ida soulard

Rédigé par l'une des pionnières de l'art textile au XXe siècle, cet ouvrage illustré offre une brillante méditation sur l'art du tissage, son histoire, ses outils et ses techniques, et sur ses conséquences pour le design moderne (nouvelle édition augmentée, avec trois textes critiques et des illustrations en couleur).

Initialement paru en 1965, Du tissage retrace le passage de l'artisanat à la production industrielle, soulignant toute l'importance de la matérialité et les innovations créatives apparues à chaque fois que des questions de design ont été résolues à la main.
En plaçant les matériaux et le métier à bras au cœur de sa réflexion, Anni Albers rend compte des limites imposées à la créativité et au savoir faire par la technologie et la production de masse, plaidant pour un retour à l'ingéniosité humaine aujourd'hui devenu essentiel. Sa prose limpide, captivante, s'accompagne d'une foule d'illustrations dont la grande richesse met en lumière l'histoire du médium : schémas à la main, détails de textiles précolombiens, études réalisées à partir de grains de maïs, de papier ou à la machine à écrire accompagnent de précieuses reproductions de ses propres œuvres.
Cette édition augmentée, qui place Du tissage à la portée d'une nouvelle génération de lecteurs, substitue aux illustrations en noir et blanc de l'édition originale des photographies en couleur. S'y ajoutent une postface de Nicholas Max Weber et deux essais de T'ai Smith et Ida Soulard qui apportent un éclairage inédit sur l'artiste et sa carrière.

Nicholas Fox Weber est directeur de la Josef et Anni Albers Foundation, et président et fondateur de Le Korsa, une ONG qui promeut l'accès aux soins, à l'éducation et aux arts dans des villages isolés du Sénégal rural. Il est l'auteur de quinze ouvrages, dont des biographies de Balthus et Le Corbusier, et plus récemment de Freud's Trip to Orvieto (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017). Son dernier essai, iBauhaus, est paru chez Penguin Random House en 2020.

T'ai Smith est maître de conférences dans le département d'histoire de l'art, art visuel et théorie de l'art de l'université de la Colombie Britannique. Elle est l'auteure de Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

Ida Soulard est doctorante à l'ENS/PSL où elle termine un travail monographique sur l'œuvre d'Anni Albers. Elle est également directrice artistique du projet Arpa, résidence artistique et centre d'art, actuellement en phase de préfiguration (Arménie). Elle est aussi la cofondatrice de Glass Bead, revue et plateforme de recherche en ligne. Elle a co-édité Marfa Sounding et Manual for a Future Desert (Mousse Publishing).

Anni Albers (1899-1994) est une artiste textile, tisserande, écrivaine, enseignante et lithographe ayant inspiré une reconsidération des textiles comme forme artistique dans leur rôle fonctionnel, en tant que tentures autonomes et en tant que tissages picturaux. Née Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann à Berlin, en 1899, elle participe à l'atelier de tissage qui se tient au sein du Bauhaus à Weimar (1922-1925) puis à Dessau (1925-1932), où elle rencontre son époux Josef Albers et adopte son patronyme, devenant Anni Albers. Les Albers immigrent aux États-Unis en 1933, où Anni Albers dirige l'atelier de tissage du Black Mountain College de 1933 à 1949. En 1949, elle devient la première artiste textile à bénéficier d'une exposition individuelle au musée d'Art moderne de New York. L'année suivante, Anni et Josef Albers s'installent à New Haven, dans le Connecticut, où Anni Albers continue de tisser, de dessiner et d'écrire. En 1959, un recueil de ses textes paraît sous le titre On Designing, suivi en 1965 de son ouvrage fondateur, On Weaving. Lauréate de nombreux prix et distinctions, Anni Albers reçoit en 1961 la médaille d'or de l'Institut des architectes américain (American Institute of Architects) dans la catégorie « artisanat ». Elle meurt à Orange, dans le Connecticut, en 1994.

