Compagnonnage Horizones #6
For the 23rd Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize, Timothée Calame, in collaboration with art historian Valérie Mavridorakis, author of Art et science-fiction : "La Ballard Connection" (Les presses du réel, 2011), proposes a "junk performance-conference" on the figure of British artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005). The performance-conference takes place in two parts: a performative speech by Timothée Calame, followed by a moment of response and conversation with Valérie Mavridorakis.
As part of the Ciné-Club Horizones in July 2022, Timothée Calame chose to screen his film History of Nothing (1961-1962), a "surrealist collage on surrealism".
While the content of Timothée Calame's "performance-conference" is in gestation, here are a few sentences of presentation of Eduardo Paolozzi from the book by Valérie Mavridorakis: "In April 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi gave a very singular conference at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London [...]. With the help of a brand new device, the epidiascope, he projected, without thematic concern and without hierarchy, images from his collection, taken from the popular press, advertisements, comics, popular science magazines and SF pulps such as Amazing Stories, Science Fantasy or Science Fiction Quarterly... This anarchic surge of pin-ups, cars, various machines, slogans or diagrams, shared the audience. Some find this pseudo-conference boring and superficial but the youngest members of the ICA (artists, critics and architects), those who will compose its pilot research unit, its real independent group, see in it the synthesis of their aspirations to refound art on a direct analysis of the technological and media landscape of the time. Indeed, the "performance" of Paolozzi already associates several elements that will develop the Independent Group: this collection of projected images is undoubtedly a new modality of the exhibition, that we can also consider as a first formulation of a work of the artist. By elaborating this Mnemosyne in the sense of Warburg or this imaginary Museum in the sense of Malraux, the artist asserts himself as the collector, the collector and the curator of an iconographic material whose organization replaces the argued discourse. [...] Finally, Paolozzi's choices highlight the irrational and compulsive, if not sexual, content of most representations of mass culture."
Image : Eduardo Paolozzi, History of Nothing, 1961-1962, 13 minutes
