Michel Aubry “The Searchers” at Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine

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Michel Aubry, Mise en musique du Kiosque de Melnikov, 1925-2009. Installation view. Photo : © André Morin / le Crédac. Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Eva Meyer, Paris. — at Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac.

Michel Aubry
The Searchers

20 September – 15 December 2013
at Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry
Ivry-sur-Seine, France

Michel Aubry has carried out a programmatic body of work for some twenty years now. It has him often interpreting objects or earlier artworks that are emblematic of modernity but using a formal idiom that springs from different handicrafts (including instrument and cabinet making, costume design and upholstery). The process of crafting the object is central to his art and is governed by a production protocol that subverts the relationship between the original and the copy.

For his show at Crédac, Aubry has made reinterpretations of temporary architectures and a number of furniture prototypes that were presented by the Soviet Union at the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris. The pieces include Alexander Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club, Konstantin Melnikov’s kiosk and the USSR Pavilion. The Pavilion is in fact the subject of a brand new piece by the artist.

Paris, 1925. Alexander Rodchenko was staying in the French capital to oversee the installation of the USSR’s show at the Grand Palais along with his Workers’ Club and several kiosks for which he had designed the color. With its simple, economical and functional forms and materials, Melnikov’s style of building design was then the architectural materialization of the Revolution’s new aesthetic, the ideological tool of a renewed relationship to objects and knowledge. In the Foreign Galleries, Rodchenko showed his Workers’ Club, an ensemble of furniture for reading, playing games and socializing that was meant to be reproduced throughout the country, the reflection of a utopian idea of integrating all the arts in daily life and contributing to human progress. Melnikov’s kiosks, which featured popular artisanal products, were exhibited in one of the exposition’s gardens.

Now lost, these Russian Constructivist masterpieces are still rather obscure in terms of documentation even today. Besides the rare photographs and layouts that have come down to us, Rodchenko’s letters to his wife, Varvara Stepanova, form a major source of information for Aubry with respect to the creative context of these pieces. The collection of their correspondence1 also makes up the plot of a fictional film biography (Rodtchenko à Paris, 2003-2013). The scenes of this biography have been progressively filmed one Aubry show at a time.

Aubry has been tirelessly documenting the production conditions of these avant-garde projects in order to put them into practice in a different context. Thus, starting in the late 1980s, the artist set up a system of equivalences between the Western musical scale and spatial measures, drawing his inspiration from a family of Sardinian wind instruments known as launeddas. These traditional instruments are constructed from reeds, with each stem length determining the note of course, the longest ones producing the deepest notes while the shortest ones emit the highest. Once the artist had worked out a Table de conversion (Conversion Table 1992) between the musical pitches (low and high) and metric lengths, it was then possible to find for each sound composition “a geometrical equivalent in space, and vice versa”2. This system, which governs nearly the whole of his sculptural output, is a “contamination” protocol, both arbitrary and ironic, of the form and functions of the objects he takes for his models. [read the full text here]

Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry
La Manufacture des Oeillets,
25-29 rue Raspail
94200 Ivry-sur-Seine,
France
credac.fr

Opening hours
Tuesdsy – Friday: 14h00 – 18h00
Saturday – Sun: 14h00 – 19h00

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Michel Aubry, Michel Aubry, Mise en musique du club ouvrier d’Alexandre Rodtchenko, 1925-2003. Installation view. Photo : © André Morin / le Crédac. Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Eva Meyer, Paris. — at Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac.

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Michel Aubry, Mise en musique du Pavillon de l’URSS de Melnikov, 1925-2013. Installation view. Photo : © André Morin / le Crédac. Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Eva Meyer, Paris.

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Michel Aubry. Installation view. Photo : © André Morin / le Crédac. Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Eva Meyer, Paris. — at Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac.

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