MIAM's Anniversary Exhibition Maps Modest Art Territories

The Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM) in Sète presents 'Les territoires de l'art modeste' from November 27, 2010 to October 2, 2011, a sprawling anniversary exhibition curated as twelve distinct territories. Founded in 2000 by artists Hervé di Rosa and Bernard Belluc, MIAM champions 'modest art'—found objects, toys, waste collections, and other physical traces of daily memory. The show features comic strips by Maurice Chot (a self-taught adolescent from the 1940s, discovered at a flea market and presented by Robert Combas); wooden sculptures by Émile Ratier, a blind farmer from the Lot region; Paño drawings by Mexican prisoners on handkerchiefs; and comic and melancholic collections by Philippe Artaud, including stolen artwork fragments (a lightbulb by Christian Boltanski, a piece of Cloaca excrement by Wim Delvoye). Hervé Perdriolle's installation confronts painted Patua scrolls from West Bengal with a video installation by artist NG. The exhibition reflects on Walter Benjamin's notion of the collector as allegorist, aiming to overturn the capitalist and utilitarian function of objects and to 'organize the world.' Supported by the city of Sète and public authorities, MIAM seeks recognition for art considered 'other'—popular, marginal, brut. The show blurs distinctions between artifact and artwork, curator and artist, proposing a future museum model of creative conservation over conservative creation.