(Contre-)culture industrielle. Pour une histoire de l’art alternatif

Born in England in the mid-1970s, the industrial music movement opens up the sound experience to many artistic practices, by developing a multimedia research platform that evolves outside the institutional circuits of art. The issues raised by these artists are not, however, so marginal when they react epidermally to the hecatomb of postindustrialization and when they reflect on a debunking of high and low hierarchies, constituting a direct bridge to postmodernity, the trademark of the artistic field of the 1970s and 1980s.

This presentation addresses the way in which alternative cultures can be explored in the field of art history, while specifying the issues that accompany the study of corpora that anticipate current questions about the media and their coercive power; from the dissidence of the industrial genre and its cultural transformations, to a new research project, “Hardcore from the Heart”, focusing on pro-sex perspectives from the 1960s to the present day.

A doctor of art history and curatorial attaché at the Centre Pompidou, Nicolas Ballet devotes his research to alternative visual cultures, experimental art, sound studies and artistic avant-gardes. He teaches the history of contemporary art and explores in his texts the visual and sound contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices. He is the author of Shock Factory. Visual culture of industrial music (Les presses du réel, 2023), two books on Genesis P-Orridge and has published in Les Cahiers du Mnam, Octopus Notes, Marges, Optical Sound, in the Cahiers du CAP and Histo.art at Éditions de la Sorbonne, as well as in books devoted to the works of Nigel Ayers, Zoe Dewitt and The Rita. He recently curated the exhibition Who You Staring At? Visual Culture of the No Wave Scene of the 1970s and 1980s (Centre Pompidou, 2023) and designed the “Sound Art Live” program and listening room for the exhibition I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake: Journeys in Sound (Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai, 2024). He is currently conducting a research project on pro-sex perspectives in art from the 1960s to the present.