The Integrated Art Collection
De toekomstige rol van de kunstcollectie in het communicatieve beleid
Symposiumverslag

Grazia Quaroni
Fondacion Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Parijs Adjunct Conservator

De Fondation Cartier werd in 1984 opgericht door het bekende Franse mode- en juwelenhuis Cartier met het doel kunstwerken te verzamelen die een duidelijk beeld geven van ontwikkelingen in de hedendaagse kunst van 1960 tot nu. De collectie omvat inmiddels ruim 800 kunstwerken waarvan velen verworven werden door kunstenaars rechtstreeks opdrachten te geven. Grazia Quaroni is sinds 1991 werkzaam als adjunct conservator bij de Fondation Cartier. Zij publiceerde verschillen-de artikelen in Italiaanse tijdschriften zoals Flash Art, Juliet Art Magazine, Marie Claire, Business Art en in het Franse tijdschrift Art Press.

Created on the initiative of Alain Dominique Perrin, president of Cartier International, and inaugurated in October 1984 in Jouy-en-Josas, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, directed by Hervé Chandès since 1994, helps to support and raise public awareness of contemporary artistic creation. Being an instrument for artists to create and exhibit their work and a meeting-place for all forms of artistic expression, the Fondation Cartier provides one of the most original forms of corporate sponsorship in France. Ever since it was created, through the choices it affirms, and its freedom and eclecticism, it has sought to place modern art at the heart of the preoccupations of the modern world and to open its doors to as broad a public as possible. As a centre for lively exchange and dialogue, the Fondation Cartier has built up steady relationships with a number of artists, whose work it defends by means of exhibitions, commissions and publications. Its history is marked by projects carried out in collaboration with French artists like César, Marc Couturier, Raymond Hains and Jean-Pierre Raynaud. This proximity to artists is also reflected in regular commissions. These commissions are one of the most original features of the Fondation Cartier's policy and are awarded to artists as part of its annual acquisitions or in the context of one-man shows and group exhibitions. Like these commissions and the acquisitions added annually to its collection, the spirit behind the Fondation Cartier's programme of exhibitions and Nomadic Nights is a reflection of the policy it pursues with regard to artists and the public at large.

The collection
Ever since it was founded in 1984, the Fondation Cartier has been committed to building up a collection of works by living artists as a reflection of the age in which we live and of the conflicting currents, singular approaches and highly individualised figures that underlie the eclecticism and diversity of the art of today. Since 1984, its goal has remained unchanged. Each year, new acquisitions continue to reinforce the identity and coherence of the collection, along with its capacity to assemble those works that will form the memory of tomorrow. The aim of bringing together works by international artists in this way is to testify to the vita-lity and value of contemporary art. The collection today covers every domain of art, from painting, video and drawing, to photography, sculpture and monumental installations. A number of works linked to new practices in art that emerged in the 1960s are like-wise present in the collection. The Fondation Cartier collection consists of a representative group of works reflecting the main trends of contemporary art since the 1960s. It brings together the works of epoch-making artists from the arts revival of the 1960s and 1970s, the great blossoming of the 1980s all the way up to the art currently in progress. The collection is structured around large groups of work and major figures with powerful identities (Arman, César, Raymond Hains and Jean-Pierre Raynaud), younger figures from the art scene in France (Jean-Michel Alberola, Jean-Charles Blais, Marc Couturier, Pierrick Sorin and Patrick Tosani) and abroad (Miquel Barceló, Matthew Barney, David Hammons, Tatsuo Miyajima, Gabriel Orozco and Hiroshi Sugimoto), and ranges from experi-ments in pure painting by Vija Celmins, Sam Francis, Simon Hantaï and Joan Mitchell, or painted mythologies by Gérard Garouste, to the sensory spaces of James Turrell and the installations of James Lee Byars. The Fondation Cartier hopes to build up in this way a homogeneous collection open to all forms of creation. Four main orientations help define the outline of the collection.

1. A collection of work by living artists

Since 1984, the aim of the Fondation Cartier has been to support living artists from all over the world. It recently opened its collection to new geographical zones by acquiring works by African photo-graphers and sculptors. In addition to housing coherent bodies of work by artists like César, Raymond Hains and Jean-Pierre Raynaud, whose careers the Fondation Cartier has been following for many years, the collection is also a lively gathering of works destined to travel. Each year, a great many loans are made to temporary exhibitions in museums in France and abroad.

