Yvelyne WOOD
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Exposition : "La chair de la guerre, une histoire de femme..." |
Yvelyne WOOD
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Exposition : "La chair de la guerre, une histoire de femme..." |
Après avoir étudié l’histoire de l’art à l’Ecole du Louvre, Yvelyne Wood quitte avec détermination l’Europe pour s’immerger dans le monde des traditions et des arts japonais. Répondant à une nécessité de mise à distance avec sa propre culture, elle demeure pendant 8 ans au Japon où elle s’initie à la sculpture, notamment sur pierre, et au modelage. Elle retrouve ensuite l’Europe et s’installe à Genève en 1995, dans un atelier au cœur de la vieille ville. Elle y développe un travail sur la mémoire universelle du XXème siècle, puisant dans la riche documentation de l’Agence France Presse et travaillant avec les détenteurs de cette mémoire, survivants et témoins directs.
Les matériaux qu’Yvelyne Wood utilise ont tous en commun d’être chargés d’histoire : métal corrodé suite à une longue immersion dans des eaux lacustres, plomb issu de vieilles toitures, pièces de bois archéologiques datant de la protohistoire. Ces matières premières témoignent du caractère psycho-archéologique de son art. En effet, comme le dit Jean-Paul Deroche (Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris), « comment de la Mort faire ressurgir la Vie est une des implications centrales de son travail. Dans les œuvres d’Yvelyne Wood, les pulsions de Vie et de Mort sous-tendent la création ».
Yvelyne Wood, plasticienne, sculpteur et scénographe se qualifie elle-même de « capteur de mémoire ». « Son art est un genre de démarche archéologique – ce qui suggère une forme d’auto-analyse – qui préserve sa raison dans un monde qui perd la sienne, un monde dont elle montre toute la folie destructrice pour éviter de s’y laisser entraîner elle-même. Le fait d’introduire dans son art des fragments historiques qui témoignent de la démence de la société est en fait une manière de s’immuniser contre elle, ce qui lui confère sa fonction profonde : repousser le mal. » (Pr. D. Kuspit)
Yvelyne WOOD, The Pain of the "Why"?
Yvelyne Wood premiered as an artist in 2000 with a major solo exhibit entitled: Wounds of Memory that toured in Geneva, New York, and Paris. In Paris, that year Wounds of Memory was presented as part of the 10th Anniversary of the Prix de la Mémoire under the auspices of the Danielle Mitterand Foundation. After viewing Woods’ sculptures and art installations the viewer can not leave the exhibit indifferent. The spectator is confronted with crimes against humanity of the 20th Century to recent history. AFP Archives provided many documents that inspired Woods’ work. If some of Woods’ art pieces bring the viewer back to the Nazi Death Camps and to Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah, the viewer must also face the injustices and tragedies of Vietnam, Cambodia, and the present sufferings of Rwanda, Kososvo, and Algeria. The crime scenes and the men that commit these crimes may be different but we realize through Woods’ work that history has a way of endlessly repeating itself. The urgency and necessity to never forget and the desire to reinstate the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights become essential. But can mankind escape this murderous repetitious fatality?
This question, among others, is asked in Woods’ sculpture entitled: The Promise presented in New York and then in Paris at L’Arche de la Fraternité at La Defense in December 2000. In this large piece, several plaster hands trailing heavy chains reach toward a massive rust color globe, representing a head. This suspended sphere is inscribed with quotes, in 21 languages, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Some are forgotten languages, while others are languages still spoken in these still oppressed nations such as: Yiddish, Kurd, Peul, Quechua, Swahili, Romanian, Farsi, Tibetan, Armenian, Arab, English, Russian, French, Japanese, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. These writings were taken from wax plates and where then directly molded onto the globe in resin. When talking about this sculpture which took Wood a long time to make she explains that: ?The Human Rights Declaration is hardly worth the paper it is printed on.? a paradox portraying the weakness in expectations and the vanity of creation. A bubble that holds the breath of human dignity and fraternity can burst at any time; the same existing vulnerability exists in Giacometti’s sculptures of standing men that evoke this precarious equilibrium of tensions and counterbalance. Many of Woods’ sculptures are eloquent pleas and deserve to exist in public. I Want to Live a monumental piece made of polystyrene, plaster and metal (dimension: 295 x 700 x160 cm), highly acclaimed at the European Biennial in Paris in 2001, is another example of this equilibrium. Battling for Freedom portrays two gigantic hands holding links from a broken chain, this piece clearly emphasizes Woods’ battle? a woman’s battle, for she draws her inspiration, energy, and will power deep from within her, allowing her to shape and erect these colossal closed fisted hands. The sensations that this great mass generates in defining the sculpture in its essence, is immediate, as is the message straightforward.
