Johan Muyle: Plus d’Opium pour le peuple / (No) More Opiate for the Masses
Johan Muyle, Raoul Vaneigem
B.P.S. 22 & Espace de création contemporaine de la Province de Hainaut, 2006
€120,00
6 op voorraad
Our copies are new, in perfect condition and still in the original sealing.
Not quite a catalog, this beautiful work can truly claim to be an artist’s book. For several years now, Johan Muyle has been creating, among other things, animated sculptures from toys and salvaged objects often collected during his travels in India or Africa. The movement of the creations is thus captured in this book thanks to a whole arsenal of fold-out pop-ups and pull-tabs, when the pages aren’t punctured, opening up other perspectives onto other images. We can thus imagine a skeletal, tightrope-walking cyclist hovering over a dizzying chasm, raise the phallus of an ancient bicorne-wearing gendarme, or wear the same Aztec-sardine crown as the artist on the book’s cover.
The poetry of Muyle’s works is childlike and disillusioned. This is what caught the attention of the situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem in his text “The Child in the Machine Room.” Noting the inevitable and depressing commodification of the world, he sees in this childish creation one of the only viable possibilities, without doubt, to resist and reinject humanity in order to seize the devouring machine: “Only price matters. Life, generosity, solidarity, beauty, wonder have no price and therefore do not deserve to exist, except in the form of simulacra… What would become of mercantile happiness if everyone invented the happiness of living according to their desires?”
The book is composed of 3 parts: – “L’enfant dans la chambre des machines”, text in French with English translation by Raoul Vaneigem about the artistic work of Belgian artist Johan Muyle (b. 1956). – “Plus d’opium pour le peuple”/(No) More Opiate fot the Masses, a reproduction on a black background of the exhibited works, including several pages decorated with three-dimensional pop-up animations. – “About this book”, text by Pierre-Olivier Rollin, director of BPS 22 and curator of the exhibition.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Johan Muyle – Plus d’opiem pour le peuple”/”Johan Muyle – (No) More Opiate dor the Masses”, BPS 22/Espace de création contemporaine de la Province de Hainaut, Charleroi, 1 September-10 December 2006.
Contains 2 inserts printed in color: – a 4-page leaflet reproducing a work in pop-up (“Au bord des lèvres”) – a cardboard crown intended to be worn by the purchaser of the book, as in the various photographic portraits of the artist.
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