On balls and brains
Installation
Swiss Art Awards, Basel, June 2016
[Excerpt from the presentation text:]
"Over the past few years, I have been carrying out an investigation on a peculiar late 15th century painting, usually attributed to Hieronymus Bosch’s studio and known as The Conjurer. Staging one of the oldest types of con game, played with cups and balls in the street, this composition surprisingly appears to anticipate the most contemporary forms of attention management and manipulation.
The research soon started to resemble a criminal investigation, as I followed the tracks of the various people who shared in the troubled fate of this painting: stolen from the town museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye by a member of French revolutionary group Action Directe in 1978, kept in a secret cellar since its recovery a year later, it also proved to conceal one of the major visual enigmas of its time.
On balls and brains includes extracts of interviews that I conducted with Jean-Marc Rouillan, The Conjurer’s thief, with Agnès Virole, the (still closed) museum’s curator, as well as with animator and film director Eve Ramboz. It also comprises a selection of drawings scratched on scraperboards, from the ongoing series entitled Models, signs, clues (archéologie de l’attention)."
A.G. June 2016
> projects: On balls and brains (performance)
> investigation: The Conjurer: towards an "ecology of attention"
> texts: L’escamoteur: économie de l’illusion, écologie de l’attention
L’escamoteur, ou le crime envisagé
>
