Belle vue – Contrechamp d’un paysage artistique luxurieux

We all know the phrase pronounced by Neil Armstrong when he took the first step on the Moon. But we are less familiar with the exclamation of Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut who, free of any injunction from NASA, exclaimed: "Nice view!"
Considered marginal or secondary, the practice of publication initiates, in the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, the freest and most invigorating artistic experiments. Belle vue is the sensitive portrait of a furtive generation that considers the published space as a public space and the act of disseminating as an artistic act. The book writes a history of art, parallel to the market, which gives pride of place to short circuits and autonomous economies. Collaborative by definition, the publishing act experiments with the dispersion of authority and puts the myth of originality to the test. At the crossroads of information, action and creation, editorial practices play with disciplines and redistribute values. The actors of micro-publishing deal with all the energies that make up creation; in turn researchers, artists, publishers, curators, collectors and amateurs. Based on twenty-five years of research and action at the Centre national édition art image (cneai =), an art centre located on the outskirts of Paris, this book compiles sources of reflections on the work as a medium, as a score and as a reproduction in the sense of the version. A mikado of quotations, images and stories crosses the fields of ethnology, politics, economics, philosophy and art. The two hundred and fifty short texts and quotations in Belle vue are taken from publications, conferences, magazines, newspapers, ephemera, exhibition sheets, websites, documentaries and unpublished texts.
Beyond the history of the Cneai, this book contains a wealth of references on the enigmas of artistic emergence and poetic confidence. In contrast to the great history of art and its academic standards of uniqueness and signature, Belle vue offers an alternative and jubilant view of art. Each double-page spread is self-contained. The book lends itself to random reading.