Introduction to :
CLOCKWISE – NEW NORDIC CONTEMPORARY ART , exhibition Vejle
museum 2002
extract :By Stine Høholt ARKEN Museum of
Modern Art
The French artist Colonel for several years has worked with
different
mappings of the worlds of art and culture. Thus, he has reflected on
the
perceived existence of a unique, authentic, national identity, and
the caricatured
foreigner’s idea of cultural assimilation. He uses his subject
area,
whether an art institution or the Danish nation, as anthropological
site.
However, in Colonel the subcultural is not central. Instead, he
deals with
“the ordinary Dane” and specific cultural areas that he maps out
with a focus
on intolerance, misguided kindness and hypocrisy. Humor is an
important ingredient
in fragmentary works that quite matter-of-factly show us the artist
as cultural
anthropologist — or “funny sociologist, ” as he prefers it.
The exhibition features two Colonel videos, I want to look Danish, I
want
to look like you (1999) and Invisibility (1999), both thematizing
integration
and differences, as well as the art project
L’imperméable (1988-2000). Colonel is an exponent of a distinctly
process-oriented and dialogical art that does not kowtow to
art-historical
requirements for beauty and genre divisions, but instead offers the
viewer
new forms of communication by moving into the social sphere through
long-term
activities. His L’imperméable project exemplifies this practice. It
consists of a number of coats printed with text and images, coats
the artist
has worn in various art contexts: walking around Paris, at biennials
around
the world or in videos such as Invisibility in this exhibition.
L’imperméable
is part of Moving Exhibitions, an unfinishable mobile project,
critical of
institutions, which has both a conceptual aim: it is about creating
new strategies
for the artwork and the exhibition situation, and an existential
aim: in
these works, Colonel creates his own personal “cabinet of wonders”
of internally
connected stories about himself, his art and the world around him
which,
it is likely, no one but the artist himself can connect with respect
to all
interfaces and historics. Colonel’s practice is manifested as a type
of transcategorical
art that gathers inspiration from ethnography, anthropology,
journalism and
cultural theory. It points out that, although art may not be the
best didactic
tool, humorous-artistic language still holds a potential for
penetrating
into cracks that are beyond the reach of didactic statements. His is
an art
that, apart from its fragmentary nature, its many piled-on details,
its humor
and irony, follows a clear, productive strategy, centered as it is
on an
interest in charting various forms of ideological, cultural and
social representation.
Installation vieuw from the Vejle Art Museum 2002