Nouveau Vague
As the art world has grown it has sprouted many cumbersome appendages. One of these awkward outcroppings is the hiring of public relations companies to promote biennials, museum exhibitions and other events. At best this promotional structure, which often inexplicably bypasses the institution’s own PR department, means that journalists are given more information and access to the organizers and artists in the event. At worst it gives rise to a proliferation of a kind of institutional propaganda – this can be as hands-off as a thick press kit or as full-on as a booked schedule of interviews with curators and speeches by museum directors. In any case, it’s how I found myself in the official apartment of the president of the Centre Pompidou, listening to an amplified speech next to a mountainous dish of shrimp and duck liver.
I should provide a disclaimer here to make it clear that this is no fault of the PR company involved – they did their jobs professionally and went above and beyond fulfilling the wishes of their client. But the biggest loss in an arrangement like this is that the PR company is called upon to do the interpretive job of a curator or a museum department that hasn’t done theirs. A 50-page press pack, no matter how lovingly prepared, can’t serve to explain a curator’s chaotic and malformed idea of an exhibition.
Such was the case at the opening of the Centre Pompidou’s ‘Nouveau Festival’ – a five-week festival billed as a ‘non-stop research lab into today’s creation’, including exhibitions, conferences, screenings and performances, with up to ten events per day by more than 160 participants. Last week’s opening in the ground-floor spaces of the Centre Pompidou proved to be a literal manifestation of this overweeningly ambitious project, a chaotic admixture of unrelated events that no press person could make sense of, no matter how dedicated.
I’ll admit that the initial confusion began with my inability to speak French, combined with a schedule for the opening night’s events that was printed only in French. I kept looking and re-looking at it, trying to solve it like a maths problem. Starting times and artists’ names were listed in bold, but no matter how many times I read it I saw nothing that prompted any sense of recognition. Just the jumble of information on this single sheet of paper conveyed the sense of an event that had been drastically over-planned. A ‘new festival showcasing today’s creation in all its shape and colours’ may have sounded promising in press releases, but it quickly became clear that not much consideration had been given to how all these shapes and colours would function together in time and space.
Feeling disoriented, I followed the escalator up to Galerie Sud, which houses the permanent installations of the festival, each demarcated by black curtains that could be opened or closed around them. I was looking at things that seemed to suggest art, that even reminded me of art – a metal cage housing paintings on racks, a platform surrounded by scaffolding from which you could look down on the space, a square of carpet with a laptop in the middle and headphones radiating from it – I even recognized Carsten Höller’s well-lit Mirror Carousel (2005), but none of it was gelling into something I would call an exhibition. Is it possible to have a festival of static art works? Is that nouveau?
I wandered aimlessly for the first half an hour, riding up and down the escalator a few times, checking the time on my phone against the printed schedule, but still not encountering anything recognizable as ‘performance’, until I entered Espace 315. Here was an empty stage with a wooden backdrop, topped by an enormous theatrical mask with an exaggeratedly bulbous nose. I made my way to the back side of the stage, which was actually a wooden cube lined with blue curtains, somewhat like a large coffin, and adorned with stumps covered in gold. Inside, a group of four performers from La Compagnie du Zerep – two men and two women dressed in outfits fit for a dinner party, were constructing a series of short, 20-second tableaux vivants in the space. They struck pose after pose, with deadpan expressions, using the props around them, which included a dish of cookies, a dead alligator, and something that looked like an oversized bicycle horn. The actors were perfect parodies of characters from French films about middle-aged bourgeois couples in Paris: the men played macho while the women played frustrated housewives. One picked something from her teeth while the other held her stomach as if she’d just eaten too much; In each successive tableau the man checks his breath, his hair piece falls off, he buries his face up her skirt. More than anything the performance was an act of stamina and invention as they improvised each new pose, barely breaking their straight faces while the audience laughed hysterically.
But the mood was disturbed shortly afterward as a procession filed through the crowd to the other side of the stage. This turned out to be an orchestra of about 20 accordion players, Les Accordéons de Paris. There are, I realize now, many different types of accordions. And many different types of accordion players. They each donned black Zorro masks, and proceeded to play theme songs from 1980s television shows and other standards for contemporary accordion. Meanwhile the giant plaster nose on top of the stage set hovered over their heads.
And with that, I’d apparently seen all the performances on the schedule for the evening, excluding the ones I couldn’t find and the ones I’d already seen that were scheduled to repeat throughout the night. I wandered around a bit more. The theatre troupe was booked to perform for another four hours, and I wondered how they’d keep that up. They seemed really delirious and sweaty. Outside the gallery I took a seat on a tiger-striped bench beside a live lizard in a terrarium. I felt confused. Maybe I was misled by the original press materials, which, among many names I didn’t know, had promised performances by Elmgreen & Dragset, Aurélien Froment and Andrea Fraser. But none of them were there. I couldn’t even find a schedule that published when exactly they would be there. Is this the point of a ‘Nouveau Festival’, that we have to let go of these classifications? Or perhaps the organizers were trying to recapture some of the original function of the Centre Pompidou as a multidisciplinary space that encouraged crossover among the arts. But if this opening was any indication, this model no longer holds up, or at least needs a clearer structuring principle to justify it.
