In 2007, the exhibition The Freak Show at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon was based on «Freak Shows» which showed amazing phenomenal characters. Nearly 50 works interpreted and explored the different types of monstrosity.
N’importe quoi (“anything”) continues in the same vein, this time on the device of showing collections of specimens in the style of museums of natural history.
Like for The Freak Show, this appropriation -a priori for fun- allows to raise a number of important questions about art, its history and its presentation. In the space of the museum, art is shown as «naturalized». Which lead us to this question : is the museum the natural environment of art? Does wild art exist? Is there an «intelligent intention» at work in its evolution, or is it a series of accidental mutations?
And as art is here shown as a gallery of evolution, at what principle of selection (cultural and not anymore natural) does it obey? Does the art express, unlike the normal evolutionary pattern, the revenge of inadequacy?
Modern art and then contemporary art have often been described as “n’importe quoi” because of the introduction into the world of art of new topics considered by many as trivial, vulgar or banal, and deviating enough from approved iconography to appear incongruous, if not completely crazy.
These are some of the topics that will be shown in this exhibition, through works of eminent artists.
N'importe quoi
