Exhibition www.art-language.org 22.03 – 30.06.2022

Art & Language, Dialectical Materialism, 1974

From 22 March to 30 June 2022, the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art presents a new exhibition devoted to  Art & Language. Based on a body of work ranging from the 1960s to the present day, the exhibition examines the place of the digital, the web and the media in the work of Art & Language. Art & Language’s early interest in computer language is the starting point for a reflection on the duality between work of art and art object.

The tour unfolds over the three levels of the museum and reveals the latest acquisitions from the Philippe Méaille collection.

 

Tomorrow’s Shelter Didier Fiúza Faustino 03.07-30.11.2021

didier faustino

From 3 July 2021, the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art presents Tomorrow’s Shelter, an exhibition by Didier Fiúza Faustino.
Acknowledging the irreversibility of climate change, Didier Fiúza Faustino imagines habitable structures that will allow humanity to develop in this new environment: Tomorrow’s Shelter. Artist and architect, Didier Fiúza Faustino lives and works in Paris and Lisbon. He has been teaching architecture at the AA School in London since 2011.

Post-apocalyptic architecture
Tomorrow’s shelter envisages how people will live, inhabit and move around once the effects of climate change become tangible. The draft report of the IPCC published in June 2021, setting a deadline of 2050. Extreme temperatures, rising sea levels, species extinction: what kind of architecture should be used in response to this paradigm shift? In a break with the major architectural trends of the last few centuries, the modules of Tomorrow’s Shelter avoid light. Cut off from the outside world, these closed structures invite you to withdraw.
Like impenetrable fortresses without windows, impervious to the elements, Didier Fiúza Faustino’s devices are composed of foundations and platforms. The former house individual living cells, while the latter constitute the common living and
activity spaces for the climate refugees of tomorrow.

Out of action

« What has interested me for a long time is a kind of dichotomy between architecture and space.  »

These protective architectures reflect the impossible cohabitation between man and nature. Failure results in the isolation of man. He must be removed from nature behind impenetrable walls, the environment must be protected from his destructive activities and a new bilateral relationship model must be proposed. This is the thread that guides us through the endless labyrinths of Tomorrow’s Shelter.
Although cut off from the outside world, bodies are free to move. Will man, however, be able to renounce forever his thirst for conquest, his need to control and exploit the environment?
The exhibition at the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art, shows six of the 125 existing modules, in the form of scale models.

Curator: Christophe Le Gac.

Concerts Les Musicales de Montsoreau 16.07 and 23.07.2021

16 July – 8.30pm
« L’Epouse du Soleil or Well, sing, Maintenon!  »
A recital that will be performed by a trio including two opera performers! A must-see!
Enraged Opera Trio
Anne Pareuil, mezzo alto – Thomas Morris, tenor – Mario Raskin, harpsichordist
Vivaldi, Lully, Tchaikovsky, Massenet, Scarlatti, Mozart, Offenbach…
A comedy-opera of a new and breathtaking concept (a world premiere!) transposing into the modern world the setbacks of the Grand Siècle… featuring Madame de Maintenon, the Wife of the Sun, in a funny and serious combination of music from various periods. This lyrical concert, set with her timeless maxims, will be performed by an impressive trio!

23 July 8.30pm
« Russian bow, French notes »
Russian Duo Sivkov – Mndoyants
Piano – Cello
Lev Sivkov, cello – Nikita Mndoyants, piano
Debussy, Fauré, Dutilleux, Saint-Saëns
With Lev Sivkov, the « brilliant » young 1st cello of the Zurich Opera.

 

Information and bookings
Opening planned for June, subject to governmental clarification concerning the summer concerts.
Saumur Val de Loire Tourist Office:
in Montsoreau: purchase at the counter and sale by telephone on 02 41 51 70 22
in Saumur, Fontevraud, Montreuil-Bellay, Doué-en-Anjou, Gennes-Val-de-Loire : purchase at the counter
on the spot on the day of the concert, from 7.30 pm, within the limits of available seats (payment by cheque or cash)

Prices 
18 € : numbered seats Château and Choir of the Church
16 € : numbered seats Upper Nave (Church)
13 € : free seating in the Lower Nave (Church)
Inhabitants of Montsoreau: 13 €.
Members of Ligeriana Musicale: 13 €.
Free for children under 18 (all concerts)

1996. Kenneth Goldsmith 22.05-01.07.2021

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of UbuWeb (1996-2021), the now legendary website founded by Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art is dedicating an exhibition to the New York artist, ex-art director, ex-sculptor, ex-artist, ex-poet, and now author.
First laureate of poetry at MoMA, Kenneth Goldsmith is one of the major figures of post-internet contemporary art, and one of the fathers of « uncreative writing », a discipline he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

“ Plagiarize your plagiarizers.
Bootleg your bootleggers.
Pirate your pirates.”

