Archiwa Lefevre Jean Claude'a
Lefevre Jean Claude's Archives

Summary/Abstract: The use of a questionnaire by artists is symptomatic of the transformation of art in the second half of the twentieth century. It reveals a clear turn of interest from imagination to reality, and places artists in attitudes close to social research. In this edition of Andrzej Pierzgalski Gallery, we reproduce a booklet published in1982 by Lefevre Jean Claude. It is the result of a questionnaire conducted in the Parisian artists' community about their contemporary attitude to the practice of exhibitions. Answers show that the critical reflection on the exhibition was in this time at the centre of attention. In the context of contesting the role of the exhibition in artistic practice, this survey is a valuable testimony to various attempts to exceed the exhibition, to adapt it to new forms of art, to overcome the concept of the work as an object, and to weaken the authority of the institution and the market over art. In 1983 Lefevre Jean Claude created theLJC Archives. They are not only a place to collect documents, but also a method of artistic work, organizing in a coherent way whole publications of art documents, to which the artist gives various forms: calendars, books, leaflets, brochures, charts, boards, etc. In his art, the boundary between the document of art and the work is blurred. Radicalizing conceptual attitudes, the artist scrupulously adheres to the postulate that a work of art is an effect of the creative process of thinking, the traces of which he carries in himself, and treats the material object as a sign of failure in the reflective chain, leading to its possible presentation. Therefore, his works are only in the written form, but they are texts for reading, not for viewing; one of his original inventions is reading as an exhibition.

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