Stéphane Corréard, Art galleries against COVVID: interview with Stéphane Corréard - The rule of game - Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Arts<

This winter, while museums and art centers were closed following anti-Cavid measures, the galleries counted among the last islets of culture still accessible during the pandemic.Because of these circumstances, they welcomed a new audience, often younger.However, deemed "non -essential businesses" during the third confinement, they also had to close their doors.

Today, one in three gallery could never reopen [1].Also knowing that 90% of artists depend directly on their gallery for living, the health crisis would thus threaten the entire world of contemporary creation [2].

Do we do the galleries?What means have they found, what strategies have they deployed to continue working?How did the confinements influence the production of artists?

Approaching the reopening of businesses announced for May 19, five Parisian gallery owners and an artist return to this year of pandemic.

Stéphane Corréard, militant actor and committed to contemporary art in France, refuses to undergo the crisis. Il nous parle des actions qu’il mène depuis un an, comme la transformation de sa galerie – Lœve&co – enlibrairie lors de ce troisième confinement.He transmits above all his love of artists and offers us a 360 ° vision of art.

Anne-Claire Onillon: Stéphane Corréard, you are art critic, exhibition curator, gallery owner and collector.You were director of the Montrouge show and you head the Galerist Fair.You seem to be a hyperactive art!How did you experience this year of pandemic and its restrictions this year?

Stéphane Corréard: I try to be useful.What interests me is art and artists.So I always try to find ways to help them, to accompany them.For the past year, we have been living for a particular moment - particular for me, and also for gallery owners, since we did not know if we were going to be allowed to receive the public when the fair was to be held, last October.Finally, we managed to go to a mouse hole, and it was a wonderful moment.Everyone said to us: "It's great that you are there!We are delighted to see works and be able to chat with gallery owners, with people in the middle!"It was good for our ego, but above all it allowed us to measure how central exchanges are in the art world.Regarding my gallery owners' activities, my friend Hervé Loevenbruck and I opened a gallery on rue des Beaux-Arts two years ago, and a second in December.We were forced to close the first time during the first confinement.At that time, we set up a virtual program: a weekly exhibition during which, every day, at 10 am, we offer a work for sale, around a theme that changes every week.For each work presented, we publish a mini-state in the form of a pdf of around thirty pages-a fairly considerable work on the history of art.This is what we did during the first confinement.And then, with the third confinement, which again forced the galleries to close their doors, we wondered what we could imagine to stay open, and especially to keep in touch and continue to talk about art with the public.So we transformed ourselves into bookstores, since the bookstores, in the meantime, had become essential businesses and therefore had the right to remain open: in forty-eight hours, we changed our Kbis, we became booksellers and thereforeStay open!Every day, we present a book on social networks.We also carry out exhibitions and projects around books and artists working on books, and on all the reports that can be between art and books.

You have been extremely responsive!It’s as if this period stimulated you.

Constraints always stimulate.We tried to make ourselves useful.We like to do things with artists and chat with the public, and this can take different forms.It is true that I have been in this environment for almost thirty years and that I have carried out extremely diverse functions there: in the galleries, in the sales rooms, in the media, as art critic, as a collector ... Ihave a 360 degree experience.It may allow me more easily than others to be agile and to invent, depending on the circumstances, new modes of dissemination of art.And then, by temperament, I always try to invent rather than lament.When we had to close at the time of the first confinement and all our projects were interrupted, postponed - like everyone else - we decided to be active rather than wait passively and depend on an external calendar.This is how we started these weekly virtual exhibitions, always accompanied by a title, a theme, a text, like any exhibition - but we change theme every week.This allowed us not only to carry out a certain number of projects that we had planned to do "physically" in the gallery, but also to invent others and to make a fairly surprising journey in the history of the art.A week can be devoted to a movement - such as surrealism, narrative figuration, or supports/surfaces - and another week to a personality, sometimes to an art critic.Or we can pay tribute to a gallery owner: this week, for example, we pay tribute to Alexandre Iolas, great gallery owner of the 1950s/60/70.The theme can relate to a typology - for example drawings of writers, the gesture ... We have already dealt with 53 themes - therefore 53 exhibitions, and 53 weeks.Of course, we are aware that we are losing physical contact with the work "for real";But on the other hand, we also gain a lot, because ultimately it allowed me to exercise my profession perhaps even more intense than before.First, I set up more exhibitions: 53 in a year, each time with five artists, which is therefore 265 works of at least 150 different artists!It allowed me to express all my love for art and for a great diversity of artists.I am a bulimic, and an artistic artichoke heart!And then, each time, I had to write a text - because it is I who produces all the texts -, so that forced me to do research for each work.And as I was trying to re -situate this work in the artist's journey, so I also did research on the artist.So, I discovered and learned a lot about the works, which is great;Because in normally, I did not have or did not always take the time to do this.Usually, a painting arrives, we try to sell it, it leaves - we don't always have time to do this research (bibliographic, historical, etc..) and communicate them to the public.While now, every day, a PDF of 20 to 30 pages accompanies the work that is presented - and it is not an "anonymous" text: it is I who write it, with my tone and my way oflook at things.We were really surprised by the success of this program.Some people record all these PDFs and build up a real library, since with 265 works and at a rate of 20 pages per work, we have already produced 5000 pages on art, with archive photos, criticism texts,And still also a text of a critic of the past: it is a mass of phenomenal information!A big boss of the CAC 40, who loves us and who follows us, told me that he "forced" his assistant to read our daily PDF, as if to follow an accelerated training in art history!In fact, we have a considerable audience: several hundred people read our PDFs every day!We could never have such an audience in the gallery, not to mention that in the gallery, often it is not me who welcomes people.So, even if it is true that we lose the physical bond, we gain a lot, because we can say more things to more people, we can go further, deepen and create links with the public.I believe that in a situation of imposed constraint, you always have to ask yourself what you can do to take advantage of it and work better.And we have taken out so much from it, it worked so well that we opened a second store in the street, which is called "Love and Collect" and which is dedicated to this specific virtual program.We have designed this space on the model of the "click and mortar" of the beginnings of the Internet, that is to say a mixed virtual and real.All the works of the week are therefore physically presented at 8 rue des Beaux-Arts.Those who live in Paris or who have the opportunity to go to the gallery can see them - and discover other things.We tried to create a virtuous circle from the constraints imposed on us.

