Dear Claude Bessy,
At the Rue Blanche communal school, while your teacher
ask Miss Bessy to draw a picture, you make appear
a ballerina on the class blackboard. Premonitory sign,
affirmation of your character, sudden inspiration? This episode, that
you often tell how your «Damascus road» led you
to dance, to this artistic discipline that has shaped your whole life
and your entire existence. This discipline you say is an art
to live” and sometimes approaches “mysticism”.
From your first steps at the Opera to the management of the school of
Dance, you have embodied dance, you have magnified it by your will,
by your beauty and by your grace. The Opera is almost your
second home and your love story with her never happened
denies. Every Star dancer knows his share of inheritance,
as evidenced by the gala held in 2004 at the Palais Garnier in
the occasion of your farewell. The “dance family” was then gathered to
celebrating a “great lady” from home.
You have climbed with enthusiasm and temperament all the ranks of the
ballet hierarchy of the Paris Opera National. You will delight
audiences from all over the world, offering you the luxury of dancing
with Gene Kelly. How to forget your interpretation of Océanide in
The fantastic wedding that would sustainably shape your image: you there
are noticed for your plastic and your technique perfectly
mastered in a costume that suffers no defect, the «academic»?
How to forget your interpretation of Cocteau’s Bel Indifferent in the
choreography by Serge Lifar, Daphnis and Chloé de Skibine or Boléro
choreography by Maurice Béjart. Now Etoile, you have
all the directories, you have faced all the challenges until exhaustion.
These meetings allow you to propose your own creations, where
tradition and modernity meet.
On October 2, 1972, you were appointed Principal of the
the National Opera, a function you held until 2004. The school
French ballet knows what it owes to your professional requirement and to
your choreographic culture. It must be remembered that classical ballet is
born in France with this young king Louis XIV, exceptional dancer, who loves
the Court. He created the first school in 1713. Heiress
of this tradition, you have allowed the students, through the Demonstrations,
to the stage, you also opened the school to the tours
You invented a future for her by moving her
with the support of this Ministry in Nanterre, in a training center
modern, more suitable for teaching, a real tool for
the art of ballet for future generations.
Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit.
Dear Giuseppe Penone,
If I dared, I would say that it is up to me today to braid
crown of laurels, to use this delicate and subtle tree, filled with scents
of the Mediterranean, intimately linked to the image of Petrarch and so present
in your work. Born in Garessio, in this pre-alpine Piedmont where flow
the torrents and where the trees are stripped once the harsh winter has passed,
you have inherited these harsh and sometimes austere landscapes, this relationship so
to the nature and work of the earth. Italian, you have inherited
Latin authors, from Lucretia but also from Virgil, this intense reflection and
relationships between the human body and nature. You are indeed
one of the major figures of the Arte povera, this movement theorized by
Germano Celant at the end of the 1960s, whose
natural materials but also the current question about the practices of
consumption.
Your vocabulary and language are based on your experiments
on wood, on stone, on kes thorns, which become the
palimpsests of a sensitive vision of the human condition. Trunks, or
beams, all worked and sculpted, reveal an anatomy, reveal a
body. Photographs, casts, prints, designs refer to the
skin, tactile envelope, with which dialogue nature. To enter
your work, you must also hear your language: I untie my arm
of the tree to which it adheres. I feel the push of the water that springs against the
fingertips. I remember the memory of the mud.”
As in the myth of Daphne, which you keep reactivating, your
work translates the idea of a humanity that makes body with nature and a
nature reinvented by the artistic gesture. How not to think about your
Breathing in the shade installation, where the walls of a large room are covered
boxes containing laurel leaves alongside a golden bronze
representing lungs formed from the leaves this same tree. This
unique and vibrant synthesis between nature and body fragments
gives all its strength and visual poetry to your work
singular. Attentive reader of Ovide, you have known in one
movement to transform nature and reignite the human.
Your work is a major moment in 20th century plastic creation
because it reconciles the look and the touch, in other words the painting and
the sculpture. The immense Eyelid that develops over 10 meters
is one of the most spectacular of your works. By questioning the
wonderful and strange, you cross gender, you make dialogue
forms, inventing what the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman calls
“tactile places”. Through your art, you are making the finger
spectator what was erected as a limit by several centuries
of art history.
