Walt Disney Productions: Bertrand Lavier at Yvon Lambert, Paris
Visiting Hollywood in 1937, Salvador Dalí boasted of having met three great American Surrealists: Harpo Marx, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney. Despite generously supporting New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Disney’s attitude to modern art remained ambiguous. Only a few minutes of the animated film Destino, Dalí and Disney’s proposed collaboration, were ever completed (and only long after both were dead). But some sense of the perspective on Modernism held by the House of Mouse can be gleaned from the bewildered look on Mickey’s face in a Disney comic strip that first aired in 1947, in which Minnie drags her murine inamorato to an art museum filled with stark canvases and glutinous abstractions intended to imitate modern art works.
In this imagined gallery space, Bertrand Lavier discovered certain ‘ghosts’ of Clement Greenberg – in the cartoon references to the sculptures of Hans Arp and the canvases of Wassily Kandinsky, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. From 1984, Lavier began making his own life-size copies of the art from Disney’s museum in an ongoing series entitled ‘Walt Disney Productions’, seeking to exhume the formalist corpse through the sedimentary layers of Pop and Postmodernity. After a successful showing of a number of these works at the Centre Pompidou last year, Yvon Lambert recently exhibited six new canvases that extended the series while also departing from it significantly.
01/18/14 at 10:16am
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