Société Réaliste
20 Sep - 01 Nov 2012
SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE - Empire, State, Building
Invited by Ruxandra Balaci
Project coordinator Raluca Velisar
Exhibition co-produced by Jeu de Paume Paris, Ludwig Muzeum Budapest and MNAC
20 September - 1 November 2012
The title of the exhibition, “Empire, State, Building,” refers to three aspects of Société Réaliste’s work.
First of all, “Empire, State, Building” obviously evokes the famous New York skyscraper, the “building/temple/monument/work of art” that, ever since its completion in 1931, has been both a myth and emblem of the United States, and a source of artistic inspiration (from the Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack film King Kong in 1933 to Empire, Andy Warhol’s silent movie, made in 1964).
Secondly, the exhibition explores the possibilities of punctuation, insofar as it can be used to order or disorder discourse.
Finally, the name of the myth, when altered by the disorder of signs, becomes something different, a grid decreasing the scales of perception and power, from empire to building, via the state.
These three perspectives underlie this exhibition of the latest work by Société Réaliste, articulated around two pivotal pieces: The Fountainhead (2010) and Cult of She-manity (2011).
THE FOUNTAINHEAD (2010)
The Fountainhead is Société Réaliste’s first feature-length film, and is based on the eponymous Hollywood film made by King Vidor in 1949, itself based on the best-selling novel (published in 1943) by Ayn Rand, whose faith in the capacity
of the market to deliver prosperity and rejection of any form of collectivism make her the founder of philosophical and political objectivism and prophet of contemporary capitalism.
This film is an enthusiastic ode to its hero, architect Howard Roark, a supreme modernist, a Promethean, egoist, phallocrat and standard-bearer of capitalism.
In their reworking of the film, Société Réaliste have removed not only the sound track but also, using digital technology, the characters from the original film, leaving only 111 minutes of pure architectural setting, devoid of narrative. The effect is an objectification of the film that is more than ideological, but also an intertwining of the places that constitute the politico-economic environment of each citizen and each spectator. Emptied of narrative, The Fountainhead is made to reveal its underlying layers, woven by the links between capitalism, architecture and modernism, like a palimpsest-made-film.
The film approaches New York as the architectural Olympus of modern times, and as the utopian city of the world of finance made real, in an almost infinite variation of mediums and reflections. The original film was shot entirely in the studio in Los Angeles. Without actors or narrative, all that remains is the representation of the scale of perception and power: sketches, photographs or maquettes of buildings, painted views of the metropolitan Leviathan, that state fantasized urbis et orbis, the décor of interiors and the map of the exteriors of a global, hazy empire, the empire whose capital is capital.
As Giovanna Zapperi writes in her text for the exhibition catalogue: “The aim of this operation [...] is to apply a principle of productive deconstruction capable of bringing out, in all their complexity, the deep-seated relations between architectural space and the ideology of capitalism, between the Promethean will of the architect and the doctrine of modernism. In fact, the emptied spaces of The Fountainhead show how architecture asserts itself with a force that goes beyond the different characters’ power to act. The film’s final sequence, for example, when we see Howard Roark standing triumphantly at the top of his skyscraper, suggests a correspondence between the architect’s body and the building, as if the strength of the former depended on the latter – as if it was its extension.”
Cult of She-manity (2011) is the last collection of colours from the political trends bureau, Transitioners, created by Société Réaliste in 2006. After previous series inspired by the French Revolution (Bastille Days Collection), the pre-Socialist utopians (Le Producteur collection, 2008) and the European revolutions of 1848 (London View collection, 2009), Transitioners is presenting its last trends, inspired by the strange transformation of Auguste Comte’s scientific and political positivism into a thoroughgoing religion, notably with the publication of his Positivist Catechism (1852). During the last ten years of his life, Comte pursed what he called his “religion of humanity” in an attempt to achieve a synthesis of all his different theories. Hence his creation of the Church of Humanity, dedicated to his lover, Clotilde de Vaux, who died in 1846.
These general articulations are evident even in the plans of the church conceived by Comte, which were reprised a few years after his death by young disciples from Rio de Janeiro who founded the Brazilian Positivist Society: Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, Miguel Lemos and Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães.