After numerous and various art experiences such as sculpting (direct carving), eight years of pottery in Japan, jewelry and accessory design in Paris, and Art Exhibit Commissioner, Wood opens up an atelier in Geneva in 1995 to devote her life art. She completes several expressive pieces made of clay. With this clay Wood inscribes with her bare hands, with her fingernails, her anxiety and sufferance. A long term sufferance with a prior knowledge of the Shoah. During this period Wood invents her own written language: Iroquois. Although these writings become illegible over time, for Wood they remain invaluable and sacred. Clay and writing are like her interior mirrors but they no longer satisfy and answer Woods’ commitment and need to take stand by speaking out through her art about the injustices and tragedies of our time.
With the bronze low relief Gates of Hell in 1998 Wood explores a new stylistic approach less suggestive and more theatrical. Out of the earth’s’ turmoil where millions of dead secret voices are excavated, a door is opened to a stage-set radicalization arousing a reaction from viewers just like in many of Claude Leveque’s installations. At the Centre d’Art en l’Ile in Geneva and at the Stendhal Gallery in New York in 2000, Wood stages her artwork in the intimacy of a silent and almost crepuscular decor rendering her installations and her photomontage, petrifying. A feeling of sulleness and timelessness resonates in Kantor’s ?Theater of Death?. Registration No. J4025X is a blow up and serigraphed archive photograph of a prisoner from Dachau with typhoid. His face and body are hunched over a bowl. The word ?WHY? is inscribed in the middle of the photograph. Shades of purple, considered as an imperial color in Japan, cover the man’s face and a part of his body, echoing the purple jet ink printed background. The color transcends the condition in which this man with no name finds himself, revealing the essence of being. Wood sheds light on a document, that is part of our repressed past, by reclaiming it and charging it with emotion. To be Eighteen in Dachau a work in mixed media on canvas, in which a photographic image of an emaciated young man is repeated twenty times in four vertical columns. Each image is slightly altered until his already cadaverous face becomes a skull resulting in a complete metamorphosis. This photomontage gives birth to a chilling new face: The Shadow (Der Schatten) a dying young man embodies life itself with his intense gaze. Our Children is a piece composed of three luminous caissons of 120 x 80 cm. A child’s bust along with his/hers Auschwitz registration number is presented in each caisson. The title is written in three languages: Yiddish, Romanian, and English. This desire to keep the memory alive, of all these unknown dead men and women, is also very important to another artist named Christian Boltanski. The pieces that comes to mind are entitled Human (Menschlich) and The Great Hornu Registers where we see those thousands of faces that form a memorial, dedicated to a group of adolescents that worked in the mines. The only thing left of their existence on this earth are their names written on boxes. Empathy and appropriateness is a clear phenomena for Wood who desperately tries to save individuals from their death sentence. Art can become a vehicle for sanctification. Boltanski commemorates a multitude of faces before they too fade into oblivion.
A recurring theme in Woods’ installations is the use of fragmented bodies along with plaster molded skulls and hands. The Soup of Kosovo draws the viewer to this mixed-media installation like a close-up. Five expressive gray body-less hands, sharing the same shallow plate of soup, balanced atop burlap bags surrounded by barbed wire. Thanks to the movie like framing the viewers attention is focalized on the hands, the plate and its content. The metonymic use of the ?hand? underlines the existence of the body as whole through the hand but nonetheless the hand also brings out the absence or lack of body, contracting all feelings of ambiguity that this piece exerts: mutilation-lost-void / life-sharing. Furthermore we can say that this installation has a universal characteristic about it. The Soup of Kosovo resembles a modern Last Supper placed in a war context.
