“The Truthful Eye”, The Museum in the Second Degree: MAC VAL - Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine

A history of contemporary art in France, 1950-1990, and a little beyond

Related to Gérard Genette and his work Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree (1982), this new hanging of the collection aims to meet a demand: the desire to revisit or even rediscover works from the permanent collections that, for the most part, have not been shown since the museum first opened in 2005. It quickly became apparent that it is possible to write a kind of history of contemporary art, based on a unity of time and place. Of course, not all the artists who have participated in this history necessarily have works at the MAC VAL, but the main figures do and can offer a fairly accurate view of the history of contemporary art in France.

Between the first work in this sequence and the last, “L’œil vérité” sheds light on the emergence of a distinction between modern and contemporary art and on its ambiguities. Contrary to what some art historians have said by putting forward the rather too convenient date of 1945, this was not something that happened immediately. This new presentation is also the story of a distinction and a critical and historical construction. It turns out that, by following the different movements, this exhibition relates the many debates which served to determine the marks differentiating between modern and contemporary. Although they are questionable and sometimes almost interchangeable, they do have the merit of establishing points of reference. This new exhibition presents a reflection on the transition between a modern art that is traditionally defined in terms of rupture, and a contemporary art that is not satisfied with this prerequisite alone. The works also seem to transform viewers, who no longer (or decreasingly) play the passive role of consumer faced with an overly neat and closed narrative. The second degree clearly indicates the limits of such an exercise but also its benefits in terms of narrative. Hence the idea of engaging the eye in the manner of that landmark exhibition The Responsive Eye (1965) or, closer to home, L’œil moteur (2005). Rather than structuring the hanging of the collections by naming artistic movements, the eye was chosen as the common denominator, a plurality of eyes. Philippe Costamagna significantly used the plural in the title of his Histoire d’œils (2016) in order to remind us of the importance of flair and sensitivity. The approach taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind (1964), mixing phenomenology and perception, visible and sensible, is also a reference in this hanging of the collection. It both plays with and breaks certain rules of the gaze and of the height of vision in an attempt to catch the gaze in the act.