État des Lieux #2
FLASHES – We come as Friends

ÉTAT DES LIEUX
To mark our tenth anniversary in the year 2000 and everyone’s entry into the Third Millennium, we decided to give the Centre of contemporary art an even greater opening. The outcome is a special program called État des lieux, aiming to set up an inventory of the various aspects of current art.

Going against established practice, we decided to invite guest curators and ask them to take stock of what is happening in art now, with a view to describing the present and outlining the future. The project broke down into four events-exhibitions – four inventories – spread out over the entire year.

These État des lieux, events or exhibitions circumscribed in space and time, bring together artists in the broad meaning of the term, who focus on the concerns of the guest curators. Their job is to establish lines of communication between the various forms of thought for which art is the medium. Each of these presentations is a statement by the curator, expressive of his or her convictions.

WE COME AS FRIENDS – MICHELLE NICOL
The attraction and the promise of recreation (fun-Factor) of contemporary art led it to a degree of popularity that nobody was expecting. Today any art is a sort of pop art.

This evolution is supported by the selected media, secret meetings, glamour dislocations, aesthetically pleasant mises en scène, the seduction for the seduction, humour and irony, and a passion for commercial practices. We come as friends is an elaborate artistic tool so that the things and the attitudes can infiltrate in the conscience. We come as friends speaks about celebrity. The artists chosen, Joseph Bourban, Susan Cianciolo, Carsten Höller, Roth Stauffenberg, were requested to make suggestions: what they would like to make famous and by which means they think of arriving there. The exhibition testifies to the progressive results.