 

Ubu, King of the avant-garde
In the early days of the web, several years before the appearance of Wikipedia (2001), Kenneth Goldsmith created the UbuWeb site in homage to Alfred Jarry, a free platform providing free access to avant-garde artworks that were previously unavailable on the web or difficult to consult. Initially an artisanal archiving site, UbuWeb has enriched its corpus of artworks to such an extent that it now rivals the world’s greatest museums.
By applying the rules of streaming to artistic production, this pirate site offers Internet users the possibility of downloading an unfathomable quantity of texts, posters, historical or unpublished videos of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Clandestine and pirate site, defying all copyright rules, UbuWeb registers today millions of monthly connections.
1996, the exhibition at the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art questions the complex and multiple status of UbuWeb, which is at once an archiving site, a digital library, a virtual museum and a militant work of art.

 

The opera of life
The 1996 exhibition opens with Soliloquy, a conceptual piece created by Goldsmith the same year.
In a large all-over, the installation reproduces all the words spoken and recorded by the artist during the week of April 15 to 21, 1996, thus laying the foundations for the great work of UbuWeb.
Divided into 7 acts, like an opera, Soliloquy is framed by the unity of time (7 days), action (Goldsmith as the sole creator of reality), and place (New York), echoing Andy Warhol’s A: A Novel, in which the artist recorded and transcribed a friend’s monologue for 24 hours.
Beyond the writing challenge, Soliloquy represents, Goldsmith questions language as an environment and its potential to materialize.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy, 1996

“I want people to feel and retain the weight of language. I want them to feel the materiality of language.”

 

The Odyssey of the Net
1996 shows a possible parallel between UbuWeb and the Homeric epic. By its extent, its architecture and its constantly expanding form, UbuWeb appears as one of the largest museum archives ever assembled. Its history constitutes a great epic poem of the creation of the net, inscribed in the long time of collection and accumulation.
Just as Homere’s work occupies a major place in Greek literature because it alone represents the epic genre at that time, so UbuWeb has become a unique work, with complex ramifications, in search of universality.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Printing out the Internet, installation view, LABOR, Mexico City, July 2013. Courtesy of LABOR, Mexico City

 

“ If every word spoken every day in New York City somehow materialized into a snowflake, there would be a blizzard every day.”

 

For a free culture
Influenced by the use of samples in hip-hop culture, Kenneth Goldsmith focuses his work as an artist on a particular aspect of conceptual practice: appropriation.
For Day (2003), he typed out every word that appeared in the September 1, 2000 edition of the New York Times newspaper.
In the age of the Internet, Goldsmith advocates the massive use of databases, programming and intentional plagiarism. The writer is now the one who appropriates existing works, makes massive use of copy and paste, chews and digests the words of others and proposes them in a new form, in a new context, thus putting forward the relative importance of subjectivity and personal expression.

 

1996. Kenneth Goldsmith
22.05 – 01.07.2021
Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art
Passage du marquis de Geoffre
49730 Montsoreau
presse.chateaudemontsoreau@gmail.com
7j/7j de 12 a.m – 6 p.m

2021: ORLAN

The François Morellet Prize 2021 awarded to ORLAN

On Tuesday, February 16, 2021, after the jury’s deliberation, the François Morellet Prize 2021 was awarded to ORLAN for her book Autobiographie. Strip-tease, tout sur sa vie, tout sur son art, to be published in May 2021 by Gallimard.
Under the honorary presidency of Danielle Morellet, ORLAN’s autobiographical narrative was unanimously designated the winner of the François Morellet Prize 2021, after reading a digital proof of the manuscript.
The jury, composed of Philippe Méaille, president of the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art, Marie-Caroline Chaudruc, vice-president of the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art, and Jean-Maurice Belayche, co-founder of the Journées nationales du Livre et du Vin, also wished to pay tribute to ORLAN’s extraordinary artistic career.
The award ceremony will take place on Sunday, October 10, 2021 at the Saumur theater during the 25th edition of the Journées nationales du Livre et du Vin, under the theme of « ivresse littéraire ».

 

ORLAN

ORLAN is one of the most important French artists internationally recognized.
She uses sculpture, photography, artificial intelligence and robotics (she has created a robot in her image that speaks with her voice), performance, video, 3D, video games, augmented reality as well as scientific and medical techniques such as surgery and biotechnology.

ORLAN constantly and radically changes the rules, deregulating conventions and ready-to-think.
She opposes natural, social and political determinism, all forms of domination, male supremacy, religion, cultural segregation, racism…
Always mixed with humor, sometimes parody or even grotesque, her work questions the phenomena of society and challenges the pre-established codes.

In 2003 ORLAN was elevated to the rank of Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture Jean-Jacques Aillagon.

In 2010 she was honored with the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite by the Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand.

In 2015, ORLAN was invited in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, USA, as a researcher.

In 2016, ORLAN was awarded the E-reputation prize, designating the artist most observed and commented on the web.

In 2017 ORLAN was awarded the Female Excellence Award for all her work as an artist by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In 2018, ORLAN received the 100 Heroines Award by The Royal Photographic Society.

In 2019, ORLAN is honored with the special Woman of the Year award, given by Prince Albert II of Monaco.

In 2020, ORLAN is honored with the medal of the National Order of the Legion of Honor.

In 2021, ORLAN wrote her autobiography « ORLAN, STRIP-TEASE : TOUT SUR SA VIE, TOUT SUR SON ART » published by Gallimard and received the François Morellet Prize.

Arno Gonzalez Live Electronic Music 30.11.2020

To be 20 years old in the Loire Valley: The Château of Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art and Arno Gonzalez celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Loire Valley UNESCO. 

