Ecart, chronologie en cinq jours
10 - 15.01.2011
Flyer for Ecart/Books bookshop, 1975
Ecart, chronologie en cinq jours is a project interpreting the history of the Groupe Ecart’s activity in Geneva from documents, archives and oral narratives that, each day, from 10th-15th January, help recreate a piece or a happening from the group. Over the week, as the programme unfolds, some items are left aside, showing traces of a series of acts from the group’s repertoire, alongside original editions of Ecart/Books.
Founded in Geneva in 1969 by John M. Armleder, Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, the Groupe Ecart, through its gallery, publishing house and publications, calved out a space in the 1970s: that of a misunderstanding, centred around the Groupe’s affiliation with Fluxus, namely the supposed uniting of the art’s realisation with the street, life and its tides. If the Groupe Ecart replaced some so-called “just” knowledge with ordinary knowledge, it is by neglecting the immutability of a place that acts, abilities, hallmarks, ideas and events would appear to pile up and accumulate without changing speaker or owner. It was necessary to devise abysses. Such are created around a spontaneous mythology punctuated with unfounded celebrations, one-off events staging multiple characters, an identity born on confidentialities and secrets built on real places and with real tools. It seems that the premise of the venture has not been to organise the cards but to play into their hands, to note gaps in the text of artistic genealogies.
Ecart, chronologie en cinq jours puts the rebuilding in this interval of reading, in the margins and plates, the gaps and absences, in the indefinite work of the texts and the images on each other. There are no precedents but some gaps, some texts and some pretexts: an intermission, relevant to the detachment and void of which Ecart has made a proper noun.
Programme
10.01.2011, 6pm
The White Flights of the Imagination & Other Pieces
Piece for eight performers enacted at the time of the first Ecart Happening Festival in 1969.
11.01.2011, 6pm
Three Colours Event (Event n°2, Artichauts)
Piece for two performers enacted for the opening of the Ecart gallery in 1972.
12.01.2011, 2pm-9pm
Conversation. Study for John Cage.
Piece exhibited at the time of the opening of the new Ecart gallery in 1973.
13.01.2011, 6pm
Ecart Films Archives
Projection of previously unreleased Ecart films.
14.01.2011, 6pm
138 Textes en Lecture Simultanée
Piece for 24 performers given on the occasion of a Dada Recital at Geneva’s Art and History Museum in 1979.
15.01.2011, 2pm-9pm
Infusion/Diffusion
John M. Armleder at the Biennale de Paris in 1979. With John M. Armleder.
