14 december – Éric Baudelaire

Vilka var årets bästa utställningar, händelser och publikationer 2012? I Kunstkritikks julkalender sammanfattar Kunstkritikks egna skribenter och inbjudna gäster konståret 2012. Nummer fjorton är konstnären Éric Baudelaire, vars film och installation The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011) har visats på otaliga utställningar och filmfestivaler runtom i världen, nu senast på Iaspis i Stockholm. Baudelaire bor och arbetar i Paris.

Top 3 French books that should be translated into Swedish

			Pierre Zaoui, La Traversée des Catastrophes. Philosophy as a tool to traverse the troubled waters of personal catastrophes. This makes it sound like a self-help book, which it is, but self-help understood as the highest form of philosophical engagement with the real.

			Marcel Cohen, Faits III. The third and final volume of Marcel Cohen’s serendipitous observations that at times resemble prose-poetry, at others narrative art criticism, or simply daily journalism of uneventful events. His subjects range from the Holocaust, to Chris Burden locking himself into a locker, to two strangers communicating in morse code with flashlights from two buildings in the night. A book in line with Walter Benjamin’s pronouncement: «I have nothing to say. Only to show.”

			Chris Marker, Collected Writings. I asked a friend why there were no great books published about Chris Marker, and she answered: because nobody can write as well about Marker as Chris Marker. And so I asked where to find Marker on Marker. And she told me there was no such anthology, only scattered, almost lost writings in the journal Esprit dating back to the 1940s, various pieces scattered over nearly half a century and mostly forgotten. Somebody should really get to it, collect, edit, annotate and publish the collected writings of Chris Marker. And then translate it to Swedish. (Stillbild ur Chris Marker, Les mots ont un sens, 1970.)

Top 3 film festivals of 2012

			FICUNAM, Mexico: Who else organized a complete retrospective of films by Masao Adachi, and published his complete writings in Spanish? Nobody else did. That’s why FICUNAM is in the Top 3. (Bild: Masao Adachi i Philippe Grandrieuxs Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution, 2011.)

			DocLisboa: What used to be a sleepy documentary festival has become an enormously ambitious program featuring a complete Chantal Akerman retrospective, video installations by Pedro Costa, a very good program of collectively made militant «newsreel» style films from the 60s, 70s and 80s (curated by Federico Rossin) and an exceptional in-competition line-up featuring works by Wang Bing (who won the grand prize), Otolith Group and Sylvain George, among many others.

			FID Marseille: Because every year, for the past ten years, Jean-Pierre Rehm blurs the lines between documentary and fiction, art and film, with very rich side-programs, and the warmest of mediterranean atmospheres. (Stillbild ur Nicholas Ray, We Can’t Go Home Again, 1976.)