November 2023: bits and bobs 1 - Matthieu Laurette at MacVal

This post is the first of three catching up with a few of the exhibitions I've been to see in November this year. The only thing they have in common is the month, so it's another of my 'bits-and-bobs' series.

When you're really desperate for something to see, on a damp and gloomy November day, you can trek out, by metro and tram, to MacVal, the Val de Marne's very own contemporary art museum.

I can be a bit snarky about MacVal, claiming it's the sort of French institution that only shows French institutional art, which I find too frigidly intellectual. I joke that the works they show are only ever black, white and grey (and preferably minimalist, if not just plain text), never in colour. My caricature holds that in contemporary art in France there are two parallel worlds: one inhabited by artists who make their living by selling through galleries and art fairs, the other by artists who don't sell at all, but show exclusively in institutional spaces, and are employees of the state, the regions and municipalities, in art schools, museums and other institutions. The two worlds, in this simplistic construction, scarcely know each other, let alone mix, at all. MacVal is the kind of place the latter are purchased by and show in.

I go there from time to time, but my expectations are low. However, at the moment they have a big retrospective about a cheeky artist called Matthieu Laurette, some of whose work on display I personally found entertaining. (I say 'personally' because I know I have friends who don't find him the least bit interesting.) He isn't easy to pin down, but in my usual lazy way I rummaged around online; and found on paris-art.com a decent summary in French that I pasted into DeepL: 

Matthieu Laurette is a contemporary French artist whose work encompasses action, performance, installation, sculpture and video. His best-known works include Apparitions (1993-current) and Produits remboursés (1991-2001). Apparitions consists of taking part in television programmes, appearing in the audience either as an extra or as a contributor. Produits remboursés is a consumer process in which Matthieu Laurette documents his purchase of exclusively reimbursed products. Surfing on the marketing wave of "Satisfied or your money back". On the whole, Matthieu Laurette's works use existing mechanisms (marketing, mass media, cultural industries, etc.) to create his own.

As the article goes on to say, by playing with media and marketing mechanisms, he ends up 'in the media spotlight as a media artist in the media spotlight.' I could write more about him here, but to keep things short will just refer to his French Wikipedia entry, which, if you scroll down, has a list of sample projects (not present in the English-language version) to illustrate how he teases the media, the art world and the state, wherever it may be. If you're interested but don't read French, you can just paste the list into DeepL, like I do.

Quite a lot of his work involves video or pages of text (this is MacVal after all), so it isn't necessarily photogenic, nor is it meant to be, but the following are a few photos from the show. The first is of one of those 'text' projects, but shows why I called the artist 'cheeky'. It consists of a series of letters to countries not present at the Venice Biennale, on the Biennale's headed paper, offering his services. The second is of a collection of rejection letters. The third finds him seeking funding for every item in his studio. And so on...