NYAB Event - Marc Camille Chaimowicz "Enough Tiranny Recalled 1972-2009"

Marc Camille Chaimowicz "Enough Tiranny Recalled 1972-2009"

Artists Space

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During the 1960s, Marc Camille Chaimowicz (born in postwar Paris) was one of the first artists in the UK to merge the realms of performance and installation art. In the early 1970s, Chaimowicz commented on an era predominantly defined by stark minimalism with an unabashed pursuit of the beautiful, establishing an art that was both playful and subtly seductive. Informed by French literary figures (Gide, Cocteau, Proust, and Gênet) as well as contemporary Marxist and early gender theory, Chaimowicz's beautiful and terrorizing post-pop scatter environments owe as much to glam rock, as it was a direct response to the political, and artistic dogmatism of its time.

"Enough Tiranny," conceived in 1972 (the founding year of Artists Space), was a proposal that aimed to bring about new models of collaboration and sociability, attempting to question the alienation between viewer, artist, and institution. Not unlike installations by his contemporaries, such as the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Chaimowicz's works require a level of participation on behalf of the audience as well as the institution.

In the otherwise monochromatic environment of the early 1970's, Chaimowicz developed an artistic language that responded to the dogmatism of its time by taking both political and emotional dimensions into account. His work speaks to the basic units by which we trade private desires with social hopes: building the texture of a communal existence.

The remembering, the revisiting, and the recalling of works from different periods of Chaimowicz's life is integral to his way of working. "Enough Tiranny Recalled, 1972 -2009" demonstrates that "the future will, in all probability, fold itself into the past to better accommodate itself in the present." (Marc Camille Chaimowicz)