November 30, 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of the inclusion of the Loire Valley in the World Heritage Sites List by UNESCO. The Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art welcomes Arno Gonzalez for a live electronic music show in collaboration with the Loire Valley Mission.

Closed to the public due to the health situation, the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art shows its support to the actors of the current music scene strongly impacted by the crisis, by giving carte blanche to Arno Gonzalez.

Arno Gonzalez will improvise this live, at sunset, from the terraces of the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art.
The live event will be broadcasted on November 30th at 4:45 pm on the Facebook page of the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art : @chateaudemontsoreau.

Produced by Linkx TV in collaboration with Interaview Productions & Spoon Productions.

Arno Gonzalez
Dj, producer, remixer, Arno Gonzalez began his career in 1998.
From 1998 to 2001, he practices the job of dj and begins to be interested in computer-assisted music. He practices a dancing electronic music, always related to house and techno, sometimes venturing into melodic regions close to electronica.
He performs on international stages: Rave On snow (Austria), Astropolis (Brest), the Rex Club (Paris), Panoramas (Morlaix), Piknic Electronik (Montreal), SXSW Festival (Austin), HSPTL Club (Russia).
Today his discography is available on labels such as Sudbeat, Obenmusik, Time Has Changed, Natural Rhythm, Etia Creations, Enjoy, Grrreat Recordings, QUBIQ Platinium Series, Brique Rouge.
Always looking for projects that motivate his creativity, he collaborates with many artists: Carlos Nilmmns (Coccoon, Trax, Planet-E / Glasgow), Camille Rodriguez (B-Trax / Paris), or more recently the world beatbox champion Alexinho under their alias FURYO.

(photo credit: Christophe Froissard)

https://www.facebook.com/arnogonzalezmusic/
https://soundcloud.com/arnogonzalez
https://www.instagram.com/arnogonzalez
https://www.twitch.tv/arnogonzalez

Secret exhibition 13.11.2020 – 02.02.2021

Lockdown 2: The Château of Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art opens a secret exhibition.

 

The Coronavirus crisis has led the French government once again to close cultural venues from 30 October 2020. This measure has silenced us and forced us to cancel our programme.

It amounts to an involuntary censorship of the cultural activity of the Museum.

A secret exhibition will open on the 13 November 2020 at the Chateau of Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art.

There are at least two ways in which a Secret Exhibition might be held. One way is for an institution or gallery to arrange an exhibition both secluded from the public and unannounced. Another is for an exhibition to be secluded from a public to whom its existence is nevertheless announced.

As the Chateau de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art is an institution normally open to the public, it is appropriate that the existence of our secret exhibition should be made known.

The exhibition will be accessible neither to the general public nor to professionals.

Both the content of the exhibition and the names of the artists involved will be kept secret.

A catalogue will be published at a later date.

Exhibition curated in collaboration with Eric de Chassey, Director of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.


Secret Exhibition
13.11.2020 – 02.02.2021
Chateau of Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art
presse.chateaudemontsoreau@gmail.com

 

 

Jacques Halbert. Cerises 10.07 – 13.11.2020

« The subject may not be so essential,
which is why I could paint cherries all my life ».
(Jacques Halbert)

 

Pornography-proof monochrome
In 1975, when he was twenty years old, Jacques Halbert wrote a founding text of his artistic approach: « How to paint a cherry ». In it, he describes step by step the process of making a cherry painting, before maliciously concluding: « If you have followed these instructions to the letter, you have before your eyes a beautiful cherry painted by you. So you are an artist. » This text is doubly groundbreaking, firstly because Jacques Halbert will indeed paint this cherry tirelessly all his life, but also because he sees his painting as a tool to fundamentally change the relationship that people traditionally have with the work of art.

The « cherry » subject is banal, even distressing if we place it in the context of the art world of the 1970s when Minimal Art and Conceptual Art reigned as undisputed masters. Yet everyone loves cherries. They herald summer, childhood parties, they are bright, juicy, sweet, red. It is also a feminine name, its shapes are suggestive, and its color brings back the color of lacquered leather. Confronting the cherry with the most sophisticated painting that modern art has produced, i.e. monochrome, will become for Jacques Halbert the missing link between art and life.
From then on, Jacques Halbert never ceases to test, destabilise and weaken the monochrome with this systematic method of surgical precision. He declines this figurative motif according to regular rhythms or random compositions, and for forty-five years has been pursuing a minimalist work that engages the visitor in a profound redefinition of painting.

The cherry, at first glance candid, is a bearer of violence that is underlined by its carmine red colour, the colour of danger. Like a drop of indelible blood, or a spot of lipstick on an immaculate surface, it is the forbidden gesture that shakes the purity of the monochrome, taking away its mystery, desacralizing the painting.
This duality of the cherry is stated by Jacques Halbert as follows: « The subject may not be so essential, that’s why I can paint cherries all my life.  » Essaimed on the monochrome, like so many mines on a wasteland, they are the prolegomena of a radical conception of contemporary painting.

