17 Sep 2014

Manners of Matter at Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard

MANNERS OF MATTER

Constantin Brancusi, Ulla von Brandenburg, Michael Dean, Kõji Enokura, Esther Kläs, Bruce McLean, Jean-Luc Moulène, Shimabuku and Alina Szapocznikow.

Curated by Chris Sharp.

'Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.' The abstract American painter Ad Reinhardt couldn't have put it better.[1] The exhibition Manners of Matter at the Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg approaches this misunderstanding of volume from exactly the opposite direction and explores the connections between the body, sculpture, image and dance through work by some ten contemporary artists.

Photographs, videos, 16 mm films, sculptures and installations, done by nine artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, question the body in its way of occupying space. How does it physically interact with the world in counterpoint to the waves and waves of images washing over us in an era dominated by screens? Coined in a 1936 essay on dance by Paul Valéry, the expression 'Manners of Matter' is meant to rehabilitate the body in its movement and dialogue with its surroundings.

Thus a dancer elegantly moves amid Brancusi sculptures and a man tries to hold back the ocean, stretching out along a wave on the beach. Another writhes about on pedestals, replaying the pose struck by Henry Moore's silhouettes, while odd pieces of chewing gum improvise their own dance.

Manners of Matter offers a physical experience of the body in contact with interactive images, films and sculptures. Feel forms and materials, face off with immense concrete sculptures, thread your way between narrow elastic cords and take a few hesitant steps to try to make out what is hidden behind the strange round of characters from a black-and-white film. The whole variegated exhibition is playing out in the same château where in 1771 it was said of the court of Prince Charles Eugene of Wurtemberg that one could behold 'the most beautiful, harmonious and expert dance' there.

The show is a joint endeavor with Salzburg's Kunstverein.

The guest curator Chris Sharp, born in 1974, is an American writer living and working in Mexico City, where he is the director of the exhibition space Lulu. He has been putting together shows in Europe since 2006. His curatorial practice draws largely on literature, as in the 2012 exhibition Bouvard and Pécuchet's Compendious Quest for Beauty at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London. As an art critic, he has written several monographs and published in art press, Artforum, Frieze and The New York Times.

[1] During a dinner party in the 1950s