Scale plan

Roman de Münster, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, 2007. Picture by Stefan Eissing.

At the occasion of the last “Skulptur Projekte” in Muenster in 2007, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Roman de Münster presented scale-downs of projects realized for the former editions of this decennial “large scale” event. The artist, making a mise-en-abyme of the sculpture park, could curate it her way. The audience, used in Muenster to be surrounded by quite monumental pieces, would overhang tiny sculptures such as in the “Miniature parks”.
Introducing the notion of time and fiction, D. Gonzalez-Foerster would call this work a “novel”: the city of Muenster collects these sculptures and choose, once a decade, some treasures to add to its cultural heritage. The act of curating shows a tribute though the device implies irony.

In 2005 Claude Closky, awarded by the Prix Marcel Duchamp, would build a Manège inside of the Espace 315 (called so because of its surface area) in the Centre Georges Pompidou. The piece consists in flat screens on the walls, showing one after one a short animation, in sort of the audience would have to walk from one to the other, making a round circuit inside of the four walls of this “manège” – which translation could be closer to “riding stables” than “whirligig”.
Still as an answer to an invitation, this artist from the same generation than Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster uses the loop as an absurd and endless path. When the passer-by is fed up turning around nothing, he can go.

In these two works, the audience is moving inside of a plan following rhetoric figures. The audience gets a certain consciousness of their movements inside these devices drawing parallels in their titles, with a novel for Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and with a “manège” in the case of Claude Closky, such a system being used to theatrically simulate the idea of progressing on a route while staying inside of a circle.