With the support of the Marian Goodman Gallery, which represents you in
France, your work has been exhibited and admired in demonstrations
dedicated to contemporary creation. In 2000, on the occasion of
the exhibition Beauty in Avignon; in 2004 at the Centre Pompidou, which
then devotes a major retrospective; in 2007 at the
Venice. I do not want to forget the Vowel Tree in the garden of
Neighboring tiles, fruit of a state order, This uprooted tree that
ironically contrasts with the elegance of the classic flower beds, dialogue
formal that you took up in your work at the Reggia di Venaria reale,
near Turin, once again a major cultural site after its
reopening to the public in 2007. I also want to mention the exhibition that
you proposed in 2008 in a place that is dear to me, the Villa Medici,
on this terrace of the Pincio where the city seems a decor and the garden its
foreground.
I remember that you are also an educator and that you teach
since 1997 at the National School of Fine Arts, training and
advising young artists. It’s the translation of your influence, it’s
also the mark of your strong emotional bond with the
cultural institutions and the French public.
Dear Giuseppe Penone, on behalf of the President of the Republic
Honour the Order of the Legion of Honour
Dear Sabine Weiss,
Should your modesty and discretion suffer, allow me
after Robert Doisneau: You have everything
included. There is in the looks that you photograph the thickness of
the human, the depth of the moment but also a lightness and grace
that singles you out. You have travelled the continents, fixed the moments,
kept the ephemeral, but remained faithful to your original vocation.
Very young indeed, you are attracted to photography. You yourself
settle at 22 in Paris and you befriend the community
artistic: Doisneau, of course - which you say is the only one
photographer important to you» and to whom your humanism makes
immediately think - but also Cocteau, Rouault or Jacques-Henri
Lartigue. You are, then, part of the adventure of the agency RAPHO, first
independent French news agency, where you rub shoulders with the most
large signatures.
You have a limitless appetite for all
sectors of artistic and cultural life: music, your second
passion, art but also press and fashion. Traveling the world, you
have collaborated with the most prestigious titles: Time, Life, Newsweek,
Paris-Match. In your singular work, there are many of our
collective memory. You have walked the streets of cities, often at night,
on the lookout for the moment, listening to the moment, in dialogue with these “little ones”
who become “great” under your gaze. It is humanity that you
in his lonely old men, in his smiling children who
reveal with spontaneity under your objective. In the apparent serenity of
there is always a story, an atmosphere, a dimension
hidden» to use the beautiful expression of the art historian Daniel
Arasse .
Giacometti’s workshop, that of Fernand Léger, that of Rauschenberg
but also Yves Saint-Laurent’s workshop on the front page of Life were
immortalized by your eyes and are today part of a heritage
common. And what about this Egyptian girl and her smile on
your goal, which appears on the cover of the monograph you
published in 2003 with screenwriter Jean Vautrin. Your tastes
and your love of words also brings you to the
literature: the pleasure you take in photographing gestures and
smiles of children brings you to collaborate with Marie Nimier; a
book dedicated to André Breton takes you on the steps of a
a passionate admirer of the work of the surrealist poet, I mean Julien
Gracq.
Photographer of light, tenderness and emotion, you have
always knew how to confront the world with truth and demand, with a
concern for justice. Your interest in current affairs and daily life
opens the doors of photojournalism very early; I recently
moved to the Visa festival for the image of Perpignan and I was able to measure the
expectations of this demanding profession, at the service of freedom
of expression, pluralism and the right to information. I know that
commitments that are important to you, as evidenced by your
Reporters Without Borders in 2007. How many facts
would remain a dead letter without their vigilant
their lives and their safety.
Your work has been exhibited in the most prestigious places and is among
the most remarkable contemporary photography collections: the
moma, the Metropolitan Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Maison
the Kunsthaus of Zurich, to name but a few
that few. Your prolific career has helped make the
photography as a creative tool and an artistic discipline in its own right,
which is today among the most eminent places dedicated to art
contemporary.
If humanism were told to us, you would surely figure in one of the
chapters of this great book to which you contributed with passion, with
the attention of those who make Roland Barthes' formula their own: what
the infinitely reproduced photograph takes place only once.” You often
made this unique moment of infinity.
It is therefore with great pleasure that on behalf of the President of the Republic and
by virtue of the powers vested in us, we make you a knight
in the National Order of Merit.
Dear Orlan,
If I am particularly pleased to pay tribute to you tonight, it is
because you are the Proteee of performance and body art. You
you have been able to make yourself the prophet and the mutant icon.
