August 1993: French artist Patrice Caire combines advanced methods of science and technology with art-making techniques in The Brooklyn Museum’s thirty-fourth Grand Lobby installation, Crash! Art Implants Reject Emotions (CAIRE), on view from October 1 through December 31, 1993. By utilizing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a medical diagnostic technique, in computer animation, holograms, photography, and digital printing, along with etching, blacksmithing, and casting, Caire creates a network connecting science, technology, and artistic expression.
“Today one has to consider philosophy, art, and science as some kind of melodic lines—on the one hand foreign to one another, on the other hand, constantly interfering with one another,” states the artist. “It is with these interferences that I operate, and my work is to create new convergences and to draw completely unexpected consequences, which will act as relay for others.”
Caire also challenges linguistics by manipulating acronyms based on her surname and using them for the titles of her installations. The application of acronyms originated in the artist’s search for new titles to her works and appeared for the first time in her 1992 installation at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Calais. In her Brooklyn Museum installation, which addresses the importance of the emotional and sensual components of art, Crash! can refer to the inevitable drama in life; Art Implants, can refer to the artist’s use of medical instruments; and Reject Emotions, can relate to the general repression of sentiments by our modern technology. In addition, unattributed quotations taken from science, philosophy, poetry, and B-movies, etched on aluminum plates, will be scattered throughout the installation, continuing Caire’s free-play with linguistics.
The installation will consist of geometric and organic sculptural forms made of synthetic materials and metal, including vinyl, acrylics, rubber, aluminum, and steel, which will be dispersed across the floor and wall of the Grand Lobby. To produce these objects the artist employs a wide range of techniques, each suited to a specific material: anodizing for etching aluminum plates, blacksmithing for production of metal sculpture, and casting for three-dimensional rubber pieces, all of which she does herself.
Four large vinyl “flags,” on which are digitally printed sections of the artist’s brain, will be suspended from the ceiling. On the floor will be two monitors with computer animation based on MRI images. While one will show images of the artist’s hand, the other will show images of the artist’s brain, both moving rhythmically across the screen. The movements of both the brain and hand images will be accompanied by the music of French composer Pierre Vasseur, who incorporated ultrasonic waves of a prenatal exam into the harmonics.
Patrice Caire was born in France and currently lives and works in New York City. She studied fine arts in Paris and Vienna, and later broadened her education in Germany and the United States. She has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, including the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Calais, the Galerie Krinzinger in Innsbruck, Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, the University Art Museum in Santa Barbara, the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, and in New York at the International Center for Photography, 494 Gallery, PS 1, and Artists Space.
Crash! Art Implants Reject Emotions (CAIRE) was organized by Charlotta Kotik, Chair, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Curator of Contemporary Art, and Vesela Sretenovic, a curatorial intern funded by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. The exhibition and its associated Artist-in-Residence programs are made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. Additional support for this exhibition was provided by the AFAA (French Association for Artistic Actions).
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1989 - 1994. 07-12/1993, 172-174.
