Let’s talk

Echoing the Raoul Hausmann, Dadasophe exhibition, the new presentation of the contemporary collection highlights the relationship between art and language. While the relationship between word and image is a constant in the history of art, from illumination to surrealism, Dada, with its taste for the absurd and the development of phonetic poetry, marked a break with established language. Another defining moment in 20th-century art came in the 1960s, when conceptual art emphasized that the idea precedes the work, hence the frequent use of words and language by the movement’s artists.

Today, in the digital age, a new multiplication of writing and coding is opening up, from social networks to sms language. So this presentation gives pride of place to the written word in all its forms, to slogans, but also to the memory power of words and the power of storytelling.

On the chateau’s second floor, the artists invite visitors to decipher their own stories. The phrase painted on the wall by Douglas Gordon is also an invitation for visitors to create their own story. What is the object described by conceptual artist Robert Barry? What is Alighierio e Boetti’s mysterious and poetic phrase to reconstruct? What is the meaning of the text message dialogue between teenagers in Laure Prouvost’s tapestry? As for Cerith Wyn Evans’s works, they border on the visible, whether it’s the astronomer’s sentence or the dialogue between the characters in the fake fluorescent monochrome. Douglas Gordon plays on inversion, the mirror revealing the tattoo’s pleonasm. “No more liaison, no more betrayal”, repeats the song looped by Ugo Rondinone’s artist. At the end of the gallery, Ian Hamilton Finlay turns the commemorative plaques into a call to revolution.

In the château’s attic, the works on display question memory and the rewriting of history. In Aurélien Froment’s film about the Fourdrinier machine, the first industrial paper-making machine, a child’s voice struggles to explain its operation and social implications. Mark Geffriaud’s installation is based on a book – in this case, a book about the stars – as a repertoire of forms that he deploys in space. Works by Thierry Kuntzel and Felix Gonzalez-Torres question the dissolution of memory, whether personal or collective. Parodying the form of the Western and the silent burlesque film, Kent Monkman humorously re-establishes the forgotten memory of the native American Indian, reconstructed by Western colonization and cinema.