Floor-naments

In 1917, with Trébuchet [Trap], Marcel Duchamp attached a coat-rack to the floor that should normally have hung on the wall: the shift from sculpted object to found object and from the vertical plane to the horizontal one are two revolutions that deeply marked the History of Sculpture in the 20th century. “Floor-naments” explores this “flattening” of one of the trade’s essential technique: instead of placing works on plinths, instead of a quest for monumentality or a choice of conventional subjects, Modern and Contemporary sculpture lies directly on the floor.

 

Hybrid objects coexist, often taken from everyday life, and noble materials interact with rough ones. This is a sculpture that develops in “its extended field”1, to use Rosalind Krauss’s formulation: it no longer complies with a unity of place but reaches out beyond the enclosed space of the museum to grasp the landscape until, potentially, it merges with it. Finally, the living body appears in sculpture: performances and videos documenting this renewed form finalize a deconstruction of the classic view. All these practices overturn the notion of a single medium.

 

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, la Monnaie de Paris and the Centre Pompidou display this unique journey in the exhibition spaces of la Monnaie de Paris.