The next day we visited the off-site half of the festival, a (relatively) conventional exhibition entitled ‘The probable fate of the man who swallowed the ghost’, housed in the Conciergerie’s Salle des Gens d’Armes, the cavernous basement of the former royal palace. This space, with its Gothic vaulted ceilings, was once where the king inspected his knights. It was later converted into the prison where Marie Antoinette was detained. We were accompanied by press representatives from the Centre des monuments nationaux; the festival’s Art Director, Bernard Blistène; and a few of the participating artists – all with their own interests to promote but none of which came together. This show, Blistène informed us, was about the ‘body in space’ inspired by a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Scenario (1997) and designed and conceived by the ‘human orchestra’, Christian Rizzo. I didn’t feel so badly about not knowing who he was, even after the curator described him as ‘the most famous choreographer in France’, because I quickly realized that he described every participant in the exhibition as the greatest or most famous at something. Hence, the exhibition included ridiculously high striped high-heels created by the most famous shoe designer in France, Benoît Méléard, as well as sculptures by the very famous cock-ring designer and most famous piercing artist, Jean-Luc Verna, who joined us to give a short but revealing lecture about the glass cock-rings that he had designed (_Bracelets érotiques_, 2009), which he reminded us several times were indeed wearable. Glancing at my notes now I see that I wrote ‘all the cock rings are wearable’ several different times. To me they looked a bit big to be ‘wearable’, and also sharp, and made of glass, but I let that slide because I genuinely believed he might strip down and demonstrate them if I asked any more questions.
Though the list of artists involved was impressive, for the most part each one had contributed only a small figurative piece, most of which were placed on a black stage-like platform that resembled a catwalk lined with tall globe lamps that dimmed and illuminated alternately. This shiny runway, designed by Rizzo, was peopled with sculptures by Berlinda de Bruyckere, Katharina Fritsch, Antony Gormley and Ai Weiwei, among others, in what was perhaps the largest collection of contemporary figurative sculpture I’ve seen in one place at one time. A procession of ghosts made of white bed-sheets and cartoonish drawn on faces seemed to emerge from one of the apses off to the side. This work, Ghosts (2003) by Olaf Breuning and Bernhard Willhelm, was actually one of the few successful works, if only because it seemed to be gleefully escaping this bizarre, stilted art/catwalk in a former prison/palace. When I asked if there were also performances taking place in this part of the festival, the curator pointed to a man dressed as a toreador lying on the ground (Pierre Joseph’s Le Toreador – personage a reactiver). Yes, of course.
The afternoon continued with a visit to the official apartment of the President of the Centre Pompidou, a modest residence situated across the plaza from the Pompidou. The President, Alain Seban, read from a prepared speech – at a Perspex podium that boasted another, shorter podium expressly for his glass of water – about statistics and figures (‘Four heads of department report to me’) and the museum’s future plans (‘Our Indian project will be centred around society issues, et cetera et cetera’). We diligently scribbled this carefully controlled collection of bullet points in our notebooks, if only to avoid having to make eye contact, particularly when someone on the plaza outside started yelling angrily, and I could see the President’s gaze fix on something through the wooden shutters, as if he were making a mental note to tell his assistant later to have that nuisance removed.
Over a dish filled with bread and paté, I tried to figure out what exactly about this arrangement had made me so uncomfortable. Was I just disturbed by the aims of the festival itself, which felt out of step with Blistène’s insistence that the museum can accommodate the ‘latest trends in art’? To me this looked more like the creation of something with no specific point of reference, historical or otherwise. (When I asked him if there was an ‘old festival’ or some other precedent for the ‘new festival’, he could refer only vaguely to the initial spirit of ‘crossing boundaries’ when the Pompidou first opened in 1977.) It seemed to be a symptom of an unspoken imperative for the Centre Pompidou to do something ‘cross-disciplinary’, even if the elements included might function best inside their own disciplines. Such a hugely ambitious programme would have benefited from a more rigorous institutional structure and some thought as to which kinds of performance might be able to exist simultaneously, and which are better given their own forum so as not to get lost in the shuffle. Blistène’s hope for the visitors to become ‘_flâneurs_’ in the space seemed a poor analogy, as Baudelaire’s flâneur was most likely never assaulted by an entire orchestra of accordionists wearing Zorro masks.
