Pierre Bismuth

° 1963

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine (FR), lives in New York (US), lives in Brussels (BE).

Pierre Bismuth moved from Paris to Brussels in 1990. In the late 1990s, he settled in London for several years. Since 2005, he has divided his time between Brussels and New York. He studied visual communication at the Ecole nationale supérieur des Arts Décoratifs where he met François Miehe, with whom he subsequently collaborated on several projects. In the 1980s, he moved to Berlin, where he attended Georg Baselitz's painting classes at the Hochschule der Kunst (Berlin University of the Arts). After graduating, he returned to Paris, sharing a studio with Xavier Veilhan and Pierre Huyghe. These artists used different media and materials in their work, including painting and sculpture, collage, video, architecture, performance, music and film.

In 2005, Bismuth was awarded the Oscar for Best Screenplay for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), along with director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. In it, the viewer is continually misled because the narrator intervenes in the basic conditions of what is generally assumed or taken for granted. The film shows a couple who have had their memories of each other erased after the dissolution of their relationship meeting - seemingly - for the first time. The latter is an important convention in romantic comedies. Bismuth once claimed that he was "not really into film", preferring instead to reprogramme our perceptions to overturn the prevailing conventions of mass culture. Ironically, this collaboration led to an award from Hollywood.

Soon after, he and his friend, the filmmaker Michel Gondry, made the video The All Seeing Eye, depicting a world devoid of human relationships in which virtually nothing is communicated.

In 2016, he completed Where is Rocky II?, his directorial debut and first feature film. A private detective and three Hollywood screenwriters go in search of an unknown artwork by renowned American artist Ed Ruscha. The piece is hidden in the Mojave Desert under a replicated rock. Despite its world fame, the mysterious artwork remained hidden and unknown for 40 years. This light-hearted documentary reformulates a criticism frequently raised in this conceptual artist's work, namely that an artwork's economic value is increasingly determined by the artist's name. According to Bismuth, conceptual artists are all too happy to participate in this fetish. Hence, his film about an unknown artwork by a famous artist, hidden under a rock, with a name referring to Sylvester Stallone.

In 2000, he created the text piece Everybody is an artist but only the artist knows it, a reference to Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. This is Bismuth's critical but generous way of using other artists' works in a context he has modified or even sabotaged.

He also likes to take products from pop culture and make them mysterious and challenging to understand. In 2002, he wanted to give a gift to his granddaughter. He thought of Walt Disney's Jungle Book. Which language version should he choose? The original English or the Dutch version? His granddaughter spoke Dutch for the most part. Or perhaps the French, his own mother tongue? Ultimately, he bought all three versions, letting the child experiment with them to see if it would not confuse her too much. It all worked out well in the end. Bismuth then decided to attribute a different language to each of the characters in a linguistic jungle, and that is how the Jungle Book project came about. Chinese was the only language he was unable to add.

Other major works by Pierre Bismuth include Following The right hand of... (1999-2021), Something less, Something More (2002-2006), Points de vue (2005), and Abstractions (2019).

An essential part of his oeuvre consists of collaborations with artists from a wide variety of disciplines, including Michel Gondry, Jerome Bel, Jonathan Monk, Dessislava Dimova, Diego Perone, Barbara Visser, Angus Fairhurst, Cory Arcangel, Cyprien Gaillard, Mathias Faldbakken and Joe Strummer. 

DE

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