Art faber is an umbrella term for works of art ¿ whether pictorial, literary, photographic, musical or cinematographic ¿ whose main or secondary themes are work, business and the world of economics. The word faber is rooted in the foundations of the economy. It is the Latin word for ¿smith¿ and the etymological root of Romance language of ¿making¿ and ¿manufacturing¿, as well as the essence of Homo faber. Homo faber or ¿man the maker¿ is the toolmaker, the manufacturer of machines and consumer products, the main protagonist of secondary industries, but also of the tertiary, service sector. Homo faber is also a producer of life, especially in terms of cultivation and animal husbandry ¿ the farmer, the breeder, the tamer, the transformer, adapting the natural world to our needs: harnessing animals¿ strength for work, creating consumer products, such as milk and meat; and processing wool and hide for artisanal ends. For several decades now, however, this manufacture of life forms has raised several ethical and moral questions about animal well-being, food strategies, sustainable development, ecology, short-and-long term disaster management, and intensive breeding and its impact on the environment and consumers. This first issue of the Cahiers de l¿Art faber tackles the field of photography through the ¿Bestiaux¿ portrait series begun by the artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand thirty years ago. In the series, the artist looks at the privileged relationship between breeder and livestock, inviting us to reflect upon the economic vocation of their animals, and on the system in which animals are produced, used and consumed. As wells as a previously unpublished interview with the photographer by Catherine Briat, the issue features articles from the historian Éric Baratay on domestication, the economist Jean-Marc Dupuy on the history of animal production in France, and the legal expert Jean-Pierre Marguénaud on the issue of animal rights, as well as a presentation of the results of a Havas-BETC survey into the contemporary relationship between humans and animals by Olivier Vigneaux, the chair of BETC advertising agency¿s Digital Studio. With this first Cahier, the Art Faber collective inaugurates a series of articles exploring major societal themes today in an attempt to create a cross-fertilization of two disciplines that are oft considered unrelated: contemporary art and economics, to encourage debate, expand scope for fresh interpretations, and encourage dialogue between the two fields.
In electrical and electronic systems, a ground noise is a sound interference, a stray noise considered as disturbance. Like a flying insect trapped in a lamp, it is a continuous rustle, a vibration that seeks to escape. Its presence is considered annoying, therefore one usually seeks to get rid of it. Insects and arthropods trigger atavistic reactions in us. Even dead and pinned under glass, a spider will be able to frighten, even for a moment, an adult human being. Admittedly, we have somehow tamed our fears towards them, through admiration (¿the incredible work of ants¿, ¿the beauty of butterflies¿) or recognition (¿the bees, our so useful nurturers¿), but this teeming fauna remains nonetheless mysterious, obscure, even unsettling. This work is extended by a conversation between Céline Clanet and eco-acoustician Jérôme Sueur, a specialist of the ¿melody of insects¿.
The King¿s kitchen garden was created by La Quintinie in 1678 on a plot of land nearby the Château de Versailles to provide fruit and vegetables for Louis XIV¿s dinner table to the Sun King¿s great delight. The whole garden covers nine hectares and is composed of a sequence of smaller plots, garden chambers whose walls and terraces control exposure to the sun and create microclimates to diversify production. La Quintinie was able to cultivate and harvest figs, melons, asparagus, peaches, plums, pears and more, sometimes even out-of-season. The King¿s kitchen garden is also a secluded haven, sheltered by high stone walls and foliage, conducive to daydreaming and letting time stand still. A listed national monument, it has been open to the public since 1991. Today the ethos of the King¿s kitchen garden is to protect the living world and the diversity of species. It contains roughly four hundred and fifty varieties of fruit and four hundred varieties of vegetable. It has conserved its triple function as a place of cultivation, experimentation into new techniques and training in gardening. Today it welcomes students from the national school of gardening, who are allotted plots for their own practical endeavors, as well as courses in gardening theory and practice. The garden has been growing and teaching for more than three hundred years without interruption. Walking the alleys between the plots we sense the history of this magnificent royal garden and the people who have made it what it is over the centuries.
