For One Solid Time: Wet, The Swimming Pool in the Imagination

This exhibition explores the swim­ming pool as a significant motif wit­hin the history of contemporary art. About This exhibition explores the swim­ming pool as a significant motif wit­hin the history of contemporary art. It unites artists who have explored the complexity of the pool, using it as a symbol of both prosperity and catastrophe, joy and solitude: a me­taphor for our search for order and serenity in the face of an increasingly uncertain future. Within the exhibition, the swimmi­ng pool is considered as a political instrument or environment, bearing similarities to the museum or the art gallery: a space in which light, bodies and lines are controlled, where order prevails over disorder, and where certain boundaries govern behaviours, in­teractions and norms. Writing in The White Album, on California and water usage, Joan Didion argues “a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable.” The exhibition engages with Di­dion’s notion of a quest for order, offering a critical and poetic reading of the swimming pool as an icon of Western societies, while highlighting the alternative narratives it can carry—queer, political, or connec­ted to memory and the passage of time. The artists featured in the exhibition present the pool as more than simple leisure setting: instead, it is a space for aesthetic and social reflection, a mirror of contemporary longings and anxieties. Le Locle is a region shaped by water, or its disappearance. The name of the town comes from the Latin word for lake, and historically, there was a small lake near Le Locle: early maps and records from the 16th–17th centuries show a body of water or marshy area near the town, but urban expansion and drainage for watchmaking and housing eliminated it by the 18th–19th century. Today, Le Locle’s large public outdoor pools try to compensate this loss. This context – and the wider issue of global water crisis - has been central to the development of the exhibition. So too has a playful yet troubling rumour in the recent history of the MBAL: a proposal, by some politicians, to close the museum and re­place it with an indoor swimming pool. Luckily, for the artistic and cultural heritage of Le Locle, the Canton of Neuchâtel, and Switzerland more broadly, this project has not come to fruition, and, with this show, the threat – and the ideas connected to it, regarding power, aspiration and modernity - is transfor­med into an exhibition theme. Through a selection of paintings, films, photography, sculptures and more, by national and international artists, the exhibition immerses visitors in the visual, symbolic, and emotional universe of the swimming pool. Works on show will include Rossella Biscotti’s (2007) Restoration of an Empty Pool, a film that reveals the slow and laborious process of cleaning the swimming pool at the Foro Mussolini in Rome; a series of images from Larry Sultan’s Swimmers, taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a body of work that seems to directly evoke a sense of chaos and confusion beneath a surface of stillness; Alain Jacquet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1970), which revisits Manet’s famous modern and intimate painting by replacing the natural body of water with a man-made swimming pool; as well as One Swimming Pool by Elisabeth Tonnard (2013), a book that can be arranged to form a temporary pool. Read more Toggle Painting Sculpture Installation Photography Performance / Live Art Film / Video