Jacques Villeglé

by Nicolas Bourriaud, François Bon, Kaira Cabanas

Found objects, ripped posters, radical collages: as part of the New Realism movement of the early 1960s, Jacques Villeglé's work directly influenced his contemporaries, in particular, New York Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. By using everyday objects, the New Realists sought new forms of artistic expression and called into question the role of the artist and the nature of art itself. Villeglé's work with posters that he found in the streets-some ripped by anonymous passers-by or decayed by the passage of time, and some even damaged to the point of illegibility-exhibited his desire to subvert the conventional discourse of advertising and political propaganda. Since the 1960s, Villeglé's work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and North America, and forms part of the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, as well as many prestigious museums and galleries around the world. Villeglé was a featured artist in the 2006 exhibition "Nouveau Réalisme: Art and Reality in the 1960s" at Vienna's Museum of Modern Art. Jacques Villeglé is the first English-language book to represent this influential artist. Illustrating his career through a series of essays-a retrospective text, an interview, and over 150 images-the book spans the artist's output from his early work to his most recent projects.

Genres: Art

216 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2007

About the author

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a curator and art critic, who curated a great number of exhibitions and biennials all over the world.

He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jérôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art (1992–2000), and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from 1987 to 1995. Bourriaud was the Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art from 2007-2010 at Tate Britain, London, and in 2009 he curated the fourth Tate Triennial there, entitled Altermodern. He was the Director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, an art school in Paris, France, from 2011 to 2015. In 2015, he was appointed director of the future Contemporary Art Center of Montpellier, France, due to open in 2019, and director of La Panacée art center.

Bourriaud is best known among English speakers for his publications Relational Aesthetics (1998/English version 2002) and Postproduction (2001). Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s. Bourriaud coined the term in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic that was shown at the CAPC contemporary art museum in Bordeaux.

In Postproduction (2001), Bourriaud relates deejaying to contemporary art. He lists the operations discjockeys apply to music and relates them to contemporary art practice. Radicant (2009) aims to define the emergence of the first global modernity, based on translation and nomadic forms, against the postmodern aesthetics based on identities.

(from wikipedia)