Pierre Villege Ripping Posters Off Walls and Making New Art With Them

Installation view of 'Pénélope' at Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

PARIS — Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois has launched a chic additional space (designed past the influential architecture firm of Jakob + Macfarlane) nearly its sixth arrondissement base of operations wth a historical bear witness of Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains's abstract, 35mm, animated picture "Pénélope" (1953). Villeglé'southward concurrent exhibition at the gallery'south main space, Opération Quimpéroise, gets its name from his hometown of Quimper, where he was built-in in 1926. He went on to become an art educatee in the sculpture department of the School of Fine Arts in Rennes, where he start became acquainted with Hains. Having been impressed with Villeglé's 2008 Centre Pompidou retrospective, La Comédie Urbaine, I was determined not to miss these complementary shows.

Opération Quimpéroise is a tightly unified prove of Villeglé's affiches lacérées (torn posters) pieces from 2006. (The gallery is as well showing a selection of related historical works in its two back rooms, though they are non technically function of the show.) This already 10-yr-old project looks fresh, and conceptually fits well inside the gallery's specialization on enquiry of celebrated works by Nouveaux Réalistes (New Realists) artists and their impact on contemporary art. The celebrated context for the "Pénélope" (1953) project begins with Villeglé'south collaboration with Hains on torn poster works, a practice that continued from 1949 to 1952. The pair was close to Lettrist poet François Dufrêne and later Mimmo Rotella, both of whom also used found décollages in the mid-1950s. Every bit early on as 1954, Dufrêne introduced Villeglé and Hains to Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Pierre Restany, with whom they founded the Nouveaux Réalistes in Oct 1960. Restany wrote the original manifesto for the grouping, titled The Constitutive Declaration of New Realism, proclaiming that Nouveau Réalisme meant fine art taking on new ways of perceiving the real.

Jacques Villeglé, "Opération quimpéroise – Mairie annexe de Penhars – Le Quartier" (2006), torn posters on canvas (Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris, photo past Soktha Tang) (click to overstate)

But prior to this, in 1958, Villeglé had already been promoting new perceptual approaches to reality with a theoretical text about his readymade ripped posters chosen Des Réalités Collectives ("Collective Realities"), published in the ultra-Lettrist review grâmmeS. Aspects of it foreshadowed and informed Restany's Nouveaux Réalistes manifesto and Villeglé went on to elaborate on this concept in a 1959 paper that divers a key role of a collective unconscious for what he called the surface area of the "lacerated anonymous." Villeglé's lacerated posters — first shown in his 1959 exhibition Lacéré Anonyme — challenged the boundary between everyday street life and High Art, opening upward the unabridged earth to get raw fabric for the creation of art. Similar ideas were beingness entertained in New York at the time past Alan Kaprow in his ledendary essay Legacy of Jackson Pollock, published by Fine art News in 1958 — the year of Kaprow'due south start informal Happening.

The fell, accumulated energy of Villeglé'due south lacerated posters was much in sync with the wait of the process-oriented side of Fine art Informel and Tachisme, and information technology predates the related assemblage motion much in vogue (see Arman'south accumulations of everyday rubbish) and the United states junk sculpture movement of the late-1950s. Frank Popper, in his book Art: Action and Participation, showed, with particular reference to post-kinetic inquiry, the convergence and specificity of Villeglé's notion of the street surround as the expanded field of fine art activity with involving the public in creative participation.

Installation view of 'Opération Quimpéroise' (photo by the writer for Hyperallergic)

Photo of Jacques Villeglé by François Poivret, "Issy-les-Moulineaux, 28 janvier 1991" (1991) (courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris) (click to enlarge)

The affiches lacérées are conceptually suggestive of the chance operations of John Muzzle and the social positions of the Situationist International, peculiarly in the way that Villeglé attributes importance to the anonymous hands that have torn the posters at random earlier he arrived to snatch them. Villeglé did not retouch the surfaces subsequently peeling off his selections, as is, from street walls. His practice was only to choose a segment of a poster wall, cut, tear, and frame it. In that, sense, his work is the mirror contrary of conventional street art, in which someone like Bansky leaves something new in the street.

In Villeglé's piece of work, anonymous easily are privileged over the hands of the artist. This idea can first be seen at work in the gallery with "Rue Jacob, Dec 5th, 1961" (1961), which, like a photograph, presents a frozen moment in time, subsuming street life into a pictorial vision that cannot exist read quickly. However one doesn't have to spend much time scrutinizing it to derive pleasures from information technology, as with Henri Matisse's cutting-outs, like "Souvenir d'Océanie" ("Memory of Oceania," 1953), or a typical Synthetic Cubist work. Given the strong areas of blues and reds at the base of "Rue Jacob," the soft, delicate colors secure a crackling compositional stability for the accumulated typographic fragments. I detect in "Rue Jacob" an early blending between the artist and public participation that took on greater and greater emphasis during the belatedly '60s, when new forms of artful immersion into chance opened upwards, foreshadowing the contemporary gestural brainchild of zombie ceremonial and the interactive tendency in new media art.

