Art by telephone - recalled -

his book enables the rediscovery of an exhibition project : Art by Telephone, as well as contributing to the understanding of art practices since the 1960s.

Art by Telephone took place in November 1969 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Jan van der Marck, the curator of this exhibition, brought together a heterogeneity of artistic practices around the following concept: instructions for the works in the exhibition would be transmitted orally by telephone, to then be executed by museum staff or local artisans. Involving sending an idea, transported remotely by language, Art by Telephone is one of the first exhibitions to present the ambition to show the conceptual nature of artistic production of this period. The project refers explicitly to a previous work: Telephone Pictures (1922) by László Moholy-Nagy. Jan Van der Marck’s aim was also to pay tribute to the work of Marcel Duchamp who have contributed to the development of the concept behind delegating the production of a work of art.

Art by Telephone... Recalled was initiated by the research program ‘’En Traduction’’, co-directed by Sébastien Pluot and Fabien Vallos at the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts d'Angers. A series of seminaries took place questioning the notion of original and the piece’s autonomy, the author figure’s dismissal, the ethical consequences in processes of delegation, of translatability and operativity, of the phenomena of a meaning and its various versions and its propagation. The project Art by Telephone... Recalled was a space of reflexion on the critical modernity of the piece.

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