Since a young age, Lorenzo has delighted audiences with his spectacular horsemanship and stunning equestrian shows. Over the years, increasing numbers of horses, black and white, have taken the stage with him, whirling dervishes of energy and virtuosity performing to perfection in spectacles imbued with poetry and magic. At the final curtain, every show is greeted with lengthy standing ovations. Because what the audience has witnessed is not just Lorenzös technical prowess but a unique relationship between artist and horse. Through the sensitive lens of the Swiss photographer Heini Heitz, we follow Lorenzo at his secret ranch in the Camargue and also in the arena in performance. He talks about his special relationship to his horses, and how he trains sixteen at a time in total freedom to create his incredible feats of showmanship. We discover how he works with foals, how he lives alongside horses, and what they become in their retirement. We also meet Lorenzo the instructor teaching equestrian acrobatics to increasing numbers of young people while constantly inventing new figures to astound us in the arena.
Devised for Château La Coste, Mater Earth takes us into the heart of humanity and the myths of creation. Prune Nourry created a monumental sculpture representing a pregnant work emerging from the earth, an immersive installation based on the principles of eco-responsible architecture. The work was first imagined back in 2010, when the artist invited a pregnant woman to pose in a bath of milk for a photography session. From those images of serenity, she created a life-size sculpture. Prune Nourry was instantly seized by a desire to produce a larger scale version of the work but it took several years of reflection before the desire became reality. The book follows the creation of the statue in situ, offering readers an original experience of symbolic rebirth. The work brings an inside view of the project and the mysteries of its conception, situating Mater Earth in Prune Nourry¿s rich and varied career. We see the stages of its development towards an ideal of ¿ultracollective chaos¿ involving multiple artists and artisans, as well as Prune Nourry¿s own ethical and ecological reflections and self-questioning. The work provides a rare vision of the gestation of creation, a window onto the creative process, showing everything that nourished the project and brought it to life. The illustrations resonate with this birthing process, creating a catalogue of the cultural and artistic motifs that inspired the work. Nancy Huston¿s journal provides sensitive, thoughtful insight into maternity, reflecting the slow metamorphosis of all works of creation.
For more than 30 years, Leïla Menchari (born 1928) was responsible for designing the traffic-stopping window displays at Hermÿsâ¿ prestigious flagship store at 24 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré in Paris. Menchariâ¿s aesthetic vision and her sense of colour and texture created magnificent installations that brought the best out of silk and leather. Born in Tunis and considering herself a citizen of the world, Menchari was inspired by her journeys to the Near and Far East, her encounters with extraordinary figures of the art world and her Beaux-Arts training. For Hermÿs she created Egyptian archaeological sites with sand and crumbling statues and iconic scenes of Paris with monuments crafted out of organza, among many other fantasies. Featuring a preface by Hermÿs CEO Axel Dumas, this extensively illustrated, sumptuous publication focuses on 137 Hermÿs storefronts created by Leïla Menchari between 1978 and 2013.
A folk-art movement emerges in the face of unchecked consumerism and waste managementDressed in masks and costumes made from garbage, a generation of Congolese street children and artists draw their inspiration from ancestral clothing arts to stand against the ecological disaster their country suffers. French photographer Stéphan Gladieu (born 1969) captures the movement in his portraiture.
A dazzling intervention at the Beaux-Arts Petit Palais from the author of The Secret Language of FlowersFrench artist Jean-Michel Othoniel (born 1964) installed his opulent sculptures in the gardens and halls of Paris¿ Beaux-Arts Petit Palais in Le Théorème de Narcisse. This volume documents his monumental water lilies, gold necklaces and glass bricks.
