Franck Scurti
Pascal Beausse is welcoming Franck Scurti.
For this new session In Situ & In Vvo -Conversations on art, Pascal Beausse receives the artist Franck Scurti,
on the occasion of his monograph, Home-Street-Museum, to be published by Presses du Réel.
Pascal Beausse has invited Franck Scurti, Michel Gauthier, Patrick Javault, and Xavier Douroux (to be confirmed). On the occasion of the publication of Franck Scurti’s monograph, Home-Street-Museum (Presses du Réel), Pascal Beausse reflects on the career of this artist like no other on the French scene, with Xavier Douroux, a co-director of the Consortium (Dijon), and art critics Michel Gauthier and Patrick Javault.
“What is Scurti’s work? Neither the mere defiguration of authorized forms in the fine arts, nor the sole emphasis on what is excluded from it, but a constant back-and-forth movement between the two. The cursor moves in one direction or another depending on the piece, on a line whose ends are the street and the museum.
The work epitomizes a moment in history when art, in order to remain faithful to the ambitions of 20th-century
avant-gardes, can define itself only in an in-between, an uncertain zone where two movements meet: from life to art,
from art to non-art.Two directions, two vectorizations, but only one line giving its conceptual coherence to a work that has taken chances in not using a formal concept or a visual signature. In 2006 the artist found a fake, resin rock on the curb, like the ones used in the display windows of some stores. He carved a formula on it, “I rent this place,” which gave the piece its title. Scurti does not have a proprietary mindset. He does not own a form, and never knows what he is going to do next. He only has his name, which explains that he would sometimes turn it into a work: “What’s My Name” (grey sidewalk, white wall) or “Snake Sign” (1997), a delightful small painting, a collage on paper which reproduces his signature in snake skin. As the rock indicates, he rents a given spot in the history of art for a specific occasion before relocating for the next one. To be sure, his art cannot be reduced to the path related above. Many pieces would certainly warrant another reading. Still, this two-way vectorization gives life to his work, between art and non-art. It has earned him a singular place in the current landscape, where the two major contrary dynamics in the avant-gardes of last century join in a synergy (art exists for no particular reason, anything can become art) – there where, in the gearing, the cogs of wheels turning in opposite directions meet to concur in a shared movement.”
Excerpt from Michel Gauthier’s text, “Franck Scurti, or the Politics of the Cursor.”
