five easy pieces crrevecoeur

		FIVE EASY PIECES is a suite of one-day-exhibitions. In each of them I present objects and sculptures using the form of a talk. All of these talks deal with property, value and their creation.
		ODD LOT is the attempt to sell a hole. Definitions of property depend on the constitution of the country the property belongs to. In theory, the french Code Civil says that all space below and above a territory belongs to its owner. In Germany property stops at somewhere around 50 centimeters below the surface and its owner has easier access to exploitation of the space above the surface but doesn't have a right to it. The talk starts with the demonstration of the size of the biggest and the smallest lot that Gordon Matta Clark bought from the City of New York in the seventies. I speak about the BHV in Paris and its capacity to sell the Noxema shaving foam at a price 10 times higher than the usual supermarket price and I show images of the 15 objects that mark the stations of Kyle McDonalds exchanges of objects that made him own a house rather than owning a paperclip. Soap changes it's form considerably when you treat it with microwaves. The objects I created in doing so were auctioned immediatly after their creation to demonstrate the act of acquisition. These preliminary stages lead to the description of the sculpture that is the centre of interest of this talk: A hole I dug out in 2010 in the vicinity of the village Les Arques, Lot, France. The hole is big enough to allow my arm to comfortably fit into it.

LE NID DE FURNARIUS RUFUS presents a conversation piece found in a garage sale in Paris, the nest of the argentinian national bird: Furnarius Rufus. The nests of this bird are made of clay, straw, tissue and its saliva and are a topological wonder: a single curved wall produces a bedroom, a hallway and ceiling and floor for both of them.
The presentation of this nest is an occasion to talk about conceptions of space and of emptiness and the discoveries of Jakob von Uexküll concerning the environment and the nature of an instant. I use the bird's construction, this nest, as a starting point to remember Otto von Guericke, show his invention, the air-pump and to re-enact one of his demonstrations: the hemispheres of Magdeburg.

In the 80ies and 90ties of the 20th century an interior design fashion spread in american households. People placed something in their entrance hall or in any first room an invited person would enter. Value and beauty were no decisive criteria for these objects, they were supposed to be or look as if they were out of place, annoying, ugly or simply without taste. These visual obstacles were supposed to trigger conversation. They were the cause and content of a dialogue that would determine if the invited stayed or left and they permitted the host to chose the way of his reception.
They were called conversation pieces.

28, BLD DE LA CHAPELLE evolves around the notions of pressure and condensation. I talk about a blister in the macadam of a sidewalk and I try to understand why it appears at a specific moment in a specific place. The blister leads me to talk about seizure, appropriation and about the difficulties that the Danube Sinkhole produces for geological definitions and a general conception of landownership that says that you can't own the water of a river.

UN OEUF DE DINOSAUR REMPLIT D'UNE RACINE DE GINSENG ET COUVERT DE CHAMPIGNONS NOIRS in this demonstration I show what makes a clay sculpture by Mark Geffriaud and Geraldine Longueville identical to a glass object produced in China when it is considered as a work of mine.

In the Western Australian desert, a species of frog of the size of a Cola can spends most of its life buried in the desert sand two feet below the surface. It is filled with water and its metabolism produces layers of gelatinous matter that cover its skin, keeping it from dehydrating or losing that water. It can survive for years in this state of hibernation. And it does.
At times the rains are heavy.
If they are strong enough they soak through the ground until they reach the hibernating frog and liquefy its gelatine layers. As soon as the mucous softens the frog begins to move, eats its nourishing ’cocoon’ and rises to the surface, reaching it at almost the same time as other frogs. All around, the rain has formed puddles, pools and small lakes. Rejoicing begins and with it the reproduction of the species. The festivities continue for weeks. When the frogs sense that the water is diminishing, they drink as much as they can and return into the hardening mud, to wait for the next party.
Unfortunately you never know if you will be seeing the others again: The indigenous Australians know the location of these ephemeral paradises and during the dry season they dig into the ground, lying flat, their arm dug into the earth up to the shoulder, to find one of these gelatinous reservoirs and bring it to the surface. Then they prick a hole in the frog’s backside and press it to their lips to suck out the moisture it contains. Once emptied, the frog is useless and is crushed, making a noise like crumpled parchment, before being thrown away.

