Catalog for the exhibition “Raymond Hains: Art Speculator.” Conceived by the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne—Centre de Creation Industrielle, Paris—and organized by the Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design. The exhibition was presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, June 27–Sept. 3, 2001, and at the Galleries at Moore, Nov. 5–Dec.15, 2002.

Contents:

• “From Colette Allendy’s Parrot to Matthieu Laurette: The Aesthetics of Coincidence According to Raymond Hains” by Christine Macel
• “Citizen of the World: From France Déchiree to Macintoshages: Raymond Hains’s France in Shreds and the Politics of Décollage” by Tom McDonough
• “Hypnagogic Photographs: Graphic Art in Photography: When Photography Becomes an Object” by Raymond Hains
• Penelope
• “Les Vérités de la Palisse: Impromptu in Eight Fragments” by Christian Schlatter
• “Saffa & Seita: I Would Prefer Not to (Exhibiti): Raymond Hains and the Critics” by Aude Bodet
• The Monochrome in the Métro: An Homage to Yves Klein
• New Realism
• Hépérile Éclaté
• Voyage to America

Spanning more than five decades, Raymond Hains’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Europe, yet it remains virtually unknown in the United States. Born in 1926 in Brittany, Hains first expressed himself artistically in photography. From his “hypnagogic photographs” to the presentation of torn street posters and palissades, his technique for appropriating and recontextualizing the found object has evolved to include sources both written and visual. Juggling words and images, Hains pairs a giant mannequin of Paris gallerist Iris Clert in Kassel with similar figures made in the small French village of Cassel (Iris Clert, la messagère des arts, 1997), and, invoking an archaic Roman name for Brittany, he transforms the American Express logo (Armorican Express, 1987). It is less a matter of simple wordplay than of disruptive intervention. The pun, often deemed a lowly form of humor, is recast as a secret, fertile catalyst, stimulating viewers’ imaginations by way of memory or experience.

His vast erudition enables Hains to weave together scholarly references with the places, people, and facts of ordinary life. “I work with a kind of Web,” he remarks today, a reference to his recent Internet projects and an apt metaphor summarizing the varied production of his career. Hains is most often associated with France’s Nouveau Réalisme, a loose collaborative formed in 1960 by Hains, Yves Klein, César, Jacques Villeglé, Arman, Jean Tinguely, and Martial Raysse. Considered a precursor to American pop art, these new realists embraced the found object and the rapidly developing technologies that shaped postwar society.

Salient pieces from every period of Hains’s career are included in the exhibition, with deliberate juxtapositions that link early and recent works. The play with language, the penchant for punning, and the enormous literary and historical bank from which Hains unceasingly draws have at times obscured the eminently visual character of his work. It is precisely this aesthetic dimension that “Raymond Hains: Art Speculator” seeks to underscore—not only the artist’s invention of forms and the plurality of his materials but his role as a scopic interpreter of signs inscribed in the landscape. For younger generations of artists seeking independence from the institutionalized art world, Hains’s unconventional methodologies and unpredictable oeuvre continue to challenge, inspire, fascinate, and, often, delight.

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Read “From Colette Allendy’s Parrot to Matthieu Laurette: The Aesthetics of Coincidence According to Raymond Hains” by Christine Macel