Intense Proximity At Palais de Tokyo - NY Arts MagazineNY Arts Magazine

The Palais de Tokyo near Trocadero was built for the 1937 International Exposition. A veritable white elephant in the academic “column-beam-slab” style, its 22,000 square feet has a tumultuous history, to say the least: part of the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) until the late 70s, it then served as the Musée d’Art et d’Essai, housing the now-defunct art schools Femis and IHEAP; during the Mitterand years, it was a center for photography; after that there were plans for a Musée du Cine followed by a Palais du Cinema—neither of which came off. Over the last decade, it has been reincarnated as a center for contemporary art under a revolving series of directors and curators.

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“Vestige is both solid and suggestive, and for what it’s worth, refuses to be pigeon-holed by looking like other contemporary art. Resistance to classification may be the beginning of the artwork’s existence.”

Image courtesy of Palais de Tokyo and Intense Proximity

INTENSE PROXIMITY AT THE PALAIS DE TOKYO

BY IDDHIS BING

It reopened, yet again, in April with “Intense Proximity,” the Triennale of art (no more biennales in Paris, for complicated reasons). Paris was back on the map. Or, as the Director, Jean de Loisy phrased it: the museum has “helped to reconcile Paris to contemporary art.”

Sarah Fauguet and David Cousinard spent the month of March planning and creating Vestige for one of the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Modules inside “Intense Proximity”, where their work will be nestled against the Wilson Arches in the basement. A somewhat foreboding area of the building, where the rupture with the old architecture is immediately evident; the Palais’ non-structural elements have been ripped out, leaving a very raw space. Vestige will be on view for a little more than a month, until early June.

Vestige—a relic or, in a poetic sense, a shipwrecked vessel that washed ashore—encapsulates the two artists’ work. Fauguet and Cousinard don’t do many fashion installations, which implies importing pre-conceived ideas into a blank gallery or museum space, as they respond to the history and sensory data of the place in which they are working. In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard famously meditated on the sensory data and memories evoked by particular spaces. Fauguet and Cousinard up the ante, filling rooms with stories and potential, like a post-modern Bachelard addicted to late-night movies, which he watches halfway through and re-imagines to his own design. The tonalities and orchestration depend on location as much as the artists’ intent.

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Image courtesy of Palais de Tokyo and Intense Proximity

Such is their film noir Johnny Vingt Trois (2005) or the The Habitation of the Spider (2009), in Sarajevo, which was in fact built as a film set; or Salle de passage à tabac (2004) at L’Impasse, Paris: the viewer completes the work by supplying the “possible fiction” (Fauguet’s words). It seems to me they are imagining strange novels built out of wood, abandoned spaces, some immaculate, most messy. What they are really doing is playing with the viewer’s head: What is this strange piece, with no identifiable function? Much of “Intense Proximity” is identifiable as art—drawings in a frame, film, documents, sculptures, and installations. Vestige is both solid and suggestive, and for what it’s worth, refuses to be pigeon-holed by looking like other contemporary art. Resistance to classification may be the beginning of the artwork’s existence.

An immediate response to Vestige is a total recall of the old skin of the Palais, stripped away like so many layers of decayed epidermis as the building passed through the hands of one institution to another. What is this “thing” that, without knowing the artists at all, is clearly handmade with a great deal of care, an object that looks like a compacted version of the building’s original ornamentation or an industrial era facade? Passing viewers offer everything from “a Japanese temple” to “a three dimensional Escher.” From one of the basement’s many looping balconies, it looks like some sort of gigantic child’s toy.

On my second visit to the “Intense Proximity” I notice Vigia (Watchtower) staring down from above. During World War II the Nazis used the Palais de Tokyo to store the treasure they seized from Jews and other “undesirables.” A museum of theft; aren’t they all? Where exactly, I asked the local historian—betraying the imagination of a literalist. We were standing in front of Vestige on opening night. Right here, he said, in the basement, pointing at Vestige—far away from the crowds.

Two Critics At The Bar On Opening Night:

A: 22,000 square feet is no small parcel of land, especially in Paris, especially if it’s dedicated to contemporary art. But how to say something definitive about a show for which there is no narrative, no single generation represented and no center?

B: The curators say they wanted to be inclusive, open to the vital currents in art now, regardless of country of origin.

A: They lack the integrity of an idea or even a group of ideas. They’ve turned the Palais into a cross between a bazaar and a shopping mall, as if the prospect of shaping 22,000 square feet gave them nightmares. There are far too many mid-level artists with more space than they know what to do with.

B: If you got lost in an endless series of private passages, wending your way from Cecile Beau to Julien Salaud’s sculptural theories about the Lascaux caves to Peter Handke’s Introspection and so on, that’s the price you pay when you walk in the door.

Nearly 150 artists represented: does that seem like small potatoes to you? I want to use the word courageous to describe the show, because during these times of political and aesthetic retrenchment,
when even France has curled up, ever so elegantly, in the fetal position and worries more about its national traditions than the world beyond its borders, “Intense Proximity” doesn’t give a damn about the color of your passport.

A: I don’t doubt that the show is strong is spots, mainly when it is small, intricate, detailed. Buggenhout has hung an enormous junkyard over the stairway: if it falls down, we’ll be crushed by the Germans yet again. The curators, meanwhile, justify their inclusiveness—or lack of defining taste—with language on this order: “In this historic moment when there are arguably no more outside cultures to discover or far away places to explore, when the asymptotic relationship between inside and outside has become a cause for alarm and anxiety, it appears that our time is emblematized, and equally traumatized by the collapse of distance.” It burbles on like that for pages. Curators earn their daily bread with language like that! Does anyone have a clue what it means?

Must we continually celebrate these mega shows, replete with artists well past mid-career, artists with little to say who repeat themselves tirelessly, while valuable artists are lost in the shuffle? The mega exposition is a disease of our time. The best thing would be if the Ministry of Culture and Communication bulldozed the Palais de Tokyo in the middle of the night—by mistake perhaps…

B: With criticism like that, aren’t you saying you really prefer the chi-chi galleries in Saint Germain and Le Marais?

Critic A had no chance to answer. Everyone began pushing and shoving to get out of the bar: The Purple People had arrived. 