Thomas Houseago @ Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Thomas Houseago is said to be a major figure in international sculpture, and though his work is certainly unusual, I was somewhat disappointed by this exhibition, Almost Human. The first couple of rooms were exciting because the works were so unique: deformed, misshapen sculptural creatures, desperately trying to move through the world in uncomfortable bodies. The figures were like a cross between Georg Baselitz’s enormous wooden sculptures, crying out to be noticed, Constantin Brancusi’s sensuous human corps without faces, and survivors of Dante’s inferno.



In the first room, I was enthusiastic about the discourses Houseago engages with: questions of the fragility of the human body, abjection, the body as a shell that, contrary to how we behave towards it, offers no more than flimsy, if any, protection. Houseago’s bodies stand awkwardly in their own skin, painfully aware of their disfigurement, thus inciting our compassion. I also enjoyed seeing  the unique way that he uses plaster and other materials. Plaster enables Houseago to mold and manipulate unfinished figures, figures that the museum text called sculptural sketches. Certainly, the notion of the sculpture as a living, breathing, always unfinished process, or an abandoned object was innovative. Also, Houseago’s plaster, hastily covering hemp with exposed frayed edges, filled with graphite scratches and scribbles contributed to the unique notion of sculpture as drawing. In a later room, a series of black paintings placed opposite masks scrawled on white canvases, extended the suggestion of sculpture as a scribble, as an idea in gestation.

Other works in the exhibition that I found conceptually, if not aesthetically, interesting were Houseago’s masks. Some were sculpted, others carved into two dimensional painted surfaces, still others scribbled onto canvases. The masks in wood, plaster and steel were said to refer to African cultures, particularly because they made no reference to or discourse on the face behind the mask. Rather, they engaged sculpture as a performance, or perhaps even an expression of the unconscious, or a symbol of life stages. Visitors will also see Picasso’s masks and figures in the shapes and expressions of these Houseago masks.



However, the later rooms of the exhibition were less convincing. There were enormous sculptures like creatures from science fiction movies, their faces on extended necks towering over us mere mortals. These creatures were frightening, as were the totem-like figures hacked out of large slabs of wood. There were also pieces that reminded me of the strange spaceships from science fiction movies, looking like wombs with vaginal openings. All around them are weird figures whose forms continue on from those in the earlier rooms thanks to their sense of being unfinished, or abandoned midway through. These later works were distinct though because the bodies were supported with iron rods, suggesting their constructedness, making them verge into architectural structures. They were very strange. As the exhibition moved on, the figures seemed to suggest increasing violence and aggression. Whether it was in their form being hacked out of a piece of wood or a giant head with scaffolding for a body, the works in the later rooms were very unsettling, less compassionate, and for me, less compelling.

Orsay par Julian Schnabel

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Julian Schnabel between van Gogh and himself.

I always admire museums that invite contemporary discussions of their historical collections. It seems especially courageous of the Musée d’Orsay to invite an artist such as Julien Schnabel to engage with its collections given that, at face value, his work appears to be derisory of the history of art, particularly when it is a history that is as entrenched as the one we think of being displayed by the Musée d’Orsay.

Théodule Ribot’s Le bon Samaritain, vers 1870

However, after seeing Schnabel’s curation of paintings from the museum’s collections side by side with his own, I realized how quick I am to jump to conclusions about the art in the Musée d’Orsay. Because the Monets, Manets Van Goghs and Courbets find their way on to placemats, tea towels, silk scarves and mouse pads, I think I have seen them all too often. However, these images are poor reproductions that should not be associated with their originals. Indeed, Schnabel gives us a whole new perspective on a number of works by the museum’s celebrated artists. And in this, he offers a new perspective on the works themselves, and along the way, on the history of art, and on historical art.

Carolus-Duran, Le Convalescent, vers 1860

For all the intellectual enlightenment usually associated with the paintings Schnabel has chosen as companions to his own, the visitor to this exhibition will be struck by their emotional outpourings. And to be precise, the emotions are all those of suffering men. There is enormous pain, agony and plain old melancholy in works such as Théodule Ribot’s Le bon Samaritain, (vers 1870) a naked man fallen by the wayside, but not dead. Even the Fantin-Latour still life example on display, Chrysanthèmes dans un vase (1873) is filled with sadness and melancholy. Schnabel places the Ribot’s fallen man next to the extraordinarily moving image of a man who is hurt but not dead in a glorious red bed shirt by Carolus Duran. Above the two images, Schnabel places his own Accatone (1978) mimicking the red, the sick and castrated through limbs in residuum on a nevertheless powerful male torso. In Schnabel’s installation, the history of art has not been kind to ailing men and their sickly—yet powerful—bodies.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Chrysanthèmes dans un vase, 1873

