curator : Christophe Domino
From January 26 to March 15, 2008. Opening on Saturday January 26 at 4:00 pm.
exhibition views | biography
Gilles Mahé. Image Capital
by Christophe Domino
By Mahé’s response to the banality of
the modernist project of turning one’s life into
a work of art was radical and discreet. Radical, because
he made working on art a condition for life—accomplished,
shared and generous, at once casual and methodical.
Discreet, because his method of working lay on the fringes
of art, the art world, and the ambition to “create.”
He was an engagé dilettante. When asked, “So,
what are you up to these days?” he would gladly
reply, “Oh, I took up where my father left off.”
“And what was it your father did?” “Nothing.”
More acknowledged than known, much celebrated in particular
by a circle of artists of all generations, his work
since its earliest days in 1972 drew sustenance from
an intense relationship to the image. To all sorts of
images: not in their demonstrative, authoritarian, voluntary,
virtuoso, saintly or glorious dimension, and not as
a specialist’s business, but rather as a secular
language, as the stuff of exchange and of social life,
of the ordinary imagination. Whether he produced by
means of drawing, with a camera, photocopier, canvas
or computer; whether filming, painting, annotating,
collecting, archiving, recycling, printing, reproducing,
blending or writing; when disseminating anything to
do with images—from a scribbled-upon kitchen memo
board to “great art” on a postcard—Mahé
was concerned with the exchange value of the image.
Rescued, reproduced, associated, published, degraded,
found, fragmented—to the second, third or nth
degree—via distant analogies or visual efficacy,
the image structures the psyche in the same way that,
as the Lacanian vulgate would have us believe, language
does the unconscious. The subjective investment made
does not depend—or at least does not depend solely—on
the nature or the quality of the image; a graphical
accident or a torn page can equal a constructed composition
or a figure of great art, nurturing the private archive
of individual memory.
Mahé’s work is therefore an invitation
both to individual revelling in the image and to an
ironic, critical meditation on the ecology of images—on
contemporary iconomics. His practice touched
only slightly on art as axiological territory or as
a locus of hierarchy and of symbolic or material benefits,
while at the same time depending exclusively on these
qualities of art because of the disinterest and freedom
that he put into his work.Thus Mahé engaged his
self so far as to make his artist name into a brand
name—only to live, in a sense, sheltered from
that name by displaying that blind spot, that unspoken
thing that is the economics of art and the artist. His
response to merchant society was to play—overplay,
even—with commercial devices, using images of
money or deploying drafts of unpublished contracts with
private collectors and public institutions. He regularly
investigated the conditions of the artist versus those
of the commission, going so far as to suggest (for the
project Vendu à tous) the execution
of a work chosen by the sponsor, who would decide everything
from subject to medium to price. The image as capital
in the economic sense is therefore one of the principles
structuring his approach to the ambiguous equivalence
of symbolic value and venal value. Putting images into
circulation through any and all means of dissemination
is the principle of sharing which characterizes art.
(Mahé claims for his own the following, from
a 1998 letter which appeared in an article: “Memory
exists only when it is expressed publicly.”) But
beyond that, it also speaks to the active principle
of commerce and the circulation of money. Whereas the
artist speculates on the productivity of image capital,
Mahé carefully organized systems of dissemination:
the store, as the consummate space for exchange; the
spreading of information by mail; the organization of
correspondence courses in drawing, or consultation devices
like Capital d’Essais (1989) and 365
images (Déposition 1997), and the organization
of group exhibitions. His untimely death meant he did
not have the time to explore, as he had wished, the
potential for dissemination offered by the Internet.
Yet, although they are founded on him, his works/devices
remain concretely active and productive, outliving the
man.
Acknowledgments to Michèle
Mahé and Marie de Crécy, Philippe Rolle
and Yves Trémorin. To the lenders, Suzette and
Rudy Ricciotti (Bandol), the FRAC PACA (Marseille),
FRAC Bretagne (Châteaugiron) and personally to
Catherine Elkar for her support.
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Biographical Notice Gilles
Mahé was born in 1943, in Brittany. He was working
in the magazine industry, in advertising departments with
occasional forays into graphic design, when he decided
to travel in the U.S. for several months with his wife
Michèle and their children, selling travelogues
to the press. The inventory of documents and images that
he amassed as a result, combined with the desire to escape
from a traditional professional career, led him to another
way of working, whereby he divided his time between commercial
pursuits (stores selling decorative accessories and furniture)
and group exhibitions/events, using images, actions and
situations. (First shows: 35 avenue Foch, 1977
and 18 rue de Lourmel, 1978). With friends, he
founded a publishing company that put out Gratuit
(1979 to 1994) and other editorial projects. He forged
solid artistic friendships on the occasion of the exhibition
À Pierre et Marie (1982–1984). Combining
attitude art with publishing, image production, painting,
conceptual work using words and titles, public commissions
and gallery exhibition projects, he often worked in group
or participatory fashion, mounting such unique installations
as Extra rapide/Vite vraiment (Galerie Gaston/Nelson,
1983). By that time, he was active at the threshold of
art and mercantilism (Rendez-vous au bar, FIAC
de Paris, 1985). For 8 jours chez Samy Kinge (1987),
he recreated his living room in the gallery window. He
reproduced postcards of classical paintings as scanachromes
(Dix peintures de Gilles Mahé,1988). Invited
to the Villa Arson in Nice, he created Capital d’Essais
(1989), an interactive archival installation. He
worked for more than a year as an artistic company (Gilles
Mahé & Associés S.A., 1990) and
created Art/Gens at the Centre Pompidou (as part
of the exhibition Art&Pub, 1990–91).
He then ran a café in Paris (Le Lafayette,
1991), simultaneously working on multiple projects of
all kinds, including commissions (J’y étais,
1992; Parking Hoche à Rennes, 1994–1996).
He left Paris for Brittany, where he directed a local
drawing school, Vitré (1993–1996), as well
as correspondence courses in drawing (N.C.D.G.Q.A.D.;
1994–1997). His use of the personal computer opened
up other avenues (images, drawing) while he pursued longer-term
projects such as Prix Choc (1994) and GM
joue au golf en pensant à Rudy Ricciotti (1993–1996).
In 1996, in the shops of the Breton village where he lived,
he organized the exhibition La Galerie du placard,
with about thirty participants both known and unknown.
Pieces for public and private collections alternated with
program residences and atelier work, in particular the
re-use of images as drawings, with a view to establishing
a catalogue raisonné in the form of comic strips;
this work was to be interrupted by illness. His work is
in private and public collections, including the Fonds
National d’art contemporain in Paris and several
FRACs (Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain),
notably the FRAC Bretagne. A monograph published in 2004
by Éditions Jean-Michel Place has recreated this
singular journey.
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credit : Michel Brunelle
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