Haughty decrees are one of the French state’s specialties. In a proclamation issued in April 1999, Minister for Culture Cathérine Trautmann announced her intention to create a new exhibition space in Paris for young artists — modeled on existing centers in London, Amsterdam, Berlin and New York — in an attempt to revive the French capital’s flagging reputation on the international contemporary art circuit. This delicate mission was entrusted to Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans, a pair of maverick art critics and exhibition curators who wowed the faceless bureaucrats at the Culture Ministry with a proposal teeming with 21st century buzzwords. Their brainchild would be a “living laboratory of contemporary art,” a “non-defined space in which different projects could cross-fertilize one another,” a “tool in which the visual arts played the role of a search engine.” Contracts were signed, money changed hands and Paris’ culture vultures settled down to await the new venue.
That wait came to an end last month when Prime Minister Lionel Jospin officially opened the “Palais de Tokyo, site for contemporary arts.” With breathtaking imposture, architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal transformed the monumental 1930s splendor of the Palais de Tokyo building into an exact replica of a derelict warehouse — spending $3.3 million of French taxpayers’ money in the process. Exposed electrical cabling runs along the ceiling’s chipped I beams. The plaster walls of the main exhibition space are randomly gashed and pockmarked. The café’s price list is scrawled onto sheets of brown paper and stuck to untreated concrete pillars with gaffer tape. Using public money and private contributions from sponsors like Pioneer and Bloomberg, Bourriaud and Sans recreated the atmosphere of a seedy Berlin squat in the heart of Paris’ opulent 16th arrondissement. But what does all this nouveau squalor have to do with contemporary art? The curators don’t explain. Nor do they say why they didn’t simply move into one of the many dilapidated industrial sites around Paris. Presumably, their intended audience prefers chic imitation to the real thing.
And that’s just the problem with the Palais de Tokyo’s approach: it’s fake. The works on display are all in keeping with the bogus trash aesthetic. The most significant is Chinese artist Wang Du’s No Comment, a giant wastepaper basket filled with old newspapers and three TV sets, a visual pun on the notion of trash TV. In Taxi Biennale — a garishly airbrushed comic strip presenting the adventures of “Curatorman, the young CEO of the global player Curatorman Inc.” — Thailand’s Navin Rawanchaikul offers a labored reworking of another hoary old chestnut: the relationship between art and commerce. American Naomi Fisher photographs herself doggy-style with plant stems transpiercing her underwear, while Japanese artist Jun’ya Yamaide transforms a white wall into an oversized coloring book complete with crayons.
The artistic aphasia of Yamaide’s Nowhere mirrors the contrived nothingness of Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off, which won last year’s Turner Prize. The Palais de Tokyo’s curators seem intent on recreating the buzz that surrounded British conceptualism of the 1990s. But as last year’s Turner awards so amply demonstrated, today’s British scene has degenerated into a media circus. Conceptual art has always been about ideas. For it to be interesting, though, the ideas have to be new. Tired ironic commentaries on consumer society are not good enough. For all the post-postmodern posturing, the center is really just an echo of artistic movements spawned in other cities decades ago. It is too much concept and too little art. Simply saying that the Palais de Tokyo is a “living laboratory of contemporary art” doesn’t make it so.
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