Jacques Halbert’s work is marked by the ambivalence of language and the world. His departure for the United States only amplifies the confusion. While in France this motif is erotic in addition to being a feminine first name, in the United States the word « Cherry » designates at the same time the fruit, but also very precisely the sex of the woman. The monochromatic chaste is the victim of pornographic attacks which consist in « painting cherries, everywhere, all the time, and thinking only about it ». The tail of the cherry, always associated with the fruit, complicates and amplifies the pornographic scope of the work, as in Il aime les cerises (1977) where the gender of the model, although clearly stated in the title, is questioned by its representation.

The good taste
His penchant for staging his character provoked immediate support from the Fluxus and Eat Art artists of New York, but the density of his individual mythology makes it difficult to link him to an artistic movement.
Owner successively of the Art Café in New York (1985) which became the meeting place of the artistic avant-garde (Ben Vautier, Jeff Koons, Daniel Spoerri, Andy Warhol, François Morellet…), then of the Magnifik Gallery in Brooklyn where he exhibited Nicolas L., Olivier Mosset, Carolee Schneemann or Alison Knowles, Jacques Halbert never ceases to undo and deconstruct the dominant idea of the artist as a prescriber of good taste. His work, free and freed from conventions, parodies and denounces the bourgeois conception of art according to which the artist is the guarantor of a definition of Beauty. He himself defines this neo-dadaist posture as « a manifesto of good taste ».

Just a bowl of cherries
Jacques Halbert creates a prolific, lively and festive work that questions the value of art, its interest or importance. Simply confronting art and life, his work plunges the visitor into a journey towards permanent creation. In the film made during the New York Fashion Show, in the creative effervescence of the New York underground of the 1980s, the body replaces the monochrome and serves as a medium for painting, creating a confusion between eroticism, village party and gender.
Questioning the mysteries of art and life, with a seriousness never devoid of humour, allows him to evoke the limits of our condition and the role of the artist in the creative process.
We would be tempted to conclude, as in the song Life is just a bowl of cherries : « Don’t take it serious / it’s too mysterious « .

Jacques Halbert . Cerises
Curated by Alain Julien-Laferrière as deliberately non-retrospective, Jacques Halbert’s monographic exhibition, Cerises, at the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art, offers visitors a plunge into the heart of the work of a personality outside the norm of contemporary art, marked by the artist’s interventions in the public space and his confrontations with monochrome. From the archives, drawings and sketches in the first room to the in situ and all over intervention in the last room, the exhibition develops the work of Jacques Halbert, complex, free and breaking the codes of modern painting. It shows the tireless repetition of the motif, the shifts, the variations, and specifies its role in the investigations and the work of Jacques Halbert.

 

JACQUES HALBERT
CERISES
10 July – 13 November 2020
Curator: Alain Julien-Laferrière
Open 7 days a week from 10am to 7pm.

Yoga with Jérôme Oliveira 25 july / 22 august 2021

Sunday July 25 and  August 22 11:00 a.m.
Learn to relax and breathe

The Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art opens its exhibition spaces to the practice of yoga and invites you to become one with the place.

A yoga teacher for about ten years, a graduate of the French School of Yoga with a specialization in anatomy and breath development, Jérôme Oliveira has been practicing yoga since his teenage years. Expert of well-being in France, he organizes conferences in Paris for the general public with international personalities such as: Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle or James Redfield. Also editor of the collection of books Bien-Etre published by J’ai Lu / Flammarion, he directs documentaries for television and portraits of contemporary artists.

Provide comfortable clothing.
Duration of the course: 1h30
Price: 25 Euros, equipment provided + book by Jérôme Oliveira Brûlant d’amour published by Eyrolles.
Reservations: 02 41 67 12 60 / contact@chateau-montsoreau.com

HOME FROM HOME 13.04-13.07.2020

The Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art maintains its exhibition programme despite the health situation.
The exhibition Home from Home will open on April 13, 2020 and will take place in your home.

From Monday 13 April, it will be possible to download an exhibition kit from the museum’s website. The kit includes 12 works of art in digital format, which can be printed out and assembled according to the instructions provided. Anyone with a printer, a pair of scissors and a tube of glue can set up the exhibition at home, turning their house or apartment into a museum and its inhabitants into organizers.
The exhibition Home from Home has been imagined by the conceptual group Art & Language, and the works all come from the collection of the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art.

#homefromhome

Should our website be saturated, you can request the exhibition kit by email at: contact@chateau-montsoreau.com.

Kenneth Goldsmith François Morellet Prize October 11th 2020

Born in 2016 from the will of Jean-Maurice Belayche, Philippe Méaille and François Morellet, the François Morellet Prize is the only prize to which François Morellet agreed to give his name.
Every year, it rewards a literary work or an author for his commitment to contemporary art and is part of a collaboration between the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of contemporary art and the National Book and Wine Days (Saumur).

On 11 October 2020, the François Morellet Prize will be awarded to Kenneth Goldsmith for his book Duchamp is my lawyer. The polemics, pragmatics, and poetics of Ubuweb, published in 2020 by Columbia University Press.

In 1996, when the web is relatively new, Kenneth Goldsmith created the UbuWeb platform to publish hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. Starting as a sharing site featuring works from a relatively obscure literary movement, UbuWeb has become an essential archive of avant-garde and experimental literature, film and music from the 20th and 21st centuries. Thanks to this site, Internet users around the world now have access to canonical works by artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs and Jean-Luc Godard.