Your reflection on the status of body and flesh has become one
international reference in arts education: it is at the heart
from your first steps, filmed in slow motion, in the
streets of Saint-Etienne, your hometown. From adolescence, adopting
your pseudonym, you mark your critical distance to civil status,
forced designation, summons as coercion, and defend the
right for everyone to have their own appearance. From your first
actions up to computer morphings and your experiments
today’s biotechnology, you have developed a work
and yet marked by a very strong aesthetic coherence
and material. Orlan is the protean version of the same
the same concept, and that is what makes your
long journey. To parody Simone de Beauvoir, we are not born Orlan, we
becomes so. If I make this quote, it is also because your work has
also gave pride of place to the critical denunciation of domination
male and codification of the female body: I think of your Origin
of war, where you reverse Courbet, or at your recovery, in the
of the Lunch on the Grass of Manet where the
men are naked, in the middle of which you pose dressed.
Orlan, you are a mutant. At FIAC in 1977 with The Kiss of
the artist, you turn into a woman – piggy bank, proposing for 5
Frankly, I quote, “a piece of conceptual art that is accessible to all.”
You are also Saint Orlan, in self-portraits with a baroque fold where
inspired by the Bernini of Santa Maria della Vittoria to
the border between clothing and skin. In search of the
best of the “me” possible, you will later become
Mayan goddess or in African odalisque with plateau, integrating the
new opportunities offered by digital photography. You have
managed to make the connection between Arcimboldo and Photoshop.
Dear Orlan, in Athena of body art, you have expanded your panoply.
Painting, sculpture, photography, video, movie posters and related products,
performance of course, sounds, digital tools, rare are the supports that
you are not familiar with. You have extended this set of
totally new way, in the early 1990s, at No Man’s
Land» of plastic surgery, filming 9 operations on your
face, some of which were broadcast live from Beaubourg to New
York and Toronto. You crossed two fetishes of our societies
contemporary, silicone prosthesis and the ubiquity of retransmission,
exploring how art and surgery can share the adjective
«plastic». In this reflection on the construction of the boundaries between the
beauty and ugliness, you detach yourself at the passage of one of the
classic themes of body art, which likes to stage the desire of
pain and redemption. In what you have baptized fleshly art, you
show instead how pain is an anachronism for you.
This experiment was a major shift in your career. A
double-edged scalpel, if I may say so, because we summarize too often
your work in this phase - as Plato’s pharmakon, at once a
remedy and a poison. One thing is certain: by the epidermal rejection that
these filmed performances may have sparked, you clearly touched a
nerve, and it has brought a worldwide reputation to your approach.
Pitanguy’s knife is not the only item in our companies
you have taken hold of. Attentive from your
beginnings to all the new materialities that sign an epoch, you
you have studied cell culture; you are interested
now in coltan, this mineral that feeds both wars and
mobile phones; almost 30 years ago, you seized the technology
of the Minitel à bras-le-corps and launch the first online art magazine
contemporary, Art-Access-Revue, in which you invite
Buren and John Cage to intervene. Protée also knows how to
make prophet.
Dear Orlan, you love hybridization of all types. Hybridization is
also the name you give to your collaborations: you have by
example connected your work on that of architecture with Philippe
Chiambaretta at the Palais de Tokyo, on the film of Stéphane Oriach and
on a screenplay by David Cronenberg, on Karine’s choreography
Saporta, on cell cultures from the SymbioticA laboratory in Australia,
on texts by Michel Serres, on chairs by Philippe Starck, on a
perfume by Christophe Laudamiel, to name a few.
Orlan, you have never forgotten to be
also, in your own words, a “normal artist”,
concerned with the transmission of know-how and the circulation of
works. By creating in 1978 the Performance Symposium in Lyon, you
have given the French public the opportunity to discover a whole range of
contemporary art that was still largely unknown. Teacher
Dijon, Pasadena, California, Paris-Cergy, Getty Research
Institute, or in residence for AFAA in New York, you had to
to transmit your question to the widest possible audience
on the aesthetic and social construction of the great dichotomies
which structure our societies: the beautiful and the ugly, the man and the animal, the
natural and artificial, living and nonliving, inside and outside, being and
have (his body), the same and the other, the before and after… By reinventing the
editing, morphing and provocation, you show us the
hybridization and the processes that make us and carry us.