As the art world has grown it has sprouted many cumbersome appendages. One of these awkward outcroppings is the hiring of public relations companies to promote biennials, museum exhibitions and other events. At best this promotional structure, which often inexplicably bypasses the institution’s own PR department, means that journalists are given more information and access to the organizers and artists in the event. At worst it gives rise to a proliferation of a kind of institutional propaganda – this can be as hands-off as a thick press kit or as full-on as a booked schedule of interviews with curators and speeches by museum directors. In any case, it’s how I found myself in the official apartment of the president of the Centre Pompidou, listening to an amplified speech next to a mountainous dish of shrimp and duck liver.
I should provide a disclaimer here to make it clear that this is no fault of the PR company involved – they did their jobs professionally and went above and beyond fulfilling the wishes of their client. But the biggest loss in an arrangement like this is that the PR company is called upon to do the interpretive job of a curator or a museum department that hasn’t done theirs. A 50-page press pack, no matter how lovingly prepared, can’t serve to explain a curator’s chaotic and malformed idea of an exhibition.
Such was the case at the opening of the Centre Pompidou’s ‘Nouveau Festival’ – a five-week festival billed as a ‘non-stop research lab into today’s creation’, including exhibitions, conferences, screenings and performances, with up to ten events per day by more than 160 participants. Last week’s opening in the ground-floor spaces of the Centre Pompidou proved to be a literal manifestation of this overweeningly ambitious project, a chaotic admixture of unrelated events that no press person could make sense of, no matter how dedicated.
I’ll admit that the initial confusion began with my inability to speak French, combined with a schedule for the opening night’s events that was printed only in French. I kept looking and re-looking at it, trying to solve it like a maths problem. Starting times and artists’ names were listed in bold, but no matter how many times I read it I saw nothing that prompted any sense of recognition. Just the jumble of information on this single sheet of paper conveyed the sense of an event that had been drastically over-planned. A ‘new festival showcasing today’s creation in all its shape and colours’ may have sounded promising in press releases, but it quickly became clear that not much consideration had been given to how all these shapes and colours would function together in time and space.
Feeling disoriented, I followed the escalator up to Galerie Sud, which houses the permanent installations of the festival, each demarcated by black curtains that could be opened or closed around them. I was looking at things that seemed to suggest art, that even reminded me of art – a metal cage housing paintings on racks, a platform surrounded by scaffolding from which you could look down on the space, a square of carpet with a laptop in the middle and headphones radiating from it – I even recognized Carsten Höller’s well-lit Mirror Carousel (2005), but none of it was gelling into something I would call an exhibition. Is it possible to have a festival of static art works? Is that nouveau?
I wandered aimlessly for the first half an hour, riding up and down the escalator a few times, checking the time on my phone against the printed schedule, but still not encountering anything recognizable as ‘performance’, until I entered Espace 315. Here was an empty stage with a wooden backdrop, topped by an enormous theatrical mask with an exaggeratedly bulbous nose. I made my way to the back side of the stage, which was actually a wooden cube lined with blue curtains, somewhat like a large coffin, and adorned with stumps covered in gold. Inside, a group of four performers from La Compagnie du Zerep – two men and two women dressed in outfits fit for a dinner party, were constructing a series of short, 20-second tableaux vivants in the space. They struck pose after pose, with deadpan expressions, using the props around them, which included a dish of cookies, a dead alligator, and something that looked like an oversized bicycle horn. The actors were perfect parodies of characters from French films about middle-aged bourgeois couples in Paris: the men played macho while the women played frustrated housewives. One picked something from her teeth while the other held her stomach as if she’d just eaten too much; In each successive tableau the man checks his breath, his hair piece falls off, he buries his face up her skirt. More than anything the performance was an act of stamina and invention as they improvised each new pose, barely breaking their straight faces while the audience laughed hysterically.
But the mood was disturbed shortly afterward as a procession filed through the crowd to the other side of the stage. This turned out to be an orchestra of about 20 accordion players, Les Accordéons de Paris. There are, I realize now, many different types of accordions. And many different types of accordion players. They each donned black Zorro masks, and proceeded to play theme songs from 1980s television shows and other standards for contemporary accordion. Meanwhile the giant plaster nose on top of the stage set hovered over their heads.
And with that, I’d apparently seen all the performances on the schedule for the evening, excluding the ones I couldn’t find and the ones I’d already seen that were scheduled to repeat throughout the night. I wandered around a bit more. The theatre troupe was booked to perform for another four hours, and I wondered how they’d keep that up. They seemed really delirious and sweaty. Outside the gallery I took a seat on a tiger-striped bench beside a live lizard in a terrarium. I felt confused. Maybe I was misled by the original press materials, which, among many names I didn’t know, had promised performances by Elmgreen & Dragset, Aurélien Froment and Andrea Fraser. But none of them were there. I couldn’t even find a schedule that published when exactly they would be there. Is this the point of a ‘Nouveau Festival’, that we have to let go of these classifications? Or perhaps the organizers were trying to recapture some of the original function of the Centre Pompidou as a multidisciplinary space that encouraged crossover among the arts. But if this opening was any indication, this model no longer holds up, or at least needs a clearer structuring principle to justify it.