Fantin-Latour’s flowers against a blank background sit together with Courbet’s enormously tender self portrait and Monet’s turkeys. The flowers, perched on the edge of a table from which they might fall, could have also been placed with a sketch by Toulouse Lautrec, Panneau pour la baroque de la Goulue, 1895. The swathes of empty space surrounding figures in motion, watching, performing, sometimes barely outlined, demonstrating Lautrec’s understanding of the richness of a line on a canvas could illuminate Fantin-Latour’s precision in the depiction of space. Indeed, the two artists play between flatness and volume as though the one might have influenced the other. Which is to say, the connections and conversations of the installation run much deeper than those obvious ones given us by Schnabel’s placement of paintings on the wall.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Panneau pour la baroque de la Goulue, 1895

It was unclear to me if Schnabel had chosen to bring the pain and suffering of men, and their consequent tragedy, into the foreground because this is the emotional narrative that best gets to the most profound levels of being human. Put differently, does Schnabel focus on the tragedy of male life for its ability to access something profound about the history of art? Or is he simply drawn to the tragedy of absence, despair and death that he believes weighs on his gender?

Julian Schnabel, Artaud (Starting to Sing Part 3), 1981

Whatever the answer to this question, the power of this small exhibition can be found on a number of levels. Schnabel gives new life to otherwise familiar artworks, inviting us to see their different aspects, in different positions on the walls. And we find new threads between Manet and Velasquez and Goya, all of which are the preface to everything that appears on the modern painting. Ultimately, I came away not only questioning the linearity given to the history of painting by a museum such as the Orsay, but through the odd juxtapositions Schnabel effects, seeing it reinforced.

Kader Attia & Jean-Jacques Lebel, L'un et l'Autre @ Palais de Tokyo

The Culture of Fear

Kader Attia is one of the most interesting young artists working today. I first saw his work when he won the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2016. That said, his latest exhibition, l’Un et l’autre, at the Palais de Tokyo is completely different from the works displayed at the Centre Pompidou in Reflecting on Memory, primarily because it is a joint venture with the older French artist, Jean-Jacques Lebel.

 

Attia and Lebel with The Culture of Fear

The blurb at the beginning of the exhibition claims that this is an encounter between the two artists/thinkers rather than an exhibition. Although I am not sure of the difference between an encounter and an exhibition, I do think it would be more accurate to call l’Un et l’autre, a document of an encounter. What we see here are theobjects representing the convergence of interests of two generations, one a French artists steeped in the traditions that motivated the radical art of the 1960s, and the other a French-Algerian whose work speaks to today’s most pressing issues: colonization, migration, social, sexual, physical non-conformism, and so on. To me, this exhibition is a visual equivalent to listening to a fascinating conversation between two artists.

L'Un et l'Autre
Display of objects made from found materials, 

The cohering principle of l’Un et l’autre might be the social construction of the other, a concept noted in the title. However, this is both too general and too specific a description of the dense intellectual ideas visualized in objects and images. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a scaffold of steel shelves supporting magazines from different decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which the language and images of violence and evil are revealed through juxtaposition as fully socially constructed. When violence is done to the African other by France, the colonizer, it is understood and accepted as a form of taming the uncivilized. When the Taliban and ISIS strike the western world in the 21^st century, a mass violence on a similar scale is labelled and treated as terrorism by the evil. The juxtaposition of the magazines across history, countries and the inversion of perpetrators and victims, paints an all too humiliating picture of the way we have manipulated the story to place us on the moral, political, and social high ground. And of course, the western obsession with categorization, archiving, ordering, documenting is embraced and then turned upon itself in an installation that reveals the mendacities hidden by such practices.

 

Dan sickness mask

Around the central space, there are objects, objects once used for violence and war that have been transformed into objects for everyday use. For example, a chair made of rifles, a beer mug made of the of ammunition casing, and German coins recycled into ritual objects by the African colonized are now transformed into objects of wonder. And then, perhaps the most fascinating of all the displays are the sculptures drawn from “the archive,” which really means found and retrieved from the oddest of places. There are some really curious objects such as twins from the Christmas Islands in which two heads have one male body and a female sex, confronting us with questions about the apparent progressive sexuality only now being accepted in the West. In this traditional culture the fluidity of sexes and genders is worshipped. In a series of “sickness masks`’ in which the face of the physical or mental condition of the patient is made visual on the face. As the wall text explains, the polarity between the western myth of facial perfection—often constructed by a surgeon—and this culture’s aestheticization of illness, representing the celebration of individual uniqueness.

 

A Chair made of Knives and guns

Beside each display, a small video shows Attila and Lebel in conversation about the objects contained therein. The video gives an explanation of the provenance of the object, its use, and the reasons for its inclusion. In addition, the discussion ensures there is no possibility of missing the point of the provocative wider dialogue of objects and artists. Ultimately, this fascinating exhibition shows the journey of cultural appropriation—both through objects and people—and critiques integration into our own value systems to create collective memories that are not ours to create. Along the way, we are alerted to the violence of everyday life, the use of things and people in an effort to appropriate power through economic, political, visual and poetic discourses.