Designblog

Rietveld Graduation Show

Émilie Ferrat [x] and François Girard-Meunier [x] graduated from the Department of Graphic Design. As part of their graduation show they presented a collaborated project ‘Ceramics with Émilie / Ceramics with François.’ This project was chosen by an independent jury to be nominated for the Design Award and was for that reason part of the exhibition ‘Selected Gerrit Rietveld Academyie Awards 2015’ organized in Castrum Peregrini [x].

Castrum Peregrini Presentation

Ceramics with Émilie / Ceramics with François

‘The medium is the message.’ These words of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan still offer room for artistic exploration. Because how exactly the message changes when the medium, or the material, is changed remains shrouded in mystery. In their collaborative project, graphic designers Émilie Ferrat and François Girard-Meunier use a classic yet surprising approach: dialogue.
 

 
    The installation consists of a video of the two designers conversing and a number of glazed clay models –a mobile telephone, for example, and shot glasses, jigsaw pieces and some undefinable models– with which Ferrat and Girard-Meunier stretch the boundaries between form, material and meaning. A new plain field is established. The video shows their fresh and resolute debate on their progress in working with ceramics – a new material for both of them. The dialogue is explicitly overacted, which stresses the artificiality of the form (a recorded conversation about models they made earlier). The overacting harmonizes nicely with the glaze on the clay models: a shiny layer upon robust content. The spoken and material form are one.
 

 
    ‘Do you think it’s the ceramics that is giving meaning to our talks,’ one of them asks, ‘or rather that our talks are giving meaning to the ceramics?’ The relationship between words and things is a complex one. It is a relationship that has puzzled many philosophers, artists and linguists. By deliberately speaking as amateurs, ferret and Girard-Meunier open up a new perspective on this relationship.
    The material prompts conversations that lead beyond just ceramics: design in a broader sense, a philosophical ‘brain in a vat’ argument, personal insecurities and the history of art, these are all subjects that lay hidden in the material. The ceramics function as a conversation starter: the medium turns out to contain many messages.

text by Thomas van Huut [x]

for full length video [19 minutes 54 seconds] contact François Girard-Meunier

In ‘Can Forgery be Appropriation Art and Vice-Versa? (bachelor’s thesis Art & Design, Gerrit Rietveld Academie), François Girard-Meunier questions and tries to compare the processes of two seemingly similar forms of “copying” artworks and ask on which terms they could be considered as their opposite.

7th Avenue Garment Rack with Warhol Flowers (1965) Elaine Sturtevant

The act of copying has multiple connotations depending on the cultures and eras on which it is performed. It can be a proof of mastery and an honest tribute (esp. in China), a mandatory step (from emulation to creation) towards producing genuine artworks or, as we know it, an underlying statement of looser value (lack of originality, usurpation of the original).

Mark A. Landis

A forgery is a specific type of copy that tries to conceal its origin and passes as the original. An appropriation is a type of copy which clearly states that its author takes over an authored form and makes it his own while retaining the properties (and embracing) that links the copy to its predecessor. One can see the two practices as illegitimate and legitimate opposites.
We value experiences with artworks (or life experiences in general) with different criteria. Sight is one of the most impactful stimuli of the human kind, so aren’t we surprised by believing what we see?
Which leads us to the hypothetical confusion of seeing two images which might look exactly the same, while having contexts, meanings and intentions which are obviously divergent.

Left: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1663) Johannes Vermeer, Right: Woman Reading Music (1935-40) Han van Meegeren)

This essay takes takes as source material works of famous forgers (Elmyr de Hory, Han van Meegeren…) and early Appropriation Artists (Elaine Sturtevant, Mike Bidlo…) and seek to figure out what makes a work of art a work of art in terms of attitudes, discursive frameworks and intentions. The two practices are looked at with the magnifying glass of their opposite’s framework, to see if by stretching any definition they could be thought differently.

download this thesis   “Can Forgery be Appropriation Art and Vice-Versa?”  If what differentiates an art forger from an appropriation artist is a matter of intention, then on which terms one could become the other?