Memory of a Century conceived in 1999, exhibits 19 identical pink trepanned skulls lined up and placed on a square base covered with sand. A red and white ribbon vaguely warns us of the potential danger. The visual effect is disturbing, for the artist combines these anonymous deaths with a funerary or sacrificial ritual that seem archaic. Memory of a Century is also the title of a four minute video installation where Wood juxtaposes twentieth century archive images of genocide’s from around the world. Moreover it questions the notion of sacrifice, in regards to primitive social rituals against our modern industrial societies.
Flow of Memory or Kristall Nacht (The Night of Broken Glass) a sculpture measuring 350 cm, is even more enigmatic as it is constructed out of bones. The straight positioning of the bones infer long spilt, fossilized legs. The impulse for this creation came to the artist while admiring The end of the World by de Beuys at the Tate Gallery in London. Flow of Memory puts forward the irreversible destruction that occurred by the autosdafé during Kristall Nacht. ?To burn books, is to destroy mankind? says Wood explaining her choice in erecting this field of bones. This upright sculpture, is a totem dedicated to death, compact and mirroring the looming masses deep within the forest of Time. A profound statement is made by Flow of Memory making us conscious of mankind’s dismissal.
Correlated together these installation, enmeshed with the artists sweat and empathy of blood, create a unique relic. It is at this time that Wood tackles large canvases, mixing photomontages and jet ink. The piece that initiates the passage to photomontage is Der Schatten (The Shawdow) dated 2000.This significant portrait has accompanied the artist for a long time. Inaugurating a distinctive actualization of the subject.
These big serigraphed canvases define two new orientations: a first choice of bi-dimensionality and a second choice in the iconography, dividing the artist between image and self. A number of Woods’ photomontage canvases were exhibited at the United Nations in Geneva in April 2002. This shift brings about a new way of showing human violence. Personified by the artist herself. Wood becomes liable to this violence. Each canvas bears revealing titles like Nausea, Infernal Machine, and The 11th, each producing a strong and emotional impact on the viewer. This visual virulence reminds us what Aragon evokes with ?revolutionary beauty? regarding John Heartfield’s photomontage, very capable in marrying image plasticity and depth of message. Wood compresses events from today’s conflicts and tragedies like September 11th, and the Palestinian – Israeli Conflict and superimposes them to Art History. Woods’ artwork is the fruit of a distinctive vision supported by bluntness of language. In Promised Lands, Wood fakes a suicide by placing a loaded gun in her month while Israeli and Palestian flags burn in the background. Faced with these injustices and mankind’s insoluble resolutions, the only humane and politically thing left to do is suicide. When a bystander witnesses a crime can she/he remain silent in guise of objectivity and science? asks Bernard Lempert in Literary Critic of Sacrificial Thought. The recent memory of United Nation’s non military intervention in Kosovo is still painful. Wood becomes a wounded Antigone and chooses to die. In The 11th we see a battlefield filled with American flags flapping in desolation while Goya’s Colossus is fighting against a gigantic iron hand. In the foreground a firefighter who has abandoned his helmet and sings incantations facing the foothills of sacrifice. These two heroic figures confront each other in this sublimated vision of war, detached from all reality and man’s distress.
