Le Printemps de Septembre
‘Là où je suis n’éxiste pas’. ‘Here where I am doesn’t exist.’ It’s not a comfortable translation – I had to read it twice – but the subtitle to ‘Le Printemps de Septembre’ (Spring in September) is not intended to be a tidy, comfortable idea. It responds in part to the equally gnomic strap-line of the 2008 edition of this yearly contemporary art festival (which was also under the artistic direction of Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, director Christian Bernard): ‘Wherever I’m going, I’m already there.’ Bernard and associate curator, Jean-Max Colard, were keen to downplay the significance of these subtitles; they were designed as jumping off points for some – not necessarily all – of the artists involved, rather than as an adhesive to bind together the more than 40 discrete exhibitions, commissions, concerts and performances of the three-week festival.
Ironically, many of the festival’s best works seem to articulate this evasive concept the most clearly, by simultaneously acknowledging and thinking beyond their surroundings. Victor Burgin expressed the subtitle’s implication of temporal and geographical dislocation in Hôtel D (2009). The work was made especially for the space in which it was shown – the magnificent, wood-panelled Salle des Pérelins and its adjoining chapel in the Hôtel-Dieu, Toulouse’s first hospital. Sequestering himself within the space, Burgin has built a grey cube within which he shows a film of ponderous, creeping pans and zooms through the Salle des Pérelins as well as an anonymous hotel room, which looks out onto a cityscape. It was only when I noticed that distant cars in the street were not moving that I realized every scene was a still photograph; despite the movement between here and elsewhere, between now and then, Burgin’s eye is as chilly and dispassionate as the digital media he records with.
In Toulouse’s Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Sylvie Fleury has interspersed a selection of chrome-plated, bronze-cast fetish objects throughout the museum’s ethnographic and natural history display. Did her Dior Shoes (2008) align themselves more to the Mongolian shaman costume, the turtle shell, the stuffed bird of paradise or the Maori hunting equipment? All of it, and none of it, I guess; while appraising contemporary culture through an anthropological long-view, the juxtapositions reveal the essential strangeness of our moment, making these items at once mystical and unknowable.
On the other side of town, Cyprien Gaillard showed a new film, Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009), in the cavernous hall of the Théatre Garonne. (Many of the exhibitions of the festival employed previously derelict, but impressive, historic spaces in the town, as well as museums, independent spaces, the art school, commercial galleries and, in one instance, a bookshop.) Gaillard’s film shows the night-time demolition of a Glasgow block of flats, framed poignantly by a graveyard in the foreground. Gradually the thick smoke clears to reveal an image of the silently thundering Niagara Falls in their place. This description belies the immaculate execution of the idea; while digital trickery would divert the work’s impact, the seamless transition seems entirely natural, as if Gaillard is uncovering the eternal sublime at the core of the Modernist structure. Pruitt-Igoe was, of course, Minoru Yamasaki’s public housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri that was dynamited in 1972, signalling, according to the critic Charles Jencks, the death of modern architecture. (Incidentally, it was Yamasaki who designed New York’s World Trade Center, which fell 29 years later, marking the end of another era.) Gaillard presents the collapse of the Glasgow building as a perpetually repeating event, both a beautiful failure and a never-ending catastrophe.
While the festival’s high points were very high, equally the lows were very low indeed, though I would concede that – in some cases – this was down to personal taste. The gloss-black and silver, adolescent hard-rock aesthetic that was so painfully demonstrated by Claude Lévêque in France’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale was here too in force. An overblown installation by the Swiss artist Pierre Vadi titled Hell is Chrome (2009), a gloomy display of sculptures and paintings by brothers Florian and Michaël Quistrebert in one of the town’s ubiquitous arched cellars, and Jean-Luc Verna’s posturing emulations of heavy-metal imagery were all classics of the genre.
