Arnaud Cohen (born January 28, 1968) is a French contemporary artist, sculptor, and visual artist.
Biography
Presented in 2015 by the daily Le Figaro as one of the ten personalities reinventing culture in France, Arnaud Cohen began his career as a visual artist in 1997 by integrating with the Marwan Hoss gallery (Paris and Brussels, Marwan Hoss was then also Vice President of the International Fair of Contemporary Art). After a setback following the partial closure of the Marwan Hoss Gallery in 2000, Cohen was back at work in 2005.
While dealing with the same obsessions (the individual responsibility in the context of the building of shared destinies), his art evolved radically on the formal level. Cohen remained an appropriationist, but his practice moved from collaging objects to collaging ideas, slipping these ideas into established forms and styles to better pervert them.
His practice is close to twentieth-century propaganda practices used both in the 1920s and 1930s in Russia and Germany, and also in the late 1960s and 1970s, to serve the proletarian cause (hence his exhibiting on the occasion of May 68 commemorations side by side with Gérard Fromanger, Jean-Jacques Lebel and Erró at the Salvador gallery, an exhibition curated by collector Yves Cothouit), but also since the 1950s to serve the commodification of goods and services.
However, with Cohen, these tools are built at the sole service of the artist, for the only purpose of sharing with the viewer his very personal vision of today's world. Controversy is part of his vocabulary, and art is there to express it. Using mythical emblems, he manages to unveil with poetry and insight economic and social meanders.
Cohen can be defined as a post-koonsian artist: like Jeff Koons, he uses the popular alphabet, but, and this is the difference from his elder pairing, he uses these letters to write words, words that are his but that can be universally shared.
Examples through major pieces
Dance over me
The Dance over me World Tour series in their different versions (installation and CCTV recording, but also their transportable versions), are experimental and empirical attempts to produce a trace, even fictional, of a past that had vanished, address one of the main drivers of the past victories of dictatorships over democracies: the collaboration of the economic, political and cultural elites and propose a third way between creating works of art that tend to be commemorative monuments and the pure and simple denial of the past.
After Dansez sur moi 2017 that addressed Western Europe elites' rally around the Nazi regime (exhibited in Berlin and Paris), Tangover Me Buenos Aires and Tangover Me Rosario address the Argentinian dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. The work borrows from Carl Andre's minimal floor pieces. But unlike the latter who said he was not interested in ideas and that his works had no conceptual nor intellectual qualities, Arnaud Cohen injects a poisonous dimension to Andre's: the work, in its different versions (first studio installation, then CCTV and transportable versions), consists of an iron dance floor made of fake graves of real Nazi collaborators, those of Maurice Rocher, a French owner of weapons factories, Jean Bichelonne, a French engineer in charge with Albert Speer to integrate the French factories to the military-industrial complex of the Reich, and Wernher von Braun, who ran the underground V1 and V2 rocket factory at the Dora camp in Germany. Dansez sur moi, exhibited in 2017 at the Rosa Luxemburg Platz Kunstverein in Berlin, was then presented in 2018 in Paris at the Memorial de la Shoah (Holocaust Memorial), in 2019 at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers France and simultaneously at the UNTREF Museum Buenos Aires Argentina as part of the official BIENALSUR 2019 selection. Another version of the work will be exhibited in Uganda in 2020 as part of the official Kampala Art Biennale's Masters Selection. It will address the Idi Amin Dada Oumee dictatorship.