It is therefore a great pleasure for me on behalf of the President of the
Republic and by virtue of the powers vested in me, I make you
Knight of the National Order of Merit.
Dear Agnes of Gouvion Saint-Cyr,
As everyone here knows tonight, you are the reference of the
photography in France. You are nicknamed «the popess» or
“Madame Photo”. So many names that inspire for some the
fear; as many symptoms of the great respect you are held in the
middle, both for your deep knowledge of this world and for
your sometimes fearsome frankness. Through a professional life devoted to
this art, its practice and its valorization, its diffusion, by your concern for
excellence, you have become the photoelectric cell of the
the image - the Luxmeter without which there can be no good picture.
Your name, dear Agnes, is also indissolubly associated with Arles, your
hometown, where you co-founded 40 years ago this major
the profession of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie,
alongside your friend Lucien Clergue, with whom you begin
learning photography. Danish literature, languages and
and classical dance dominate your course
and your first professional activities, but it’s
new photography that calls you when you join the
Ministry of Culture in 1976. Michel Guy – to whom I would pay tribute
in a few weeks - had created the photography department,
where you start as a Senior Fellow.
This is the starting point for a great career in the service of
photographers and the politics of photography in France. During 35
you contribute to the structuring of the network of professionals; you
multiply initiatives to enrich national collections, and propose
many public commissions. French photographers you
also owe much for the valorization of their work to
the foreigner. You want to make this action sustainable; you make yourself
and institutions. Thus, in 1973,
you embark in Arles in the adventure of the «R.I.P. » with Lucien
Clergue, Michel Tournier and Jean-Maurice Rouquette. You are participating
the creation in Lyon of the national foundation of the
photography in 1976, which will become the CNP in Paris. That’s all
Naturally, you will later join the Arts Delegation
plastics, then the General Inspection of Photography and Fnac.
Another essential dimension of your action is of course the
exhibitions that you have organized. Since 1982, for example, with
Tribute to Alexey Brodovitch at the Grand Palais, or Paris Magnum at
Musée du Luxembourg, up to Dans le champ des étoiles at the Musée
d'Orsay and Cirque en majesté at the Abbey of Montmajour, not to mention
that some, your exhibitions reach a vast audience both in Paris
than in the regions.
But it is also your international projects that will have an impact
exhibition Man Ray, in 1982, travelling to Italy; De
Brancusi in Boltanski, 1993, between Turin and Athens, of which you sign
also the catalogue; Dimitriev in Moscow in 1996, where you organize
two years later From elegance to trend. It is in Madrid that you
The Greatest Age: The Greatest Youth Exhibit
Metamorphoses of the model will travel to Seoul. Last year
again, you are in the month of photography in Singapore - of which
you advise the Minister of Culture - for the exhibition Changing Asia.
In the monograph work that you are currently doing, I believe
you know particularly concerned about the contextualization of works
that you are working on, including the cultural dimension
of the artist’s space. It is precisely this quality that
and this finesse of approach that has guided, I believe, throughout these
years, your tremendous contribution both to the heritage
for the very life of the world of the image, by
through the exhibitions of course, but also through your remarkable
knowledge of its players and your know-how in the field
intermediation. This action, you will now continue in the
private sector, and increasingly internationally, for the largest
happiness, I am sure, of the whole profession for which you have so much
worked.
At a time when photographic creation is undergoing transformations without
previous, I wished that there be a house within the Ministry
Common» for photography gathering conservation issues
funds, but also those relating to production and
dissemination. It is now the task of the Mission of Photography that
created last March. This approach owes much to your
commitment and action. Indeed, you have been able to tackle
all the dimensions of public action in your field without
leave none aside. As such, your journey is more than exemplary and
can only inspire us all.
Dear Agnes of Gouvion Saint-Cyr, on behalf of the French Republic,
we make you Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters
Address by Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, on the occasion of the award ceremony of the insignia of Grand Croix in the Order of Merit to Claude Bessy, Chevalier in the Order of the Legion of Honour to Giuseppe Penone, from Chevalier in the Order of Merit to Sabine Weiss and Orlan, from Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters to Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr.
Address given by Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, on the occasion of the Grand Croix award ceremony in the Order of Merit to Claude Bessy, deChevalier in the Order of the Legion of Honour to Giuseppe Penone, deChevalier in the Order of Merit to Sabine Weiss and Orlan, deCommandeur in the Order of Arts and Letters to Agnes of GouvionSaint-Cyr.
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