Article about MARCEL BASCOULARD / SPECIAL GUEST JÜRGEN KLAUKE

© Geijutsu Shincho

Miki Kanai wrote an article about our April show MARCEL BASCOULARD / SPECIAL GUEST JÜRGEN KLAUKE for the Japanese monthly printed art magazine, Geijutsu Shincho.

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PHOTO | BRUT. COLLECTION BRUNO DECHARME & COMPAGNIE / Les Rencontres d'Arles

Margret – Chronicle of an Affair, 1970/08/21 - 1970/08/31, Vintage Print, 13 x 17 cm

PHOTO | BRUT

COLLECTION BRUNO DECHARME & COMPAGNIE

July 1 – September 22, 2019 

Opening: July 1 

on the occasion of Arles. Les Rencontres de la Photographie

"Could 'raw photography' be classified as art brut ('raw art'), as defined by Jean Dubuffet? If so, it would include shots, prints, photomontages and photo collages created by self-taught artists, developed outside of conventional art circles, in contexts such as mental institutions, solitude and marginality, both in cities and rural areas. Photo | Brut presents more than 500 works from the Bruno Decharme collection, as well as a selection of other institutional and private collections chosen for their complementarity. This exhibition addresses four central themes ('Private Affairs', 'Reformating the world', 'Performing, or another I', 'Warding off the reality') and its aim is to grasp and introduce this art form to the public, art brut being a concept studied by few despite its significant and fascinating field.

With works by Horst Ademeit, Shell L. Alpert, Steve Ashby, Morton Bartlett, Marcel Bascoulard, John Brill, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Aloïse Corbaz, Jesuys Crystiano, Henry Darger, Charles Dellschau, John Devlin, Curzio Di Giovanni, Fumiho Endo, Karel Forman, Frédéric, Pepe Gaitán, Giovanni Galli, Pietro Ghizzardi, Lee Godie, Yohann Goetzmann, Kasuo Handa, Marian Henel, Mark Hogancamp, Paul Humphrey, Günter K., Zdenek Košek, Alexandre Lobanov, Tomasz Machciński, « Margret », Alexandre Medvedev, Donald Mitchell, Albert Moser, Edward Nadgrodzki, Norma Oliver, Photographies Spirites, Luboš Plný, Ilmari Salminen, Milton Schwartz, Ted Serios, Valentin Simankov, Leopold Strobl, Ichiwo Sugino, Elke Tangeten, Dominique Théate, Miroslav Tichý, Ufos, Elisabeth Van Vyve, August Walla, Melvin Way, Adolf Wölfli, Zorro, and numerous anonymous persons. (...)"

Exhibition curators: Paula Aisemberg, Bruno Decharme, Barbara Safarova & Sam Stourdzé, in collaboration with Valérie Rousseau.

For further information please visit:
www.rencontres-arles.com
www.abcd-artbrut.net

Installation Views of Marcel Bascoulard / Special Guest Jürgen Klauke

Installation views of Marcel Bascoulard / Special Guest Jürgen Klauke: Jürgen Klauke, Selfperformance, 13-parted, 1972/73, photography on barytpaper, 57 x 42 cm, Courtesy Delmes Copyright VG Bild-Kunst; Marcel Bascoulard, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne

Fotos: Johannes Post

MARCEL BASCOULARD / SPECIAL GUEST JÜRGEN KLAUKE

 Marcel Bascoulard, untitled, undated, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print,
12,8 x 8,8 cm, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne

MARCEL BASCOULARD / SPECIAL GUEST JÜRGEN KLAUKE

Delmes & Zander will show the photographic work of French artist Marcel Bascoulard. The photo series "Self Performance" (1972/73) by Jürgen Klauke, a seminal reference to the contemporary art scene, will be shown in the context of this exhibition.

Marcel Bascoulard is born in 1913 in France. He attends the art school of Bourges in the early 1930s. Parallel to his photographic work, he continues to paint and write throughout. He lives on the street at his own will, a self-determined clochard, until he is murdered in 1978 under unclear circumstances. He will remain a landmark of the city of Bourges until his death and is known to this day as “the man who dresses up in women’s clothes.”

His first self-portraits are taken in the early 40s. They show a young man in a dress, only subtly posing, brash yet sober, no makeup. He looks straight into the camera, unapologetically. This look, captured in his photographs as it progressively ages over the course of forty years, is the seemingly asexual invariable in a playful and elaborate interchange of dresses, some sewn by Bascoulard himself, others acquired in exchange for his paintings. It is these brief moments that transfer him into a different time and that enable him to take on a number of female identities: the unmarried young woman and the old spinster, the teacher and the shopkeeper (often holding a piece of broken mirror that resembles a hand-fan or a machete), the housekeeper with an apron and the lady of the house, but also roles that he invents or creates himself, such as the futuristic-looking geisha in vinyl from his later work. When arrested by the police in 1952, Bascoulard replies to the question of why he dresses in women's clothes in public: “It’s an artistic necessity.” Bascoulard's work derives essentially from this necessity: an artistic obsession at the heart of a carefully contrived life that raises questions about gender, identity, and biography.

Jürgen Klauke, Selfperformance, 13-teilig, 1972/73, Fotoarbeit auf Barytpapier, je 57 x 42 cm, Courtesy Delmes & Zander, Cologne Copyright VG Bild-Kunst

Jürgen Klauke (* 1943) begins to place his body at the center of his photographic work in the late 1960s and implements it as an immediate vehicle for expressing his artistic ideas. In doing so, he raises the question of gender-specific role assignment with provocative directness, ultimately reducing it ad absurdum. Beyond its formal serial character, the photographic work "Self Performance" (1972/73) also functions conceptually as a projection surface for multiple identities and genders, all of which Klauke constructs deliberately as part of his artistic thought and action. Beyond the mere appropriation of femininity, Klauke explores the concepts of self-presentability and transformability in order to explore new sexual typologies and to capture and objectify them within the medium of staged photography. This artificial and artistic rupture with traditional roles and standardized notions of identity in Klauke's pictorial worlds of the early 1970s form the core of a radical practice that is to this very day of seminal importance to an entire generation of young, performance-oriented artists.

"Jürgen Klauke is a unique figure in the art world. His inventions are nowadays taken for granted and have significantly influenced art over the last 30 years. He is a pioneer of multimedia and interdisciplinary artistic exploration, whose work fascinates and irritates in equal measure, oscillating between the poles of attraction and repulsion.”

Klaus Honnef on Jürgen Klauke, 2002

We would kindly like to thank Jürgen Klauke for his collaboration in this exhibition.

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