‘You Have Everything to Learn, Everything That Can Not Be Learned’

Drawing inspiration from both George Perec's The Man Who Sleeps (1967) and Hermann Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener (1853), ‘You Have Everything to be Learned, Everything that Can Not be Learned’ arranges works that reflect on distance, unproductivity, and the act of stepping outside of the world. Perec's novel tells the story of a young man who isolates himself in his room, in order to think only of the world, while Melville's one recounts the well-known destiny of a scrivener who decides, one day, to remain inactive. Both are used as tools to investigate the political and social implications of gestures of silent resistance, of active stillness, in the face of the ever-active mechanisms of the liberal economy. At the centre of a constellation of works by emerging artists including Vittorio Brodmann, Alan Schmalz, Linda Voorhinde, Ulrich Wulff and Seyoung Yoon, a recent piece by major Swiss figure John M Armleder, Carl Gustav Krevatseveau (FS) (2013), stands as an icon of non-action: a clock with its hands cut out.
- Yann Chateigné