From May 10th to July 5th 2019, the exhibition Mappa Mundi presents the new acquisitions of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art: 50 unpublished works by Art & Language, shown for the first time in France.
Displayed on the top floor of the museum, the exhibition opens with the installation Mother, Father, Monday: Map of the World, 2000, a monumental work composed of more than 150 monochrome paintings representing a huge map of the world. Each painting is autonomous but also represents a detail of a map of which it is a part. As in Lewis Caroll’s The Snark Hunt, the map stretches and eventually occupies the entire surface of the room.
The film Qui Pourra is a dive into the studio of the artists of Art & Language. The title refers to an injunction by Gustave Courbet – « Find out who can » – about his work L’Atelier du Peintre. The artists are absent but their voices, far away, are heard as the voice-over of a film. They are joined by another voice, unidentified, which makes a hesitant entry in the form of a text that gradually invades the image.
Produced in 2019, Ten posters: illustrations for Art-Language is a series of ten posters produced in 1977. Art & Language raises the question of how the work is made. By diverting the codes from the propaganda posters and building this series of posters as a series of images, in the manner of the 7 deadly sins, these posters tell us about the foundations of our society and especially about what makes the success of the codes of tragedy within it.
The exhibition ends with a room banned to children under 18 years of age in which a series of variations on pornographic texts are presented, gradually evolving towards comedy, in the manner of Ms Malaprope.