Bernhard Rüdiger at Summer School as School 2021.
August 6, 2021, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club
Bernhard Rüdiger: In 2019 I was invited by Éric Dégoutte, director of the Centre d'art contemporain Les Tanneries in Amilly, south of Paris, to conceive a retrospective of my work for the 5000 m2 of the two floors of galleries. The occurrence of the pandemic situation gave me a little more time to think about this invitation and I realized that it was impossible for me to conceive a retrospective exhibition. How can I explain this impossibility to you since it is impossible for me to theorize my recent work? I will show you how I approached the problem, looking back at a decisive moment in my career in the early 90s and explaining, from the point of view of theory, the problem at the heart of the course I teach here at Summer School as School, the impossibility of reorganizing past work.
If I no longer find myself working within and for a society of progress — or more precisely — if the direction of modern time, which is always heading towards the future, is no longer a valid option, what becomes of my work and how do I organize its retrospective reading? How to chapter the work done, if the line that carries it towards a time to come is no more?
The practical solution that I will illustrate with some images of the exhibition was to agree to make an exhibition of works from different times in half of the space and to invite 4 younger artists to occupy the rest of the space. But beyond my immediate solution, how can we think of this past time without being able to put it into perspective? What is an oeuvre outside of this time moving towards the future? This experience of time has always been there and is something substantial to what we call a work of art since the beginning of modernity, since Giotto, in the 13th century began to paint figures in perspective.
Biography
Bernhard Rüdiger was born in Italy (Rome, 1964) and lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan with Luciano Fabro and, after stints as a teacher in Tours and Valenciennes, he currently teaches in Lyon. He is editor of the magazine Tiracorrendo and was co-founder of the artists’ gallery Lo Spazio di Via Lazzaro Palazzi, a busy venue in the Milan art scene from 1989 to 1993. His works confront visitors with a physical experience involving object, body and space. At once sculptures, monumental models and architectural pieces, through their meticulous spatial and acoustic arrangement his works seek to investigate history, particularly the history of places. One example is in the semi-private garden of the Antonin Perrin residence in Lyon, in which Rüdiger installed a scaled-down model of the two old low-rise buildings destroyed in 2004 during the zone’s renovation, which recalled the history of the site and its industrial culture. Rüdiger’s works also propose direct physical experiences and the possibility that the work can react to the visitor’s presence or to natural elements. All of Rüdiger’s projects are systematically accompanied by studies and models in cardboard, wood, iron, etc., as well as drawings, but they are far more than mere stages in a creative process. They constitute part of the fully-fledged work and are involved in specific presentations in an arrangement encompassing some 30 display stands. (Excerpts from Nadine Labedade, FRAC Centre Orléans).