Equally teenage, but far more objectionable, was Christian Marclay’s 35 mm film Solo (2008), shown in the town’s arts cinema. The film opened with a lithe, blonde young woman entering what looks like a soundproofed room, and starts exploring the curves and knobs of a Stratocaster that happens to be plugged in to an amplifier. Given the work’s title, and Marclay’s interest in using instruments in unorthodox ways to make sound (think of 2000’s memorable Guitar Drag), you can probably guess how the film pans out. The woman is soon naked, grinding her groin ecstatically (and presumably uncomfortably) against the strings. Perhaps Marclay has a point here about subliminal attraction to the muscular, phallic emblem of the electric guitar (particularly the Strat), although I’d argue that the real erotic charge of the instrument speaks, like this film, primarily to 14-year-old boys. Perhaps, at a stretch, Marclay is deliberately quoting the language of high-grade porn. But by the 20th minute, as the camera lingers on the writhing model’s breasts, I wondered how this film ever got to be made, let alone shown. In an interview published last year in the Daily Telegraph, Marclay says of the work that previously ‘it would not have been politically correct [...] But today it doesn’t seem to be an issue.’ When he goes on to compare it to Marcel Duchamp’s once-scandalous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the full extent of his obliviousness is revealed.
If you’re considering visiting ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’, don’t let Marclay put you off. It’s worth the trip just to see Jim Shaw’s remarkable installation Labyrinth: I dreamed I was taller than Jonathan Borofsky (2009), in the contemporary art museum, Les Abattoirs. Shaw’s carnival of figures on cut-out panels responds partly to the vast paintings by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí between which it is sited, partly to the iconic work of US artist Barofsky, and partly to the cast of characters from graphic Americana that already populate Shaw’s work. Also excellent are the series of smaller exhibitions, ‘Seven Easy Pieces’, also in the museum. To those who complained that these drew too heavily on the collection of Christian Bernard’s own institution, Mamco, he might have answered that ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’ was in no way meant to be about the local or the site-specific; after all, ‘Là où je suis n’existe pas’.
‘Là où je suis n’éxiste pas’. ‘Here where I am doesn’t exist.’ It’s not a comfortable translation – I had to read it twice – but the subtitle to ‘Le Printemps de Septembre’ (Spring in September) is not intended to be a tidy, comfortable idea. It responds in part to the equally gnomic strap-line of the 2008 edition of this yearly contemporary art festival (which was also under the artistic direction of Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, director Christian Bernard): ‘Wherever I’m going, I’m already there.’ Bernard and associate curator, Jean-Max Colard, were keen to downplay the significance of these subtitles; they were designed as jumping off points for some – not necessarily all – of the artists involved, rather than as an adhesive to bind together the more than 40 discrete exhibitions, commissions, concerts and performances of the three-week festival.
Ironically, many of the festival’s best works seem to articulate this evasive concept the most clearly, by simultaneously acknowledging and thinking beyond their surroundings. Victor Burgin expressed the subtitle’s implication of temporal and geographical dislocation in Hôtel D (2009). The work was made especially for the space in which it was shown – the magnificent, wood-panelled Salle des Pérelins and its adjoining chapel in the Hôtel-Dieu, Toulouse’s first hospital. Sequestering himself within the space, Burgin has built a grey cube within which he shows a film of ponderous, creeping pans and zooms through the Salle des Pérelins as well as an anonymous hotel room, which looks out onto a cityscape. It was only when I noticed that distant cars in the street were not moving that I realized every scene was a still photograph; despite the movement between here and elsewhere, between now and then, Burgin’s eye is as chilly and dispassionate as the digital media he records with.
In Toulouse’s Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Sylvie Fleury has interspersed a selection of chrome-plated, bronze-cast fetish objects throughout the museum’s ethnographic and natural history display. Did her Dior Shoes (2008) align themselves more to the Mongolian shaman costume, the turtle shell, the stuffed bird of paradise or the Maori hunting equipment? All of it, and none of it, I guess; while appraising contemporary culture through an anthropological long-view, the juxtapositions reveal the essential strangeness of our moment, making these items at once mystical and unknowable.
