La Force de l’Art 02

On the opening day of ‘La Force de l’Art 02’ (The Force of Art 02), the second instalment of the triennial of French contemporary art, Le Monde published a text by dealer Isabelle Alfonsi, artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar and critics Claire Moulène and Elisabeth Wetterwald that had been circulating as an Internet petition entitled ‘La Faiblesse de l’art’ (The Weakness of Art). The text criticized curators Jean-Louis Froment, Jean-Yves Jouannais and Didier Ottinger for their selection of only seven female artists out of a total of 42 artists in the exhibition’s main venue, the Art Nouveau Grand Palais. Contextualizing the way the under-representation of female artists in French national collections belies the increasingly strong presence of women in the French art world, the authors decried ‘the place assigned to female artists at the highest level of French institutions’ as ‘precarious, peripheral, and punctual.’

The French have long excelled at the public exchange of passionate opinions about art and culture, but this mini-polemic never gathered enough strength to swell into a storm. In fact, ‘La Force de l’Art 02’ demonstrated an astonishing indifference to all pressures from the outside, including a potentially welcome onslaught of international visitors en route to or from the Venice Biennale and Art Basel, since the organizers misguidedly scheduled the exhibition to close just days before those other events opened. Nor did this exhibition or the majority of its artists display any awareness of the widespread anxiety over the global economic crisis and unemployment or the blitz of enduring anti-government protests and strikes taking place in France.

This sense of insularity, reinforced by Jouannais’ comparison of ‘La Force de l’Art 02’ with the Biosphere 2 research laboratory in his catalogue text, was partially due to exhibition designer Philippe Rahm’s building within the building, which he called ‘The White Geology’. This was, despite justifications to the contrary through the overbearing use of natural metaphors, essentially a refracted white cube built to fit the dimensions of individual art works, and no less ideological for it. The Grand Palais dwarfs even the most monumental projects, but Rahm’s architecture was best appreciated from Wang Du’s scaffolded nine-metre tower of stock image reproductions, International Kebab (2008), one of the few works with a mercifully succinct title that actually referred to something besides art and architectural history, obscure factoids, texts, codes, secrets or inside jokes. Inside, the glare of natural light onto the snow-white surface made sunglasses obligatory. These were hardly clement conditions for viewing art and negated the curators’ stated intention in their press release to focus exclusively on the ‘force of the artworks’ and ‘an authentic relationship’ to them.

Instead of a synthetic image of contemporary art made in France, ‘La Force de l’Art 02’ emphasized certain artistic obsessions – namely with historical art and architecture, knowledge and texts. In doing so, it unintentionally exposed our era of 21st-century Alexandrianism, a consensual artistic orthodoxy devoid of messy historical specificity yet concerned with perpetuating the past through reference and repetition – a tendency that I don’t think is specifically French. Guillaume Leblon’s Maison Sommaire #1 (Summary House #1, 2008), Grout/Mazéas’ Untitled (You damn fool, you ruined the door! – The Texas chain saw massacre) (2009), Stéphane Calais’ La Chambre (The Room, 2007–8), and Mircea Cantor’s Arch of Triumph (2008) all deconstruct or reconstruct built environments, rooms, or ornamental motifs in dialogue with Modernist or vernacular architectural histories to varying degrees of formal success. Dominique Blais’ Sans Titre (Lustre) (Untitled [Chandelier], 2008) thankfully broke rank by registering architectural absence through displacement. This installation replicated a space and sound piece from a previous exhibition, right down to the parquet floor and windows from the original space. The sounds of that empty gallery at night had been recorded and diffused throughout the day by devices placed in a wrought iron chandelier.

In the textual realm, Julien Prévieux’s installation La totalité des propositions varies (The Totality of True Propositions, 2008–9) comprises an over-designed and imposing circular shelf that holds books and manuals whose use value has been outlived because the knowledge contained in them is obsolete. The simple precision of Jean-Baptiste Ganne’s Coopération Le Capital illustré IV, XI (Cooperation, The Illustrated Capital, IV, XI, 1998–2003), everyday photographic portrayals matched with concepts from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), was spoiled by his Morse code translation of the text projected from the dome of the Grand Palais (hello? Cerith Wyn Evans?). By contrast, Véronique Aubouy’s touching long-term video project Proust lu (Proust read, 1993– ongoing), a collection of people from all walks of life reading aloud from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) in different settings, highlighted agency and the active pleasures of reading rather than passive transmission of form. More than any other, the voices in her work provided respite from the quietus of the rest.