Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes @ Palais de Tokyo

Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes
Installation

It took a while for me to work out what was going on in Anne Imhof's latest exhibition, Natures Mortes, at Palais de Tokyo. This is not art that necessarily puts the viewer in awe or happily consuming its beauty. It is, first and foremost, a cerebral experience. As we wandered around the sprawling spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, there were moments when my friend Nicole and I were not sure if we were looking at the exhibition or the desecrated walls of the museum. Imhof's installations are designed to blur the line between art and its context (here the Palais de Tokyo). They go further when it becomes unclear if the structures are to be looked at, stepped on, sat on, or if they are designed to direct our movement through different spaces. For example, in one section of the exhibition, black and white photographs of warehouses on lower Manhattan peers are juxtaposed with an industrial plinth topped with a white mattress. Similar mattresses are scattered throughout the exhibition, but on first encounter, it's impossible to know if it is intended for visitors to sit on while watching an adjacent film. Or is the mattress in the "do not touch" vein of an artwork in installation. We tried our luck and were promptly approached by the guards and told to get off the artwork.

Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes
Installation

In the same way, Imhof creates a fluidity between modern art and street graffiti, railway yards and, depending on the visitor's imagination, torture chambers in the gallery. Beds made of steel girders will remind some visitors of torture tables and others of a feature found in an S & M club, and still others of a NYC loading dock. Throughout the spaces, smoked glass - or perspex, it's difficult to say - panels are desecrated, scratched, graffitied and then juxtaposed to form curved walk throughs, walls, mirrors, or objects that might be part of the architecture. They can be around the corner from a drawing by Piranesi or Géricault, a painting by Cy Twombly or Joan Mitchell. Ironically, the guards were huddled around panels of what looked like spray-painted metal sheets and scratched glass walls, ensuring that visitors stood well clear. The Mitchell painting and the Géricault drawing, however, were there to be examined and no one would have known if they were touched. It's impossible to know what we are meant to be thinking or to give these works a definitive meaning. 

There are works by Sigmar Polke, Adrián Villar Rojas, Wolfgang Tillmans, and others sprinkled throughout the exhibition. However, again, it's not always obvious that we are looking at works by different artists. The environment created in the bowels of the Palais de Tokyo is one of curated exchange rather than one that singles out works to be applauded by unique individuals. The use of other's works also functions as an admission of Imhof's debt to art history. She is anything but a lone, romantic artist to be revered. In another installation, a fridge full of plastic decomposing food faces a Mitchell painting hung on bare, warehouse walls. Around the corner from the fridge is a Cy Twombly painting and some photographs. My first reaction was to wonder what on earth these works were doing there. But of course, Imhof has curated works by herself and other artists to fashion a world through which we walk, wander and discover, rather than a conventional gallery exhibition.

Anne Imhof, Installation
Palais de Tokyo

The sea is everywhere in this exhibition. It is photographed at night, in the day time, in film and evoked in other images. In the two works titled Nature Mortes, Imhof has scratched the surface of a light-charged red, Sugimoto-esque seascape. Like Sugimoto's romantic photographs, the horizon is blurred. But, in distinction, we lose sight of the overwhelm and power of nature thanks to the distress to the surface, often at the place where the horizon would be. Imhof's own gender fluid body stands on a beach where two images of the sea intersect. Her body repeatedly whips the sand, body and movement of her arm with the rope as an extension in come together in a mesmerizing movement. But in this film, shod footprints in the sand suggest the presence of a man, a threat. Is Imhof whipping this place in the sand to fight off danger? The ambivalence of what happens at the sea is typical of Imhof's exploration of the tensions in an otherwise sublime nature.

Anne Imhof, Installation
Palais de Tokyo

Each piece is matched or echoed, repeated throughout the exhibition by something not always its double. In a film on a monitor, a different woman makes the same movement as Imhof with the whip at the sea. However, on the monitor, the woman is violently attaching a bike. Ironically, in relationship to the other film, the bike poses no threat. The bike is already dead matter. Again, typical of Imhof's constructed environment, life is always juxtaposed with death, nature with culture or industry. 

The set up of the exhibition was also impressive for its showcasing of the Palais de Tokyo as a space that emanates decay of the past, itself like a Piranesi ruin. Visitors were invited to wander the exhibition and discover the building crumbling, as much as the significance of Imhof's art. Architectural features, eroded floors, and exposed bits and pieces are as fascinating as Imhof's walls. Thus, if the exhibition is about death and destruction (still life/natures mortes), it is also about walking and discovering. Each object and installation runs effortlessly into the next, even if appearing somewhat haphazardly placed. Thus, the exhibition encourages us to move rather than look.  And because there's little enticement to look and ponder, the experience is one of ideas and associations coming to us as we wander - in itself a Romantic pursuit.

Ultimately, this is an exhibition about contradictions and tensions in the urban environment. The composed music is beautiful and romantic, rising above and falling below the crashing and banging that can be heard throughout. As we walk through the detritus of capitalism, we are in the presence of great works of art on crumbling and stained walls, sprawled across the wartorn floors of the Palais de Tokyo.