The next day we visited the off-site half of the festival, a (relatively) conventional exhibition entitled ‘The probable fate of the man who swallowed the ghost’, housed in the Conciergerie’s Salle des Gens d’Armes, the cavernous basement of the former royal palace. This space, with its Gothic vaulted ceilings, was once where the king inspected his knights. It was later converted into the prison where Marie Antoinette was detained. We were accompanied by press representatives from the Centre des monuments nationaux; the festival’s Art Director, Bernard Blistène; and a few of the participating artists – all with their own interests to promote but none of which came together. This show, Blistène informed us, was about the ‘body in space’ inspired by a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Scenario (1997) and designed and conceived by the ‘human orchestra’, Christian Rizzo. I didn’t feel so badly about not knowing who he was, even after the curator described him as ‘the most famous choreographer in France’, because I quickly realized that he described every participant in the exhibition as the greatest or most famous at something. Hence, the exhibition included ridiculously high striped high-heels created by the most famous shoe designer in France, Benoît Méléard, as well as sculptures by the very famous cock-ring designer and most famous piercing artist, Jean-Luc Verna, who joined us to give a short but revealing lecture about the glass cock-rings that he had designed (_Bracelets érotiques_, 2009), which he reminded us several times were indeed wearable. Glancing at my notes now I see that I wrote ‘all the cock rings are wearable’ several different times. To me they looked a bit big to be ‘wearable’, and also sharp, and made of glass, but I let that slide because I genuinely believed he might strip down and demonstrate them if I asked any more questions.
Though the list of artists involved was impressive, for the most part each one had contributed only a small figurative piece, most of which were placed on a black stage-like platform that resembled a catwalk lined with tall globe lamps that dimmed and illuminated alternately. This shiny runway, designed by Rizzo, was peopled with sculptures by Berlinda de Bruyckere, Katharina Fritsch, Antony Gormley and Ai Weiwei, among others, in what was perhaps the largest collection of contemporary figurative sculpture I’ve seen in one place at one time. A procession of ghosts made of white bed-sheets and cartoonish drawn on faces seemed to emerge from one of the apses off to the side. This work, Ghosts (2003) by Olaf Breuning and Bernhard Willhelm, was actually one of the few successful works, if only because it seemed to be gleefully escaping this bizarre, stilted art/catwalk in a former prison/palace. When I asked if there were also performances taking place in this part of the festival, the curator pointed to a man dressed as a toreador lying on the ground (Pierre Joseph’s Le Toreador – personage a reactiver). Yes, of course.
The afternoon continued with a visit to the official apartment of the President of the Centre Pompidou, a modest residence situated across the plaza from the Pompidou. The President, Alain Seban, read from a prepared speech – at a Perspex podium that boasted another, shorter podium expressly for his glass of water – about statistics and figures (‘Four heads of department report to me’) and the museum’s future plans (‘Our Indian project will be centred around society issues, et cetera et cetera’). We diligently scribbled this carefully controlled collection of bullet points in our notebooks, if only to avoid having to make eye contact, particularly when someone on the plaza outside started yelling angrily, and I could see the President’s gaze fix on something through the wooden shutters, as if he were making a mental note to tell his assistant later to have that nuisance removed.
Over a dish filled with bread and paté, I tried to figure out what exactly about this arrangement had made me so uncomfortable. Was I just disturbed by the aims of the festival itself, which felt out of step with Blistène’s insistence that the museum can accommodate the ‘latest trends in art’? To me this looked more like the creation of something with no specific point of reference, historical or otherwise. (When I asked him if there was an ‘old festival’ or some other precedent for the ‘new festival’, he could refer only vaguely to the initial spirit of ‘crossing boundaries’ when the Pompidou first opened in 1977.) It seemed to be a symptom of an unspoken imperative for the Centre Pompidou to do something ‘cross-disciplinary’, even if the elements included might function best inside their own disciplines. Such a hugely ambitious programme would have benefited from a more rigorous institutional structure and some thought as to which kinds of performance might be able to exist simultaneously, and which are better given their own forum so as not to get lost in the shuffle. Blistène’s hope for the visitors to become ‘_flâneurs_’ in the space seemed a poor analogy, as Baudelaire’s flâneur was most likely never assaulted by an entire orchestra of accordionists wearing Zorro masks.
