Julien Berthier Is Obsessed with Bollards

Flaneuring in the footsteps of the situationists before him, Julien Berthier is preoccupied by those camouflaged apparatuses which guide and delimit the flow of people through urban space: the common potelet – better known in English as a bollard or metal traffic post. With ‘Passion Potelet’, an exhibition of the French artist’s musical sculptures and détourned readymades at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, Berthier makes a triumphant muse out of that most lowly and ubiquitous instrument of urban traffic control.

Occupying the centre of the main gallery space is Harmonie européenne (European Harmony, 2025), a wide, flattened grand piano built of plywood. Erupting like multicoloured organ pipes from the lid of the giant instrument are 77 unique bollards collected from 20 different European countries. While each may have once been carefully designed under the auspices of some city-planning commission to blend seamlessly with its intended environment, here, posed together in a confused huddle, their differences in colour, size and shape render them cartoonishly conspicuous. They are also meant to represent the musical notes of the keyboard: Berthier struck each bollard with a mallet, recorded the sound, and electronically mapped the individual recordings to each of the piano’s keys. Gallerygoers are encouraged to play the instrument, which sounds a bit like the clanging, cacophonous live accompaniment to a slapstick silent movie.

At times, Berthier’s whimsy gets the best of him. Public Thoughts (2019) transforms the sawed-off scalp and hair of a bronze statue into a hollow bell suspended from the ceiling, which can be played with a specially designed mallet the artist fashioned from yet another bollard. The effect is charmingly silly, if slightly one-note. Berthier’s work is at its most compelling when the extent of his interventions, and the logic guiding them, is less apparent. In Public Sculpture (a clock) (2013), what appears to be a massive stone base for an outdoor monument that has been turned on its side and mounted to the wall is, in fact, a clever simulacrum carved from resin and left out in the artist’s garden to calcify and gather moss. The work is also, as its title suggests, a clock: it marks each hour with an ominous chime played from a speaker installed within. 

To construct Tape Recordings: Doing Something Stupid While Listening to Something Interesting (2021), Berthier spent countless hours winding roles of packing tape (253, according to the press release) around a single aluminium block. As these layers accumulated, the work’s shape morphed gradually from square to circle, ultimately forming a massive disc which Berthier displays on a plinth, like the cross-section of an ancient tree trunk, its concentric rings indexing time long squandered. We’re left wondering what the ‘something interesting’ was that Berthier listened to as he undertook this private ritual, and whether those audio files may still be trapped somewhere inside the busted MacBook wedged behind the giant disc of tape to prop it up.

Though several of the show’s artworks also function as playable instruments, Berthier, curiously, does not compose scores for them. He prefers to leave the music to us, a gallerist explained while demoing Black Metal (2023), a sort of electric guitar fashioned from a bollard and played by running an empty Heineken bottle up and down its single string. The instrument released a whining screech, like a sitar fed through multiple distortion pedals. Meanwhile, my daughter banged out an unholy rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’ on Harmonie européenne. One visitor left, while another started headbanging to the noise. The tranquillity and dignified air of your typical commercial art gallery had been suddenly upended. It’s easy to imagine Berthier enjoying that.

Julien Berthier’s ‘Passion potelet’ is on view at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, until 26 April 2025 

^{Main image: Julien Berthier, Harmonie européenne (European Harmony) (detail), 2025, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris; photograph: Aurélien Mole}