On the other side of town, Cyprien Gaillard showed a new film, Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009), in the cavernous hall of the Théatre Garonne. (Many of the exhibitions of the festival employed previously derelict, but impressive, historic spaces in the town, as well as museums, independent spaces, the art school, commercial galleries and, in one instance, a bookshop.) Gaillard’s film shows the night-time demolition of a Glasgow block of flats, framed poignantly by a graveyard in the foreground. Gradually the thick smoke clears to reveal an image of the silently thundering Niagara Falls in their place. This description belies the immaculate execution of the idea; while digital trickery would divert the work’s impact, the seamless transition seems entirely natural, as if Gaillard is uncovering the eternal sublime at the core of the Modernist structure. Pruitt-Igoe was, of course, Minoru Yamasaki’s public housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri that was dynamited in 1972, signalling, according to the critic Charles Jencks, the death of modern architecture. (Incidentally, it was Yamasaki who designed New York’s World Trade Center, which fell 29 years later, marking the end of another era.) Gaillard presents the collapse of the Glasgow building as a perpetually repeating event, both a beautiful failure and a never-ending catastrophe.
While the festival’s high points were very high, equally the lows were very low indeed, though I would concede that – in some cases – this was down to personal taste. The gloss-black and silver, adolescent hard-rock aesthetic that was so painfully demonstrated by Claude Lévêque in France’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale was here too in force. An overblown installation by the Swiss artist Pierre Vadi titled Hell is Chrome (2009), a gloomy display of sculptures and paintings by brothers Florian and Michaël Quistrebert in one of the town’s ubiquitous arched cellars, and Jean-Luc Verna’s posturing emulations of heavy-metal imagery were all classics of the genre.
Equally teenage, but far more objectionable, was Christian Marclay’s 35 mm film Solo (2008), shown in the town’s arts cinema. The film opened with a lithe, blonde young woman entering what looks like a soundproofed room, and starts exploring the curves and knobs of a Stratocaster that happens to be plugged in to an amplifier. Given the work’s title, and Marclay’s interest in using instruments in unorthodox ways to make sound (think of 2000’s memorable Guitar Drag), you can probably guess how the film pans out. The woman is soon naked, grinding her groin ecstatically (and presumably uncomfortably) against the strings. Perhaps Marclay has a point here about subliminal attraction to the muscular, phallic emblem of the electric guitar (particularly the Strat), although I’d argue that the real erotic charge of the instrument speaks, like this film, primarily to 14-year-old boys. Perhaps, at a stretch, Marclay is deliberately quoting the language of high-grade porn. But by the 20th minute, as the camera lingers on the writhing model’s breasts, I wondered how this film ever got to be made, let alone shown. In an interview published last year in the Daily Telegraph, Marclay says of the work that previously ‘it would not have been politically correct [...] But today it doesn’t seem to be an issue.’ When he goes on to compare it to Marcel Duchamp’s once-scandalous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the full extent of his obliviousness is revealed.
If you’re considering visiting ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’, don’t let Marclay put you off. It’s worth the trip just to see Jim Shaw’s remarkable installation Labyrinth: I dreamed I was taller than Jonathan Borofsky (2009), in the contemporary art museum, Les Abattoirs. Shaw’s carnival of figures on cut-out panels responds partly to the vast paintings by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí between which it is sited, partly to the iconic work of US artist Barofsky, and partly to the cast of characters from graphic Americana that already populate Shaw’s work. Also excellent are the series of smaller exhibitions, ‘Seven Easy Pieces’, also in the museum. To those who complained that these drew too heavily on the collection of Christian Bernard’s own institution, Mamco, he might have answered that ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’ was in no way meant to be about the local or the site-specific; after all, ‘Là où je suis n’existe pas’.