This book is an extension of conversations began at Marfa Sounding, a three-year exploration into the acoustic processes of a specific place, which began as a 2015 curatorial residency with Fieldwork Marfa, an international program run by Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, France; the University of Houston School of Art; and HEAD, Geneva.
Focusing on “phase shifting” in music, particularly as it relates to early experiments in Minimalism and artists whose practices run from the 1960s into the present, Marfa Sounding hosted writers from many different backgrounds—composers, sound theorists, art critics, dance historians, filmmakers, educators, students, curators, and archivists—who treat performance as a point of departure for thinking through the intersection of music, minimalism, and the political. Marfa Sounding treated sound as a frame for understanding how art integrates with, invades, and is effectively produced by its context. The spaces of Marfa also became frames for sound as individual and collective experience, where people come together at a specific place and time, in a site that enfolds them.

Edited by Jennifer Burris & Ida Soulard
Artists: Alvin Lucier and Éliane Radigue with Charles Curtis; Anna Halprin with Phillip Greenlief, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener, Nina Martin, and Stephen Petronio; Tarek Atoui with Amma Ateria, Jad Atoui, and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Texts by James Fei; Jennifer Burris; Erik DeLuca; Ida Soulard; Maria Chávez; Janice Ross; Andrew Abrahams in conversation with Cate Cole Schrim; Wendy Vogel; Claudia La Rocco; Ian Lewis; Amma Ateria in conversation with Caitlin Murray; Jad Atoui in conversation with Claire Amiot; Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe in conversation with Anthony Elms; Sabrina Tarasoff

Glass Bead is a research platform and journal concerned with transfers of knowledge across art, science and philosophy, as well as with their practical and political dimensions. Prior to its launch (winter 2015), Glass Bead started a year of inquiry under the form of an audio research program and a series of public events, initiated in New York in April 2014 (MoMA, eflux) and at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (Fall 2014). With (among others): Philippe Descola, Andrée Ehresmann, Lucca Fraser, Martin Holbraad, Franck Jedrzejewski, Giuseppe Longo, Guerino Mazzola, Reza Negarestani, Frederik Stjernfelt, Occupy Museums, W.A.G.E.

Glass Bead is developed and run by Fabien Giraud, Jeremy Lecomte, Vincent Normand, Ida Soulard, and Inigo Wilkins. A project initiated in 2012 by Fabien Giraud and Ida Soulard

Tarek Atoui rarely works on stage and does not produce records, nor any other fixed forms of composition. Rather, he “works with sound in various spaces, whether in galleries or museum halls or outdoor setting” and constructs an “experiential way of listening to a concert of musical performances” that does not only “involves the ears as a way of listening, but also involves the eyes, the body, the sense of touch.”  These physical sound experiments rely on an expanded practice of composition. For Marfa Sounding, Atoui created two live performances: at Saint George Hall, a concert venue that opens to the outside, and at Vizcaino Park, an open-air amphitheater and community park. These two performances were preceded by a series of workshops open to all members of the Marfa community as well as to international art students in residence at Fieldwork Marfa. This essay follows a conversation with Tarek Atoui held in Paris in June 2018 where we discussed his practice of composition, work methods, modes of collaboration and how he understood music as an experimental space for constructing knowledge

Anni et Josef Albers ont pour objectif commun la production d’un art qu’ils désiraient intemporel et universel. À un monde « déconcertant  » et fait « de changements rapides » ils répondent tous deux par des œuvres qui refusent de se plier aux « expressions des demandes transitoires  » des modes passagères et des goûts de l’époque. Loin d’un formalisme éthéré, leurs œuvres sont une réponse à l’époque troublée dans laquelle elles se forment (dans l’entre-deux guerres en Europe et un exil forcé aux États-Unis en 1933). Pour construire ces œuvres qui résistent au transitoire, ils regardent ainsi à la fois vers un passé lointain, à travers la constitution d’une collection de figurines et de textiles anciens, un temps d’avant l’écriture, où des formes muettes, parvenues jusqu’à nous en partie coupées de leurs ancrages socio-culturels, font preuve, en termes formels et techniques, « d’une inventivité (…) jamais atteinte à nouveau à aucun moment  », et en direction du futur. « Le grand art, affirme Anni Albers, n’est par essence pas affecté par la subjectivité, par l’époque et par le lieu  ». Ce grand art, celui qu’ils tentent de construire, chacun à leur manière, et au cœur des contraintes et des possibilités offertes par leur époque, a pour horizon le silence. Ce silence actif est le moteur d’un art qui se rêve ainsi atemporel, transculturel, objectif et universel.

