362

infolageneralespum

la générale

en manufacture

LaGeMe

What we achieve, how and for which future?

Concept note – last revision: Jan. 2015

"Desire, which is at the center of Human experience,
is desire for nothing that you can name¹."Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre II, Le Désir, la vie ou la mort,
19 mai 1955, p 261-262, Seuil, 1978

How?

LaGeMe is a collection of artists and few social scientists or similar. Our main purpose is simply to make Art.

We decide that the way you make Art has an influence on Art, which is then not anymore the simple ‘result’ of human activity but mainly what we cannot speak for. It’s then not only and it is also the result of our work which is interesting and valuable. This process of making Art remain discreet without being hidden as it offers then an intimate relationship to Art which is often spectacular.

At the junction of theory and practice, thought is also included in the Art field that we invest in.

LaGeMe is then not a brand and we advise all our artists not to mention that their works has been produced with the support of LaGeMe (or of LGeLe²). This kind of weak visibility is a strong tool as it reduces a lot costs and indirect time spending activities. In a nutshell: our main character is the artists and their works, not the structure that support them even when this structure is part of the Art spheres. Reversely, you can consider that LaGeMe is a long and permanent exhibition pursuing similar modus operandi as ‘The Factory’ for instance. Unlikely ‘The Factory’, we make a point of being diverse, we don’t have any guru and we don’t have a clear aesthetical doctrine out of what is drafted here³.

We also decided that we will not have any bureaucratic apparatus and that we reduce the paper work (including archives) to a minimal level. Each artist that wants to document this or that is of course free to do it.

We refuse to fall into petrifaction and then remain temporarily here or there. This apparent fragility⁴ is one of our strong points.

We don’t have commissions deciding who will or will not join us. Each artist is free to invite but then is responsible for the invitee⁵.

We sometimes do or host formal exhibitions but most of our exhibitions are spontaneous. We don’t keep a record of these exhibitions.

Our relationship with institutions is relaxed.

What we achieve?

First, as already underlined, the way we achieve what we achieve is already an achievement.

Then, we host and hosted artists - as members or not - that produced numerous works exhibited in several public and private spaces in France, including our, and abroad.

Our actions are the actions of our members. They are permeable to several ways of joining distances.

The future is open

Overall future is made of coldness, fears and desires.

We have the desire to comeback downtown, to develop also projects abroad (Tokyo, Moscow, LA…), to move and change, to see new faces, to meet again with old ones, to be surprised, to help (yes, to help), to remain tender one to the other, to stay warm and on top of all to keep being not afraid.

The overall future that we see is not the one that we support, at least not fully.

We are not Lacanians neither now nor in the future but it happens that we read it (speaking of future).

------We warmly thank French Ministry of Culture and the Manufacture de Sèvres for their crucial support that was never, not at any single moment, intrusive. They not only respect our independence, they obviously understand the value of it---------

1 « Le désir, fonction centrale à toute l'expérience humaine, est désir de rien de nommable. »

2 LGeLe is one historical channel of “La Générale”.

3 Some analysts see a family likeness between works of our members see infra.

4 We build the notion of ‘spum’ to help us to identified lines of strength of fragility. How do we manage to stand strongly on very tiny legs?

5 We still ask our artists to give a priority to foreign artists and to women but they make their choices freely.