Lumière, the script hints, might want to do more than just conserve. As conservators, they’re entrusted with maintaining objects brought into Europe by colonial agents through theft or other ethically-questionable means of acquisition. The script’s main characters, Lumière and her new colleague, Seon-Min, work in a Belgian museum conserving art and African antiquities. brilliantly animates both of these historical contexts. With two conservators at the center of his script, Barrois Jr. The very person intended to protect, care for and provide access to these invaluable objects was the one literally ripping them from their binding and selling them up the block and around the country. When a 2017 audit of the library’s collection revealed the theft, it rocked public confidence in an otherwise reliable public institution. Schulman passed the stolen goods along to unsuspecting buyers, including other library systems. His partner in this criminal endeavor was John Schulman, former proprietor of Caliban Book Shop, located just a minute’s walk from the museum. For 25 years, Greg Priore, manager of the library’s rare books collection, extracted valuable elements from prized books and sold them. Pittsburgh residents might also place Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette in another, hyper-local context-the 1992-2017 theft of $8 million worth of book plates, maps and photographic prints from the Carnegie Museum of Art’s neighbor, the Carnegie Public Library of Pittsburgh. CPhoto: Filip Wolak, courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art A highlight from ‘Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette’. While this setup included European artists copying African art, it also included explorers, anthropologists and others raiding the material legacy of Africa to stock their mantelpieces, country estates, university offices and-eventually-public museums with objects derisively labeled ‘primitive.’ It is a system that turns living people into images of an unsalvageable past. As Liz Park, the museum’s Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, writes, the “rubber vine-like and elephantine shapes” of the Belgian Art Nouveau “recall the colonial roots of these forms.” Just as rubber and ivory were taken from Africa to become goods on a global market, so too were visual forms and styles taken. More specifically, the show aims to take part in historical and cultural understandings of the extraction of resources, labor, visual culture and life from the Democratic Republic of Congo-and Africa more generally-by European nations and private firms. Wherever you stand in Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette, the artist asks you to consider the value of the objects you see and how that value is generated. Perhaps you’re a movie-goer, a memorabilia collector or an early-2000s film bootlegger with a digital video camera in their pocket. I’ve been that intern.) Turn around and you’ll see two paintings-as-prints advertising Barrois Jr.’s fictional film. When you stand in front of the case, you might fall into the role of a visiting researcher or an unpaid intern seeking a quiet place to text. The case has the un-ornamented look of museum storage, but the arrangement of objects gives a film-ready quality. To your right is a case of minerals and small sculptures, each in its own padded storage box and tilted 45-degrees towards the viewer. Standing here, you might be “Lumière,” the film script’s conservator-turned-possible-forger. A partially-painted canvas rests under the microscope, presumably mid-forgery. As you enter the museum’s Forum gallery, you see a conservator’s table, complete with brush, goggles, objets and a microscope hooked up to a computer monitor. Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette offers viewers multiple elements of the story. Photo: Filip Wolak, courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art The show, Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette, gives material form to the script’s central question: What is the relationship between the image, the museum and value? Installation view of Lyndon Barrois Jr., Guardians Gate (Farfanicchio), 2022, and Masters of Fine Arts, 2011/2022. Partial results of those tests are currently on display at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art in the form of half-duplicated paintings, borrowed art shipping crates, printed herbarium samples and other objects of questionable authenticity. tests out interactions between two of his interests, art forgery and the museum heist film genre. The script is a laboratory where Barrois Jr. is writing a movie script, but you’ll never see the film in theaters.
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