I meet Eliane Radigue, eighty-six, in her apartment, located in a lively part of the 14th arrondissement in Paris. She tells me this will be one of the last interviews she gives, as she now feels time is passing rapidly and wants to concentrate on the only thing that truly matters to her: new compositional works. She does not want to be recorded, asking instead that I write my own story. She talks the way her work unfolds, embarking with the materials, without any view from above—without system or fixed theory—sliding from the history of one piece or anecdote to the next with a presence that permeates. We talk for three hours, share a glass of Porto, and I leave, highly moved by this encounter, holding her last published work— Occam Ocean I (2014)—in my hands.

Quel est l’héritage du travail d’Andrea Fraser aujourd’hui ? Comment rendre aux dynamiques de la critique institutionnelle leur actualité dans un contexte institutionnel et épistémologique renouvelé ? Comme leur nom l’indique, ces pratiques ont en commun la production de gestes critiques au cœur des institutions artistiques. Il faut ainsi commencer par donner une définition large de ce qu’est un geste critique : c’est un geste qui aborde la question du possible à partir de sa limite, qui agit depuis une limite, dans une série de dialectique possible/impossible, dedans/dehors, ouverture/fermeture. Le geste critique c’est celui qui met en crise ce qui est en le confrontant avec ce qui n’est pas. Sous cette définition large, le négatif (ce qui n’est pas) est le moteur de la critique et fonctionne comme embrayeur de la pensée. Partant du travail d’Andrea Fraser il s’agira de voir comment ce geste a été repris, quelles ont été les impasses dans lesquelles il est venu buter, et de proposer quelques notes pour sa réorientation contemporaine. Nous verrons notamment que l’actualisation du geste critique passe par une définition renouvelée de la négativité et sa réintroduction dans les pratiques et théories contemporaines.

The temple of Apollo Epikourios – the helper – at Bassae, built in the fifth century BC, is located at an altitude of about 1130 metres on Mount Kotilio, in Arcadia, Peloponnese, Greece. In the mid-1980s, the temple was reinforced for reasons of preservation-restoration by earthquake-resistant scaffolding and covered by a gigantic canopy. Bassae is the name of the “temple-scaffolding-tent”, of this complex object resulting from the superimposition of three different static systems. This object only exists in its links. It does not strictly belong to any field: neither archaeology nor architecture nor history nor preservation-restoration. Such an object exceeds any of these categories. In order to grasp this “body in crisis” in all of its dimensions it is necessary to overhaul our theoretical frameworks and to elaborate the premises of a “prosthetic history of art”. What we will propose here is the formulation of a theoretical extension, a return to objects, aiming at the construction of a “natural history of art” yet to be written.

Les Magiciens de la Terre avaient permis en 1989 l’émergence d’une nouvelle cartographie des subjectivités et de leurs expressions. En faisant un pas de côté, il s’agira de considérer les grandes lignes d’une histoire qui a permis la formation de ce nouveau paysage et qui a couru sur les soixante dernières années: celle des mouvements féministes. En traçant une rapide tératologie cognitive et féministe, il s’agira de voir quels sont les monstres, ces figures du négatif, depuis lesquels penser aujourd’hui.

Partant des écrits d’Anni Albers, il s’agira de s’intéresser à l’atelier textile du Bauhaus à Dessau comme un site d’expérimentation, d’invention et de créativité esthétique, technique et politique. Nous verrons comment la fabrique textile est devenue un lieu de production transdisciplinaire dont les nouveaux agencements vont révolutionner une certaine conception des liens entre art et science, technique et esthétique, corps, geste et machine. Enfin, il s’agit également de voir comment ce lieu a travaillé les subjectivités : de la production de gestes génériques aux expressions impersonnelles.

