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Radioactive
spring: Sarah de Teliga revisits nature. Tania
Mouraud: Martin Luther King speeches, nails and brass rings, violins, accordions,
and computer generated sounds: an ode to music. Emily
Harvey: a life in
fluxus. Swept
off my feet: Keith Donovan in poetic frame on Jerome
Borel's Paris inspired paintings. America
it seems, is holding vast quantities of Codeine,
Tiger Balm, Tylenol, Preparation H, Chanel No. 5, and Vaseline. Fear
and painting in America: flagging multiculturalism. Jeremy
Stigter's Japanese landscapes: an empire of emptiness. Strange
money: Peggy Preheim
makes a buck. The
lonely contents of a strange world are undeniably ours: Caterina
Verde in Eindhoven. "This
coming together between video, photography and paint involves the environment
and myself. The video footage acts like a paintbrush" says Valentina
Loi. [Warhol
Factory hand] Billy Name once said of Ray Johnson
that he "wasn't a person, he was a collage, a sculpture." Exacting
images of people in the celebrated and banal act
of wearing clothes. Could this be you? James Startt focuses on Uniforms. On
a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese
in Rome, romantic
minimalist Livia
Signorini unfurls
a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers. Painting is either back, or, never left the building.
A discussion around the state of art today. Did
Picabia prefigure our current
human-technology
questions? MADE
IN JAPAN: KILLER CUTENESS INVADES PARIS "What
I do is not really art, not really furniture," chairs
from the throne to the unsitable. Michael
Mandiberg is selling everything. Everything is art, everything is for
sale "...Images
of the Towers being struck and then falling in a plume of smoke." One illusion
of Heaven against other illusions of Heaven.
Fought to the death?" A
letter from Paris, from Basel. Art 32 Basel
reviewed. Swiss
artist thomas hirschorn, in association with
the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Jean-Noel Laszlo: liberty
is still controversial.
Jonathan Horowitz's interactive low- technology web
enabled art show reviewed.
part
1 Art, Paris, porn and the web. part
2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film. part
3
asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction? |
letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
  
the
word from liberté Jean-Noel
Laszlo is one of the French artworld's greatest holdouts, opting for decades to
channel his career through the narrow slot of mail boxes rather than the wider
doors of galleries. The writer, curator and artist of fluxus-inspired Mail Events
and exhibitions, has however turned his obsession with the post into a grand and
formidable installation. Awarded a large commission by the Direction Departemental
de la Poste du Var, Laszlo sent a message to his neighbors, creating a monumental
work in the Toulon-Liberté post office that will be trampled by thousands: 40
grés sandstone tiles with the word "Liberty" (in 40 different languages) engraved
in their faces. 
Laszlo's style
is to use words as a concrete aesthetic form. But from a public relations point
of view, Toulon, with its ex-extreme right wing Mayor (now only the Mayor is right
wing), the message is somewhat controversial. The work expresses the multicultural
modernity and the universal dimension (not to leave out mission) of the post,
not the "Foreigners Out!" message of Le Front National (FN), the extreme right
political party that still partially runs the town. Laszlo's gesture is in the
end a simple word guaranteed to engender complex associations, subtle protest
as well as a language lesson of sorts. Here
you'll find the word Liberty cast in Hebrew, Afrikaans, Czech, Romanian, Finnish,
German, Basque, Russian, Vietnamese, English, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Serbian,
a dozen languages you've probably never heard of, and even Gaelic. A veritable
nightmare for the local xenophobes. The languages, from the Western "free" world
and those regions where "liberty" has quite different meanings have long interested
this global artist - particularly his home town. why
did you choose the word liberty? Because
it is the name of that particular office in Toulon--Liberté-Toulon. It's emblematic
and symbolic. The word "liberty" is excluded from their [the extreme right's]
language - it made perfect sense to exploit the situation and develop a wide venue
for this word. 
Also,
this post office is the most international of all the post offices in Toulon.
More languages are spoken there on a daily basis than practically any other place
in Toulon. People come here to get their unemployment checks. It is a commercial
center and in some ways a social point where news is received and sent abroad.
And as there
are about 40 people working there, I chose 40 languages. What interested me was
to make an artwork for the people of Toulon, as well as for those who work in
the post. Often when there is a public project made by an individual artist, the
artist more often than not proposes something around his own ego. tell
me about the languages you chose for your project. I
selected languages that were both widely spoken in the world and were at the same
time those that had a precious sense of the word "liberty." But words also represent
ideas about culture and history and change. Venda, for example, is a South African
language and obviously the word liberty for these people is critical to their
political consciousness. I also chose Latvian, a language formerly under the political
weight of Russia. Gaelic interested me because it is an original language that
is losing its power in the face of the widespread use of English. Basque, too,
is an original language, not a dialect of French or Spanish. And liberty for the
Basque is a highly charged concept. For the Chinese text, I spoke to a professor
of art here in Toulon. He gave me the ideograms that correspond to the "idea"
of liberty. There are two signs for it but many meanings. But
the idea of liberty - and its semantic senses - is quite varied the world over.
There are many kinds of liberty. There is not for each language a clear correlation
for "liberty." Each "liberty" has its own history…in Hebrew, one of the world's
oldest languages, has certain meanings particular to the Jews. In Arabic, too,
the word liberty is significant - and, there are many French citizens in Toulon
who have come from Arabic speaking countries, particularly North Africa. For
me, this project, beyond its physical installation is also the story of language
and culture and history and consciousness. how
has the liberté project changed your work? Well,
first, I'm very happy with the project being so large. The Poste put a copper
plate in the post office that explains the work, why it was created and what it
is about. It indicates all the languages involved in the installation. I'm happy
because it is a strong work and one that will last. The
installation has changed my work as well. I now have other projects that are "monumental,"
although they are in the beginning stages. Certainly Liberté is very different
from what I've been doing previously. I've worked for many years with mail art,
correspondence art and artist postage stamps. Those works are small, marginal
and confidential. But now with this piece and other large projects it opens up
a new period where the work can be monumental, more public and enters into a greater
debate. Yet, oddly enough it's the same kind of work, the concerns are similar
- words and messages. There are certain artists who are known for a savoir-faire
(know how), while I have always wanted to be known for a faire-savoir, that is,
a make known. Jean
Noel Laszlo "Liberté"
29 Mai 2001 Toulon-Liberté
58 Rue Jean Jaurès
83000
Toulon
France
Jean Noel Laszlo 04 94 16 02 17 Matthew
Rose is a Paris-based artist and writer. His e-mail is: mistahrose@yahoo.com.
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