Fountain Archive

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The Fountain Archive (also known as the Fountain Archive Project or Works Encyclopedia Fountain Archives ) is a procedural art project started in 2008/2009 by the French conceptual artist Saâdane Afif . The project comprises an ongoing series of framed pages that contain one or more images of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain . Afif uses the principle of objet trouvés and separates the pages from different publications. Afif usually only produces one copy per publication and page for the Fountain Archive. The Fountain Archive project also includes a bookshelf with all the publications from which Afif took the pages for his frame objects.

Origin and description

Saâdane Afif, who received the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2009 , began working at the Fountain Archive that same year. As early as 2008 Afif had started collecting publications with images of Duchamp's Fountain as a hobby. With the receipt of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, it developed into an extensive research project that the artist pursues obsessively. Continuously updated, the Fountain Archive currently consists of around 500 pictures of Marcel Duchamp's urinal. Each of these images was taken from all kinds of publications - from books, through newspapers, magazines and encyclopedias to pornographic magazines. Afif always tears or cuts out the entire page, even if the motif is placed there with other texts and images. These texts and images make a factual reference to Duchamp's work, but also present them in completely different contexts. The area around the image also becomes part of his work. Afif integrates the individual cut-out pages into picture frames adapted for this purpose, some with colored back walls, making the frame an integral part of the entire work. As a rule, Afif only produces one copy per publication and page. Each work in the Fountain Archive is therefore unique. The works are then installed in accordance with the architectural ambience. Another part of the Fountain Archive project is the collection of all publications ( sans Fountain ) from which Afif has taken the pages for his frame objects. These are kept on a bookshelf in the artist's studio.

There is, however, one exception to the process that always results in only one Fountain Archive work from a publication: if a publication depicts one or more works from the Fountain Archive project, two copies of the publication ( sans Fountain ) are placed in the archive and two editions made from the page with a picture of a fountain archive. This work thus represents a mise en abyme (picture in picture).

According to the artist's intention, the work encyclopedia Fountain Archives should one day reach a number of 1001 works. In view of the daily publication of images of Duchamp's urinal and a very large number of past publications, the project could theoretically be continued forever.

history

In 2013 a group of 101 Fountain Archives was shown in the exhibition “The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future” in the Museum Kurhaus Kleve . For the contribution to the exhibition, the art historian Valentina Vlasic wrote the first published text about the Fountain Archive. A picture of Duchamp's urinal is attached to the text, printed in the series of publications of the Museum Kurhaus Kleve - Ewald Mataré Collection No. 62. On this occasion, Afif also made a Fountain Archive from this contribution. The aforementioned Klever Fountain, with the designation FA 0366, is on permanent loan in the collection of the museum in Kleve.

interpretation

The German curator Eva Huttenlauch describes Marcel Duchamp as “the guiding star to which Saâdane Afif looks up as his ideal self”. Many of Afif's concepts, such as the work encyclopedia Fountain Archives, are based on Duchamp's foundation.

For the Austrian art historian and curator Valentina Vlasic, Afif's Fountain Archive is the repetition of the key moment of the ready made, the fundamental act of choosing which, like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, represents a full artistic achievement. Afif does not do this with real objects, such as a commercially available object, but uses the artistic object of the "fountain", as an image from a publication. Vlasic describes the fact that “Afif Duchamp's 'Fountain' leads back to the museum in a new way - a place that he had to leave around a hundred years ago when he was expelled from the exhibition as charming and witty.”

For art historian Elena Filipovic, the great art-historical significance of Duchamp's Fountain arose in particular because the artist understood that reproducing, exhibiting, staging, disseminating and reviewing a work of art not only determines its value and meaning, but also determines whether it is in art history finds its way. She sees this understanding as the background for Afif's Fountain Archive project. Filipovic looks in Afif for “R. Mutt ”or Marcel Duchamp another person who appropriates the white urinal and also builds an icon. Filipovic describes the Fountain Archives, which contain a picture of a Fountain Archive ( mise en abyme ), as a “remake” and compares the works in particular with the process of significance of Duchamp's Fountain in art history.

literature

  • Eva Huttenlauch: “Everything must be scandalous” , in: Saâdane Afif. Another Anthology of Black Humor , ed. by Susanne Gaensheimer and Eva Huttenlauch, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg 2012.
  • Valentina Vlasic : Saâdane Afif , in: The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future , Series Museum Kurhaus Kleve - Ewald Mataré Collection No. 62, Freundeskreis Museum Kurhaus und Koekkoek-Haus Kleve eV (ed.), July 14th to 15th . September 2013.
  • Elena Filipovic, Xavier Hufkens: Sâadane Afif. Fontaines. Triangle Books, 2014.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. René Zechlin: Toutes Directions - Le Prix Marcel Duchamp, ed. by Astrid Ihle and René Zechlin, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum , in Silvana Editoriale Verlag, p. 15.
  2. Valentina Vlasic : Saâdane Afif , in: The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future , Series Museum Kurhaus Kleve - Ewald Mataré Collection No. 62, Freundeskreis Museum Kurhaus and Koekkoek-Haus Kleve eV (ed.), July 14 to September 15, 2013, p. 47, also see Elena Filipovic, Xavier Hufkens: Sâadane Afif. Fontaines. Triangle Books, 2014, ISBN 978-2-930777-05-4 , pp. 20-21.
  3. Elena Filipovic, Xavier Hufkens: Sâadane Afif. Fontaines. Triangle Books, 2014, ISBN 978-2-930777-05-4 , p. 21.
  4. a b Eva Huttenlauch: “Everything must be scandalous” , in: Saâdane Afif. Another Anthology of Black Humor , ed. by Susanne Gaensheimer and Eva Huttenlauch, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg 2012, ISBN 978-3-86984-321-6 , p. 41.
  5. Elena Filipovic, Xavier Hufkens: Sâadane Afif. Fontaines. Triangle Books, 2014, ISBN 978-2-930777-05-4 , p. 21.
  6. Xavier Hufkens: Sâadane Afif. Fontaines. Triangle Books, 2014, ISBN 978-2-930777-05-4 , p. 70.
  7. Claudia Gronewald: The urinal in the archive of images The urinal in the archive of images , derwesten.de, June 17, 2014, accessed on November 16, 2014
  8. Valentina Vlasic: Saâdane Afif , in: The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future , Series Museum Kurhaus Kleve - Ewald Mataré Collection No. 62, Freundeskreis Museum Kurhaus and Koekkoek-Haus Kleve eV (ed.), July 14 to September 15, 2013, p. 47.
  9. Elena Filipovic, Xavier Hufkens: Sâadane Afif. Fontaines. Triangle Books, 2014, ISBN 978-2-930777-05-4 , pp. 20-21

Illustrations

  1. Saâdane Afif: AFIF, Saâdane Fountain Archive 0366 , 2014. Torn page from a book 29 × 37.5 cm, unique (+ 1 AP), certificate signed by the artist