In Duchamp is my lawyer, Goldsmith looks back at the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how works are archived, consumed and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates copyright issues and how it challenges the history of the avant-garde. The book also describes the growth of other « shadow libraries » and discusses the artists whose works align with UbuWeb’s goals, aesthetics and ethics. It concludes by contrasting UbuWeb’s commitment to the free culture movement with the current guardians of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon and Spotify.

Kenneth Goldsmith is the first MoMA poetry laureate, founder and publisher of UbuWeb, professor of Uncreative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and host of New York radio station WFMU. He advocates for writing that is plagiarized, copied and transcribed. Considered a major figure in contemporary creative writing, he is also seen as a paradox when he is received at the White House as a writer, when he has publicly admitted to stealing other people’s words and advocating plagiarism.
Following the model of Conceptual Art, Kenneth Goldsmith develops his texts according to new forms of installations and broadcasts, reflecting on the new possibilities offered by the digital and internet.
He is notably the author of Kenneth Goldsmith: theory (2015) and Uncreative writing: managing language in the digital age, (2011).

In 2020, the Pays de la Loire region joins forces with the National Book and Wine Days and the Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art to award the François Morellet Prize.

CHARLOTTE MOORMAN. THINK CRAZY 12.11.2019 – 03.07.2020

From November 12, 2019, the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art will devote an exhibition to Charlotte Moorman, a true legend of international contemporary creation.

Charlotte Moorman. Think Crazy moves away from the simplistic image of « topless cellist » that Charlotte Moorman has had since her performance of Nam June Paik’s « Sextronic Opera » to present the unclassifiable, iconoclastic and radical artist who is at once cellist, performer, event organizer and mediator of the avant-garde.

The « Joan of Arc of the New Music »

Because of her militant attitude, Charlotte Moorman was very early nicknamed the « Joan of Arc of New Music » by the composer Edgar Varèse.
After her academic training, Charlotte Moorman freed herself from the straitjacket of classical music to propose a vision of contemporary music based on the porosity between artistic practices.
She is close to John Cage, who developed a music in which the sounds of the world are used as a source of creation. She, for her part, develops a new relationship with interpretation, introducing a creative approach.
At every opportunity, Charlotte Moorman enthusiastically questions the frontier between music and visual arts and collaborates with the most innovative artists of her time: Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys.

The instrument of desire

Whatever the proposal, Charlotte Moorman executes it with precision.

In her performances, Charlotte Moorman emphasizes the physical and even carnal relationship between her body and her instrument. Both are sometimes put to the test, as when she plays naked on a cello carved out of a block of ice (Ice Cello, 1976) or when she plays on a bomb transformed into a cello (Bomb Cello, 1965).

She nevertheless manages to shock public opinion and to be arrested for indecent assault in the middle of a performance when, in 1967 during the Sextronic Opera with Nam June Paik, she takes off her clothes and continues to play bare-breasted. Many feminist artists (with the exception of her long-time friend Carolee Schneemann) have publicly denounced her, believing that she had too willingly exposed her body.

Sometimes a foreign body appears, such as that of Nam June Paik (Child of the Cello), which is interposed between the concert performer’s body and her cello.
If the body can be used as an instrument in the service of music, on the other hand, it is never instrumentalized.
Charlotte Moorman ironizes the idea of beauty conveyed by classical painting and denounces society’s obsession with the female body. In a photo taken for Miss City Beautiful in 1952, she already showed her sumptuous beauty with a casual and amused detachment. Suspended in the sky with balloons (Sky Kiss) by Jim McWilliams in 1976, in front of the Sydney Opera House, she plays her instrument with intensity, dressed in a concert dress in the image of a classical concert performer.

« Think Crazy »

In 1963, Charlotte Moorman created the « Festival d’avant-garde »… a festival that will last for 15 years. Programming the events, it invites artists (filmmakers, dancers, poets, musicians…) both known and unknown to invest New York City. From 1966 onwards, the festival ceased to take place in traditional theatres and moved to the public space (the J.F.Kennedy ferry, Central Park, the Wards and Mill Rock Islands, the 69th Infantry Regiment Arsenal or the Shea Stadium), thus setting a precedent for future major festivals of this kind.
Like a motto inscribed on the banners of the Avant-Garde Festival, « Think Crazy » by Polish artist Marek Konieczny is an exhortation to boldness and creativity. Combining his classical training with the avant-garde, Moorman once remarked: « I don’t feel like destroying a tradition. I feel like I’m creating something new. »

The exhibition

Charlotte Moorman. Think Crazy focuses on two main themes: Moorman’s repertoire as an artist and her work as founder and organizer of the Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival. It includes a wide variety of works: photos, videos, archives, ephemera from the artist’s private archives.
Several iconic works mark the route, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, which Charlotte Moorman is said to have performed nearly 700 times in her career and during which the audience is invited to cut off her red dress to take a piece with them; or Bomb Cello, where she appears playing the cello on a bomb with braided flowers as a bow.
The ephemera from her personal archives bear witness to a prolific production, as do all the posters for the 15 editions of the avant-garde festival.

