Published by the Centre national des arts plastiques, Explorers is a digital book in which an artist takes turns being an explorer, inventor and cartographer, dives under the seas, traverses oceans, burrows beneath the earth, gets lost, finds their way or ends up shipwrecked, leading the reader in their wake.
Carte blanche was given to Argentine author Alberto Manguel. Muesli was appointed to handle the graphic design, devising an original navigation that creates a nonlinear personal reading experience through the use of hyperlinks. The publication is also available in French.
Whatever the terrain—on land or at the depths of the ocean, real, virtual or even at the farthest limits of the subconscious—exploration remains a quest, accomplished thanks to and in spite of oneself, to redefine the contours of a world, whether it exists for real or in our imagination. In this respect, exploration is not so unlike art, which is largely inspired by it, both in terms of how it is done and its objective. From Voyage autour de ma chambre by Xavier de Maistre, whose detailed inventory encompasses just a single room, to Jules Vernes’s Voyages extraordinaires, in which we anticipate an exploration of the seas, the centre of the Earth and outer space, the paths taken by the explorer seem infinite, from the most exotic to the most local, from the direct trajectory to the most labyrinthine of routes.
Explorers unites an exceptional selection of works from artists chosen from the collections owned by France’s Centre national des arts plastiques: Martine Aballéa, Adel Abdessemed, Pierre Alferi, Dove Allouche, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Berdaguer & Péjus, Berger & Berger, Biosphere, Andrea Blum, Stanley Brouwn, Vija Celmins, herman de vries, Detanico & Lain, Marcel Dinahet, Julien Discrit, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Hamish Fulton, Cyprien Gaillard, Luigi Ghirri, Piero Golia, Andy Goldsworthy, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia, Kristján Gudmundsson, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Marine Hugonnier, Peter A. Hutchinson, Anne Marie Jugnet, On Kawara, Joachim Koester, Guillermo Kuitca, Emmanuel Lagarrigue, Guillaume Leblon, Richard Long, Charles Lopez, Charles de Meaux, Nicolas Moulin, NASA, Roman Opalka, Dennis Oppenheim, Claudio Parmiggiani, Gianni Pettena, Pratchaya Phinthong, Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador, Philippe Ramette, David Renaud, Thomas Ruff, Vladimir Skoda, Stalker, and Nathalie Talec.
Explorers is a revised and enhanced edition of two printed catalogues, in French, produced to present the eponymous exhibition at the Centre des arts in Enghien les-Bains in 2010 (available to buy at www.cda95.fr), then at the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix des Sables d’Olonne in 2012 (available to buy at the museum).
Technical information
Compatible with iPad
Titles: Explorers: Works from the collection of France’s Centre national des arts plastiques/
Explorateurs : Œuvres du Centre national des arts plastiques
Publisher: Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP)
ISBN reference: 978-2-11-129961-0 / 978-2-11-131037-7
328 pages
Languages: French / English
Authors:
Alberto Manguel, writer;
Sébastien Faucon, inspector of art, Head of Visual Arts Collections at the CNAP;
Gaëlle Rageot-Deshayes, national heritage curator, Head of the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix au Sables d’Olonne.
Contributors:
Raphaël Brunel, Stéphanie Fargier-Demergès, Loïc Le Gall
Graphic design: Müesli
Free of charge
Distributor: Art, Book, Magazine
Interactive digital catalogue distributed free of charge and exclusively on Art, Book, Magazine
www.artbookmagazine.com
www.cnap.fr