DISPLACEMENT

DISPLACEMENT (prologue)
“Displacement (prologue)” functions as a prelude to a series of projects initiated by Bureau des Réalités throughout its 2017 traveling program abroad. This foreword constitutes the impetus to various approaches around issues of displacement. Its multiple definitions reflect its plural essence (action, geography, economy, politics, physics, chemistry, geometry, psychoanalysis, etc.).

Aside from its first nature that derives from the laws of physics and the movement of a body in space, it would be tempting to retrace the exciting textual anthology of displacement from the first narratives on sailing and voyages to Rousseau’s “Reveries of a solitary walker”, Nietzsche’s walks, as well as the rambles of the nineteenth century (Woolf, Poe, Baudelaire), or the wanderings of Rimbaud, Perec and Debord, to name but a few, but this, however, is not the topic at hand.

As a vector, sign, mechanism and consequence, displacement lies at the heart of any form of process. The history of modern art carries within itself the desire to free the artwork from its static materiality and turn art into a vital experience. In today’s globalized world, it has become a way of life and a societal reality.
This prologue aims to highlight the different approaches addressed since the late 60s and early 70s by a selection of emblematic figures of Conceptual Art and a younger generation of artists with heterogeneous methods that have chosen displacement as their source or subject of reflection.

Walkers, urban nomads, modern pilgrims – Giovanni Anselmo, stanley brouwn, and André Cadere each have, in their own way, created normative and sensitive systems to measure both the body and the object in tangible and infinite space so as to fathom the immeasurability of our presence in the universe.

The exhibition does not, as such, articulate itself as a group exhibition, but rather as a conglomerate of individual and complementary paths – leading from the teachings of Conceptual Art to a free and open approach to what displacement may be in its current understanding and form, while also revealing social and migratory issues.

Extract from the text of Lilou Vidal, Displacement (prologue)

FEW WORDS ABOUT LYNDA MORRIS & CADERE
Lynda Morris developed a close correspondence with Cadere in the last three years of his life, including the organization of a series of eight “pub presentations” in Oxford and London in 1976. The eponymous exhibition publication “Documenting Cadere” 1972-1978 draws on Morris’ personal archive, and the archives of the Herbert Collection, Ghent; Massimo Minini, Brescia; and Barry Barker, London.

André Cadere (born Warsaw, Poland, 1934) was a key figure in an avant-garde generation that contested the nature of the art object and the institutional framework of the art world in the 1970s.

The actions of Cadere centered on appearances with his Barres de Bois Rond – “round bars of wood” made of brightly painted cylindrical units. Although he presented his work in galleries, these appearances at public sites and at the openings of renowned Conceptual artists, constituted a provocative approach towards art’s dependence on context. The correspondence and documentation around these interventions and his interactions with other artists, gallerists, collectors and critics serve as important sites for Cadere’s ideas, providing particular insight into his thinking around the politics of space, both social and institutional, against the backdrop of the economic crisis of the 70s.

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Lynda Morris is Professor of Curation at Norwich University College of the Arts, UK, where she established the successful EASTinternational open submission exhibition in 1991.

She curated the first UK exhibitions of Agnes Martin, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gerhard Richter, and more recently in 2014-15: The Life Room and the City: John Wonnacott and John Lessore Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and NUA, Dear Lynda.... at White Columns New York, Chelsea Space, Birmingham, Dundee and BQ Berlin, Genuine Conceptualism 1967-73 Herbert Foundation Ghent and 2015- 2013, Documenting Cadere 1972-1978 Oxford, Ostend, Artists Space New York and Rumania. 2016 she wrote on Konrad Fischer and Carl Andre first European Exhibition 1967 for K20 Dusseldorf. She is currently working on David Lamelas Getty LA:la project and Returning Emigres After 1945 for the Dahlem Museum Berlin.