AGNES THURNAUER 25.06-25.10.2016

Agnès Thurnauer, an internationally renowned Franco-Swiss artist who had the honour of hanging a gallery of feminized portraits on the entrance wall of the Centre Pompidou for two years and then at the SAM in Seattle and the CCBB in Rio de Janeiro, will be visiting the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art from 25 June to 25 October 2016.
Her protean work makes her unclassifiable in the contemporary artistic universe and gives full meaning to the retrospective exercise.

The answer that Agnes Thurnauer gives today is in the form of a story, that of painting, which she disguises by feminizing or masculinizing the first names of the greatest heroes of Western painting. In the largest room of the Château, she presents a gallery of Portraits, one of a series of those already presented at the Centre Pompidou, offering a panorama of the history of painting from Nicole Poussin (specially created for the exhibition) to Annie Warhol, including Roberte Mapplethorpe.

Each of these « Grandeur Nature » Portraits, as Thurnauer calls them, is an opportunity for the viewer to remember, or to encounter a work of art, through the artist’s name, emphasizing the meaning and importance of the patronymic. This new complex first name/patronym becomes the form of painting, and makes it possible to extract painting from the notion of gender, to tell another art story: an art story where the creator of the work is no longer in a male or female role, but in a painting role. A role in which he or she embodies this painting that may well not have a genre. A way of saying that in any case this story does not belong to men alone.

TRIBUTE TO FRANCOIS MORELLET 13.12.2016

From 13 December, the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art will pay tribute to François Morellet, father of Minimalism, who died this year.
Following the tribute paid on 7 November at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art  would like to pay tribute to this artist from Cholet, whose international reputation has enabled French art to shine on a global scale.
François Morellet’s production is closely linked to the history of Conceptual Art, the basis of the permanent collection of the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art.
After having created the François Morellet Prize in April 2016 in collaboration with the Department of Maine et Loire and the Journées nationales du Livre et du Vin, Château of Montsoreau, a new museum of contemporary art in the Loire Valley, is putting a spotlight on François Morellet’s work by installing a work on the façade of the building dedicated to temporary exhibitions.

The artistic gesture

Passing through the glass walls of the five French windows of the building hosting the temporary exhibitions, a work entitled « Door-to-door constrained curve » representing a lemon yellow adhesive curve, will be installed on December 13, 2016, in collaboration with Danielle and Frédéric Morellet.
It was in 1969 in Amsterdam (Galerie Swart) that François Morellet created the first ephemeral adhesives that he glued directly to the walls of emblematic buildings: the Galliera Museum (1971), the Kunstverein in Hamburg (1971), the Fine Arts Museum in Grenoble (1972), the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden (1977).
In 1954, François Morellet painted for the first time an oil painting on four wooden panels: « Arc de cercle brisé en 4 » which became a very representative principle of his systems.
In 1980 in Duizel in the Netherlands, François Morellet also applied it to architecture, on a set of buildings: « Fragmentation of lines and neon curves ».
According to this principle dear to the artist, the door-to-door constraint curve brings the different intervention surfaces closer together, then draws one or more lines on the whole. These intervention areas are then removed to find their initial positions (or real positions in terms of architecture).

François Morellet, father of Minimalism
Painter, engraver and sculptor, François Morellet is considered as one of the major actors of geometric abstraction in the second half of the 20th century.
A pioneer of systematic painting in France, his work is in line with geometric and constructivist art.
For Morellet, the work of art refers only to itself. It aims to control the creative process and demystify the romantic mythology of art and the artist. The rigorous application of the notions of geometry brings over the years a spatial approach that places him at the forefront of concrete or minimal art.
International artist using multiple supports (canvases, paintings, adhesives, neon lights, building surfaces…), he has been highly regarded since the 1970s in France, Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States, manifesting himself in a large number of public and private co

FICTION 28.09.2016-03.01.2017

The only Château de la Loire built on the riverbed, Château de Montsoreau has been a museum of contemporary art since 2016.  This historic castle, which today is part of the present through contemporary creation, was the subject of study for students at the Camondo School during the 2015/2016 academic year, who imagined its future through design and architecture.  From 29 September, the temporary exhibition FICTION presents the projects awarded by the jury at the end of this collaboration.

Reinventing heritage
In 2015, the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art was entrusted as a subject of study to the future designers and interior designers of the Camondo School to reinvent its spaces in line with the new vocation of the place. The problem was to find a balance between the monument, classified as a Historic Monument, the requirements of contemporary hanging and the expectations of the public. In this spirit, the students also worked on the museum furniture, scenography and access to the monument

15 ambition projects
To understand the volumes, the 58 fifth-year students went to the castle in September 2015 while it was still under renovation. During the year, the students asked themselves about the problems of traffic in the monument and the surrounding areas: the restaurant, the ticket office, the shop in order to reflect the new identity of the place.  The projects of the 15 students on display reflect the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art’s desire to improve the visitor experience and meet the expectations of the public.

PROTEST 1517-2017, 31.10.2017

Just 500 years ago Martin Luther (1483-1546) changed the course of Western civilization by placing his 95 theses on the doors of the Wittenberg church, violently condemning the indulgence trade practiced by the Catholic Church. Through this performative gesture, which takes over the urban space and addresses the whole world, Luther accuses, challenges and affirms his convictions. This gesture would give birth to the Protestant church.
On the occasion of this anniversary date, the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art gave carte blanche to today’s protesters – artists, philosophers, museum directors – to each create a poster.

