as Panamarenko and the John Latham's "Artist's Placement Group"). What these artists have in common is the modelling of a professional activity, with the relational world issuing therefrom, as a device of artistic production. These make-believe phenomena which imitate the general economy, as is the case with Ingold Airlines, Servaas Inc., and Mark Kostabi's "studio", are limited to a construction of the replicas of an airline company, a fishery and a production workshop, but without learning any
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ideo ogical and practical lessons from doing so, and thus being restncted to a parody-like dimension of art. The example of the Les ready-mades appartiennent a toutle monde (Ready-mades Belong
to Everyone) agency, headed by the late Philippe Thomas, is a bit different. He did not have time to proceed in a credible way to a second stage, because his signature casting project ran somewhat out of steam after the Feux Pales (Pale Fires) (1990) exhibition at the Cape in Bordeaux. But Philippe Thomas' system, in which the pieces produced are signed by their purchaser, shed light on the cloudy relational economics that underpin the relations between artist and collector. A more discreet narcissism lies at the root of the pieces shown by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at the ARC in Paris and the Cape in Bordeaux5• These were Biographical Offices where, with no more than an appointment, the visitor came to divulge the salient facts of his life, with a view to a biography that would then be formalised by the artist.
Through little services rendered, the artists fill in the cracks in the social bond. Form thus really becomes the "face looking at me". This is Christine Hill's modest aim, when she becomes involved in the most menial of tasks (giving massages, shining shoes, working at a supermarket check-out, organising group meetings etc. ), driven by the anxiety caused by the feeling of uselessness. So through little gestures art is like an angelic programme, a set of tasks carried out beside or beneath the real economic system, so as to patiently re-stitch the relational fabric. Carsten Holler, for his part, applies his high-level scientific training to the invention of situations and objects which involve human behaviour: inventing a drug that releases a feeling of love, Baroque sets, and para-scientific experiments. Others, like Henry Bond and Liam Gillick as part of the Documents projects embarked upon in 1990, adjust their function to a precise context. By becoming acquainted with information just as it "came through" on press agency teleprinters, Bond and Gillick would hasten to the places where the thing was happening at the same time as their "colleagues", and bring back an image that was completely out of synch when
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compared with the usual criteria of the profession. In any event, Bond and Gillick strictly applied the production methods of the mainstream press, just as Peter Fend, with his OECD company, and Niek Van de Steeg put themselves in the architect's working conditions. By conducting themselves inside the art world on the basis of the parameters of "worlds" that are heterogeneous to it, these artists here introduce relational worlds governed by concepts of clientele, order or commission, and project. When Fabrice Hybert exhibited at the Musee d'Art Modeme de la ville de Paris in February 1995, all the industrial products actually or metaphorically contained in his work, as directly dispatched by their manufacturers and earmarked for sale to the public through his company "UR" (Unlimited responsibility), he puts the beholder in an awkward position. This project, which is as removed from Guillaume Bijl's illusionism as from an imitative reproduction of mercantile trade, focuses on the desiring dimension of the economy. Through his import-export activity dealing with seating bound for North Africa, and the transformation of the Musee d'Art Modeme de la ville de Paris into a supermarket, Hybert defines art as a social function among others, a permanent "digestion of data", the purpose of which is to rediscover the "initial desires that presided over the manufacture of objects".
How to occupy a gallery
The exchanges that take place between people, in the gallery or museum space, turn out to be as likely to act as the raw matter for an artistic work. The opening is often an intrinsic part of the exhibition set-up, and the model of an ideal public circulation: a prototype of this being Yves Klein's L'exposition du vide, in April
1958. From the presence of Republican guards at the entrance to
the Iris Clert Gallery to the blue cocktail offered to visitors, Klein tried to control every aspect of the routine opening protocol, by giving each one a poetic function defining its object: the void. Thus, to mention a work still having repercussions, the work of Julia Scher (Security by Julia) consists in placing surveillance apparatus
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in exhibition venues. It is the human flow of visitors, and its possible regulation, which thus becomes the raw material and the subject of the piece. Before long, it is the entire exhibition process that is "occupied" by the artist.
In 1962, Ben lived and slept in the One Gallery in London for a fortnight, with just a few essential props. In Nice, in August 1990, Pierre Joseph, Philippe Parreno and Philippe Perrin also "lived in" the Air de Paris Gallery, literally and figuratively, with their show Les Ateliers du Paradise. It might be hastily concluded that this was a remake of Ben's performance, but the two projects refer to two radically different relational worlds, which are as different in terms of their ideological and aesthetic foundation as their respective period can be. When Ben lived in the gallery, it was his intent to signify that the arena of art was expanding, and even included the artist's sleep and breakfasts. On the other hand, when Joseph, Parreno and Perrin occupied the gallery, it was to turn it into a production workshop, a "photogenic space" jointly managed by the viewer, in accordance with very precise rules of play. At the opening of Les Ateliers du Paradise, where everyone was rigged out in a personalised T-shirt ("Fear", "Gothic", etc. ), the relations that were struck up among visitors turned into a while-you-wait script, written live by the film-maker Marion Vernoux on the gallery computer. The interplay of inter-human relations was thus materialised in compliance with the principles of an interactive video game, a "real time film" experienced and produced by the three artists. A lot of outside people thus helped to build a space of relations, not only other artist but psychoanalysts, coaches, friends... This type of "real time" work, which tends to blur creation and exhibition, was taken up by the exhibition Work, Work in Progress. Work at the Andrea Rosen Gallery (1992), with Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew McCaslin and Liz Lamer, and then by This is the show and the show is many things, which was held in Ghent in October 1994, before finding a more theoretical form with the Traffic exhibition that I curated. In both instances, each artist was at leisure to do what he/she wanted
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throughout the exhibition, to alter the piece, replace it, or propose performances and events. With each modification, as the general setting evolved, the exhibition played the part of a flexible matter, "informed" by the work of the artist. The visitor here had a crucial place, because his interaction with the works helped to define the exhibition's structure. He was faced with devices requiring him to make a decision. In Gonzalez-Torres' Stacks and piles of sweets, for example, the visitor was authorised to take away something from the piece (a sweet, a sheet of paper), but it would purely and simply disappear if every visitor exercised this right: the artist thus appealed to the visitor's sense of responsibility, and the visitor had to understand that his gesture was contributing to the break-up of the work. What position should be adopted when looking at a work that hands out its component parts while trying to hang on to its structure? The same ambiguity awaited the viewer of his Go-go Dancer (1991), a young man wearing a g-string on a minimal plinth, or the person
looking at personnages vivants a reactiver, which Pierre Joseph
accommodates in the exhibitions at the opening. Looking at The
female beggar brandishing her rattle (No man's time, Villa Arson, Nice, 1991), it is impossible not to avert the eye, enmeshed in its aesthetic designs, which reifies, no precautions taken, a human being by assimilating it to the artworks surrounding it. Vanessa Beecroft juggles with a similar chord, but keeps the beholder at a distance. At her first one-woman show, with Esther Schipper in Cologne, November 1994, the artist took photos, among a dozen girls all wearing identical thin polo-neck jumpers and