Joe Scanlan

Born in 1961 in Stoutsville (USA), he lives in New York.

"Americans love destruction", declares Joe Scanlan. This iconoclastic artist has himself been busily at work since the mid-1980s destroying the taboo that separates art from commerce, by including the idea of consumption in his work. In a reversal of the Duchampian readymade, he has thus come to notice through his production of practical objects, which, though laboriously constructed in a traditional manner, imitate the products of industrial design. In his latest installations devised in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Scanlan appropriates another essential notion of contemporary art: entropy. Out of this concept which lies at the heart of Robert Smithson's hermetic work, Scanlan makes a commercial value. For Smithson, entropy is synonymous with the loss of energy necessary for any creative work, and here it is likened to the cyclical and cynical movement of capitalism which feeds on catastrophes. These latest works are on view in one of the ground floor rooms at Les Abattoirs.