From poster to book
PROTEST is an edition containing a presentation text and six posters.
PROTEST is sent by post to museums and art centres around the world so that they can display one or more of these posters on their doors if they so wish.
The existence of PROTEST in the urban space is therefore conditioned by the willingness of museums to accept to display these reflections and manifestos in their own space.
The display of the works in the urban space will be relayed on social networks on October 31.
Published in 1000 copies, PROTEST is curated by Fabien Vallos and co-edited with Mix Editions.

Around PROTEST
The PROTEST edition will be launched twice, one at the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art on 31 October 2017 (anniversary date), the other on 2 November at Florence Loewy Bookstore Paris.
A study day organized in partnership with the ESBA-TALM of Angers will take place on November 22nd at the Château of Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art..

In Berlin, Kassel and Wittenberg, the exhibition Luther und die avant-garde focuses not on the historical figure of Luther but on his ability to shake up the established order to propose a new vision of society.

31/10/17, 6:30 pm: launch and dedication.
Librairie du Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art.

02/11/17, 6:30 pm: launch and dedication.
Florence Loewy Bookstore.
9 rue de Thorigny, Paris 3.
www.florenceloewy.com/bookstore

22/11/17, 10am-5pm: study day.
Château of Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art.
in partnership with ESBA TALM Angers

ETTORE SOTTSASS DESIGNER OF THE WORLD 04.04-20.06.2017

credit photo: Bruno Gecchelin

The Château de Montsoreau – Musum of contemporary art dedicates an exhibition to Ettore Sottsass, a radical artist, designer, architect, ceramist, draftsman, photographer, who willingly breaks the bourgeois codes linked to the object.
Three times winner of the prestigious Compasso d’Oro, Sottsass is one of the major players of the groups, Antidesign (1966), Global Tools (1973), Alchimia (1976), Memphis (1981) and creates the Studio Sottsass Associati (1982).
His works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, MoMA, Metropolitan Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum.

« Design is not about shaping a more or less stupid product for a more or less luxurious industry. For me design is a way of debating life. » (Ettore Sottsass)

Between revolution and emancipation
In his works, Ettore Sottsass takes a look at the world that reflects a new relationship between man and object. Considering that the object influences more or less directly the one who owns it, he creates furniture that is no longer defined only by its function but by its ability to create an imagination. He wants to « bring culture and free individual creativity together ».
With the series Foto dal Finestrino published every month in Domus magazine, Sottsass, a sharp observer, questions himself about the world around him and questions it. This poetry of the world, palpable in the object, will become the marker of a claiming thought and an era.

Icon creator
The objects created by Sottsass are representative of a changing society, a liberation from codes and conformity.
Inspired by Pop Art, the Valentine typewriter, manufactured by the firm Olivetti, is a revolution in its own right. Red as a lipstick, light as a handbag, sexy even in its shapes, it dares to reveal its mechanism and finally tells the story of the society of the late 60s.
Brigitte Bardot appears with her Valentine in hand in the film Les femmes de Jean Aurel (1969), David Bowie composes his planetary hit Let’s Dance on his brilliant keys and in Orange Mécanique, Stanley Kubrick places one in Malcolm MacDowell’s room. The furniture created by the Memphis group also represents a break with bourgeois ideas, through its new associations of synthetic materials such as Abet Laminati’s laminate with luxurious materials such as lacquer or gilded wood.

Designer of the world
Voluntarily not retrospective, the exhibition proposed by the Château de Montsoreau retraces this conception of design as a concrete materialization of a philosophy of life, free and uncomplicated.
In collaboration with the Museo Alessi, Kartell, Abet Laminati, galerie XXO and Akmé, the exhibition looks back at the founding experience in the electronics company Olivetti, the exuberance of Memphis and the questioning of the language of architecture in the 1970s.

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND ON 15 SEPTEMBER 2019 19:30

crédit photo Thierry Cantalupo

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
Sunday, September 15 at 7:30 pm
Castle courtyard

The Possibility of an Island is the story of a comedian, Daniel. In the 2010’s, he became a millionaire by writing vulgar and politically incorrect shows, somewhere between Dieudonné and Bigard. One evening, he falls in love with Isabelle, editor-in-chief of Lolita magazine. She
is thirty-seven years old, he’s thirty-nine. They married and then retired to a huge property in Andalusia. The years go by and their love does not survive. Towards the end of his life, Daniel met Esther. From the very first moments of this encounter, he understood that he would experience total happiness with her and that the loss of that happiness would kill him.

Adapted and directed by Léo Cohen-Paperman

Bookings on 02 53 20 32 99 or on the online ticket office 
Rate of your choice: 
5€, 10€ or 15€. In an ideal of cultural democratization, the NTP has been offering a single rate of €5 per place since 2009.
Aujourd´hui, to preserve the festival, the NTP proposes a new pricing system where everyone can choose the price of their place without having to justify their situation.

