Philippe-Alain Michaud

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

Laura Mulvey

Michael Rush

Mark Lewis’s films are remarkable, not only for their rich and highly seductive use of light and color, but also for the way in which they pay homage to both classic Hollywood cinema and the avant-garde while remaining outside of both traditions. Mark Lewis is the first book to explore this acclaimed Canadian’s art, and it features images from several of his works, including his most recent piece, Rear Projection. This film, in particular, documents a significant shift in Lewis’s practice. Actress Molly Parker, known for her roles in Six Feet Under and Deadwood, is superimposed against the bleak landscape of rural Ontario using the standard Hollywood technique of rear projection. Lewis takes what was, for old Hollywood, a tool meant to convey seamless realism, and foregrounds its essential trickery. Another piece incorporates the dreary backdrops of concrete council flats in the same way. In both settings the film takes on a painterly quality, referencing and restaging traditional portraiture to startling effect. Accompanied by essays by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Laura Mulvey, and Michael Rush that place Lewis’s work next to that of his contemporaries, Mark Lewis reaches insightful conclusions about the evolving relationship between film, technology, painting, and photography.

Mark Lewis

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included such celebrated art historians of the twentieth century as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the interpretation of symbolic material. As Phillippe-Alain Michaud shows in this important book, Warburg's own project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Nietzsche and Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a "critical iconology" to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture. Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Vasari, Warburg's method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using "montage-collision" to create textless collections of images, he brought together pagan artifacts and masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, ancient Near East astrology and the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals and the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was the discovery within the art work itself of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism. Challenging normative accounts of Western European classicism, Warburg located the real sources of the Renaissance in the Dionysian spirit, in the expression of movement and dance, in the experience of trance personified in the frenzied nymph or ecstatic maenad. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion is not only a book about Warburg but a book written with him; Michaud uses Warburg's intuitions and discoveries to analyze other categories of imagery, including the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loie Fuller. It will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the origins of modern art history and the visual culture of modernity.

Jean-Yves Jouannais

Denis Savary

Julie Pellegrin

Following a series of exhibitions held between 2010 and 2012, this book is the first monograph dedicated to the Swiss artist Denis Savary.Spanning a wide range of media, from drawing to video, performing arts to sculpture, his work fictionalises fragments of art and literature, and deals with historical figures such as Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Félix Vallotton, and Lautréamont.Savary's practice weaves narratives steeped in childhood fantasies and adult phantasmagoria, notably through a vision of exhibition as a domestic place that the spectator can inhabit.Two essays, by the art historian and Centre Pompidou curator Philippe-Alain Michaud, and the art critic and La Ferme du Buisson director Julie Pellegrin, provide insights into Denis Savary's oeuvre, especially his video works and his relationship to performance, exhibition making, and music. An interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais completes the table of contents.Published with La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel (Paris), and Kunsthalle Bern.

John G. Hanhardt

This catalogue presents the emblematic videos and recent works by the duo, with contributions by Philippe-Alain Michaud (Chief Curator for the films at the Mnam Centre Pompidou) and John G. Hanhardt (Senior Curator for Media Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum), as well as a complete biography. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at musée d'art moderne de Saint-Etienne, from February to April 2010. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky (born respectively 1954 and 1950) live and work in New York since 1988. They have participated in many Biennales: Venice (1988), Sydney (1992), Sao Paulo (1994), Istanbul (1995), Lyon (1997), Liverpool (1999), as well as Sculpture Project, Munster (1997) and Documenta 11 (2002), among others. Their works are presented in the following collections: MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art and Metropolitan Museum, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., J.V. Zimmerli Museum of Art, New Brunswick, Tate Modern, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Folkwang Museum in Essen, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin, Museum für Moderne Kunst and Deutsche Bank collection, Frankfurt am Main, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato, Makao Museum, Beijing.

Svetlana & Igor Kopystiansky

Centre Georges Pompidou

Aujourd'hui, au seuil du XXIe siècle, alors que l'on assiste à une migration massive des images en mouvement des salles de projection vers les espaces d'exposition, migration portée par la révolution numérique, il devient nécessaire de redéfinir le cinéma hors des conditions d'existence qui auront été les siennes au siècle précédent. Défilement, projection, récit, montage: les données fondamentales de l'expérience filmique échappent au dispositif cinématographique traditionnel pour apparaître désormais comme un principe de renouvellement de l'expérience des œuvres. En s'ouvrant au déplacement, à la répétition, à la discontinuité, les images en mouvement exposées sur les cimaises s'inscrivent dans une nouvelle temporalité, produisant de nouveaux régimes de perception et d'intelligibilité qui rejaillissent en retour sur l'ensemble des arts réputés statiques-peinture, sculpture, dessin, photographie, mais aussi architecture et design. Ce catalogue, qui reprend le déroulé de la nouvelle présentation des collections du Musée national d'art moderne (avril 2006 janvier 2007), s'attache à montrer comment le cinéma, après avoir irrigué les problématiques artistiques du XXe siècle, conditionne celles du XXIe siècle commençant.

Philippe-Alain Michaud

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