A three-month exhibition called «Voilà», dedicated to memory, opened at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris on June 28th 2000. The idea of this exhibition was formulated Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier who invited some sixty artists to show their works with memory as a central theme with various ways used to give an close insight on today's world.
Boltanski has notably chosen thousands of pages of telephone directories to give his own interpretation of the world while other artists have been concentrating on photos to show ordinary or famous people as well as daily life scenes.
Visitors have for instance discovered that an artist like Andy Warhol used to be a kind of maniac keeping everything, letters, magazines, invitation cards, posters, cigarette packs, sweets, postal cards or rare objects like Clark Gable's shoes as well as a dress that belonged to Jean Harlow or a piece of cake made for Caroline Kennedy's anniversary.
Photography has been playing a major role in this exhibition with many shots by August Sander, Seydou Keita, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Dieter Roth, Peter Fischl, David Weiss or the Becher couple while many objects, seen as samples of our civilisation, are presented in the museum.
Suzanne Pagé, curator of the museum, said that her main concern was to focus on man since the 20th century had somewhat negated humans. “Voilà” thus tends not to commemorate anything but to reintroduce an idea of man. She added that she had worked closely with Boltanski and Lavier as well with the artists invited to exhibit in order to obtain strong responses.
“As a result, Gilbert & George have decided for the first time to give us access to their personal archives and not only artistic or social documents. Until the last moment, we did not know around what the exhibition would revolve. What was important was to give top priority to the specific language adopted by each artist and not to impose a concept since only the works make us free“, she said.
Movies and video films have also a major role in this exhibition with installations by Nam June Paik or Jonas Mekas who is showing collages of excerpts of about two hundreds 20th century films mostly dedicated to Jean Vigo, Bunuel or Antonin Artaud.
Movies are thus considered as much important as photos and now tend to be much familiar in many major exhibitions. Still, their presence is even more stronger here with Chris Marker, Sarkis, Anri Sala from Albania who has produced an extraordinary film montage and it is true that movies seem to have a stronger impact than conventional works of art, especially when it comes to deal with the theme of memory. Strangely enough, there is not a single painting shown in this exhibition.
Jonas Mekas notably said that he was filming because he had in fact no memory. “This enables me to remember what I filmed and to revive my memory when I am watching my movie,” he added.
Such assertion tallies well with the idea one can have of the 20th Century as movies are here to stir memories and because we tend to get stuck to our TV screens to get tuned to daily news. As a result “Voilà” could not bye-pass such phenomenon.
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