“Contemporary art is dead, long live the contemporary arts!”

“Popular art” is a sensitive term. I remember having to cut it from the title of an exhibition of Indian art I was organizing at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1998 because it was considered derogatory. But times change. Forms of art that once existed on the margins are moving to the center of contemporary art. Popular art, art brut, singular art and outsider art are increasingly coming to the fore in major international events such as the biennials in Venice, Moscow and Gwangju.

The Fondation Cartier plays a particularly active role in this process. Organized in 2001, the exhibition Un art populaire (“A Popular Art”) presented artists from all over the world, a global culture combining heirs of the historical avant-gardes and artists from local cultures, including Brazil, Africa and China. This juxtaposition of different cultures continued on the path mapped out by Les Magiciens de la Terre and in the spirit of the art modeste championed in France by Hervé Di Rosa. Boundaries between genres are becoming increasingly elastic and pushing them is one of the great concerns of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, which, under this moniker, summons a rich and eclectic mix of modes of expression.

Where did this access to diversity begin? In the 1940s André Malraux emphasized the popularizing role that photography could play by giving access to the finest works, dispensing with the need to travel to the four corners of the world to see them. A wonderful photo shows him piecing together his Imaginary Museum, standing amidst dozens of photographs of masterpieces spread out around him on the floor. Pictures of André Breton’s apartment in the 1960s reveal his cabinet of curiosities, juxtaposing works―the actual physical works―from every continent.

More than ever in human history, diversity is within our reach. Today, we are all in a position to constitute our own imaginary museum, our ideal cabinet of curiosities.

Histoires de voir, Show and Tell was the title of the second Fondation Cartier exhibition dedicated to art on the margins. Who were the makers of this popular art exhibition held there in 2012? Some were individuals who reinterpreted common scores, local skills and ritual practices in order to add in their own vision, something of themselves, of their particular sensibility and creativity. Virgil Ortiz, Jivya Soma Mashe and Isabel Mendès da Cunha come to mind here. Some claimed the status of artist but stood out because they were autodidacts. Often they came to this calling late in life, when they at last had time, or when what others thought no longer mattered. One thinks of Francisco da Silva, Nino or Mamadou Cissé. Sometimes, the works were the result of external interventions whereby other individuals (ethnologists, poets, enlightened enthusiasts) introduced media and materials not seen before in these isolated communities, such as paper and canvas, allowing them to preserve and disseminate their singular cultures, their ancestral modes of expression threatened with extinction. Here one thinks of Jangarh Singh Shyam, Djilatendo and, of course, Taniki, a young Yanomami shaman.

Un art populaire and Histoires de voir, Show and Tell. A popular art in the singular, in contradistinction to popular (or folk) arts. “Histories of seeing” in the plural in order to celebrate plurality. Singular and plural: the expression of our contemporaneity. “Contemporary art is dead, long live the contemporary arts!”

“Contemporary art” is a singular concept which designates art from the end of World War II to the late 1970s, whereas “contemporary arts” is a pluralistic concept that designates art from the end of the 1970s to the present.

Hervé Perdriolle, art critic, gallerist and curator.

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