A BEAUTIFUL EARLY OCTOBER
DAY IN PARIS. The hottest (in degrees centigrade) of any fashion week this
season has just begun, and the annual FIAC extravaganza is about to open in its
frenzied wake. Yet as tightly scheduled fashion shows spread from the Louvre’s
commercial annex to more spectacular venues through- out the city, and as fair
exhibitors add the last touches to their booths, a particularly loud and
massive throng crashes all the parties, threatening to paralyze the city and
disrupt the international buyers’ carefully tailored agendas. A day and a half
of strikes in the public and private sectors, along with a series of
demonstrations, is in full effect. They start, as protests often do, at Place
de la Republique and follow the traditional route along Boulevard du Temple to
Place de la Bastille, brandishing the usual artillery-smoke, megaphones, flags,
and banners.
But the demonstrators fail
to incite the usual rendezvous with chaos. The new minimum-service policy that’s
being tested on workers in state-run companies proves to be effective. Or is it
simply that a majesty of people doesn’t even bother trying to get to work—or
even to demonstrate—since daily chaos, labor strafe, and resignations are
overwhelming enough to make them just stay home? In any case, the Parisian art
and style crowds make it to the fair on time—with a hint of indecision over the
various fashion parties and exhibition openings. And so do several agents of
the cultural authorities, including the prime minister himself, with briefcases
full of fiscal promises and encouragements directed toward French collectors.
Just a few days after all this, in a neighborhood bookshop on the same
boulevard where the protesters were marching, philosopher Jacques Rancieres** presents his much-awaited La haine
de la démocratie published by La
fabrique while a day later Fresh Theory (a pop anthology of texts
enhanced with artworks and published by Léo Scheer) is celebrated at the
headquarters of a notorious pastis brand. Well, isn’t this combination of
overlapping events, this flow of releases, Just how you’d expect a decent
French kiss to feel? Or at least a quintessential Pans tale that could be
wrapped up from the heights of a Ferris wheel—such as the one that happened to
be installed inside the imposed nave of the Grand Palais throughout these
horned festivities?
What else could one list as
far as recent events Made in Paris? Nothing that one couldn’t find in any other
European or North American capital. Over the span of a year a dozen young
galleries opened, their only surprises being the uncanny fact that nothing
differentiates them from their elder brothers (other than their smaller size),
and that they only seem to reproduce the same frigid models and artistic for-
mats over and over agar. These are nonevents, as are most institutions and the
few corporate spaces that have emerged In the city, striving only to fill
spaces, programs, press junkets, and didactic missions, paraphrasing the market
beneath a touch of corporate varnish—nowadays a force of legitimization—rather
than working to produce contexts, situations, critiques, and identities (not
just visual ones), while backing up artists In such endeavors.
But such possibilities seem
to be emerging outside Paris. At the fair’s opening party at the Grand-Palais
in the midst of an exhilarated crowd of thousands running from an
artist-designed open bar to a Jean Prouvé construction that people seem to
think is a bus stop, I run into Pierre Bal-Blanc, head of the suburban Brétigny
Contemporary Art Center (CAC). I ask him about his entanglement in the discreet
fuss (not being covered in the French newspapers) over the current project by
architects Francois Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux, and John Navarro of R&Sie(n),
and he invites me to come to the art center to see for myself.
Arriving at Brétigny after
a thirty-minute train ride southwest of Paris one experiences the ambivalent
feeling of awkwardness such off-center art-world sites can trigger. Director of
the CAC since 2003, Bal-Blanc has made his primary program the commissioning of
artists to produce specific projects that successively alter aspects of the art
center’s spaces. As part of an agglomeration incorporating a media library and
theater space, the art center’s intervention alters the building’s use not only
by its audiences but also by its future invited artists. Adding up with time,
these seemingly minimal interventions subtly inform the ongoing and rather
unauthorized history that is effectively being written between the walls. David
Lamelas, for example, constructed a concrete corridor for a film installation,
which stretches outside the premises of the center and has become a permanent
sculpture after the show, while for Common Grave, 2005, Teresa Margolles brought waste water all the
way from Culiacán, Mexico, to cast the concrete floor of the CAC. By pursuing
such long-term, durable projects, Bal-Blanc has effectively devised a
curatorial strategy that opposes the inscription of a cultural institution
within the whims of local politics and vacillating community support.
This summer R&Sie(n)
pushed things a bit further with “The Void,”
a project involving not just the CAC but the transformation of the
surrounding urban area. Appropriating the consultative urban-planning
procedures used by public authorities, R&Sie(n) launched “The Void’’ with a
public survey concerning the development of the no-man’s-land of a parking lot
right outside the CAC, itself located between a high school and a field. As it
turned out, most residents wanted the area to remain a parking lot, although
improved with trees. Next an urban-planning proposal based on the results of
the study was presented on a large billboard installed in the middle of the
actual dead zone. The sign, on view as part of the project until the middle of
this month, reads in French, “If you don’t like this world, you should make
other ones’’ (a twist on the title of a 1977 Philip K. Dick essay), and
announces an experimental biotransformation operation including a “phyto regeneration’’
of the cultural center. A digital rendering shows the CAC covered by what looks
like a giant bush and a parking area modeled on and functioning as several
giant skateboard ramps.
