Science fiction inspires art
What if Man had for a long time been so afraid of witnessing the collapse of capitalism... that he had finally preferred to envisage the end of the world? What if in reality humanity had the means, material and intellectual, to build a new way of cohabiting, with itself and with nature? This is basically the message of hope distilled by the splendid exhibition at the Center Pompidou-Metz, entitled “The doors of the possible – Art & science fiction”, visible until April 10, 2023. Because since industrialization has unleashed the imagination, by giving birth in the 19th century in Europe to fantastic stories like those of Jules Verne, which he himself described as "scientific anticipation", of H.G. Wells or Mary Shelley, science fiction quickly became an international work of art in its own right! A work and a literary genre, certainly. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds< /em> or Frankenstein, spread at great speed, and thus all kinds of publications were born, starting with the famous pulps in the United States after the Great War.
It was a certain Hugo Gernsback who created Amazing Stories, the first magazine exclusively dedicated to the genre that the novelist and editor named “science fiction”. Except that very quickly, illustration became the keystone. And from there, all the visual arts were able to happily take hold of it. Comics, painting, sculpture, architecture, video... The proof in some two hundred works of art exhibited at the Center Pompidou-Metz in a breathtaking scenography, whose aesthetics will seduce even the most hermetic to science fiction which little by little , along the way, will ultimately find themselves passionate about this form of critical reflection that shakes all the ramparts of dominant thought.
Paintings, installations, sculptures, films... Visual artists, writers, architects, filmmakers... They are all in Metz to unfold a panorama beginning at the end of the 1960s and leading up to the present day. This flagship exhibition offers visitors a total immersion in 2,300 m2 in this science fiction which has become a veritable laboratory of hypotheses, which manipulate and extrapolate the repressive norms and dogmas of the current world, its ambitions, its social horrors, its chances and its perils. Light is shed in a radical way on the links uniting fantasies and reality. Future and present. “Science fiction is the art of the possible,” declared the American writer Ray Bradbury. So here, everything is possible. Inspiring, this is a very inspired exhibition which, to say the least, provokes debate.
“SF is a literature of the margins, so we are going to show them,” explained Alexandra Müller, the exhibition curator, presenting this project to journalists, notably those from Beaux Arts Magazine, the monthly magazine which devotes this month of December a complete file on the meeting of art and science fiction. “The idea is to consider science fiction not as a genre, but as a method of thinking, which consists of questioning our acquired knowledge, our mode of operation, the ultra-liberalist system in which we find ourselves,” warns -She. Thus, artists like Ilya Kabakov, Kiki Kogelnik, Laurent Grasso, Lee Bul, OtobongNkanga and many others explore the possibilities of a more lenient world.
Laurent Grasso who can also be found in Paris, with “Anima”, until February 18 at the Collège des Bernardins. The contemporary artist born in 1972 in Mulhouse, today represented by the Perrotin and Sean Kelly art galleries, lives and works between Paris and New York. Installationist and video artist, he plays with mystical apparitions and paranormal phenomena to take over the nave of the Bernardins with a grace as strange as it is disturbing.
In the historic Salle des Gens d’armes de la Conciergerie, in Paris, Théo Mercier is presenting “The Sleeping Chapter”, the third chapter of his triptych “Outremonde”, until January 8. The contemporary artist born in Paris in 1984 lives and works between Paris, Mexico and Marseille. Sculptor and director, he offers here a restorative journey through sleep and wounded dreams, creating in situ a dream of sand from which fragments of architecture emerge. Like a journey through time and the mists of time.
Finally, Beaux Arts Magazine also spotted for its obvious link between art and science fiction the exhibition visible at the Parisian art gallery Nathalie Obadia until December 23: “Andres Serrano – The Robots”. The contemporary American photographer born in 1950 in New York has become known for the place his images give to the body, whether in the form of portraits, remains, staging... or bodily materials. With this new exhibition of photographs, he explores our links with the machine and its potential abuses, playing on the ambiguity and nostalgia of these grown-up toys.
Even though science fiction was at its zenith in the 1970s, it still unleashes passions. “Already in 1939,” writes Daphné Bétard in Beaux Arts Magazine, “during the New York World's Fair, the Futurama designed by Norman Bel Geddes, theater decorator and industrial designer, caused a sensation by showing the city twenty years later, with a system of automated highways crossing all of the United States. This appetite of architects but also of designers for science fiction was the subject of an abundant exhibition at Mudam in Luxembourg in 2007. Entitled “TomorrowNow – When Design Meets Science Fiction”, it combined construction models worthy of a spaceship from the Coop Himmelb(l)au agency, Eero Aarnio's futuristic armchair, half-closed swivel ball, André Courrèges' unique looks with trapeze skirts and patent white ankle boots to feel weightless, the crazy creations created by prosthetic makeup artist Stephan Dupuis for David Cronenberg’s films…”
You only have to see today at the Pompidou-Metz center “Is More Than This More Than This”, the monstrous giant character of John Isaac, a sculpture embodying our vile and consumerist societies. blind people, pose in front of the famous Cities of the avant-garde panel from the Wai Architecture Think Tank studio, to see that among the projects represented in this assemblage of a hundred utopian architectures, from the dome geodesic by Richard Buckminster Fuller to cover Manhattan up to Miyazaki's castle in the sky, passing by Vladimir Tatlin's helical-shaped Monument to the Third International... the most likely are not necessarily those that 'we imagine!