First Class
Art school friendships are bound by a mutual love of art, disdain for the institution and collective trauma, and who’s-sleeping-with-who-gossip. However, they often mature into spaces of mutual appreciation and support.
Dan Demarre (Meththananda) first met Benjamin Blaquart at Ecole National des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2010, where Blaquart (b. 1981 Chesnay, France) la Seine, the postgraduate program, following his DNSEP (MFA) diploma at La Villa Arson, Nice. Demarre (Meththananda) (b. 1985, Margate, England) was admitted directly Into the graduate program, having no prior art education.
First Class traces Dan Demarre (Meththananda) and Benjamin Blaquart’s friendship since art school. Demarre (Meththananda) was an extrovert drawn to comedians Tommy Cooper and Dave Chapelle, whilst Blaquart was a more sentimental material maker drawn to Paul Thek. Yet, the pair was cemented through a mutual appreciation for the work of Detroit-born and California-practicing artist Mike Kelley (1954–2012).
For their presentation at The Tail Brussels, the duo takes as a starting point Mike Kelley’s piece, the Educational Complex (1995).
Dan Demarre (Meththananda)
Beaux-Artiste [double negative], 2010 (Variant 2022)
An image taken moments before his entrance interview at Les Beaux-Arts de Paris. Demarre (Meththananda). With a film make-up artist’s work, he was transformed into a white man — becoming an adapted readymade in the Duchampian tradition.
Education, Realife?, 2022, plaster, oil pastel, one-way mirror acrylic, and led UV lights, 3D print, torches, batteries
Demarre (Meththananda) revisits his inception moment in contemporary art in 2009. Following Warhol’s adage “Good Business is the Best Art”, and the subprime financial slump, Demarre (Meththananda) staged a long-form situationist performance to become an artist in the elite French business school, HEC Paris. In Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex lineage, the artist recreates scale models of the first buildings he set foot in on 16th September 2009: Bâtiment T of the HEC campus, designed in 1962 by Rene Andre Coulon, whose modernism is inflected by his concept of Existenz Minimale. Presented here are Halle Donnateurs, Amphithéâtre Blondeau, and classroom 08. If—at least initially—Kelley wanted to recreate buildings from memories with forgotten parts that represent places of trauma, in a planned, larger work following Kelley’s lead, Demarre (Meththananda) wants to visit each of his old schools to recreate repressed memories. unlock and unleash pre-educational selves. Included in the piece is a 3D scan of the artist styled in a hoodie courtesy of Li-Ning and blazer by Georgian design collective, Situationist.
Rendered in one-way acrylic, a material that echoes the institutions’ seductive yet obtuse nature.
On Demarre’s (Meththananda) site visit in February 2022, he unlocked a memory from September 2009 during the induction day. He participated in an initial team-building “icebreaker” exercise given by an HEC alumni turned acting coach.
New students were divided into groups of four invited on the stage of the Amphitheater Blondeau and given improv acting instructions. Demarre (Meththananda) and his group was told “imaginiez que vous m êtes une famille de marmottes”. The aspiring artist—the only non-native French speaker—did not understand the keyword “marmotte”—instead, he performed by mimesis—following the others pulling his hands to his chest and speaking in a squeaky voice. Only moments after the sketch did he ask, “mais c’est quoi un marmotte?” to roars of laughter. A fellow student Google translated it as marmot or woodchuck, or groundhog.
Demarre remembers the strange poetry of acceding to an elite education and being turned into an animal. The marmot is an industrious worker with complex social interactions independently from the group. “Do we draw animals as kids because we want to, or are we taught to stay innocent?”
Having evaded drawing for decades, Demarre presents his first drawing as the base of the architectural maquettes. In the reflections of the buildings, the drawings become diagrammatic landscapes.
The gestures reveal the artists’ attempt to channel earlier pre-university educational selves. His art portfolio at high school at seventeen consisted of some abstract paintings but mostly representational drawing in pastel. Earlier, still in on bursary at a British prep school aged ten, he was instructed by his art teacher Mrs Barker to draw animals instead of naked people.
Drawing then becomes a means to access a state of innocence; it is contrasted to the educational formatting he received that elevated and propelled him socially across classes and countries.
Schematic Drawings, 2022, photocopy, rollerball pen
Echoing Mike Kelley’s preparatory drawings, each drawing is a spatial diary of Demarre’s first day at HEC.
Matriculation Matrix [016,009,009/009,005,006/022,009,003], 2022, locks leather, torch, UV torch, acrylic
Briefcase lock presentation case indicating Demarre (Meththananda) ‘s matriculation dates in reverse chronological order at HEC Paris, Columbia University, New York and University College London.
Benjamin Blaquart
Romantic Lover, 2007 (Pink Cathartic Variant 2022) DV video, screen multimedia player, 3D print, pulped paper
Video piece created during Blaquart’s DNSAP diploma year at La Villa Arson in Nice. Blaquart presents overblown, extended regressed adolescence of the white-straight-male emerging artist, the 26 year old student sulkily playing with toy figurines named Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.
Daddy, Daddy, 2022, 3D print, plexiglass, acrylic paint, watercolour
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
— Sylvia Plath
The final stanza of Sylvia Plath’s Daddy provides a key into Blaquart’s first moments of his childhood with his current relationship to art-making, Mike Kelley and his evolution of self.
A remark on how to extend a lineage in the shadows of those who went before. If the artist’s surname being Blaquart is a homonym of Black Heart, suggesting the artist’s critique of past selves that conformed to psychological norms of gender, who are the villagers in the context of contemporary art practice? Peers that are left behind? Or was it the artist’s childhood self whose father would be absent?
Bell Jar — I’m Through, 2022, glass, pulped paper, wood, acrylic, resin 3D print
If Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar inspired Mike Kelley through his Kandor Series, Blaquart follows and warps this lineage. With the glasswork, Blaquart inverts the neutral geometric bell jar into an ambivalent bodily form. Echoing the topology of a Klein bottle, the form is charged with apsychoanalytic tension. Puncturing the form appears to be ersatz flowers which are in fact, fallopian tubes.
Mummy Silvia / Mummy Mike, 2022, wood, 3D print, acrylic, pencil
On smooth organic wood on weathered wood, a curved mind map remnants of thoughts mourning both mothers of Sylvia Plath and Mike Kelley.
Let me carry, 2022, wood, 3D print, plexiglass, watercolour, pencil
Reflecting to childhood maternal relation, a paen to the carriage of the biological and psychic responsibilities lent to those born female, which must to Blaquart remain an impossibility.
John Miller
Supershop Reflection, 2022, text
A friend and peer of Mike Kelley, John Miller (b. 1954, Cleveland, Ohio), shares a mediation on Kelley’s time as a work-study student at CalArts, and his unfolding.
Aura Rosenberg
Headshot — Mike Kelley outtake, 1995, photo
Photo taken from the series Headshots. Rosenberg (b. 1949, New York) shot portraits of her male peers, friends, and friends-of-friends— all caught in the moment of sexual release.
Dan Demarre Meththananda would like to thank Thomas Paris and Jean-Noel Poli from HEC Paris for their dialogue and support. Jeremy Lecompte, Baptiste Ceriez and Hugo Soucaze of Ecole Nationale d’architecture de Versailles for their architectural and modeling prowess. And finally, Mary Clare Stevens Mark Lightcap from the Mike Kelley Foundation for her insight into the late artist’s process. Benjamin Blaquart would like to thank Mum and Dad.