M/M (paris) photo Inez Van Lamsweerde, Vinoodh Matadin
"(...)Nowhere was this level of distortion more evident than in the show at the Palais de Tokyo. What was originally conceived as two separate exhibitions — one of the contemporary art collection of a prominent Greek collector, the other an M/M (Paris) retrospective — evolved into “Translation,” which is described in the accompanying limited-edition catalog as “a visual trip operated and articulated by M/M (Paris) with the Dakis Joannou collection.” In the Palais de Tokyo’s sprawling industrial galleries, well-known pieces by Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Chris Ofili and Mike Kelley duked it out with advertising images for Calvin Klein Jeans, Balenciaga invitations and a trove of posters created by M/M (Paris) for various Théâtre de Lorient productions. The artist Yinka Shonibare’s piece, “Dressing Down,” was installed upon a variation of the Café Étienne Marcel carpeting, in a room lined with frenetic M/M-designed wallpaper, while the title for Kara Walker’s “Being the True Account of the Life of N,” writ extra large in the model alphabet, threatened to overtake the artwork itself. However visually stunning, the raucous installation often seemed less like a dialogue and more like a shouting match, with M/M apparently winning. “An art collection,” M/M explained, “is an individual’s chance to write their own story using art. In our way of working over the past 10 years, we have also collected little stories. When someone asks us to do an exhibition, it’s the opportunity for us to de-archive and re-edit all those microhistories.”
And how did the art world receive this creative intervention? “They still don’t want to talk about it,” Augustyniak says.
Their solo show in London caused a similar sensation. Titled “Haunch of Venison/Venison of Haunch,” M/M (Paris) created a visual identity for the gallery, which has been open since only 2002, reflected in the mirror of their own experience. In other words, a portrait of the gallery but also a self-portrait. “It’s not like we are graphic designers and suddenly decided to become artists,” they insist. But the approach, they say, made both people from the art world uncomfortable and people from the design world uncomfortable. This, we are meant to understand, was a good thing.
Recently, Hans Ulrich Obrist commissioned M/M (Paris) to create a Web site for the Serpentine Gallery, where he is now a director. The Serpentine already has a perfectly functional if totally unremarkable Web site, with a nice picture of the gallery in its bucolic setting in Kensington Gardens, and useful information about opening hours and future exhibitions. “There is no one better to do this,” Obrist exclaims, “because we knew that they would never want to design a Web site. So what would it be? An anti-Web site? An invisible Web site?” In answering his own questions, Obrist veers off into a tangent about quantum physics, and suddenly he is no longer talking about a Web site as we — or for that matter even Craig Newmark — know it, but a virtual art institution, an entire parallel world unto itself. If you click a button on the Serpentine Web site, you can see the M/M work in progress. It is a fat, squiggly animated line that emerges and disappears in an endless loop — a serpent eating its own tail."
By ALIX BROWNE
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