Quel est l’héritage de Michael Asher aujourd’hui ? La Critique Institutionnelle à laquelle il est majoritairement associé a été une dynamique artistique si abondamment commentée et critiquée qu’elle en est devenue un genre autonome, un label dont se revendiquent de nombreux artistes depuis les années 1980. Le travail de Michael Asher a ainsi souvent été lié à un héritage critique et aux entreprises philosophiques et théoriques de la Déconstruction. Cette intervention veut effectuer un changement de perspective et réinscrire le travail de Michael Asher dans une tradition pragmatiste américaine d’où il est également issu. Les gestes de Michael Asher ne peuvent alors plus être envisagés comme critiques, mais se présentent comme des gestes créateurs d’espace. Partant d’une étude de cas, l’exposition présentée au Santa Monica Museum of Art, à Los Angeles, en 2008, il s’agira de  revisiter le travail de Michael Asher comme le lieu d’une pratique diagrammatique ouvrant à une théorie des possibles et peut-être même à la construction d’une politique des gestes.

On March 11th 2011 at 2.46 pm local time, a 8.9-magnitude earthquake shook the Japanese archipelago. Less than an hour after, the first waves of the tsunami started crashing on the east coast of Japan. Entire cities were devastated, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was almost entirely flooded, more than 15 000 persons died and around 4000 disappeared. The day after, at 3.36pm a first hydrogen explosion occurred in the reactor n°1 and was transmitted by the international broadcasting system. On the 16th, another explosion in reactor n°2 damaged the containment building and led to the fear of a reactor core meltdown accident.
From few days after artists went to the Tohoku region to confront those two new landscapes, different in nature as well as in their regime of representation: the Catastrophic - made of rubbles, debris and destruction, sculpted by the violence of the combined earthquake and tsunami -and the Disastrous - bathed in the invisible light of radioactivity. But in both cases, the question of the real, either overwhelming or insufficient, has been a core issue when all immunological spheres have been burst. The threat is not an outsider anymore, but comes from a reflexive modernity that looped upon itself and consequently led to this phenomenon: the gentpatsu-shinsai, a “natural” catastrophe leading to a nuclear accident,half-human, half-geological. What we today call the Anthropocene is a dynamic that erodes even more the above categories and makes the difference between geological and human, natural and artificial, even thinner.
How artists worked from, within and with the “Tohoku crisis”? How this crisis also worked and shaped new artistic practices? How did artists try to think from within this emergency of the present? This case study will focus on and discuss several artistic strategies developed by artists on the aftermath of the Tohoku crisis. By confronting the very specific and new situation of our time, these artists and productions can serve as models for defining an art of the Anthropocene. Fukushima is not a Japanese issue.

Episode 1. After The Ends (a workshop)

She grew up with a story of the ends. The end of history, the end of art, the end of grand narratives, the end of any possible story of universal emancipation. Post-history they said. She grew up after the ends.

There is something peculiar to our times.
Well, two things.

First, the direction of time changed, they say. Time comes from the future. Preemptive, that’s the word. Infrastructures, networks, platforms – these are the spatial entities governing our current orientation in time. Second, the encounter between the time of the human and geological time: the Anthropocene. Our present is shaped by those two peculiarities. Time.

And Space. As we all know, a standard framework for artistic production now demands to act ‘locally’ and to operate within ‘specific’ situations while at the same time being more and more complicit with the generic dynamics that makes art an ideal laboratory for neoliberalism and hypercapital. The historical concept of “site-specificity” developed in the 1960s - as a foregrounding of the background becoming the real artistic figure - has been of great importance and carried a true emancipatory virtue. But practical and conceptual tools that once aspired to artistic emancipation now seem to work towards its alienation. Escaping this deadlock demands to work towards a radically enlarged conception of space, the precise mapping of the space of the present, and the invention of new tools for orientation and navigation.

