Art in Nîmes

Katia Zoritch
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

In Nîmes I rushed through the main streets to catch the last open hour at the Carré d’Art, a museum of modern art mirroring the delicate and compact (and almost intact!) Roman temple just across the street. I happened to see an exhibition called “A different way to move”, dedicated to the intersections in dance, music and visual art in New York in the 60s and 70s — to the recently deceased Trisha Brown as well as Yvonne Rainer and company.

Broadway 1602

There, in Nîmes, in a tucked away cradle of ancient civilization I found examples of dance documentation that are usually so hard to witness elsewhere. I have, for long, been thinking about “dance writing”, minute directions for body’s movements in space. One of the first articles that introduced me to my internship at n+1 magazine in New York was Lizzie Feidelson’s piece entitled “The Merce Cunningham Archives”. It speaks — in broad strokes, among many things — about the task of archiving choreography and preserving performance, at once a very precise and a fleeting, intangible subject. Here, at the Carré d’Art, I witnessed those exact instances of preservation, dance notations: meticulous arrangements carried out by Yvonne Rainer and Sol LeWitt, stage plans describing the architecture of the sequences, letters to the dancers pointing out exact gestures and patterns of behavior for every single one of them.

Yvonne Rainer,Duet from Terrain, 1963, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown performing at Judson Memorial Church, New York

Some are really amusing: “When you arrive at points marked ‘x’, you must sit down for 10 bananas. […] set down your raisins and do your ‘standing-in-one-spot bird movement dance’”. Or: “When you are thru, roll the ball of string across the stage. Then: practice hand stands or cartwheels; or: Eat walnuts at points marked ‘x” ”.
The other — permanent — collection at the museum had spacious rooms and a medley of abstract pieces. I especially loved Sophie Calle’s portraits of people who lost their eyesight and remember the last things they saw before facing eternal darkness. An elderly woman lost her eyesight because her eye doctor mistook normal solution with some dangerous chemical. Her last visual memory is a blotch of a red bus arriving to the stop to take her home.

La Dernière Image. Aveugle au lever de soleil / The Last Image. Blind with sunrise, 2010, Copyright © Adagp, Paris 2012. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin

Another photograph shows a middle-aged man who remembers stepping onto his hospital balcony to see the sun rise above the seaport of Instanbul before undergoing a risky operation. He was saying goodbye to the colors of dusk at Bosphorus, trying to rememebr them in order to save the picture in the tenebruous backstage of his mental memory.

In a way, this documentary art piece speaks precisely about the loss of visual documentation. In the cases of Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer it can bring dramatic consequences as their work only exists through an experience of speechless spectacle. This summer, having lost two months of contacts, notes, photographs and phone memory, I have gone through a microloss of visual material as well. In the cases of Sophie Calle’s characters the experience is, of course, immensely more radical and painful. It is the source of all visual immediacy and contact that is cut off like an umbilical cord connecting them to the world. The question is: what and how do we (manage to) see when we only have our imagination and mind space to rely upon? This same question applies to prisoners whose visual reality is confined to the bare walls of a prison cell. That is the reason I was (/am) so curious to see Olivier Py’s production of “Hamlet” with prisoners of Avignon-Le Pontet correctional center showed at the Avignon Theatre festival this July. He has skillfully worked with their minds and their conscious(ness) by bringing in a piece of different reality that has visualized itself in their acting of it.

Hamlet © Christophe Raynaud de Lage
Katia Zoritch

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katiazoritch at gmail dot com

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