A6 / N104
You're driving, you're coming from the south and you're approaching Paris. It won't take very much longer, it's the moment just before arriving. It's the same for the the opposite direction: this is the place where you feel that you are leaving the city. If you were in Mongolia, you would stop the car, here, get out and celebrate this place, like you would celebrate the crossing of a river or the edge of the forest.You see a sign: La Francilienne, sculpteur (sculptor): Alex Garcia, 1992. Apparently you're not alone in thinking this place is worthy of celebration or appropriate for the construction of a monument. You're pleased with this. And it becomes really intriguing since you're not able to discern anything that this sign might refer to. You're not in a hurry and you exit the motorway to go back and have another closer look at the area. On the way back to the south you spot the same sign and again nothing that looks as if it could be announced by it. You try to find a place with an overview of the whole area, you go northwards again and you take a second motorway that crosses yours in the area situated between the two signs. Once more there are signs in both directions but no object. On the north-south axis it takes some 20 seconds to drive from one sign to the other, from east to west it takes about half a minute. 20 seconds are not a long time for a party. Maybe it is just a salutation or a hint to the possibility of a party. At the same time a cry of joy rarely lasts longer than 20 seconds and you won't keep a sip of wine in your mouth for very much longer either.

You can't believe it, you're falling in love with a motorway sculpture. You tell it to a friend. He takes this road twice a day since a couple of month to go to work. He never read the name of the scultor, but usually didn't manage to not see the 12 feet high sculpture that resembles a women walking probably southwards. The sculpture is located at the intersection of the A6 ( the Autoroute du soleil – motorway of or to the sun) and the N104 ( the Francilienne) a motorway running around Paris in a distance of 30 kilometers. You're disappointed, even though you didn't imagine it to be much different: Something big and bulky, a motorway-sculpture. It's only discrepancy was that you could pass without noticing the sculpture. This difference persists. You drive past the same place once more, you slow down and are once more unable to see it.
While you were driving from one sign to the other ten cars have passed in the opposite direction. On the way back there are just as many. The traffic on the N104 is a bit less dense, there are 5 cars per half a minute in both directions. 30 cars in 30 seconds. Considering this is not the rush hour and a couple of cars transport more than one passenger you think it is fair to say, one person per second traverses the area in-between the signs.
The inauguration would have taken place in spring, like the launching of a ship. There would have been flowers, preferably blossoming cherry-trees. But it wouldn't have been the best moment to finish road-works, those are best completed before winter. Since you are uncertain, you decide to not count the year 1992 at all. From January 1993 to December 2010 the sculpture could have been seen once per second. 18 years sum up to 567 million 648 thousand potential viewers. Mona Lisa still has to wait another 20 years until she will have been seen as often as that.
On official visits to a museum German Chancellor Willy Brandt stayed for 30 seconds in front of each artwork. Previously this seemed a short time, by now it feels long.

You're with your friend, he'll show the sculpture to you. None of you sees it on the way south and backwards. You stop the car on the emergency lane at the foot of a small hill right after the intersection of the two motorways. You walk up the hill. Blades of metal-saws are dispersed all around a concrete platform, that served as a base for the sculpture. Two forms that resemble to shoes or hollowed-out feet are the only visible parts that remain of the original sculpture. It makes you think of big game hunting, of elephants. You imagine the heavy body's collapse and how it's being cut up to transportable pieces. You can still see the spots where the falling sculpture hit the ground, you can see imprints of a shoulder, a knee and an ellbow in the clayey soil. Some of the bushes in the vicinity are crushed, the broken branches of others probably mark the passage the pieces were torn on, down to the motorway.
According to Fabien Giraud tears of Jesus Christ have been searched for and found in a crusade some 800 years ago and are now being kept in a church in France. Similar to the pieces of a holy sponge that
are kept elsewhere. You look around. The shoes of the figure and two floodlights remain attached to the platform. The legs of the figure have been cut above the ankle, most likely because it is easiest that way. The only trees that are cut down at floor level are the ones that will be submerged in the construction of a dam. Some bathing accidents can be avoided by this. None of the remains of the sculpture is higher than the surrounding bushes. It is an ideal object. It is unlikely that someone will think of turning the lights off. At night the sculpture is thus even more evidently absent. Two cones of light, crossing each other above a small hill situated between two bridges next to a motorway. If there is fog it becomes a static luminescent cloud.

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