In Promised Lands?, Infernal Machine, Nausea, and ?I got the reply, I forgot the question? Wood stages her own body in each of these pieces. These canvases are composed with the same precision and testifies similar intimate performances of the artist. The manner in which these photographs are processed draws an ambiguous line between reality and performance that can also be found in Cindy Sherman’s and Orlan’s work. In Nausea Wood cleanses herself from all tyrants that she’s ingested while in Infernal Machine she mimes the birthing position as in the painting The Origin by Courbet, and gives birth to the world and her own story intermeshed with history: Mishima Basquiat Gandhi, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Mother Theresa, and Woods’ mother. By swallowing the world, it is maybe Woods’ way to better impregnate it. In Lucy Lippard’s book entitled ? Overlay Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory? she believes that women are predisposed in writing autobiographies underlying taboos and unchanging suffering. It is interesting to compare The Origin of War by Orlan with the Infernal Machine. Orlan photographs a man’s genitals using the same angle that Courbet used. Both pieces act as a diversion to the painting The Origin. One takes the opposite stance while the other molds itself to the stomach of The Origin revealing the complexity of the world which women have to carry. In Woods latest piece entitled: ?I got the reply, I forgot the question? we see how this complexity is clearly organized into two separate spheres. The artists’ body acts as a cutting divider The razor blade surrounding the vagina, and it is not without revulsion, focuses on the duality nocturnal and diurnal, dressed and naked, taboo and fantasies, violence and eroticism. The razor becomes a torture instrument for body and soul while simultaneously reminding us of Fontana incisions, a violent aesthetic gesture, using symbolic representation.
War Children relates an armed Cambodian child with a reproduction of Saturn Devouring Children by Goya. The running child is looking backwards over his shoulder. His body is placed parallel to the devouring Saturn. Two skeleton-like ghosts-like soldiers are painted up top, aiming at a perpendicular angle towards the armed child. This piece questions the myth. Behind hatred we find more hatred, the weapon deforms and becomes an extension of the boys body. What is war? A merciless, endogenous cannibalistic feast like in the original myth where Saturn is afraid of loosing his almighty powers. Leaving little choice to his son Zeus, spared by his father, but to kill him and the Titans. Are we not undergoing the same ?cannibalistic? worldwide ordeal ?
Through her art Wood raises questions that we would rather ignore. Her research and creations emanate from a deeply rooted necessity and ensue into a collective experience revealing the humanistic aspect of our history through Woods’ emotional screen. This art experience is not only necessary but wholesome allowing us to recall and rethink history. Woods’ strong need to ask questions is used as an expression of her art. Why? empowers Wood to counteract.
Jean-Paul Deroche
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
The major stages of the artist
A visual artist, born in Paris into a family of intellectuals and artists (her grandfather was a painter) Yvelyne Wood lives and works in Geneva. She studied History of Art in Paris-The Louvre, and discovered the skills of art.
1974-1981: Initiation into direct size.
Yvelyne Wood left for Japan completing her studies. Welcomed into a Japanese family, which practiced patronage, very interested in sculpture, she was initiated into direct size and also worked pottery.
1981-1992: Detour into the world of fashion.
Yvelyne Wood set up a feminine architecture shop in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, where she exhibited her creations as well as young painters.
1992-1995: Exhibition management.
After additional training at the Institut d’Etudes Superieures des Arts in Paris, she launched herself into exhibition management in 1993, specializing in American impressionists and the American colony in Giverny.
1995-2001: Art for art’s sake.
She went to live and open a workshop in Geneva. She gave full reign to her passion for life, art: she produced her first monumental works; her commitment and her rebellion compelled her to avail herself of other techniques to satisfy her imagination.
Les grandes étapes de l’artiste
Artiste plasticienne, née à Paris dans une famille d’intellectuels et d’artistes (un grand-père peintre), Yvelyne Wood vit et travaille à Genève. Elle fait des études d’Histoire de l’Art à Paris – Le Louvre, les Antiquités - et découvre les métiers d’art.
1974-1981 : Initiation à la taille directe
Yvelyne Wood part en voyage de fin d’études au Japon. Accueillie dans une famille japonaise qui pratique le mécénat, très ouverte à la sculpture, elle s’initie à la taille directe et travaille aussi la poterie.
1981-1992 : Détour par l’univers de la mode
Yvelyne Wood crée un espace Architecture féminine, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Elle y expose sa ligne de bijoux et d’accessoires, ainsi que de jeunes peintres.
1992-1995 : Commissariat d’expositions
Après une formation complémentaire à l’Institut d’Etudes supérieures des Arts à Paris, elle se lance, en 1993, dans le commissariat d’expositions et, notamment, se spécialise dans les impressionnistes américains et la colonie américaine de Giverny.
