The event is rather rare… For an artist who lived in Canada to be presented at the Center Pompidou in Paris, in a major exhibition, is in fact on the order of the exceptional. We can remember that in this prestigious institution took place the exhibitions of the Canadian – but also French – Hervé Fischer in 2017 and the Vancouverite Stan Douglas in 1994.
Even further in the past were presented Jean Paul Riopelle in 1981 and Michael Snow in 1978-1979… The list is therefore rather limited. And it even seems to us that Cohen is the first Canadian to have such a tribute. Although Paris is no longer the capital of the arts in the West for a long time, this exhibition is nevertheless the symbol of an important consecration that goes beyond the fashion effects that the New York art scene often embodies.
Admittedly, our era is slowly trying to valorize — that’s the right word — the arts produced outside the so-called international network, which is in fact a speculative market still dominated by New York and Western art. However, the works of artists living or having lived in Canada are still often forgotten in history. For many, the art made here does not seem to distinguish itself enough from American art, as if we were only a distant suburb of the New York scene.
Lynne Cohen could have been devoured by her affinity with American art. In the catalog of the exhibition, the curator Florian Ebner recalls how John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), had not grasped the postmodern contribution of his work, the comparing unfavorably to that of photographer Chauncey Hare. Cohen’s work, recognized in Canada, had to be celebrated by France for it to acquire Western notoriety. However, the MoMA still has no works by this photographer in its collections…
Born on July 3, 1944 in Racine, Wisconsin, Lynne Cohen, who renounced her American citizenship, died on May 12, 2014 in Montreal. Having started her career in 1970, she moved to Ottawa in 1973, where she taught at the university, before moving to Montreal in 2003. From 1975, she was represented by the Montreal gallery Yajima. Then she found, among others with Jim Borcoman and Ann Thomas, curators at the National Gallery of Canada, very strong support. As her husband and philosopher Andrew Lugg explains, she was also very quickly integrated into the French art scene, where she exhibited regularly. We will remember in particular the fact that curator Jean-Pierre Criqui included it in the exhibition Mixed doubles in 1995 at Palm game alongside Barry X. Ball, Pascal Convert and Rachel Whiteread.
Image intersections
Cohen’s work is here paired with the work of Marina Gadonneix, an artist born in 1977. Gadonneix was inspired by Cohen in his artistic research and maintained a correspondence with her for several months just before her death. This exhibition is also placed under the auspices of the transmission of a vision of the world and of art. It also includes a short section dealing with the links between the art of Cohen and that of Walker Evans, whose landmark lecture she listened to at the University of Michigan in 1971.
This aesthetic and intellectual dialogue is presented in a very judicious way with intertwinings between the works of Cohen and Gadonneix. Both speak of places of entertainment, consumption or even scientific studies present in our current world. Spas, sports clubs, military sites, classrooms, TV studios, scientific laboratories are scrutinized there. These photographers show how these places are not neutral, but staged, dramatized, inhabited by values.
The world as it is, in truth, in its artificiality
As Andrew Lugg explains, in one of the podcasts offered by the Center Pompidou, “one of Cohen’s favorite authors was Anton Chekhov. She liked the fact that he just talked about ordinary situations when a lot was going on. The story is not limited to what is said. When you read his novels, you access the story, but also all the unsaid. She was trying to accomplish that too.”
This goes in the direction of what the art critic Marc Donnadieu wrote in double blind, Cohen’s monograph, published in 2019. He explained how, in his images, Cohen “returns reality to its own representations”. The world around us is ideology, socio-political values embodied in the settings of our daily lives. But unlike Donnadieu, we do not only see in his work the “consequences of a world invaded by representations linked to the culture of commodities and mass consumption on our experience of the reality that surrounds us”.
Cohen teaches us how the real has always been invested with values (religious, political or social). And there would not simply be, on the one hand, a pure real, and, on the other hand, ideologies attempting to impose representations on the real, thus seeking to stifle it, to constrain it. The material world that surrounds us unfortunately only makes sense in the reading that our values can make of it.