On Kawara, Leigh Ledare, John Miller, Carolee Schneemann, Martha Wilson - FIAC - Art fairmfc-michèle didier | Paris - Brussels -

FIAC 2019
October 17 - 20, 2019
Paris, France

For this new edition of FIAC, mfc-michèle didier proposes a selection of works that testify to a particular use of the image: the image as a relation to space and time. 

Walter Benjamin states that: "In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art?its unique existence in a particular place.", we will therefore present a selection of artists whose work is a personal and intimate narration that reminds us of the time and place of their creating. 

John Miller's Shooting Log testifies to human activity at a specific time of day: between noon and 2pm. Begun in 1994 and continued to this day, John Miller's The Middle of the Day gathers hundreds of photographs taken at that precise time of the day. The special edition, Shooting Log, contains the book and a set of ten photographs from The Middle of The Day?s corpus. It is impossible here to describe the subject of these photographs, the real subject, "between noon and 2pm", remaining irremediably invisible.

All the postcards from I GOT UP by On Kawara testify to the authenticity of the artist's place and time of getting up. Between May 10, 1968, and September 17, 1979, On Kawara sent a postcard every day attesting to his whereabouts. On the back of each card, he stamped the words "I GOT UP AT", followed by the time he got up that day. The date, name and address of the sender and recipient are also stamped on the card. 

Fuses, Carolee Schneemann's iconic 1965 film in which she is seen in the sexual act through the placid eyes of her cat, was reworked in a rich variety of ways: the film is blown up, printed, painted, covered in acid, coloured. In this work, Carolee Schneemann broke the chains that bound the body, particularly the female body, at the time but also nowadays. Fuses is a central piece as it draws together all the themes found in Schneemann?s work. It is both a starting point and a manifesto.

We will also present two artworks by Martha Wilson. Her photographic practice, which began in the 1970s and is now considered as precursor, points to a territory later conquered by many contemporary artists, such as Cindy Sherman or Martha Rosler. In Breast Forms Permutated, Martha Wilson applies permutation, a method for arranging objects according to a variable, to the female anatomy. Thus the artist humorously criticises the tendency to police the female body, crucial in the feminist struggles of the 1970s. We will also present I Make Up the Image of My Perfection/I Make Up the Image of My Deformity.

In Double Bind, the images based on an assumed voyeurism attest to the moment experienced by two men and the woman who binds them. Double Bind is built based on a protocol established by the artist Leigh Ledare. He organised two work sessions, two months apart. The first session documents the encounter between the artist and his ex-wife, Meghan Ledare-Fedderly, in a hotel room in New York?s countryside. For the second session, Meghan returned to the same place with her current husband, the photographer Adam Fedderly. The two subjective archives resulting from the photo shoots provide the basis of this project and evoke an ontological and phenomenological comparison of the subject, seen through the circumstances of the two relationships.