The Brazilian Positivists actively contributed to the overthrow of the Brazilian emperor and the proclamation of the Republic on 15 November 1889. In addition, Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, the future Apostle of Humanity, or high priest of the Positivist religion, was the man who designed the flag of modern republican Brazil. While retaining the old imperial colours (“Habsburg” yellow and “Braganza” green), he added the positivist motto “Order and Progress” (from “Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal”) and, by way of an ornament, the starry sky seen over Rio de Janeiro on the night of 14 November 1889 – the foundational, legendary night that witnessed the proclamation of the Brazilian Republic and the inception of political rationality in Brazil.
It is the starry sky from another foundational night that Société Réaliste has chosen as the starting point for its last collection, Transitioners.
Cult of She-manity takes the form of a map of the night sky over Paris. The values of the x and y axes used to locate the elements on this map are based on the 13-month Positivist calendar. This calendar map is at once a tool and an image. It is divided up into 2,400 shades, alternating between whites representing the stars (the visible, the named and the known), and blacks defined by their positions between the whites (representing the invisible, the unnameable and the unknown).
For the artists, Cult of She-manity “is meant to serve as rationalist astrolabe providing orientation in the almost monochrome sky of a grand soir” [a moment of revolutionary fulfilment]. The grand soir represented in this installation is a very particular one, that of the night of 5 October 1789, when the women of Paris, led by the prostitutes of Palais-Royal and the market sellers of Les Halles, marched on “the State” – or rather, on the royal château of Versailles, where they took the king and queen prisoner and then brought them back to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. These Parisian women constituted the first modern political force to mount an assault on monarchic absolutism in the name of the legitimacy of the people; the first to collectively profane power.
What Rand’s objectivism (The Fountainhead) and Comte’s positivism (Culte de l’Humanitée) have in common is that both justify the dominant order and argue for the necessity of its accomplishment as a global project in the name of its own naturalised, sanctified reason. The style is cold and pragmatic in Rand, elegiac and morbid in Comte.
It is in this speculative space, between The Fountainhead and the Cult of She-manity de l’Humanitée, that Société Réaliste has decided to install a number of its critical apparatus.
THE ARTISTS
Société Réaliste is a Parisian cooperative created by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy in June 2004. It works with political design, experimental economy, territorial ergonomy and social engineering consulting. Polytechnic, it develops its production schemes through exhibitions, publications and conferences.
Invited by Ruxandra Balaci
Project coordinator Raluca Velisar
Exhibition co-produced by Jeu de Paume Paris, Ludwig Muzeum Budapest and MNAC
20 September - 1 November 2012
The title of the exhibition, “Empire, State, Building,” refers to three aspects of Société Réaliste’s work.
First of all, “Empire, State, Building” obviously evokes the famous New York skyscraper, the “building/temple/monument/work of art” that, ever since its completion in 1931, has been both a myth and emblem of the United States, and a source of artistic inspiration (from the Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack film King Kong in 1933 to Empire, Andy Warhol’s silent movie, made in 1964).
Secondly, the exhibition explores the possibilities of punctuation, insofar as it can be used to order or disorder discourse.
Finally, the name of the myth, when altered by the disorder of signs, becomes something different, a grid decreasing the scales of perception and power, from empire to building, via the state.
These three perspectives underlie this exhibition of the latest work by Société Réaliste, articulated around two pivotal pieces: The Fountainhead (2010) and Cult of She-manity (2011).
THE FOUNTAINHEAD (2010)
The Fountainhead is Société Réaliste’s first feature-length film, and is based on the eponymous Hollywood film made by King Vidor in 1949, itself based on the best-selling novel (published in 1943) by Ayn Rand, whose faith in the capacity
of the market to deliver prosperity and rejection of any form of collectivism make her the founder of philosophical and political objectivism and prophet of contemporary capitalism.
This film is an enthusiastic ode to its hero, architect Howard Roark, a supreme modernist, a Promethean, egoist, phallocrat and standard-bearer of capitalism.
In their reworking of the film, Société Réaliste have removed not only the sound track but also, using digital technology, the characters from the original film, leaving only 111 minutes of pure architectural setting, devoid of narrative. The effect is an objectification of the film that is more than ideological, but also an intertwining of the places that constitute the politico-economic environment of each citizen and each spectator. Emptied of narrative, The Fountainhead is made to reveal its underlying layers, woven by the links between capitalism, architecture and modernism, like a palimpsest-made-film.