Particular of Jacques Villeglé, "Rue Tourelles, August 16, 1971" (1971) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) (click to overstate)

The other older piece here that rewards shut looking is "Rue Tourelles, August 16th, 1971" (1971). The up-thrusting, Socialist, "ability to the people" fist that dominates the composition ensures a strong presence. Here, the physical energy of ripping away poster parts and the political free energy pushing for revolution fuse into i artful statement. The piece's visual energy repays hard looking and hard thinking. It is besides typical of all of Villeglé's affiches lacérées works, as it directs our reflective attention to the multifarious and cacophonous peel of the urban mural. The fact that the vehement-and-revealing palimpsest seen here was created by the action of passersby, before Villeglé came along, is crucial to his involvement in a public and anonymous aesthetics of the street.

The solo show Opération Quimpéroise is made upward of 15 torn posters from Villeglé's hometown solo show at Le Quartier in 2006, when the artist was 80 years old. These bright, invigorating works create something of a cocky-portrait of the artist. They were once on diverse placards and panels on the walls of the urban center, and over the course of a few weeks these posters promoting the forthcoming exhibition were ripped past the public. The artist had them recovered, cropped, mounted on sail, and framed. My favorite of these recent pieces is "Opération quimpéroise – Mairie annexe de Penhars (Le Quartier)" (2006), as it manifests a flashy free energy that verges on the abstract. Ripped fragments unfolded into recognition of the artist's face and disappeared into noise at an increasingly intense charge per unit the longer I looked at information technology. Villeglé'south seizure of a establish fragment of reality is something of a twist on the readymade, every bit the fabric is not industrial and has been shaped by unknown hands. As opposed to Duchamp'due south readymades, Villeglé asserts that posters, when "torn by strangers, become a non-manufactured production, an anti-object." In fact, Villeglé considers himself more an accumulator of a commonage social production of artistic destruction than the piece of work'southward sole author.

Even more complex and historically significant is Villeglé and Hains's "Pénélope," a moving-picture show they worked on from 1950 to 1954 but never finished. On view from Villeglé'southward archives are various studies, gouache sketches, preparatory drawings, collages, prints, cartoons, and more. "Pénélope" was the culmination of a series of procedures that are besides numerous to describe here, but 1 landmark design was called a "hypnagogoscope" filming machine that was equipped with fluted glass lenses. There are two samples from the original 35mm motion-picture show here: one 2:xix minutes long and the other, the better, only 17 seconds long. Seeing these curt hypnagogoscope films allowed me to place the work within cinematic modern art history near Brion Gysin'southward Op Art "Dreamachine," alongside the early Dada blitheness films of Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, Marcel Duchamp's "Bloodless Cinema" (1926), and, later, Norman McLaren's "Dots" (1940). I establish this hypnagogoscope device technically fascinating, an optical appliance equipped with overlapping ribbed lenses that disturb the image of whatever is filmed. The hypnagogoscope relates to hypnagogia, the transitional state between wake and sleep, and to the hypnagogic state of consciousness.

Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains, "Pénélope" (1952) (courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris)

The bulk of the exhibition consists of beautiful, modest, glycerophtalic paintings, a number of preparatory drawings, collages, engravings, and cartoons. The serial of blueish glycerophtalic paintings on Bristol paper"Pénélope" (Ravenne sequence) (1953) is especially ravishing, evoking an temper of undulating Mediterranean water and Matisse'due south cut-outs, specifically his "The Swimming Pool" from the previous yr. This portion of the two-gallery bear witness emphasizes the importance of the hypnagogoscope approach for Villeglé'southward work, which consists of constantly disrupting signifiers, an artistic act that I consider role and parcel with a visual fine art of noise.

Clearly, Villeglé's focus on street disruption helped pave the way for other important racket artists of the '60s working in the expanded field. A good case is GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Fine art Visuel), a commonage of eleven artists active in Paris from 1960 to 1968 that picked up the Villeglé trend where the alone artist at work in the studio could be superseded by post-studio street piece of work. GRAV employed various types of bogus light and mechanical movement to investigate various kinetic and optical effects. Later, members of the grouping realized that their efforts to appoint the public'south vision had shifted their concerns toward spectator participation. On April 19, 1966 GRAV staged "Une Journée Dans la Rue" ("A Solar day in the Street"), inviting pedestrians to participate in various kinetic activities, including having them wearable elaborate, distorting spectacles to experience a warped globe — non dissimilar Villeglé and Hains'due south hypnagogoscope.

Villeglé and Hains's unfinished optical noise project, I recall, exemplifies something completely baked that Robert Smithson said inA Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects: "A great artist tin make art by simply casting a glance."

Photograph of Jacques Villeglé by François Poivret, "Quai d'Ivry, 27 novembre 1989" (1989) (courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris)

Jacques Villeglé: Penelope in Quimper or the Render of Ulysses continues at Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois (33/36 Rue de Seine, sixth arrondissement, Paris) through May 13.

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