So, when trying to orientate within a site: where do we begin? The landscape. It starts with a border. Or from a border. Then, figures. And navigation tools. Or all of them at once.

This workshop will attempt at providing a platform for collectively mapping « the site of the present » and inventing tools for its navigation. How can and should we design the Now? Can the site of the present be hacked? Which new strategies and interventions can come to inflect this fluid confrontation with unspecific enemies and unmanned technologies?

Participants should come with a question, a conceptual object, or a concrete object, to be unfolded in a short presentation. Those individual “specific objects” will serve as the basis for the unfolding of the workshop.

Episode 2. Deserted Horizons (A summer School)

After the end of the workshop, 6 students will be selected upon a letter of intent to participate to a two-weeks summer school in Marfa, TX (May 13-May 26 2019).

A community of two thousand situated amidst the desert plains of west Texas, Marfa is best known as a site for the permanent installation of large-scale artworks. Marfa was built as a railroad waterstop at the end of the 19th century, became headquarter of the border patrols, a training site for the air force during the second world war, and in the 70s, Donald Judd, the minimalist artist installed his permanent collection as well as works by many of his peers -Roni Horn, John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, today considered as iconic. After Judd’s death, in the 1990s, art galleries, film festivals and artist-in residence programs flourished in Marfa and transformed the town in a must place for international contemporary artists and curators. It is a unique place for investigative research where art, architecture and design questions meet environmental and geopolitical border issues.

The desert appears as a space of possibility. It has been and still is a laboratory space for human and environmental experiments: from utopian projects to military test-sites, as an archetypal mythic and psychopolitical space, as a zone of emergency and crisis, as border and buffer, and as a staging-ground for experimental or subcultural acts. The desert beyond its sole geographic position embodies a generic projection surface, a space for simulation, where new models are to be invented and new geometries and tools for orientation can be explored and engineered.

One specific aspect that will be addressed during this summer school is the construction of communities, commune, collective spaces present in the South of the United States since the mid 19th century: from Fourierist communities to Quakers and Qhakers, from the long history of anarchist, autonomist, and libertarian communities and literature to the emergence of counter-cultural practices and experimental artistic propositions such as the one Donald Judd attempted in the desert of Marfa.

What is a community? What are the new conceptions of love, intimacies, and sex mediated by the platform age? May simulation and speculation be strategic tools? What are the new social, political and aesthetic forms at stake? What would the communities of the future be?

During this first summer school students will work on individual projects as well as a collective proposition. They will be in Marfa together with a group of 6 students from the University of Houston, and a group from les beaux-arts de Nantes Saint Nazaire.

Guests (to be confirmed): Roberto Tejada (art historian, curator and editor), Zoe Leonard (artist), Oscar Tuazon (artist), Tim Johnson (poet and co-owner of the Marfa Bookstore), Caitlin Murray (Judd Archivist, researcher, and co-owner of the Marfa Bookstore), Jillian Conrad (artist), Rick Lowe (artist, founder of Project Row Houses). With Abinadi Meza (artist, the University of Houston), and Bruno Persat (artist, les beaux-arts de Nantes Saint Nazaire).

DUST (Desert Unit for Speculative Territories) is an experimental research studio working at the intersections of spatial practice, critical theory and contemporary art. Run by les beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole (France) and The College of the Arts at the University of Houston (Texas) in the wider context of Fieldwork: Marfa, DUST initiated in 2016 a three-year series  of transdisciplinary seminars, lectures, events and workshops. A project conceived and organized by Abinadi Meza (University of Houston) and Ida Soulard (beaux-arts, Nantes).

Fieldwork: Marfa is the joint project of two major European schools, ESBA Nantes Métropole and HEAD-Genève. This international researcher-in-residence program is dedicated to the practice of art in public space, critical approaches to landscape and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. Located in Marfa, Texas, USA, this outstanding platform is intended for emerging artists, critics and/or researchers. Residents are selected on the basis of the singularity of specific projects they present.