Yann Sérandour's 'Weiss' at gb agency: White Pages and Artistic Echoes

Yann Sérandour's exhibition 'Weiss' at gb agency in Paris (November 15, 2008 – January 10, 2009) explores the artist's engagement with art historical narratives through a series of works that reference and recontextualize earlier art movements. The exhibition's title, German for 'white,' alludes to a previous exhibition on white in modern art at Kunsthaus Basel. Central to the show is an eponymous work consisting of books placed on the floor, created from 'degreased' gallery documentation—specifically, white or near-white pages—bound into an artist's book with a cover from the Weiss exhibition catalogue. This also echoes the gallery's address on rue Louise-Weiss. Another key piece is a wallpaper listing objects from a 2007 intervention by Sérandour at the Musée de l'Objet in Blois, where he emptied Arman's 1994 reconstruction of his 1960 'Le Plein' vitrine (originally a response to Yves Klein's 1958 'Le Vide' at Iris Clert). Sérandour catalogued each object, reducing the accumulation to a list. The exhibition also includes a 1930s self-portrait bought on eBay and a reactivation of Robert Smithson's 'Yucatan Mirrors Displacements.' Sérandour's practice, which began in 1999 with 'Thirtysix Fire Stations' (echoing Ed Ruscha's 'Twentysix Gasoline Stations'), consistently interrogates how we relate to stories and art history, often through editions and archives.