Do you think that virtual access to the work, which has still developed with the health crisis and confinements, can really transform the public report at work?

Absolutely. J’ai d’ailleurs été frappé, durant le premier confinement, par l’article d’un historien d’art dans Libération, qui rappelait que, jusqu’au XIX^e siècle, les historiens d’art écrivaient beaucoup sur des œuvres qu’ils n’avaient jamais vues.First, at the time we were traveling less;Then the works were more in private collections.So very often, art historians of the past had only seen one or two paintings by an artist;They only knew the rest of his work by engravings of interpretation, by older texts which mentioned it, etc..There is a whole story of the apprehension of works other than by physical contact.And in fact, what the pandemic and the confinements have highlighted is that today, with digital but also with books, we ultimately have many more contacts - virtual - with works than what'we imagined.For having worked in sales homes for several years, I can testify that 90 % of people who buy works have never seen them physically!They are on the other side of the world, they ask for condition reports, they see high definition images, etc.., but they have never seen these works "in real" - and that does not bother them.They see other works physically at other times: they see them with them those they own, they see them in exhibitions, in workshops ... So already before the pandemic, there was a kind of mixed.As Turner's great merchant said in an interview with the world: "Finally, it's like music.»Indeed, we go to concerts, but we also listen to records and music on the radio.Sometimes we discover an artist on the radio, then we buy his records and we will listen to him in concert;Other times, we discover an artist in concert, then we are going to buy his records - there is no rule, and I think it applies to painting and art in general.Take the example of an artist I know very well, like Jürg Kreienbühl, whom I have been for years, which I have exposed and of which I have seen hundreds of paintings: if tomorrow I see on the Internet an image ofA painting of him, I can make an opinion and even buy it without seeing it physically.At the other end of the spectrum, it is true that sometimes, on Instagram, like everyone else, I will discover an artist that I absolutely do not know.If he holds my attention, I will look for other works from him on Google;Then I may buy her a work remotely, and when I receive it I will finally see her physically.There is a fluidity in relations with the work that periods of slowdown and transformation like that which we are going through because of the pandemic obliges us to recognize and take into consideration.

You are in close relationship with artists: how do they live this period?How do they react?

At the start, many artists who said that being by nature people who work alone, they were somehow "naturally confined", even outside the pandemic, and that ultimately, this health crisis gave them the opportunity to take aslightly.I like to recall that until 1950, artists did not make exhibitions;They worked in their workshop, then, once they had produced a certain number of works and their merchant bought them, only, perhaps, there was an exhibition.The world of art was not at all centered around exhibitions.Today - since the 1960s -, the exhibition form has been hypertrophied.It started with Duchamp and the way in which the monitoring of the work is of theoretical importance, until it becomes art in itself.But that has taken exaggerated proportions: the artists invest so much in the exhibitions that sometimes they no longer even have time to work!When I go to the workshops of the artists I know, I note that a personal exhibition of a little scope requires one or two months of work: gathering the works, giving the images, doing the texts, granting interviews,Organize the publication, mediation, preparation of works, hanging, opening ... To the point that when we see an artist who makes ten, twenty, thirty exhibitions per year, we wonder when he heStay in time to work!Perhaps the health crisis has forced us to refocus on artistic work itself, which is not an evil.

