September 25th / October 31st 2009
Tuesday-Saturday, from 6PM to 8PM / 0-24 vetrina
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BASE / Progetti per l’arte is pleased to present a new project by Pierre Bismuth especially conceived for the occasion. For his project the Brussels-based French artist has invited different people to donate objects they have purchased with the hope of changing their lives. The artist thus ends up with a collection of beauty products, sports equipment, books… All these objects haven’t fulfilled their promise. It is not surprising then that the collection accumulated this way comes in the form of various consumer goods, mostly unused.

So how does the promise fail even before the act of consumption? How have the consumers gotten out of the spell of the commodity before actually using, or sometimes even opening the product?

Use value is necessary to make exchange possible. But the aesthetic surrounding the commodities fabricates a desire that has nothing to do with the promise of use. It displaces the real act of consumption from the actual using of the product to the moment of purchase. True use is anyway only a lure; the real usefulness of the product is in its aesthetic promise and is concluded in the act of buying.

But in the project of Pierre Bismuth the objects on display are not just commodities. The consumers have demanded of the objects a promise no simple commodity can carry - the promise of happiness. As we know from Stendhal and later Benjamin and Adorno, it is this promise of happiness that defines a work of art. It is also what makes a work of art ultimately useless – no use other than this very promise is demanded of it. This promise is now absorbed by the aesthetic of the commodities – and it makes it possible for the simple consumer goods to act like artworks, at least for a while.

Unlike a readymade, the installation of Pierre Bismuth does not make the commodity an artwork just by a switch of context. By becoming useless testimonies of a broken promise, the objects in the show have already acquired the potential of artworks before the gesture of the artist to bring them into the exhibition space. At the same time they have lost all their possibility to act as commodities again – their appearances have faded and their use has been rejected. Paradoxically it is only by becoming art that they become commodities again, with a new use value – uselessness.
Bismuth’s gesture breaks the illusion of the commodity’s promise of happiness, but as a consequence also that of art. The disenchantment does not aim at revealing any truth, but leaves eventually the artwork and its public free to envision another kind of promise.
Dessislava Dimova (September 2009)

Brussels-based French artist Pierre Bismuth (*1963, Neuilly-sur-Seine) is a leading figure in conceptual art. Known for his intelligent dismantling of cultural products and the wry and often humorous shifts and "misuses" to which he subjects his material, Bismuth’s work constitutes a creative intervention into familiar codes, habits and objects.
Pierre Bismuth has been exhibiting his work for the past twenty years. Prominent solo exhibitions have been held at the British Film Institute, the Kunsthalle in Basel, Nice’s Villa Arson, Rotterdam’s Witte de With, at MAMCO in Geneva, and at the Kunsthalle in Vienna. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the ICA in London, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, the Kunsthalle Bern; the Ludwig Museum in Köln, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and numerous others. His work was included in the 2001 Venice Biennale and in Manifesta 4. Bismuth has had solo shows at galleries in such cities as London, Paris, Brussels, Turin, Tel Aviv and Antwerp. Pierre Bismuth is the only visual artist to have ever won an Academy Award — in 2002 for Best Original Screenplay with Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 

BASE / Progetti per l’arte is a non-profit cultural association established in the spring of 1998 by a group of artists in Florence. The exhibition program was inaugurated in September 1998 with works by Sol Lewitt, followed by shows of Marco Bagnoli, Alfredo Pirri, Cesare Pietroiusti, Niele Toroni, Jan Vercruysse, Heimo Zobernig, the concert by Michael Galasso, Luca Pancrazzi, Marco Fusinato e John Nixon, Ingo Springenschmid, Paolo Masi & Pier Luigi Tazzi, Muntadas, Robert Barry, Luca Vitone, Liliana Moro, Claude Closky, Remo Salvadori, Pietro Sanguineti, Liam Gillick, Massimo Bartolini, Mario Airò, Eva Marisaldi, Rainer Ganahl, François Morellet, Bernhard Rüdiger, Nedko Solakov e Slava Nakovska, Olaf Nicolai, Giuliano Scabia, Kinkaleri, Steve Piccolo & Gak Sato, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matt Mullican, Michel Verjux, Elisabetta Benassi, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Pietro Riparbelli, Simone Berti, Jeppe Hein, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Jonathan Monk, Peter Koegler, Carsten Nicolai, Surasi Kusolwong, Franz West, Tino Sehgal, Nico Dockx & Kris Delacourt, Grazia Toderi, Armin Linke, Davide Bertocchi. The primary idea of Base is to provide a space which is open to the most significant contemporary Italian and international art practices, and to present the works of artists in a dialectic of sign and language that encourages an ongoing and open dialogue of ideas concerning contemporary culture. Base was established and supported by founding member artists, but aims to involve a wider circle of art-related individuals, including scholars, critics, collectors and friends, by way of participation and sustaining support for the association’s activities. BASE 2009 founding members are: Mario Airò, Marco Bagnoli, Massimo Bartolini, Paolo Masi, Massimo Nannucci, Maurizio Nannucci, Paolo Parisi, Remo Salvadori. Upcoming projects: Olivier Mosset, Pierre Huyghe, One Star Press, Lawrence Weiner...

_L’attività di BASE è promossa e sostenuta dagli artisti fondatori
_dall'Associazione BASExBASE
_e dall'Osservatorio per le Arti Contemporanee dell'

_Si ringrazia l'istituto Culturale Francese di Firenze per la collaborazione