Plein Sud : How did you come up with the idea for an exhibition of this scale?
Jean-Marc Huitorel : I'd already put on several medium-sized exhibitions on the subject, and I was dreaming of the ‘big one’. Thanks to Muriel Enjalran (director of FRAC Sud, editor's note), who invited me to design it, I was able to produce a large-scale synthesis of my work on the subject.
PS : Each of the three exhibitions has a different name and tackles the theme of the link between art and sport in a different way. Are they to be considered independently of each other or as a whole?
J.-M.H. : This is a single exhibition in three different, complementary venues. Giving each section a subtitle underlines these different approaches. At Frac Sud, ‘L'heure de gloire’ refers to the glorious dimension of sportsmen and sportswomen, which we have just witnessed at the Paris Olympic Games, and which will no doubt be confirmed at the Paralympic Games. It's also a nod to Andy Warhol and his ‘15 minutes of fame’ to which he claimed everyone was entitled. The exhibition is conceived as a sort of table of contents covering most of the questions raised by the relationship between art and sport. Another part of the exhibition at the Mac is entitled ‘Paintings from an Exhibition’, because I've wanted to do a painting exhibition on this subject for a long time, and the Mac really lends itself to it, because it's a ‘museum of picture rails’. Even though it also includes photographs, drawings and a few sculptures. Finally, at the Mucem, Trophées et reliques (Trophies and relics) tackles the crucial question of popular and learned culture, the different instances of the object (vernacular, artistic, mythical and heritage) and the beliefs it carries.
PS : Is it so obvious to link sport and art, which in theory come from different cultures - popular for one, learned for the other?
J.-M.H. : It seems to me that all research, including scientific research, is based on intimate sources and personal experience. Coming from a rural and agricultural background, my first cultural experience was of football pitches, cycle races and Breton wrestling. Then I became more educated and gained access to what is known as scholarly culture, but it all started in the soil of what is known as ‘popular and sporting’ culture. Today, I continue to lay claim to this plural culture and my conception of art is that of an activity that is part of the whole range of human events and the symbolic objects that emanate from them. Art is not a bubble disconnected from everyday realities, that's fundamental to me. But in this field of art, sporting culture was for a long time very much in the minority, if not despised, very little represented. I'm pleased to see that the issue is now taking centre stage, giving rise to debate and intellectual production. But at the end of the day, I think it's mainly because artists have integrated these elements into their work that they have managed to make this link obvious.
PS : The part of the exhibition taking place at the Mucem also makes this link with the objects in the museum's collection...
J.-M.H. : Absolutely! At the Mucem, I worked with Jean-Fabien Philippy (project manager, editor's note), which gave me an insight into the fabulous collections. We also owe a great deal to the Musée National du Sport in Nice. Very quickly, we were able to bring together everyday objects with works of art, as well as sporting and mythical objects such as Roger Federer's racket. The objects are sometimes identical, sometimes different, but they all form part of the same chain, that of human production and creation.
PS : You have written several books on art and sport, including La Beauté du geste, l'art contemporain et le sport (éditions du Regard, 2005), L'art est un sport de combat (with Barbara Forest and Christine Mennesson, Analogues, 2011) and Une forme olympique / Sur l'art, le sport et le jeu (HEC éditions, 2017), as well as organising several exhibitions on these themes. Have you seen any changes from what you presented then?
J.-M.H. : I've been working on this subject for twenty-five years now, and I've noticed that, while it's true that sport can be used as a creative material, as a background, it has also changed a great deal. Today, as an exhibition curator, you can't help but wonder about the parity between men and women artists. In the early 2000s, frankly, we didn't ask ourselves the question. Today, of course, we do, and this is leading to the discovery of new artists and new approaches. At the Frac, we've achieved parity. And on the whole of ‘Des exploits, des chefs-d'œuvre’, we're not far off. This attention has coincided with the emergence of today's major societal issues. At the time (the turn of the 1990s-2000s), the issues of gender, homophobia and post-colonial problems were just beginning to take hold in the field that concerns us. Today it's central. The whole ‘Des exploits, des chefs-d'œuvre’ exhibition obviously takes these issues into account.
PS : How did you manage to create a dialogue between so many works and artists?
J.-M.H. : I believe that these articulations, these dialogues occur in various ways, but the heart of it all is the work. As an art critic, what interests me is working with artists I like, finding quality works (sometimes masterpieces...) that I take pleasure and interest in looking at and understanding, while trying to avoid the pitfalls of flat illustration. To articulate three hundred and fifty works in three very different places, the question of hanging is central. In a sort of ping-pong game, I tried to ensure that each of the works would bounce off and constantly echo the others. At the Mac, for example, I had to create surprise effects to avoid the boredom of a linear accumulation. So I played with winks, placing a sculpture by Barry Flanagan, an English artist who has sculpted mainly hares, diagonally across a group of works by Alain Séchas, whose world is populated by cats. And I said to myself, it's funny because the hare is to Flanagan what the cat is to Séchas. At the Mucem, it was fascinating to establish chains of objects. From an ordinary football, to the semi-final ball of the 98 World Cup signed by Aimé Jacquet, we naturally arrived at the ball by artist Fabrice Hyber or Laurent Perbos. These are the kinds of shifts that make for a coherent and enjoyable exhibition.
PS : Is there one work in particular that stands out for you?
J.-M.H. : I love them all, otherwise I wouldn't be showing them! However, to play the game, at least in part, I'll mention not one but three, because there are three exhibition venues. At the Mac, for example, I'm proud to present an extraordinary work that is being shown for the first time and probably for the last time in its entirety. It's L'œil du tigre by Julien Beneyton. The work occupies 250 square metres of the museum, comprises around one hundred and forty elements (paintings, drawings, sculptures, etc.) and paints the portrait of a recent French boxing legend, Jean-Marc Mormeck.
At the Mucem, I'm very attached to Club, which is also a work in several parts (around fifteen) by the duo Aurélie Ferruel and Florentine Guédon, revealing the admiration of two young women for sport in the village. It's a work that is highly emblematic of this dialectic between the popular and the learned.
At the Frac, I'm particularly interested in this huge hanging tapestry by the African-American artist Noel W. Anderson, which depicts slightly deformed black bodies playing basketball. This work, with its powerful visual impact, raises the question of the erotic exploitation of black bodies in sport, particularly in the context of the NBA.