BEHIND THE SCENES:
ESTHER SHALEV-GERZ
CNAP ACQUISITION,
“Describing Labor”, 2012

PART I

It is with particular excitement, we announce the recent CNAP (Centre national des arts plastiques) acquisition of Esther Shalev-Gerz’s large installation “DESCRIBING LABOR”: 24 large-scale photographs, 2-channel HD video projection (58min) 7 glass objects, 1 soundtrack.

I proposed this collaboration in 2011 between the Miami-based Wolfsonian Museum, Florida International University in Miami and the artist—through the auspices of then board member, now gallerist Detroit-based Gary Wasserman. This early research and development led to the Wolfsonian commissioning this exhibition and installation for the museum. Wolfsonisan Director at that time, Cathy Leff and her curatorial team Marianne Lamonaca and Matthew Abess allowed the artist freedom and support in mounting this ambitious and radical work for the first time. They also published a brilliant book.

“DESCRIBING LABOR” is a work that esteems the image of workers as seen in the remarkable and unusual permanent collection at the Wolfsonian Museum; it is the largest university art collection in the USA, based on the history of propaganda, architecture and industrial and graphic design from 1850-1950 — as a social history documented in works of art, decorative art and objects. In a unique creative process that tied the current museum team into a timeless historical fabric incorporating works from the collection, which were then placed inside the crowded storage and photographed by Shalev-Gerz in this new dislocation. After selecting forty-one historic artworks depicting working figures from the Wolfsonian and the Margulies collections, the artist asked the museum to invite twenty-four people involved in art and its language to choose and describe a work from this selection on film.

PART II

Subsequently “DESCRIBING LABOR” was included as part of a mid-career retrospective 2017/18, “The Factory is Outside” curated by Timo Valjakka, assisted by JSVC for the Serlachius Museum Gustaf, Mänttä, Finland, Pauli Sivonen, Director. It was also presented in Detroit at Wasserman Projects, 2016.

In the making of DESCRIBING LABOR each participant, on the artist’s instructions, placed their chosen work among other artefacts in the museum’s storage annex where it was then photographed in its new context. The participants then were interviewed on camera about their choices and the deeper meanings these uncover; Shalev-Gerz makes the levels of connections obvious to us at the same time they are magical to the people she embeds in the work. The two channel video displays, on one screen the participants describing the image they chose and on the other a slow pan across the surface of the described work.

In the catalogue to the museum exhibition “The Factory is Outside”, I described the unusual vision of Shalev-Gerz:

“The work expresses mystical sensitivity for things in between that are rarely seen, much less uncovered and used as an emotional core; what historians and critics see that by using the existing world as her material – people, things and stories they tell – her way of seeing is like Walter Benjamin taking bits of information, putting it in a notebook, wandering through the world jotting down quotations that become vertical soundings to plumb the soul of a moment.”

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

PART III

“This methodology is an austere and sensual way of seeing. The point of view is unforgiving and at the same time uncanny, almost flirtatious. Her ear for the voices of people in any given circumstance allows her work to be made from the raw materials of real life… A thought, a pause, a suspension of belief, time moving forward and back—in this suspension the work functions. Shalev-Gerz reveals something invisible in plain sight. The sensation of standing in a vortex where everything is moving around one precise spot; content stands still in this turbulence of sensation. This is the surprise—a feeling of not knowing while understanding everything in the same time.”

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

Shalev-Gerz has lived and worked in Paris since 1984. Among an international career of museum exhibitions and permanent installations, she has made two important exhibitions in Paris notably “Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz, 1945-2005”, City Hall, Paris 2005, and “Ton Image Me Regarde!?” Jeu de Paume, Paris 2010.