Pierre Bal-Blanc
Pierre Bal-Blanc, Vienna, 14 February 2025
After “The Death of the Author” diagnosed by Roland Barthes in 1968 comes the death of the viewer: 2009 saw the French artist and curator Pierre Bal-Blanc choose “The Death of the Audience” as the title of an exhibition that he staged at the Vienna Secession. 16 years later and in the very same place, Bal-Blanc speaks about the principles that underlie both his practice and his theoretical engagement with art: prior to developing a “score” on a given theme, he always takes local givens—those of a space and its historical implications—as his starting point. This entails that even exhibitions on related themes can end up being quite disparate: most recently, his two iterations of “The Cynics Republic” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2024) and at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2025), both commissioned by the Kontakt Collection, followed entirely different “scores” in which the viewers could seek out their own paths as if editing their own films. “Cynics,” by the way, refers here not to cynical individuals in the contemporary sense but to the 4th century BCE’s pre-Socratic Cynics, from whose aphoristic philosophical impulses Bal-Blanc can derive quite a bit that is relevant to the present era. “When a Cynic saw a young person collecting many books, he said: ‘Store them in your chest, not in that trunk.’”
After “The Death of the Author” diagnosed by Roland Barthes in 1968 comes the death of the viewer: 2009 saw the French artist and curator Pierre Bal-Blanc choose “The Death of the Audience” as the title of an exhibition that he staged at the Vienna Secession. 16 years later and in the very same place, Bal-Blanc speaks about the principles that underlie both his practice and his theoretical engagement with art: prior to developing a “score” on a given theme, he always takes local givens—those of a space and its historical implications—as his starting point. This entails that even exhibitions on related themes can end up being quite disparate: most recently, his two iterations of “The Cynics Republic” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2024) and at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2025), both commissioned by the Kontakt Collection, followed entirely different “scores” in which the viewers could seek out their own paths as if editing their own films. “Cynics,” by the way, refers here not to cynical individuals in the contemporary sense but to the 4th century BCE’s pre-Socratic Cynics, from whose aphoristic philosophical impulses Bal-Blanc can derive quite a bit that is relevant to the present era. “When a Cynic saw a young person collecting many books, he said: ‘Store them in your chest, not in that trunk.’”