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Artists - M
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Artists - M
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Claire Morel
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Lives and works in Mulhouse (FR) et à Paris (FR).
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33 hab/m2 (ou X hab/m2),
2013
Printed papers. The work consists of printed dedication pages. Purchased in: 2013 |
Blanchot, Borges, Foucault — these are a few of the famous authors to whom Claire Morel has been paying homage since 2005, by submitting their work to fetishist practices common among bibliophiles of her kind (designer-typographer leanings). While the replicas she produces preserve the format, pagination, and weight of the paper of the original publications, the content is submitted to various games of censorship, screening, and encoding. Like a wayward copyist, the artist rearranges, for example, all the letters in a book in alphabetical order or precipitates the ink from a page to form a black pool at the bottom margin. In this way the young artist revisits the most respectable collections of her library: from the very prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française series published by Gallimard, to the mythical Éditions de Minuit, known for bringing Beckett and Duras to the public. These are publications that, for the most part, constitute literature written about literature, and whose authors most often talk about other authors. Cultivating a special taste for what Gérard Genette has called the paratext, 1 Claire Morel enjoys manipulating the “surroundings” of the text that turn the text into a book: the title, the subtitle, the inter-title, the blurb, the preface, the afterword, footnotes, etc. Following the title page, the dedication pays homage to the person who inspired the work it introduces or to its sponsor. In current use since the ancient Rome, the dedication varies from diplomatic obsequiousness to a declaration of love. Having collected over six hundred dedications in general literature, Claire Morel skims those published in works of science fiction in order to line with them the entire exhibition wall, like with wallpaper. At some 33 pages per square meter, 33 hab/m2 (2013) evokes the density of human population signaled by its demographic title, with SF authors fond of dedicating their books to particularly fantastic fauna, such as “synanthrope humanoids” or “all the robots of the Earth.” Because science fiction is collective literature par excellence, “strongly marked by its authors’ acute awareness of building their work on those of their predecessors,”2 the tributes predominantly name the spiritual forefathers: to Catherine L. Moore, “First Lady of science fiction”; to Isaac Asimov “with my deepest respect,” etc. Next to that spiritual communion there are acknowledgments of one’s close friends and family (“À ma mere”) and an ironic allusion to the clichés of the genre (“To the fourth dimension”). Finally, one last dedicatee holds a special place in science fiction: the reader. In fact, every author was first an avid reader, a fan capable of patiently standing in line at book signings to obtain her favorite author’s autograph. This ritual of devotion had an intense following in Metz, where 33 hab/m2 was installed for the first time,3 and where the legendary Festival International de la Science-fiction et de l’Imaginaire was held between 1976 and 1986. Hélène Meisel 1 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987 2002). 2 Pierre Versins, “La science-fiction est-elle une subculture ?”, in Science-fiction, exhibition catalogue [November, 28 1967–February 26, 1968, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris] (Paris: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1967), p. 5. 3 As part of the exhibition “Si ce monde vous déplaît”, Nov. 8, 2013—Feb. 9, 2014, FRAC Lorraine, Metz. |
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