<img src="https://img.lemde.fr/2023/06/22/0/0/5669/3905/664/0/75/0/85c7e7f_1687433293842-004-1.jpeg" srcset=" https://img.lemde.fr/2023/06/22/0/0/5669/3905/556/0/75/0/85c7e7f_1687433293842-004-1.jpeg 556w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/06/22/0/0/5669/3905/600/0/75/0/85c7e7f_1687433293842-004-1.jpeg 600w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/06/22/0/0/5669/3905/664/0/75/0/85c7e7f_1687433293842-004-1.jpeg 664w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/06/22/0/0/5669/3905/700/0/75/0/85c7e7f_1687433293842-004-1.jpeg 700w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/06/22/0/0/5669/3905/800/0/75/0/85c7e7f_1687433293842-004-1.jpeg 800w" sizes="(min-width: 1024px) 556px, 100vw" alt="" verfügung="" (1976),="" by="" valie="" export."="" width="100%" height="auto">
An exhibition about graffiti, but without graffiti. Hugo Vitrani's innovative mind came up with this audacious idea. For some 10 years now, through the Lasco Project, the curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris has been proposing ways of exhibiting graffiti's wilder practices and adventures in the establishment without distorting its spirit or energy. For a long time, the game has been to infiltrate the art center's basements, hidden spaces and peripheral surfaces with partly secret invitations – from Mode 2 to Futura 2000, from Evol to Cleon Peterson, from Craig Costello to JR and Os Gemeos.
Entitled "Il Morso delle Termiti" ("The Termites' Bite"), this new exhibition brings the cycle to a close, assembling some 50 artists, both established and little known, emerging and long-defunct, in a great cultural melting pot devised in the official exhibition spaces. The original aim was to bring together graffiti artists and contemporary artists from the 1960s to the present day, forging links through shared ideas, forms, inspirations and obsessions.
Through this personal rereading of art history, "graffiti is approached not as an aesthetic, but as an experience, an attitude, a tactic, an imagination of disorder and an underground thought," Vitrani pointed out. The title is a reference to the 1962 "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" essay by American film critic Manny Farber (1917-2008), who defined a type of "termite" artist, with practices difficult to grasp: "A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity."
This frame of reading enables the curator to break down categorizations and propose some 20 delightful dialogues built on collisions and large discrepancies detailed on museum labels that are often essential to understanding the exhibition – which is sometimes cryptic. In the process, a "gray zone emerges, where graffiti and contemporary art intersect, influence and merge, without it being possible to draw a formal demarcation line between them," explained the exhibition curator.
Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), known for his "building cuts" in urban reality, photographed graffiti extensively in black and white, and recolored it with paint, as in the full panorama of train cars presented here, made in 1973. In contrast, Skki, an iconic figure of Parisian graffiti turned visual artist, who considers graffiti to be "a souvenir of the 20th century," presents, in a display case, the sleeve of a sweater with holes that has been carefully mended, which belonged to his late parents, a resilient relic of his family history.
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