Banks Violette’s ‘Theatrical Disasters’ Set Celine Alight

B ritish New Wave-punk band Ian Drury and the Blockheads released the single “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3” in 1979. The track on the album “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” was inspired by the near death of the band’s roadie. This dark humour at the intersection of life and death is an apt choice for a new series of artworks created by American artist Banks Violette playing with the song’s same title. Since he graduated from New York’s School of the Visual Arts in 1998, Violette has made a name with sculptures, installation works and monochrome drawings exploring the meeting point between movement and stillness, presence and the void, darkness and light, nihilism and celebration.

Violette himself has much to be cheerful about. He took a break from the art world machine in 2010, moving upstate from New York City and taking a pause from exhibiting (and the hedonistic world he then inhabited). Violette today is clear speaking, intellectually adept and clearly engaged with the possibilities of sculpture and art making.

Following a solo show at Gladstone, Banks’ work was used in capsule collection for Celine in 2022 on the invitation of the iconic designer and photographer Hedi Slimane. The pair had worked together in 2007, when Slimane curated Violette in a group show “Sweet Bird of Youth” at Arndt & Partner in Berlin. This month sees that collaboration between Violette and Celine transform into something more ambitious and on a global scale. Violette created a series of sculptures that transformed fourteen Celine flagships around the world into accidental art spaces. The works in retail stores from UAE to China, Paris to Manhattan were all unveiled on the same day – a mammoth study in logistics.

The installation pieces – “Throne/first and Last and Always (Reasons to be Cheerful), pt. 1 to 14” – are made of wires, lights and sculptural metal. Each unique work riffs on the idea of a chandelier. It related to the kind of things that Violette previously showed at MoMA, Palais de Tokyo and the Whitney. “They're things that look familiar, or similar to work that I've made in the past. A series of variations based on stable forms that collapse in the space,” he explains. The sense of variation brings to mind musical compositions. The materials that Violette uses bring to mind rigs used in large stage gigs – all exposed wires and a high-level voltage. They exude a sense of something subcultural and theatrical at the same time.

The works are composed of fluorescent tubes or LEDs, depending on different countries’ laws. “Flourescent is a definition of an obsolete technology, because they incorporate mercury,” Violette points out. “There’s lots of places banning them outright; you just cannot use them. You could probably get away with that in an institutional art context, the gallery and museum, but these are retail spaces.” That context is part of what makes the project so engaging – spaces to dress the human body, where we become conscious of our corporeal selves in a different way. One of Violette’s references, aside from Dan Flavin’s iconic neons and Robert Smithson land works, were Martin Kippenberger’s drunk street lamps, “collapsing, knotted out,” he says.

“There is this implied theatrical disaster, and then people happily walking around it to go shopping.”

2024 also sees Violette’s first retrospective museum show in a decade, at BPS22 in Charleloi, Belgium. The show will gather together work from collectors across Europe, as well as some of the new pieces made for the Celine spaces. The exhibition emphasizes part of what makes Banks’ work so vital and relevant today – how much it explores and responds to the history of art and the energetic legacy of performance.

Contemporary Art

From High Art to Couture: The Celine Art Project