2. An unusual collection

The second orientation is to provide a historical basis and aesthetic reference points for the collection by bringing together works from key movements. A collection of powerful works is also a question of synchronicity, sequence and association. For this reason, a particular effort was recently made with regard to photography and video, with the acquisition of important works by Nobuyoshi Araki, James Coleman, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Seydou Keita, Thierry Kuntzel, Pierrick Sorin, Wolfgang Tillmans and Bill Viola.

3. Commissions

The collection above all reflects the close relationship the Fondation Cartier maintains with artists. Since 1984, the Fondation Cartier has shown itself to be particularly attached to commissioning work from artists. As the corner-stone of the activities undertaken on behalf of the collection, commissions carried out in conjunction with an exhibition project represent the privileged moment at which a dialogue is establi-shed with the artist. Today, many of the Fondation Cartier's acquisitions (including works by Richard Artschwager, Balthasar Burkhard and James Lee Byars) are the fruit of commissions carried out with the contingencies of a particular site in mind: the unaffected, airy building designed by Jean Nouvel to house the Fondation Cartier.

4. Acquisitions

Each year, the Fondation Committee approves of a list of acquisitions proposed by the curator of the Fondation Cartier. The Fondation Committee is comprised of personalities from the art world and of representatives from the Cartier Group and the Fondation de France. On a parallel with the approved acquisitions, the collection is enriched by donations from artists.

Exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier
Ever since it was founded, the Fondation Cartier has varied its programme so as to include both one-man shows and group or thematic exhibitions. Each of these projects is an opportunity to work in close collaboration with the artists concerned. Several of these exhibitions were built on important commissions from the Fondation Cartier. The exhi-bitions by Jean-Michel Alberola, Richard Artschwager and Raymond Hains, for example, consisted largely of commissioned work that had never been shown in public before, and were put together in close cooperation with the artists. Bringing together in its programme established artists like César and James Lee Byars and artists unknown in France, the Fondation Cartier has focused public attention on the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, Vija Celmins, Shinzo and Roso Fukuhara, Seydou Keita, Bodys lsek Kingelez, Malick Sidibé, Patrick Vilaire and Herbert Zangs. The Fondation Cartier seeks to draw attention to the work of young artists from France and abroad. It notably played this important role in sponsoring artists like Matthew Barney, Carole Benzaken and Pierrick Sorin, along with those younger artists whose work was presented in spring 1997 in the exhi-bition Coïncidences: Judith Bartolani and Claude Caillol, Pierre Bismuth, Michel Blazy, Jean-Baptiste Bruant, Richard Fauguet, Pierre Huyghe. Inaugurated in Jouy-en-Josas with Les Années 60, Hommage à Ferrari, Vraiment faux, A visage découvert and Azur, thematic exhibitions have helped highlight the identity and originality of the Fondation Cartier. That spirit has been given a new lease of life in Paris through exhibitions like By Night, Comme un Oiseau and Amours, in which links have been forged between different eras and civilizations, and meetings initiated between a wide range of artistic forms. The Fondation Cartier regularly invites specialists from various fields, such as Jacques Kerchache, Kohtaro lizawa, André Magnin and Patrick Roegiers, to help draw up original exhibition projects. This allows it to extend its activities to areas sometimes lacking in public exposure, such as contemporary African photography and art, or Japanese and South American photography. Regular contributions from well-known personalities in the literary and art world, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Onfray and Philippe Sollers, testify to the interest aroused by the activities of the Fondation Cartier on the French cultural scene.

The Fondation Cartier in France and abroad
To continue its activities on behalf of the artists it supports, the Fondation Cartier regularly organises exhibitions in France and abroad, and takes part in arts projects where it is confronted with new surroundings and different types of public. The Fondation Cartier's extra-mural activities take one of four forms:

- presentation of selected works from its collection;
- travelling exhibitions that are first shown in Paris;
- organisation of original projects;
- Nomadic Nights.

