Identifying at times as an itinerant dreamer, a thrifter, and a ringleader, conceptual artist Pierre Leguillon is fascinated by how art is produced, preserved, and circulated. He began his career as a critic and a photographer and has since gone on to create bodies of work in the form of books, slideshows, performances, and installations. His primary material is a growing archive of objects and images that he constellates into new arrangements for presentation. Through these permutations, Leguillon approaches art history through all its facets—the artwork, the institution that frames it, the artist, and the artist’s own institutionalization.

 Ads

 In the Window Gallery of the foundation, Leguillon presents “Ads:” a selection of images from his collection of advertisements in which artists appear as models or brand ambassadors. Spanning from the 1940s to the present, the ongoing collection comprises a single work currently numbered at over 250 pieces, representing a lifelong endeavor.

Organized alphabetically, the selection on view is tailored to Los Angeles and the Marciano Art Foundation. It spans luxury goods, fashion, alcohol, and technology–from McDonald’s to Dior and much in between. It features a range of artists from Marina Abramović to Andy Warhol, by way of Joseph Beuys, de Chirico and Dalí. As Leguillon puts it: “It’s a collection about art without any art in it.” Both glamorous and banal.

“Ads” represents not only the art that informs our culture, but also the people who embody it, and what we expect from them. Its subject strays from “art” to “influence,” considering the ways an artist’s persona may accrue cultural capital equal to, if not greater than, the work itself. In doing so, the collection stresses the kinship between advertising and art, as forms that traffic in emotional persuasion.

Brands

 In 2013, Leguillon founded The Museum of Mistakes, his own non-hierarchical institution in Brussels, where he organizes and displays his collections. Complete with a store—“the little shop of errors”—the museum brings together an eclectic range of objects, with a particular emphasis on printed matter. Classified and juxtaposed in unexpected ways, the collection may at times include such diverse items as a plastic bag printed with an exhibition advertisement, posters, printed fabrics, a pair of painted Doc Martens, a collection centered on socks…

The Museum of Mistakes has traveled (“Like a circus,” Leguillon chimes in) and has been exhibited equally in museums and book spreads. The project reflects his ongoing interest in the circulation of culture: how images, books, advertisements, documents, and reproductions shape our understanding of contemporary culture, and how rereading this material allows it to accrue new meanings. In addition to The Museum of Mistakes, Leguillon has founded a series of other micro-institutions or “brands” through which he circulates his bodies of work including Slideshow, The Promise of the Screen, and Teatrino/Palermo—each one a different vehicle for a repeated practice or performance.

In the MAF Library, The Museum of Mistakes will unfurl a new installation of its traveling collection. This installation—an annexation of the Library—will dovetail with a comprehensive presentation of Leguillon’s artist’s books, offering the book as central to the artist’s practice. Presenting original objects alongside their printed appearances, the installation considers presentation, historicization, and museological display. A ‘pop-up’ in every sense, this exhibition offers the book as a museum and the museum as a book.

–Lauren Mackler

Pierre Leguillon: Ads & Brands is co-curated by independent writer and curator Lauren Mackler and MAF Director Hanneke Skerath.

Ads published by Triangle Books, Brussels in 2019 (and again in 2021) received the Bob Calle Prize for artists’ books in 2021.

MAF is grateful for generous support provided by: Villa Albertine, the French Institute for Culture and Education.