Teaching How to Say the Colors in French and My Five Year Olds Built the Eiffel Tower #hiddencurcurcurtwhttp: // T.Co/9borwwe

— Ally C. Thu Sep 08 19:45:55 +0000 2011

Most of the artists have experienced, like everyone else, the painful feeling of being prisoners of a calendar that does not belong to us.It is of course very frustrating for everyone to have to stay exhibitions, to publications, etc..But I think we have to invent another model of financing the production of artists.For me, the art market has only one interest: allowing artists to work.Everything else is speculation.Then it remains to be seen whether the market is agile enough not to refocus on itself to the point that the galleries are not living, as at the moment, that subsidies which are granted to them on the right and on the left, and that the artists haveMiserable aid-CNAP aid, for example, it's 1000 euros per month ... They are often people in precarious situations, who have a self-entrepreneur status or no contract.Some artist friends said to me: "I pay my year assistant, according to a shared working time depending on the projects.I'm not going to tell him: Sorry, it's the pandemic!Many artists have tried not only to maintain their activity, but also to continue to assume their responsibilities vis-à-vis others.They were very surprised and painted to find that often, their gallery did not want to hear about this aspect at all.When I asked them how they got out of it to pay the costs of their workshops and pay their assistants, they told me that stretching, their gallery owner did not even ask them the question!I think we may have lost the notion of long time, which is the time of art and which requires providing support to artists to allow them to "pass the bumps", as we say.

Which past or contemporary artist could, in your opinion, be representative of the time we live?

In our virtual exhibition programs, we have sometimes touched the news a little.When the first curfew was decreed-"curfew": an expression all the same terrible, which we had not heard since the war-, we have chosen for theme: "curfew yourself", around artists who used the image of war, etc..I think this is the only week we have sold nothing, as if there was a kind of rejection-perhaps it was too early to play it.The idea of having fun of the situation does not mean, however, that we do not also have anxieties and difficulties;But we tell ourselves that it is a form that evolves and with which we can have fun.Among the exhibitions we had planned and that we had to postpone, there was that of Jürg Kreienbühl, a Swiss Basel artist who arrived in Paris with a scholarship in 1955.He was 23 years old and he landed in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, rue de Buci, at the time of Zazous, taboo and abstract painting per kilometer, which was then sold very, very good.Jürg Kreienbühl, who was a realistic painter, interested in social issues, etc.., was laid.He then took a bike and tried to look for other places where different things happened.Very quickly, he discovered the slums of the Parisian suburbs, especially around Nanterre and Hauts-de-Seine, and he moved there for twenty years.He painted these places and their inhabitants on the pattern, since he lived there and painted only on the pattern.We therefore planned to do this exhibition, and then the confinement occurred.Finally, we did it anyway. Je me demandais si les gens allaient vraiment avoir envie de voir cela : des bidonvilles, des gens enfermés à l’intérieur de leurs caravanes… L’exposition a été un incroyable succès, on n’avait jamais vu ça : le samedi, 300/400 personnes venaient à la galerie, ce qui est énorme pour une galerie de 25 m² ! Nous avons essayé d’être généreux, il y avait une vingtaine ou une trentaine d’œuvres, mais c’est quand même une petite galerie.There was a lot of press, many novelists wrote on this work or took it.I was very struck to see how the works of an artist could resonate - not directly, since his work did not carry directly on the pandemic or confinement - with the news and, more broadly, with the'Evolution of our societies for fifty years.Philippe Degan wrote in the world: "If you want to understand today's France, look at Kreienbühl's painting fifty years ago.Indeed, Kreienbühl has painted the social reality which has accompanied the transformation of France for fifty years.He notably painted immigrant workers who lived in slums and who were there to build the HLM bars that we see in his paintings: these people lived in the slums, they built these low -cost bars, then we destroyed the slums and theywere going to live in these HLM bars ... The exhibition showed very well how a whole completely crazy system of dehumanization had been put in place, because Kreienbühl portrayed this without miserability, but in a very lucid way.We saw that in these slums, he was obviously reigned very great poverty, but at the same time also a deep humanity, which was expressed both in relationships between people and in the relationship of people with their environment.I think of certain paintings that have always struck me, for example those who represent an old prostitute who lives with her daughter and her companion in a miserable caravan, but also other paintings than Kreienbühl painted in summer and where the charactersare taking an aperitif outside, sitting in smashed armchairs and with a parasol-it could be Saint-Tropez ... Finally, if in the low-rabbit bars, these rabbits, there is running waterAnd central heating, you cannot settle in a lounge chair under a parasol outside, while in the slums, at least, the link with the exterior was much more direct.I think that if the exhibition was so successful with the public at that time, it is also because it resounded with questions that people are asking themselves on the options of life: all those who, today, plan to move would like a small balcony or a piece of garden, they no longer want to live without any contact with the outside.