Ever since it was founded, the main objective of the Fondation Cartier has been to accompany the activities of a number of artists and thereby build up a privileged relationship with them and their work. César is one of these artists whose story regularly intersects with that of the Fondation Cartier. It is only natural, therefore, that the Fondation Cartier joined in the retrospective of his work, held at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in June 1997, pursuing in this way a friendship that has existed for many years. Every year the Fondation Cartier gives its support to the festival "Le Printemps de Cahors", as a token of the commitment it has shown to contemporary photography. Sponsorship of the festival is a sign of the Fondation Cartier's commitment to regional initiatives, as well as an affirma-tion of its determination to address as large and broad a public as possible. Invited by Mécénart Aquitaine, from June 13 to September 14, 1997, the Fondation Cartier presented a large selection of works from its collection in ten 'châteaux' in the Bordeaux region. The exhibition was an opportunity to present the Fondation Cartier collection for the first time in France and was made up of a particularly lively selection of works. It also reflected the Fondation Cartier's commitment to disseminating, in addition to the works themselves, an image of the many artists whose careers the Fondation Cartier closely follows.

Since 1990, a number of original projects has been organised by the Fondation Cartier in other countries as a way of developing its presence abroad. In 1992, eager to present the work of French artists it supports, the Fondation Cartier organised the exhibition Too French in Tokyo and Hong Kong. The same year was marked by the donation of César's monumental sculpture The Flying Frenchman to the city of Hong Kong. In perfect harmony with the site for which it was specially created, the sculpture was the first work commissioned by the Fondation Cartier to be the object of a donation. 1995 was a particular highlight in the Fondation Cartier's international programme, with the presentation of Marc Couturier's drawings in Japan for the 1,200th anniversary of the Toji temple. Another major event in the Fondation Cartier's international programme was the journey undertaken by Jean-Pierre Raynaud's The Gilded Pot, from Berlin in May 1996 to the Forbidden City in Peking the following October. In 1998, The Gilded Pot will be installed outside the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The journey is not only the fulfillment of an artist's dream, but also a moving and unprecedented cultural event. In addition to these projects and the presentation of a group of works from our collection abroad (in Seoul in 1994, and in Taipei in 1995), the Fondation Cartier also organised a number of travelling exhibitions in Europe and North and South America, Including Les 3 Cartier. Du Grand Louvre aux 3 Cartier by Raymond Hains and an exhibition of photographs by the Malian Seydou Keita. Finally, since 1992, the Fondation Cartier, in collaboration with the Shiseido Gallery In Tokyo, has set about focusing public atten-tion in Japan on a young Japanese artist resident outside Japan. Disregarding national boundaries and distinctions, these original exhibitions have allowed us to establish fascinating and un-precedented ties with Japanese artists like Tomoko Kubo (1992), Etsuko Watanabe (1993), Shuji Ariyoshi (1994), Mariko Mori (1995) and Yu Hirai (1996), for all of whom this first exhibition in their home country, despite their choice to live in Europe, the United States or elsewhere, constituted a particularly impor-tant moment.

Nomadic Nights
Within the Nomadic Nights programme performances are held in conjunction with the present exhibition. They have taken place every thursday at 8.30 pm since 1994. The works they present to the public are based on a wedding of sensibilities and a willingness to adapt to a particular site. Artists from the worlds of theatre, dance, music, cinema, video and design, along with writers and poets, are given an opportunity to meet the public in rather different circumstances and surroundings from those provided by more traditional venues. With Nomadic Nights, the Fondation Cartier provides a meeting-place where the fine arts and other forms of contemporary art can get together. In response to a growing interest for the principle of Nomadic Nights, among artists and cultural organisations, the Fondation Cartier set up a network to help promote the "nomadic outlook". In collaboration with other bodies in France and abroad, Nomadic Nights now provides a regular series of extramural events.

Maake een keuze uit de volgende sprekers:

Erik Hermida, Onderneming & Kunst
Dirk Noordman, Organisatieadviseur
Sacha Tanja, ING Groep
Rosemary Harris, NatWest Group
Grazia Quaroni, Fondation Cartier
Maria de Corral, Fundación "La Caixa"
Paul Mertz, Communicatieadviseur