The New Popular Theatre

Le Nouveau Théâtre Populaire is a collective, which created in 2009, an open-air theatre festival in Fontaine-Guérin (49). The festival is growing, until it alternates between six shows per edition. It takes place every summer in August.
The company has also grown over the years. Today, it has twenty members: Pauline Bolcatto, Valentin Boraud, Julien Campani, Philippe Canalès, Baptiste Chabauty, Léo Cohen-Paperman, Thomas Chrétien, Emilien Diard-Detœuf, Clovis Fouin, Frédéric Jessua, Joseph Fourez, Sophie Guibard, Elsa Grzeszczak, Lazare Herson- Macarel, Lola Lucas, Morgane Nairaud, Antoine Philippot, Julien Romelard, Claire Sermonne and Sacha Todorov.
The troupe operates democratically, all decisions are made collectively, but each show has a director who retains his or her artistic uniqueness. Without wishing to assert dogma, the New Popular Theatre recognizes itself in Jean Vilar’s values: great texts, low prices, decentralization.
The festival has already featured Andersen, Brecht, Büchner, Claudel, Corneille, Feydeau, Fosse, Hugo, Maeterlinck, Molière, Novarina, Perrault, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Singer, Sophocles, Tchekhov, Winsor Mc Cay and two collective creations on the 5th Republic and the 1st World War.

Subsidized by the Entente-Vallée (Beaufort-en-Anjou, Les Bois d’Anjou, Mazé-Milon, La Ménitré), the Ministère de la Culture-drac Pays-de-la- Loire and the Région Pays-de-la-Loire. With the support of the Théâtre National Populaire, the Quai-CDN d’Angers, and the communes of Beaufort-en-Anjou, Loire-Authion, Baugé-en-Anjou.

Subventionné par l’Entente-Vallée (Beaufort-en-Anjou, Les Bois d’Anjou, Mazé-Milon, La Ménitré), le Ministère de la Culture-drac Pays-de-la- Loire et la Région Pays-de-la-Loire. Avec le soutien du Théâtre National Populaire, du Quai-CDN d’Angers, et des communes Beaufort-en-Anjou, Loire-Authion, Baugé-en-Anjou.

 

EUROPEAN HERITAGE DAYS 18-19 SEPTEMBER 2021

Guided tours

For two days, the museum’s mediators accompany visitors in their discovery of the monument while giving them keys to reading to simply understand Contemporary Art.
At 10:30 am, 3 pm and 5 pm: the history of the place in 20 minutes.
At 11:00, 14:00 and 16:00: in-depth visit of the castle, the museum’s permanent collection of contemporary art and the temporary exhibition Didier Fiuza Faustino Tomorrow’s Shelter.

Exceptional price
Adult: 8,50€
Child: 4€

CONCERTS THE MUSICALES OF MONTSOREAU 19.07, 26.07 AND 02.08.2019

Musicales de Montsoreau

 July 19 – 8:30 pm
« Carmen Impressions »

Andrea Hill, mezzo-soprano
Elena Abend, piano
Bernard Zinck, violin
Bizet, de Falla, Sarasate, Turina, Saint Saëns, Rodrigo Messiaen

Part One: Mezzo soprano and piano
FALLA Manual Spanish Follow-up Popular Suite
Xavier MONTSALVATGE Cincos conciones Negras
Georges BIZET extract from Carmen
Maurice RAVEL vocalizes in the form of Habanera
Joaquim RODRIGO Very Spanish canciones

Part Two: Violin and Piano
Pablo de SARASATE malaguena op. 21 n° 1 – habanera n°2
Joaquim TURINA Spanish Sonata No.2 op 82
Camille SAINT SAENS from Havana op.83
Olivier MESSIAEN theme and variations

July 26 8:30 pm
« Romantic dreams »

Eloïsa Cascio, piano
Schubert, Brahms, Rachmaninoff
Frantz SCHUBERT two improvisations opus 90 n°2
Johannes BRAHMS two rhapsodies opus 79
Serguei RACHMANINOFF: Sonata No. 2 Op. 36 in B flat minor

August 2 8:30 pm
« Fantastic Classics »


The Impromptu Concert
Wind Quintet
JC. Mural, clarinet, clarinet
Y. Carpenter, flute
V. Dufès, oboe
A. Bonnal, horn
P. Fatus, bassoon
Gluck, Gebauer, Dvorak, Marais, Debussy, Blondeau, Berlioz
Christophe Willibald GLUCK Orphée and Eurydice scene of the Elysees fields
François René GEBAUER quintet n°3 in C minor, allegro moderato
Antonin DVORAK American Quartet, lento
Marin MARAIS Les folies d’Espagne from the second book of viola pieces (extracts)
Claude DEBUSSY clouds and celebrations (extracts from the nocturnes for orchestra)
Thierry BLONDEAU Stolen 1961
Hector BERLIOZ a ball (excerpt from the fantastic symphony)

Information and reservations
Montsoreau Tourist Office (ticket office and reservations). Tel. 02 41 41 51 70 22
Saumur Tourist Office (ticket office only). Tel. 02 41 40 40 20 60 60
Tickets on site on the day of the concert www.ville-montsoreau.fr
Rates :
Full price: 18€
Residents of Montsoreau: 13 €
Ligériana Musicale members: 13 €
Under 18 years old: free of charge