1995-2001 : L’art pour l’art
Elle s’installe et ouvre un atelier à Genève. Elle se consacre pleinement à sa passion de vivre, l’art : elle réalise ses premières œuvres monumentales ; son engagement et sa révolte l’obligent à s’emparer d’autres techniques pour satisfaire son imaginaire.
2000 NEW YORK – Gallery Stendhal
2000 GENEVA – Art Centre in L’Ile
2000 PARIS – Arch of Fraternity
2002 GENEVA – United Nations
2005 VALENCE D’AGEN – Public work
2007 LYON – Gallery Tuilliers
2008 LAUSANNE – Gallery Grancy
2008 GENEVA – MBS Gallery
2010 PARIS – Museum Grande Loge De France
2011 GENEVA – Gallery Bailly
1999 GENEVA - Crédit Suisse
2001 PARIS - European Biennale of Sculpture
2003 GENEVA - Art Centre in L’Ile
2004 NEW YORK - Gallery Stendhal
2006 NEW YORK - Gallery Stendhal
2008 ANVERS - Foundation Werberke
2009 ANVERS - Foundation Werberke
Age of Extreme, Barbarism and Human Rights in the 20th century, november 9th – december 2nd 2000 : ( Exhibition of) Yvelyne Wood, essays par Donald Kuspit, Prof. Louis Kern, Davis Douvette, New York, Gallery Stendhal (2000)
"Mémoire en Flamme" (2010)
PR. DONALD KUSPIT (American art critic, Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York), Age of Extreme. Barbarism and Human Rights in the 20th Century, 2000.
PR. LOUIS J. KERN (Professor at the Hofstra University, New York), The Pursuit of the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, 2000.
JEAN-PAUL DEROCHE (historien de l’art), La Douleur du Pourquoi, 2004.
PR. DONALD KUSPIT, Yvelyne Wood’s Auschwitz, 2010
2000 NEW YORK – Gallery Stendhal
2000 GENEVE – Centre d’Art en L’Ile
2000 PARIS – Arche de la Fraternité
2002 GENEVE – Nations Unies
2005 VALENCE D’AGEN – Œuvre publique
2007 LYON – Galerie des Tuilliers
2008 LAUSANNE – Galerie de Grancy
2008 GENEVE – MBS Gallery
2010 PARIS – Musée de la Grande Loge De France
2011 GENEVE – Galerie Bailly
1999 GENEVE – Crédit Suisse
2001 PARIS – Biennale Européenne de la Sculpture
2003 GENEVE – Centre d’Art en L’Ile
2004 NEW YORK – Gallery Stendhal
2006 NEW YORK – Gallery Stendhal
2008 ANVERS – Fondation Werberke
2009 ANVERS – Fondation Werberke
Age of Extreme, Barbarism and Human Rights in the 20th century, november 9th – december 2nd 2000 : ( Exhibition of) Yvelyne Wood, essays par Donald Kuspit, Prof. Louis Kern, Davis Douvette, New York, Gallery Stendhal (2000)
"Mémoire en Flamme" (2010)
PR. DONALD KUSPIT (American art critic, Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York), Age of Extreme. Barbarism and Human Rights in the 20th Century, 2000.
PR. LOUIS J. KERN (Professor at the Hofstra University, New York), The Pursuit of the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, 2000.
JEAN-PAUL DEROCHE (historien de l’art), La Douleur du Pourquoi, 2004.
PR. DONALD KUSPIT, Yvelyne Wood’s Auschwitz, 2010
Polystyrène, plâtre, métal - 7m x 2,80m x 2,09m - 2001.
Oeuvre d'une réalité brûlante, s'adresse aux peuples frappés dans leurs chairs. "L'homme brise ses chaînes", cette sculpture est soutenue par mon engagement déjà ancien de femme sculpteur au service de la mémoire sur les crimes et les injustices d'une certaine inhumanité.
polystyrène, plâtre, métal
Réalisée pour l'exposition personnelle d'Yvelyne Wood à la Galerie Stendhal de New York, sur le thème majeur de l'Holocauste. Témoignage contre l'oubli, mais surtout oeuvre liturgique dans ces piliers osseux et ressoudés, montant au plus haut cette cathédrale d'espoir.
