Summary of the exhibition project

The exhibition The State of Things. The object in art from 1960 to the present day was presented in its first version at the Museum of Fine Art in Nantes from the 28th June to the 12th October 2003. It marked the cultural event called "Public Treasures, 20 years of creation in the Regional Funds of Contemporary Art in France", organized by the French Ministry of Culture and curated by Jean Marc Prévost.

One year later, the museums of MARCO in Vigo and ARTIUM in Vitoria are hosting this exhibition. As for MARCO, this is the first time a temporary exhibition occupies both floors in the museum, due to the high number of works of art exhibited and their large size.

The exhibition is composed by 117 works of art from the collections of 17 FRAC (Fonds Régionaux d'Art Contemporain, i.e. Regional Funds of Contemporary Art in France), created in 1983 by the French Ministry of Culture and the regional governments. The FRAC are a network of 24 centres focused on the dissemination and support of contemporary creation, following a policy of cultural decentralization that has proved high success in the acquisition of works of art.

This exhibition presents a selection of these collections that leads us along the evolution of international contemporary art from the beginning of the sixties -when everyday objects were integrated into art discourse- to the present day. Thus, the status of the "object" in art is introduced and analyzed in all its forms and states throughout different artistic movements.

The original project is enriched in MARCO's and ARTIUM's version by the addition of Juan Muñoz and Joan Brossa, two recently deceased Spanish artists, whose works abound in the FRAC collections. On this occasion, their brilliant career will be commemorated in two halls showing diametrically opposed approaches to the object.

Following this method of analysis -a sort of cross section-, objects gradually turn into reflections of contemporary vision right in front of us. They sometimes tell us about the experience of the immediate environment; claim for their individuality and that of their creators; make us think about their role and effect on consumer society; raise questions such as the uselessness of the work of art or the borders between art and design; or become metaphors, symbols or traces of their immediate past and their origins. In short, they operate as a channel for the better understanding of contemporary art.

The exhibition opens with Duchamp's Boîte en Valise (1966), and it obviously could not be otherwise. This work reproduces 83 miniatures of the creator of the readymade, who turned a urinal into a "work of art" when he entitled it Fountain (1917) and presented it at an exhibition. The artist decided to decontextualize and put on a base this everyday object, which became then an artistic object. The result went beyond provocation and laid the foundations of a new concept of artist and work of art, still valid today, claiming that the idea is more important than the product itself.

It has been forty years of piled up, crammed, invented, recycled, manufactured and decomposed objects, manipulated by artists in all the imaginable ways: everyday objects deflected from their roles by Fluxus or provided with a memory by Christian Boltanski; objects rejected after having been used by consumer society and reinvented by the "New Sculpture" in Britain; objects deflected from their roles by Bertrand Lavier or John Armleder; objects inventoried by Claude Closky; objects displayed by Christian Marclay; objects piled up by Daniel Firman; objects magnified by Patrick Tosani; objects coming from ephemeral encounters orchestrated by Gabriel Orozco; and all the other machine-objects, showcase-objects, cynical objects, bandaged objects, etc. This provides an insight of what has been created in art through exhibitions taking place since the birth of contemporary art. In these exhibitions, things swiftly become objects and objects become products, oscillating relentlessly from one to the other, between irony and cynicism, criticism and demonstration, protest and aesthetic fascination.

Fluxus artists (Robert Filliou, Ben) drew inspiration from the Dadaist and Duchampian heritage, decontextualizing everyday objects to produce "poetic and political" images and puns. Later, Pop artists (Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol) and New Realists (César, Raymond Hains) took an interest in mass consumer goods and incorporated them as integral part of their work of art. By doing so, they intended to establish a direct relationship between reality and the changes taking place in the contemporary world.

After the sixties, Christian Boltanski followed the trail of Conceptual Art and conceived a series of intimate objects full of memories. During the eighties, the "New Sculpture" in Britain (Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow) picked up the forms of Minimal Art and Conceptual Art to reveal an interest in the extent of consumer society. Richard Artschwager's decontextualizations, or later Bertrand Lavier's, John Armleder's or Sylvie Fleury's are a way to critically trace the history of contemporary sculpture and painting.

During the nineties, Claude Closky worked with language and object, taking and staging anodyne "things", while Fabrice Hybert's POFs (Prototypes d'objects en fonctionnnement, i.e. prototypes of working objects) question the systems of art production and spreading. Objects can also take part in a more narrative field -as in Xavier Veilhan's works- or become a product, as Jean-Luc Moulène shows in his creations. Gabriel Orozco, for his part, questions the concepts of "crafts" and "industrial product", while L'Atelier Van Lieshout, among others, reflects on the status of a work of art, its role and its representation, so as to raise again the question of the economy of object and its desires.

The addition of objects to the work of art, the artistic object and its role, art and consumer society... These issues and many more are raised by The State of Things, an exhibition of the peculiar voyage of objects and their creators through the history of contemporary art.