The film approaches New York as the architectural Olympus of modern times, and as the utopian city of the world of finance made real, in an almost infinite variation of mediums and reflections. The original film was shot entirely in the studio in Los Angeles. Without actors or narrative, all that remains is the representation of the scale of perception and power: sketches, photographs or maquettes of buildings, painted views of the metropolitan Leviathan, that state fantasized urbis et orbis, the décor of interiors and the map of the exteriors of a global, hazy empire, the empire whose capital is capital.
As Giovanna Zapperi writes in her text for the exhibition catalogue: “The aim of this operation [...] is to apply a principle of productive deconstruction capable of bringing out, in all their complexity, the deep-seated relations between architectural space and the ideology of capitalism, between the Promethean will of the architect and the doctrine of modernism. In fact, the emptied spaces of The Fountainhead show how architecture asserts itself with a force that goes beyond the different characters’ power to act. The film’s final sequence, for example, when we see Howard Roark standing triumphantly at the top of his skyscraper, suggests a correspondence between the architect’s body and the building, as if the strength of the former depended on the latter – as if it was its extension.”
Cult of She-manity (2011) is the last collection of colours from the political trends bureau, Transitioners, created by Société Réaliste in 2006. After previous series inspired by the French Revolution (Bastille Days Collection), the pre-Socialist utopians (Le Producteur collection, 2008) and the European revolutions of 1848 (London View collection, 2009), Transitioners is presenting its last trends, inspired by the strange transformation of Auguste Comte’s scientific and political positivism into a thoroughgoing religion, notably with the publication of his Positivist Catechism (1852). During the last ten years of his life, Comte pursed what he called his “religion of humanity” in an attempt to achieve a synthesis of all his different theories. Hence his creation of the Church of Humanity, dedicated to his lover, Clotilde de Vaux, who died in 1846.
These general articulations are evident even in the plans of the church conceived by Comte, which were reprised a few years after his death by young disciples from Rio de Janeiro who founded the Brazilian Positivist Society: Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, Miguel Lemos and Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães.
The Brazilian Positivists actively contributed to the overthrow of the Brazilian emperor and the proclamation of the Republic on 15 November 1889. In addition, Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, the future Apostle of Humanity, or high priest of the Positivist religion, was the man who designed the flag of modern republican Brazil. While retaining the old imperial colours (“Habsburg” yellow and “Braganza” green), he added the positivist motto “Order and Progress” (from “Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal”) and, by way of an ornament, the starry sky seen over Rio de Janeiro on the night of 14 November 1889 – the foundational, legendary night that witnessed the proclamation of the Brazilian Republic and the inception of political rationality in Brazil.
It is the starry sky from another foundational night that Société Réaliste has chosen as the starting point for its last collection, Transitioners.
Cult of She-manity takes the form of a map of the night sky over Paris. The values of the x and y axes used to locate the elements on this map are based on the 13-month Positivist calendar. This calendar map is at once a tool and an image. It is divided up into 2,400 shades, alternating between whites representing the stars (the visible, the named and the known), and blacks defined by their positions between the whites (representing the invisible, the unnameable and the unknown).
For the artists, Cult of She-manity “is meant to serve as rationalist astrolabe providing orientation in the almost monochrome sky of a grand soir” [a moment of revolutionary fulfilment]. The grand soir represented in this installation is a very particular one, that of the night of 5 October 1789, when the women of Paris, led by the prostitutes of Palais-Royal and the market sellers of Les Halles, marched on “the State” – or rather, on the royal château of Versailles, where they took the king and queen prisoner and then brought them back to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. These Parisian women constituted the first modern political force to mount an assault on monarchic absolutism in the name of the legitimacy of the people; the first to collectively profane power.
What Rand’s objectivism (The Fountainhead) and Comte’s positivism (Culte de l’Humanitée) have in common is that both justify the dominant order and argue for the necessity of its accomplishment as a global project in the name of its own naturalised, sanctified reason. The style is cold and pragmatic in Rand, elegiac and morbid in Comte.
It is in this speculative space, between The Fountainhead and the Cult of She-manity de l’Humanitée, that Société Réaliste has decided to install a number of its critical apparatus.
THE ARTISTS
Société Réaliste is a Parisian cooperative created by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy in June 2004. It works with political design, experimental economy, territorial ergonomy and social engineering consulting. Polytechnic, it develops its production schemes through exhibitions, publications and conferences.