LES ROIS DU MONDE
MAC MARSEILLE, FRANCE
NOVEMBER 10, 2024 — MARCH 2, 2025
Les Rois du monde is the second part of a series initiated by Mégane Brauer at the Musée Transitoire, Paris, in 2023. Mégane Brauer uses text as much as objects, but not necessarily on the same level. In 2023, the story around which the exhibition revolves, “Cry me a river”, was partially reproduced and pinned to the wall, but this time it’s present in its entirety: “At first, the work gave value to the text, but now it’s the other way round: it’s the text that gives value to the work”.
The installation is therefore a “reconstruction”, a “less livable simulation”, a “model of the text”, “intimate but new”, whose “witnesses” are “less personal”. It includes “my fridge, my furniture, but depersonalized”.
“Cry me a river” tells a story of childhood memories. It’s all true. It’s a true story, but it’s all false, amplified, absurd, large. The distortion is a necessary one, transposing the gaze of childhood to that of adulthood: “The truth is so big that I use fiction to make it truer”.
Under “hardcore white neon, nightmarish Gifi ambiance”, the sounds of the fridge, or the dripping of a fountain onto a plastic sofa resting on the Plexiglas of a giant swimming pool, take the place of ASMR. The pieces are “amplified”, but “the more time passes, the more disembodied they become”. “It’s a question of closing the story, which is put under vacuum, frozen, dead, finished”, of translating ‘the exhaustion of the story, the exhaustion of the affect of forms’.
If our aesthetic prescriptions are an objectification of affects, as Chinese-Canadian cultural theorist Sianne Ngai puts it, what happens when exhaustion takes over the works? After a book devoted to the zany, the cute and the interesting, as grids for reading the aesthetics of late capitalism2, she more recently published a book entitled Theory of The Gimmick: “This book deals with the gimmick, aesthetic judgment and capitalist form, simultaneously irritating and strangely seductive ”.
The irritating and seductive character of Mégane Brauer’s works plays on the height of the glances that potentially intrude between the metal slats of the 8 blind wall shutters, along the heavy 2 m-high administrative shelf to the small pink children’s table in fuchsia plastic. 38 binders in plastic sleeves hold the cheap herbarium of 2,000 laurel flowers plucked from privileged private spaces in Marseille, like a “repetitive archive of what each bloom would represent”, “because they bloom and die a little”.
The aesthetic value of the sensitive experience proposed by Les Rois du monde collides with the commercial value of the objects and materials used. Mégane Brauer’s work signals the violence of the gap between mass production, the forced reproduction of underpaid labor, and the work of art; and she refuses to choose. She flirts with the gimmick and keeps us in the discomfort and disquiet that only sentiment can create, to prevent the stories that matter from being sold off to the highest bidder.
— Emilie Notéris
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