“Support” and “surface” mean the same thing in French as they do in English, an accident of language that mirrors the immediacy of Supports/Surfaces, a self-titled exhibition of paintings, sculptures and category-skipping hybrids from a little-known art movement based in the south of France. The works in the show may seem as if they are coming from an unusually cohesive group of brash (if highly refined) young Gallic upstarts, except that they were made before today’s brash young upstarts were born.
Beautifully installed at CANADA on the Lower East Side, the exhibition (presented with the participation of Galerie Bernard Ceysson, which has outposts in Paris, Luxembourg, Saint-Étienne and Geneva) spans 1967 through 1983, with the bulk of the work coming from the early to mid-70s. This was a time of worldwide political unrest, with 1968 as the epicenter, a year that began with the Tet offensive — North Vietnam’s decisive psychological victory against the United States — followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, the police riots at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, and the election of Richard M. Nixon.
It was also on May 6th of that year, known as “Bloody Monday,” that thousands of student demonstrators in Paris engaged in their most violent confrontation with the police, kicking off a monthlong wave of protests that succeeded in temporarily shutting down the government as President Charles de Gaulle fled the country.
The exhibition’s press release states that “Many of the artists involved with Supports/Surfaces were veterans of the war in Algeria, and as young artists and citizens they were looking for alternatives to the colonial war machines that seemed to be the norm in western society.” The Algerian War of Independence was, like America in Vietnam, a conflict that brought into question the moral foundations of society. Hostilities ended in 1962 after referenda held in France and Algeria approved independence, though the last French forces left in 1967.
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