Between 1978 and 1981, Sophie Calle went on a clandestine exploration of the then abandoned Hotel du Palais d'Orsay. She selected room 501 as her home and without any pre-established method, set about photographing the abandoned hotel over 5 years. As she explored, she picked up items she found: room numbers, customer reception cards, old telephones, diaries, messages addressed to a certain "Oddo" and more besides. What happened to room 501? More than 40 years later it has disappeared and an elevator has taken its place. At the invitation of Donatien Grau, the Musee d'Orsay curator, Sophie Calle returned, equipped with a flashlight, to explore the site again during the lockdown period. She hunted down the ghosts of the Palais d'Orsay, now connected to the present by the visitors that had also deserted the museum. The work reconstructs the artist's archive of photography, letters, invoices and other daily items which bring a forgotten past back to life. To provide commentary on her discoveries, Sophie Calle called upon the archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, who writes a series of texts combining fact and fiction. All this evidence has been assembled together to create an objet d'art which resembles an investigation notebook.
The ¿travail-peinture¿ pioneer at the Lambert CollectionThis book spotlights works by Swiss artist Niele Toroni (born 1937) produced for the Lambert Collection in 2000: a series of paintings on paper, tracing paper, canvas, wood and even on a school blackboard. This book of the exhibition contains gallery views and an interview between Toroni and Yvon Lambert.
Catalog of an exhibition held at Mucem, November 21, 2019-March 1, 2020.
After Failles Ordinaires (2012) which revealed Géraldine Lay's keen eye and original talent, the photographer here continues her urban explorations of humanity in Great Britain. Faithful to her precise, detailed method and ever attentive to the potential for surprise and chance in any setting, Géraldine Lay mentally apprehends her territories before photographing them. She senses the light and atmosphere, immersing herself in a setting rather than reconnoitring, an approach that brings intimacy to the heart of anonymity. Some critics have rightly highlighted the cinematographic dimension of the artist's work but such an interpretation overlooks the essentially photographic nature of her pursuit and, in each of her 'photograms', her exacting work reminds us how photography was invented before cinema, and had a special ability to capture and hold the delicately ephemeral. In doing so, she creates a new aesthetic unique to the photographic craft, an aesthetic that imbues all of her work. As we traverse suburban streets and squares, lives are captured in the mystery of their daily existence. As the Irish writer, Robert McLiam Wilson writes, 'People walk and wait. They talk, drink coffee. They cross streets. They work. They move about. Citizens busy with citizen things. Like all citizens everywhere, they are multiple, varied, various. Men, women, children. They are also British. Incredibly British. They couldn't come from anywhere else.' In an age of exponential standardized universality, Géraldine Lay's photography reaffirms both the permanence of unusual individualities and the resistance of collective identities.
Koto Bolofo¿s film work has garnered several awards and featured at a variety of festivals, including the Berlin International Film Festival, the BBC British Short Film Festival, Amnesty International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Cambridge Film Festival and Cape Town International Film Festival. Along with his short films, Koto Bolofo has shot for many prestigious international magazines and journals. He has also published three books: Racing Style, Sibusiso Mbhele and his Fish Helicopter and Venus Williams. Bartabas is the performing name of the French horse trainer, film producer and impresario Cl¿nt Marty. In 1998, he founded the equestrian performing show, Zingaro, which means ¿Gypsy¿. In 2002, he founded the Acad¿e du Spectacle ¿uestre (Academy of Equestrian Arts) in the Grande Ecurie of the Palace of Versailles.
JR is a contemporary French artist. Using his photo collage technique, he has managed to cover the walls of the world with his art, appealing to people who would never usually go to art galleries.
A luxury pop-up format book of paper constructions expanding on the Hermes scarf brand's designs.
Offers unparalleled insight into Gus Van Sant's world - his films, his collaborations and inspirations - on the occasion of Cinematheque Francaise's 2016 retrospective of the filmmaker's work and life.
A richly illustrated book surveying more than forty years of artist Nils-Udo's development.
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