Erik Dietman - La Verticale

by Nicolas Bourriaud

Ce recueil de textes de Nicolas Bourriaud sur l'œuvre d'Erik Dietman est publié à l'occasion de son exposition à La Panacée, « La Verticale (Millésimes 1962-2001) ». Couvrant toutes les périodes de son travail, elle s'articule autour de thèmes récurrents – le langage exploré dans sa richesse poétique, ses double-sens et ses apories ; la jouissance et la mort ; l'art comme dérive, refuge et commentaire sur la vie… Ces textes de circonstance, accompagnés d'un long entretien, témoignent d'une relation qui s'est nourrie, au fil du temps, de conversations et de regards bienveillants et actifs. Ils décrivent diverses facettes d'une œuvre foisonnante. On y retrouvera les relations d'Erik Dietman, qui se définissait comme un « pilote d'essai », à la gastronomie, à la matière, à ses compagnons artistes, aux légendes nordiques et au jeu.

180 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2018

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)