C91 Reviews
Paris
The re-opening of the Centre Pompidou
The much-awaited event of the new millennium in the French art world has been without doubt the re-opening of the Centre Pompidou this January 1. After a closure of 27 months, the Centre finds a new image, with a total renovation cost amounting to 550 million francs! It is ready to take up the challenge of the 21 st century, and determined to respond to immense cultural expectations, notably through a programme dense with multidisciplinary activities. The Musée National d'Art Moderne, within the Centre, reaps the greatest reward from this return to form, and it is now the largest museum in the world devoted to the art of the 20 th century. With its new temporary exhibition rooms it will keep record of the effervescence of contemporary artistic creativity.
Jour de fête: a disconcerting optimism
The Musée National d'Art Moderne, hoping to be the experimental lab of forms to come, displays an air of positivism and satisfaction, notably with the exhibition Jour de fête ('holiday')--a title borrowed from the popular Jacques Tati film--which showcases nine young French artists. One would be tempted to be carried away by this optimism, particular in this period of the re-opening of the Centre Pompidou. Organised according to the device of a fair, the show leads the visitor on a walk in an ephemeral land-art installation by Michel Blazy, across his 'bouquets of spaghetti', or his ephemeral sculptures in toilet-paper or in aluminium... In the same room Guillaume Paris' cartoon-animation videos loop side by side with his milk fountain.
Like at a fair, the visitor can go ecstatic over their deformed reflections in Philippe Ramette's mirrors, or hear a Concert autistique , 1999, by Gilles Barbier, whose suspended masks diffuse electronic music. As an entertainment, Pierrick Sorin offers five vitrines containing virtual mini-spectacles which link back to the first tragi-comedies of the silent-film era. The viewer can then fantasise in front of the glass cases of the Espace d'amour--a rose caravan supposedly harbouring the activities of a card reader, as imagined by kitsch painter Philippe Mayaux and his accomplice Philippe Ramette. The panoramas of the 19 th century are evoked by Marie-Ange Guilleminot and her Paravent ('wind shelter'), 1996, a multifunctional polygonal structure, and by Xavier Veilhan, who leads the visitor into La Clairière ('the clearing'), 1998, a sort of large fresco of numbered images representing the three ages of human evolution, in a lineage based on the theme of vanity.
As for Frédéric Lecomte, he offers a satire on our image-saturated world with installations abounding with moving images. Given the eclecticism, the fractionalised universe, the singularities expressing the desires or the obsessions of these young artists, the living art of today is a long way from that optimism supposedly trumpeted by this inaugural Beaubourg exhibition, which sees itself as bearer of the hedonism of the simple pleasure of painting, of constructing... In effect, since the end of the 70s the last hesitating attempts at believing a progressive vision of art have disappeared. Gone is the image of the avant-gardes, instituted at the dawn of the 20 th century: creation from now on occurs outside of formal novelty. It is the hour of insolent provocations. The visual arts must attract attention, prick our curiosity, 'democratise' themselves... Artists are expected to evade categories and to pass from one medium to another, from photography to video, from drawing and painting to objects, from sculpture to installation. With Jour de fête the artists who come together to bear witness to the diversity of the French art scene display their freedom with ironic, frivolous or desperate insolence... Viewers remain dissatisfied, perhaps even disconcerted, faced with their own uncertainties and questionings about 'what is art today?' This recent history of art is still in process, and must prove itself.
The cosmic images of Alain Jacquet
Alain Jacquet: Mercure toupie, 1995,
inkjet print on canvas, 90 X 92 cm;
photo André Morain; courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon
Although certain of these young artists have already acquired a real international reputation, their art is a kind of work in progress, compared to the oeuvre of the older French artist Alain Jacquet, who is showing five large works from the last ten years at the Palais des Congrès. It is regrettable that an artist of this stature, a pioneer from the beginning of the 60s in the mastery of systems of mechanical reproduction, is not better collected at an institutional level, especially in France. Only a single large work of the artist's is exhibited in the Musée d'Art Moderne at Beaubourg:Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe , 1964, a remake of Manet's famous painting and one which places Jacquet in the first ranks of the Mechanical Art/Mec Art movement. His practice of using 'screens'--which utilise the photographic dot and silkscreen transfer, based on a three-colour system, enlarging and transferring to canvas--blurs the image to the threshold of the illegible. Photography is thus put to the test by painting.
After his work with braille sculptures in the 70s, Jacquet utilises a computer to paint anamorphic 'visions' of the terrestrial globe, starting with an image of the earth taken by American astronauts in 1969. It is in this encounter between his work with screens and photos of the conquest of space which sets the paradigm for the ensemble of his output. The image of the earth, transformed by computer into a flat surface, a 'skin', can take all forms, ovoid or annular, a torus (still called "donuts" by the artist), suggesting a half-disintegrated flying saucer in the cosmos in Space ship , 1988, or erotic symbols, for example in La danse , 1995, Mercure toupie , 1996, or his most recent creation, Bonjour M. Courbet No. 2, 1999. Far from shutting himself off in a fascination for the aesthetic of the technology itself, he is on the contrary committed to exploring novel form-giving effects in the technological applications. He tries doggedly to give images, already known to the point of cliché, even more meaning, when the multiplication of the images would tend instead to make them disappear.
Jour de fête, Musée national d'art moderne du Centre Georges Pompidou, January/February 2000
Alain Jacquet, Palais des Congrès de Paris, December 1999-March 2000
Soko Phay-Vakalis is an author and teacher in aesthetics and contemporary art at the University of Paris III-Nouvelle Sorbonne, and at the University of Paris VIII-Saint Denis.
Review reproduced from CIRCA 91, Spring 2000, pp. 58-59
