Salonishesque tendencies
Avec / With / Met : Itsasne casas ; Christophe Charon ; Agnès Geoffray ; David Ramirez ; Jimmy Robert
A modernist house is used as a backdrop for eclectic interests, refineries, humour and decadence all at once. Proustian salons were a unique moment to experience the meeting and radical juxtaposition of different fields, ideas and communal sensitivities, as in a literary device (exercise de style), a zealous engagement in a necessarily mediated sense of contemporaneity. An appetite for taste rather than taste itself : eventually perhaps just a desire to reactivate desire itself.
We read passages of rare books to eachother, smoke variuos subtances masked by elegant perfumes, organize exotic concerts or witness unparralled dances in the confines of the salon, dicussing seemingly deviant sexual practices, continually redesigning the world, tempatively going forward, then go home full of hopes or really frustrated and angry, upset by some non-descript feeling forming a knot in the depth of our throat. Belonging to the group and at the same time feeling left out and a quite separate entity : aspiring to the ‘Oh, so dear…’ image of the artist as outsider…but quickly again passions re-emerge and the need to share with a familiar audience, an audience ‘in the knowledge’ is painfully present. Vicious circles.
As artists, are we some sort of’in between class’ (socially, politically) ? Are we as a group the contemporary emulations of the bourgeois cultural militants of the proustian era ? exhibiting our salonishesque desires onto these walls ?
The last paragraph of maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable comes to mind.
Excuse my poor translation, however if you can do better or can find a rare translation, feel free to come forward. «  the unavowing community : is this meaning the one not owning up to itself or the one that is never revealed by any confession since each time we talk about its modes of being we only sense what allows it to exist by default ? Then should we have kept silent ? perhaps it would be better to experience it as a contemporary version of a past we never lived ? the now too well known and too often reminisced past of Wittgenstein (What cannot be talked about must remain silent) whicch indicates well that since a statement has occured then silence fails, consequently to keep quiet one has to talk. What kind of speech ? here is one of the questions this little book asks to others, not so much so that they could answer but so that they bear it, follow it on. Therefore we will realise the community has a political meaning just as demanding and that we cannot allow ourselves to lose interest in the present which while opening unknown spaces of freedom makes us responsible for new relationships always thrreatened, always hoped, between what we call work and idleness  »
Exposition ouverte les samedi de 14 Ã 18h., du 22/9/2007 au 27/10/2007
L’Observatoire-Maison Grégoire
292 Dieweg B 1180 Bruxelles
www.maisongregoire.be observatoiregalerie@hotmail.comdu