Do you think there will be an after-Cavid art, as there is an post-war art, for example?

Sure.This is what pushed us, a month after the first confinement, to create our virtual exhibition program.We understood that we had to project ourselves in something new, rather than asking ourselves when it was going to leave as before-because it will never leave as before.I became aware of this in a very elementary way by listening to the information.Hearing: "It is the first time since 1910", "It is the first time since 1914", "It is the first time since 1945", "It is the first time since 1968", I haveVery quickly understood that this pandemic would become a marker as strong as these, as strong as 1910, as 1914, as 1945 or that 1968.I think that for a century, it will be said: "This is the first time since 2020 that this has happened.What will happen after the covid?Perhaps, as some predict, will there be an acceleration of history and crises will follow one another, crises of different natures but ultimately continual, a perpetual crisis-I hope not.In any case, this will have constituted a very strong break, and this break will obviously have repercussions in art, because art is not a bubble cut off from the world.I therefore think that certain practices of the art world will evolve radically.A few months ago, I wrote a text in Liberation to try to imagine what art could be, but the world of post-COVVID art.Is it reasonable to go to Miami or Hong Kong to see the same works and meet the same people?do we wonder.Obviously no, all this no longer makes sense.Traveling as often as before, and sometimes for such futile patterns, it's over.So, if I can no longer do five thousand kilometers to go see something that interests me, what can I go see ten kilometers around my home?In favor of this crisis, many have realized that the artistic ecosystem that we have around you is essential: as a collector or as a visitor, I am responsible for the galleries who are around me, artists whoare around me.This responsibility whose people, and in particular collectors, feel invested with the environment, was very palpable to gallery owners, last October.All the collectors I met there said to me: "I bought, I bought!" - With the air of saying:" I did my job!It is true that if collectors stop buying, it will become complicated for artists and galleries.

So yes: I think things will change in the world of art.And, mechanically, art itself will also change.The unrestrained globalization of art consumption has created an art form that corresponded to it: gigantic, made for biennials and to impress a certain audience, which was itself in a frantic consumption of novelty.I think and I hope that these changes will give artists who are not in the rehearsal of the logo, not in the race for spectacular and gigantism, but who may be in another mode.

Is there an artist in particular that it seems important to you to show today, and that you would like to present?

As we have also become a bookstore, I want to show Jean-Michel Alberola, an artist that I really like and with whom we have already carried out a project around the Beat Generation.He is a painter, very young retiree from the fine arts of Paris where he was for a long time an important teacher.Jean-Michel Alberola is someone very deep, who does nothing by calculation or career effect, but only things that he considers important and that are close to him.He lives in a relationship with the ecosystem that seems extremely healthy.He has a lithography workshop and works a lot on printed works and their dissemination at low cost.Two years ago, he notably made a magnificent exhibition at the Living Center, at the Louvre, on the readings of Walter Benjamin;And currently, he is working on Kafka, for an exhibition in Berlin.The exhibition he had made at the Louvre was precisely an exhibition of books, since it is that Walter Benjamin held a list of all the books he read.Jean-Michel Alberola searched and found the editions of the period of all the books that Walter Benjamin has read during the last year of his life-which are probably the editions in which he read them-and he has drawn up a kind of portraitof this man from his library.I find that it is a fairly beautiful image of a mental journey, and which has a strong resonance in the period we are going through today.

In the crisis we face, you seem to be invested with even greater responsibility ...

I think we are in a time when we really have to say that we are responsible for the art world that we manufacture.This is also why the question of ecological impact, for example, becomes so central.These are complex questions, but it is very healthy to say that there is a direct relationship between our behavior and the world in which we are evolving, because it is not a world that is imposed on us from the outside, it's a world that we make from the inside.From this perspective, artists as deep and human as Jean-Michel Alberola are, I find, excellent examples to highlight.

Galerie Loeve&Co, 15 Rue des Beaux Arts, 75006 Paris

https: // www.LOEVE & CO.com/

[1] Museum TV18/05/2020

[2] Knowledge of the arts of January 14, 2021