les presses du réel

The Museum of Mistakes

Pierre Leguillon - The Museum of Mistakes
First monograph dedicated to Pierre Leguillon's Museum of Mistakes: a traveling exhibition gathering a collection of mass culture artifacts and craft objects, questioning with humor and subversivity the mechanisms of today's visual culture.
Founded in Brussels in 2013 by Pierre Leguillon, the Musée des Erreurs is a traveling exhibition that encamps for a show in the halls of brick-and-mortar museums—like a traveling circus that comes to town—and then moves on. The rest of the time, the collection is stored in the artist's studio apartment, mainly in his kitchen cupboards. Most of the items are serially manufactured and of negligible material value: postcards, record sleeves, posters large and small, pieces of fabric, ceramics, folk art, children's drawings and other miscellany. This book also includes items deemed too small, fragile or insignificant to take on tour in the past, as well as photographs of everyday street scenes that shed some light on various facets of the collection. Whether signed or anonymous, these artifacts defy any claims of authoritativeness in an age in which visual culture is shared on social media and all over the web, with no distinctions of substantive or aesthetic value, often with no captions and, all too frequently, with erroneous attributions. For Leguillon, the constant sorting and reshuffling of the items helps us revisit conventional interpretations and subvert, with an ample dose of humor, the sort of cultural “prêt-à-porter” so many museums serve us up nowadays. Essays by Patricia Falguières and Morad Montazami situate the Musée des Erreurs in the tradition of art museums and the phenomenon of cultural appropriation. And Carrie Pilto contributes freestyle captions commenting on the featured items.
Second edition (2021).
Pierre Leguillon (born 1969 in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, lives and works in Paris) is an artist, curator, and writer who has become known for transforming the slide-lecture format into an enlightening, poetic, and witty form of performance art. His “Diaporamas”—slideshows composed of the artist's snapshots—suggest through juxtaposition unexpected connections and new classification systems. Leguillon also makes enigmatic assemblages and dioramas exploring the work and careers of artists such as Diane Arbus, Ad Reinhardt, George Ohr, and Jean Dubuffet. Leguillon's work has been featured at institutions around the world, including at Moderna Museet (Malmö, Sweden, 2010), Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2009), and Artists Space (New York, 2009). He published the journal Sommaire between 1991 and 1996, and his writing has appeared in publications such as Purple, Artpress, and Journal des Arts.
Texts by Patricia Falguières, Morad Montazami, Carrie Pilto.

Graphic design: Conny Purtill and Stéphane De Groef.
 
published in September 2020
English edition
19 x 26 cm (hardcover)
240 pages (250 color ill.)
 
58.00
 
ISBN : 978-3-906803-94-4
EAN : 9783906803944
 
in stock


 top of page