Quite unexpectedly
R&Sie(n)’s project triggered an Orwellian-Wellesian panic among some of the
local inhabitants who immediately turned to the authorities for explanation. If
the initial intention behind this more or less fictitious scenario was to
capitalize on an existing urban “void” in order to sponsor dialogue between the
population and its elected representatives, the latter responded with
unjustified offense and threats directed at the CAC for having trespassed the
limits of its mission. Incapable of reappropriating the debate (let alone the
project) to their advantage, the politicians opened up a more blatant void in
discourse than there had been before. And whether or not this conclusion—already
inferred in R&Sie(n)’s script—was predictable, it played out at the expense
of the community. Nevertheless, the political fracas flies in the face of those
who might decry the futility (or better, the fiction) of contemporary art
outside larger cities with manifest cultural ambition. The project created a
public incident, a situation the bigger institutions in Paris and elsewhere are
largely scalable of—or not Interested in—producing.
There is undeniably a
certain schizophrenic inertia in the institutional air right now. On the one
hand, there is the cultural tourism Industry (also known as the French Cultural
Exception), which evinces a certain fascination for Anglo-Saxon,
arty-entrepreneurial success stories, and whose underlying Ideology was easily
summed up in a statement uttered by LVMH impresario Bernard Arnault at the
opening of his new Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Elysées: “Luxury is the
French Microsoft.” On the other hand, there is the apparatus of cultural tools
available (the French Ministry of Culture, its stipends, production or research
grants, network of art centers, etc.), which was originally created in a quite
different spirit and is currently trying to resist mounting pressure from
within.
In the meantime, on a
domestic scale, this tension spreads a serious confusion whereby contemporary
art, in order to be capitalized on, must necessarily take the form of
proliferating consensual events. Nuit Blanche in Paris, for askance, showed us
how to consume most of the city’s annual cultural budget in an orgiastic one-night
stand of art in the streets—a populist intercourse ready-made for live broad-
cast on public television. The fiction that such packaging creates is also
evident in more international gatherings, such as the Biennale de Lyon, which
this year was boldly titled “Experience de la durée” (Experiencing
Duration). We might compare events like these to the much less schizophrenic
and longer lasting total experience found in projects such as Thomas Hirschhorn’s
“Swiss-Swiss Democracy’’ at the Centre Culturel Suisse. Here Hirschhorn once
again demonstrated an artist’s capacity to take charge of a complex issue
politically and aesthetically through a one-month- long marathon that included
an exhibition, a play staged by Gwenaël Morin, conferences and readings, and
the publishing of a dally newspaper.
Another example of
engagement taking place in the shadow of institutional glamour is the program
of an independent art space located in the old center of Lyon. In a few years,
La Salle de bains has distinguished Itself with concise but sharp solo
exhibitions alternating between French artists (including Ingrid Luche and Agnès
Martel, Pierre Joseph, and soon, Bruno Serralongue) and debuts in France of
more well-known international artists (such as Jeppe Hein, Pae White and Kelley
Walker). As elementary as it may sound, La Salle de bains proposes a straightforward
frame or context that one can relate to simply—a surprisingly precious refuge
from the ambient confusion of event-making genres that most of the time preempt
the actual visibility or experience of artists’ projects.
This conflict between artistic
practice and (its) representation is perhaps one explanation for the sudden
appearance of ghosts haunting exhibition spaces around town. Quite
coincidentally, this past year the much-anticipated shows of Loris Gréaud, Saâdane
Afif, and Rirkrit Tiravanija (featuring Philippe Parreno and Bruce Sterling)
all summoned this spooky figure as procurator for the artist, avatar of the
work, stenographer or guide. Drawing on a well-justified urge to escape readymade
formats (exhibitions or otherwise), this Inscription of the artistic endeavor
and spectatorship within other space and time unveils a sense of timely
detachment. And, perhaps Ironically, it might even make some of us want to turn
toward the more live and disturbing fringe of self-declared zombies. Here let
us pay homage to those exemplary kids who have lately turned out quite fearlessly
on the streets outside Paris.
But for those who still
like to believe in the materialization of local artistic scenes, Paris certainly remains
confounding, although I’d be tempted to say relevant, In its lack of clear
signals. However, two drastically different exhibitions—and stories—this winter
might help you make up your mind. First, “<i>Le voyage intérieur</i>,”
an exhibition on the subject of decadence, that Included both Paris and London-based
artists, curated by Alex Farquharson and Alexis Vaillant, opened last month at
the bourgeois Espace Electra (the French Electricity Foundation). Then, this
January, Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme
Sans will throw themselves a farewell party in the form of a (still secret)
thematic show gathering artists who have emerged in France during the ’90s.
Hopefully, this new year (and era for the Palais) will make way for more
demanding and reflexive situations—a confrontation audiences certainly
deserve.
Paris-based critic and
curator, Eva Svennung is editor of the free French and English quarterly
Pacemaker.