Answering three basic questions asked by Antoine de Galbert about the software driven setting of his collection currently on display at La Maison Rouge in Paris

 

At page 85 of the “strange”, rather a bit uncomfortable-to-read catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to the collection of Mr. Antoine de Galbert currently at La Maison Rouge – the private museum he has founded ten years ago – there are three questions by Mr. Galbert we unassumingly would like to answer.

 

How will the public react to this unusual kind of hanging, which is bound to cause the visual collisions by its accumulation and superabundance?

 

We are not the public, however our response as single visitors to the software ordered and provocative display of so many artworks, nearly 1200, has been quite negative. Instead of being encouraged to read each single work and grasp its own subjectivity we were overwhelmed by the whole. The “visual collision” between the artworks immediately turns out to be fortuitous, therefore scarcely interesting. Furthermore, the absence of any caption beside the artworks is like an invitation to remain on their surface. Of course captions would be visually disturbing, but the touchscreens available in front of each section in which the long “wall” carrying the pieces is divided seem to be a weak solution to the problem. It reduces each of those artworks, warmly described by the collector as reminders of “a story, a moment, an encounter”, to silent items. It follows that you just end up attempting to recognize what you already know, forgetting about the rest.

 

How will they view, how will they apprehend the works?

 

We don’t need to quote Aby Warburg or Erwin Panowsky to prove that to understand any kind of artwork the beholder needs specific information. But if they are neither provided in the museum’s rooms, nor by the exhibition’s catalogue, how can the audience shape his view and “apprehend” anything? Would asking ourselves if we like a certain thing or not be enough? We don’t think so.

 

Does not the “unviewable” always, everywhere, arouse the desire to see?

 

By showing such a huge agglomeration of artworks, it is clear that Mr. de Galbert, a former gallerist and according to his Wikipedia page one of the heirs of the Carrefour Group, is not trying to hide something, or make it “unviewable”. In this instance, what is really missing, or not convincing, are the aesthetic and ethical criteria adopted by the collector in his approach. The reason why he opts for a certain artist or artwork remains opaque. As the 2013 Venice Biennial clearly has proved, when you gather objects according to your own taste, and out of any well motivated intellectual, idealogical, or historical frame, you could end up setting a beautiful show, but with no point. Everything turns out to be ephemeral, specious, chancy, thus very disputable when public money are involved; or, to be pure solipsism. In this latter case the artworks are just bricks of the monument the collector erects to himself; but that is not a problem if the collector isn’t ashamed of regarding himself as an artist, in the way Mr. Galbert apparently does, according to the passionate and straightforward text he has written for the catalogue, that is, from our point of view, the real reason why this show is a must visit, and its catalogue a must read, especially for art insiders:

 

“When we collect we sketch a self-portrait. A collection is an act of introspection, an inner journey. We are not artists, but we do create a work of art by taking possession of works by others. Without this rereading of art history, this fantasy of wanting to write fresh pages in that history, a collection would be no more than an accumulation, however rich and beautiful.”

January 14, 2016