Hideout (après J.-L.G.) 2013

Hideout (après J.-L.G.) 2013

Hideout (après J.-L.G.) focuses on themes first explored in Smith’s one-person exhibition Teach-in installed at the Pedagogical Museum, Belgrade in 2009. Both Hideout and Teach-in are reflections on Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise in which radical students have re-purposed a bourgeois Parisian apartment for use as a place to meet and educate one another.

Godard’s film hints at the notion that art, like politics, takes place in a rarefied world of
intellectual and economic privilege. La Chinoise was made at a time of corresponding political turmoil in France and in America. But can art and culture really affect societal and political change if, as Jacques Rancière states, “the whole basis of politics is the struggle between the poor and the rich” or, more precisely, “the struggle between those who have no part in the management of the common and those who control it”….