La bibliothèque d'Olivier Mosset

Olivier Mosset is a Swiss-born artist who lives and works in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert. He was a founding member of the acronymically named mid-1960s B.M.P.T. Art Group, consisting of radically Minimalist painters Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset himself, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni. The Paris-based collective elevated a democratically produced art object over Greenbergian notions of near-spiritual artistic authorship and brushstroke, employing a machine-like execution of colloquially understood signs/symbols and hard geometric forms. It is appropriate that the group came of age alongside the publication of Roland Barthes 1967 essay "The Death of the Author"/"La mort de l'auteur," which argued for privileging the reading of a text or sign as embodied in the perspective of the viewer or reader, rather than that of the author of a piece of artwork. Still in his youth in the Paris student movements of 1968, Mosset is an artist who still lives out his ideals. For an artist of such art historical importance and renown, and frankly, market prominence, Mosset lives a low-key life of relative asceticism. His home studio consists of a twin mattress covered in a wool blanket, which he sleeps on, his canvases and acrylic paints, and his extensive collection of mostly esoteric literature. I captured these images of Mosset playfully showing visitors to his studio how he chooses to store some of his books, using a defunct refrigerator as a bookcase. Mosset can often be seen driving around Tucson in Levi's 501's and a black leather jacket and chaps, driving either his Harley Davidson motorcycle or El Camino, both custom designed in the tradition of Southwestern Chicano hot rod culture. Like many artists of his generation, he eschewed the market-saturated art capitals of New York, London, and Paris for an independent life modeled on romantic notions of individualism in the American West.