Art Ludique: a museum for the entertainement industry.
Brand new contemporary art museum opening in Paris is entirely dedicated to art pieces used to make movies, cartoons, comics, manga and video games. Jean Jacques Launier, Art Ludique’s director, explains the idea behind this world premiere.
Hi Jean-Jacques and thank you for welcoming us to this wonderful place. How has emerged the idea of a museum dedicated to the art of entertainment ?
This museum is a world first and we are very proud of it. Basically, I am a fan of drawing. When I was little, I was drawing around the margin, which made me stop classical studies to redirect to drawing studies . Then I realized movie posters to become an artistic director. But I was always very frustrated that there was no recognition of the artists I admired : those from the drawing, cartoon, animated films. When I was doing my studies was the time when Star Wars came out in theaters and where Ralph Mc Quarrie, that even today few people know, had drawn Darth Vader. I told myself that it was unbelievable that there was no recognition for artists of this caliber. Since there are museums everywhere , why not dedicate one to these major artists museum? In any case, the first step for me was to try position them on the contemporary art market place.
So this place, “Art Ludique le Musée” is the logical follow-up to Arludik gallery which you also founded ?
That is correct. I had the chance to meet people like Moebius who became a great friend, and that ‘s when we decided to create a gallery. You should know that an art gallery is anything but speculation, we had not paid ourselves for several years. But we had the opportunity to expose artists and Moebius was the first to open the gallery in 2003. Then other big names followed like Katsuhiro Otomo, John Howe, designer of The Lord of the Rings, Geof Darrow for how work on Matrix, Disney’s Glen Keane, designer of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Beauty and the Beast, and Pocahontas, Peter de Sève who designated Ice Age and many more … It’s pretty crazy, but none of these artists had never been asked to showcase their work in an art gallery, we were the first to do it.
Your definition of art ludique, or the art of entertainment includes video game. What have you done regarding this field?
Video games are an essential component of the art of entertainment. We showcased works from video game artists like Toby Guard, Lara Croft’s designer, Yoji Shinkawa, Metal Gear Solid’s designer, who came with Hideo Kojima, Assassin’s Creed’s designers and more. New York’s MOMA recently integrated a permanent exhibition dedicated to video games, which is a strong gesture. From our side, we had the chance to showcase works from artists of this industry since 10 years.
Your museum is full of intermediate works, thereby visitors can have a picture of the whole creative process. However, why focus on works that were necessarily meant to be exhibited one day?
What touched me at core is primarily the drawing, because it is from this talent that artists are able to work either in the cartoon industry or in the design, film or animated movie industry. They are magicians able to create fantasy universes from the tip of a pencil. Moëbius was able to create The Masters of Time as an animated movie, but also do design work for the movie industry for Tron and Abyss, comics with Blueberry and even video game with Panzer Dragoon. We just want to pay tribute to the great artists, who happens to works for the entertainment industry at large.
These new fantasy worlds require the talent of artists working in disciplines usually gathered to a smaller audience, like opera, orchestral music, sculpture…
We have several sculptures here, which shows the natural gateway between academic artists of the 19th century and today’s artists using computer graphics. There is a clear link between illustrators like Daumier or Doré and video game artists. In this museum , we have the chance to be both avant-garde and mainstream, which is generally difficult to achieve as the audiences are differents.
In the animation we can distinguish large schools: American, Japanese , but also the French school. How do you see its future?
There is no need to talk about the future, French production is huge , actually it’s ranked third worldwide. Within Pixar or Dreamworks teams, you’ll encounter a great number of French artists. Just as America got Walt Disney and Japan got Osamu Tezuka, in France we had Paul Grimault , Michel Ocelot, and nowadays new talents like Johan Sfar or studios like Illumination Mac Guff, which made one of the highest grossing animated movie of all time with Despicable Me. France remains one of the most spectacular country in terms of artistic creation in the animation field.
Do you think new technologies can bring revival to disciplines like comics ?
I saw interesting experiments with animated comics on Ipad: when tapped , each box comes alive and becomes a movie itself. I do not know if it is technologically feasible in the long run because it must require a crazy amount of job as one must make a animation box then multiple animations per page, but the result is spectacular and perhaps one day technology will be able to fully bring comics to uncharted territories. But isn’t it already the case with animated movies?
Designing these imaginary worlds requires a wide range of skills: scenario, drawing, illustration, animation, music, staging… How do you manage to show this variety through the Museum?
Since we focus on figurative art, we mainly deal with image, drawing, painting and sculpture. For the Pixar 25 years of animation exhibit, what is showcased is a selection of works among thousands of drawings, mainly curated by John Lasseter — director producer, director atistique at Pixar — himself. We have modestly participated in approving the final selection and worked on the scenography. Another great strength of our exhibitions is that artists are alive and can therefore participate themselves in the making of their own exhibit.
How do you place the art of entertainement into the whole movement of contemporary art?
Art of entertainement is connected to well-identified movements, espcially the return of figurative narrative in contemporary art. If one refers to the history of art, figurative narrative actually exists since the Stone Age and the beginning of illustration. But its second genesis can be traced to the 19th century with the arrival of newspapers and printing, when suddenly engravers, illustrators and painters became illustrators and cartoonists for books or newspapers. Take for example the famous drawing by Charles Philippon caricaturing the face of King Louis Philippe of France by giving it the shape of a pear. That was in 1860. We don’t realize today how much these artists were ahead of their time in term of creativity which is why I think it is important to show the innovative work of Philippon, Doré, Daumier , Windsor McCay in the United States or Hokusai in Japan, who become a major source of inspiration for the manga movement later. These people are totally part of the history of art, so the notion of “entertainment art” should certainly not considered as a sudden novelty falling from the sky.
What kind of relationship do you establish between technology and artists?
Walt Disney benefited from a technology that allowed him to animate and give life to his drawings. He is separated from Doré or Daumier by a few dozen years, yet he was completely inspired by them, as well as other European illustrators. Somehow video games can be viewed a kind of total art which involves interactivity, light, music, image and narrative. Technology and art can work together when the technology is used as a tool for the artist that helps develops his vision. I always thought that people like Leonardo di Vinci, if they had a computer in their time would have been playing with stat-of-the-art computers and devices: they are visionary artists who have always benefited from any source of available technology to be stay ahead in their creation.