Hito Steyerl, I will Survive Physical and Virtual Spaces @ Centre Pompidou

Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah, We Fuck Die, 2016

After months without museums and galleries, I am now overwhelmed with choice for exhibitions to visit. After sitting in my apartment since last October, I am being reminded of why I live in Paris—and it's not because my apartment is anything special. Despite booking a ticket for the Women and Abstraction exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, this afternoon I ended up in the Hito Steyerl "retrospective in reverse," as the museum calls it. Other than the fact that the most recent works are shown at the beginning of the walk through and Steyerl's 1990s German films are at the end, there's nothing particularly radical about the decision to move from the present to the past. 

Hido Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 2013

Steyerl is one of the art world's most celebrated contemporary artists. Her high impact videos are politically outspoken and raise issues that get people talking. In addition, her work is often about making visible the invisible contradictions driving the power structures of global capitalism. The odd piece included in group shows at the Jeu de Paume aside, Steyerl's work is rarely shown in Paris. My suspicion is that this might be because it's very much in the tradition of German documentary film of the 1980s in particular. Especially the early essayistic work which might not have so much appeal to a French audience. Reasons aside, it was a treat to see the exhibition which has come from K21 in Düsseldorf.

 

Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc., 2016

Steyerl's best work creates connections where we least expect them. Liquidity Inc., for example, is a video that follows a man who is made redundant from his job in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The man takes up martial arts. You would think there couldn't be two activities more different, but Steyerl connects them through water! The liquidity and unpredictability of the financial markets are likened to the need to be flexible, always on one's toes, prepared to react, and to re-establish equilibrium following an opponent's surprise attack move. As viewers, we sit in rubber rings on a raked floor, already on our life boats as the man in the video attempts to get back on his feet. The video floats through a stream of references, images from the media, pop art, high art from different cultures such as Hiroshige's famous waves. Images from the media, GIFs, memes, hashtags, documentary films flow into each other suggesting the liquidity of everything around us. Before the screen, judo mats and pieces of broken raft are littered. They are the only concrete material objects in the piece.

Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall, 2010

In another video, In Free Fall, 2010, Steyerl films an ex-airline pilot who talks about making movies using mangled airplane bodies that he locates in a desert graveyard for airplanes. What's so perverse about the practices of recycling is that after the metal is no longer needed for the movies, it is recycled to make DVDs. Ironically, they too are now objects that are all but obsolete, like the airplane wreckage. A young Israeli man tells the story of crashing 707s as it is reported in the Israeli press. They considered the crash a success: the statistics are manipulated to make the government look good. The fact that the only thing left lying beside an airplane carcass are all the dead bodies that have fallen from the sky is nowhere mentioned by the Israeli press. No one survives an airplane crash. But the body of the airplane can be recycled without a problem. The young Israeli man and Steyerl herself perform the airline stewards saying their familiar safety routine. It is shown as the performance it is with lines such as the reminder to put your mask over your own mouth first being accompanied by images of the plane exploding into fire. Such is the show put on to make us all feel good within capitalist consumerism. Again, the force of the video comes in its juxtaposition of unlikely faces and voices, images and texts.

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Hito Steyerl, The City of Broken Windows, 2018

Another fascinating work The City of Broken Windows sees two facing video installations at either end of a long hall-like space. On the one end, sound engineers smash windows and record sounds for clients to download onto their devices (presumably as an app). Armed with these sounds, the wealthy home owners will be alerted and know if someone breaks into their house. It's a violent, if precisely carried out process, in which destruction is enacted in the name of technological advance. The engineers are more interested in the replication of the sounds than they are in reflecting on the aggression of their method of smashing sledge hammers into glass panels. At the other end of the corridor, The City of Unbroken Windows shows a second video documenting a diametrically opposed practice . Members of a community organization in New Jersey paint the boards that have been used to replace broken windows. One of the men was an army officer charged with dropping bombs during the Iraq war. And here he is decorating once vandalized windows as a way to stop violence through beautification. This half of the installation is about real people, addressing the problems that have come with capitalism, urban crime and vandalism. The other one shows the implications of technology, at a remove from the violence needed to advance it.

Hito Steyerl, Guards, 2012

Ultimately, the exhibition is a compelling walk through of Steyerl's practice. It is particularly rewarding if viewers sit in patience to watch and wait for the revelations that reveal themselves over time. The videos are satisfying because they are easy to understand, even if we do find ourselves laughing in horror at the secrets behind how our power structures operate.
 

teamLab Au-delà des limites @ la Villette

Les Fleurs et personnes ne peuvent être contrôlées,
mais elles vivent ensemble

teamLab is a Japanese group of artists, programmers, engineers, architects, mathematicians and animators that have turned the Grande Hall de La Villette into an immersive, interactive experience for the whole family. On a sweltering hot Paris afternoon, there were kids of all ages—from 5 to 75—wandering, lying, sitting, dreaming and interacting with the imagescapes in au-delà des limites.

 

La paix est possible même sans ordre

The images are design innovations before they are aesthetically challenging or conceptually interesting. The walls, floors and, in one room, screens are overtaken with fully interactive image narratives, some of which have no beginning and no end. Others are clearly story narratives, though not of the cause and effect kind. Children loved in particular the installations that required full interaction from the visitors: works activated and further developed by touching, moving along or towards the wall. The thrill was in the process of creating images rather than in the images created. 

 

A visitor walking past the above installation

Two of the installations invite visitors to sit on the floor and not just watch, but allow the constantly moving procession of images to wash over them. For these, one in the biggest space and the other in a small room, I sat at the edge of the room, others lay in the middle, and still others walked around. The music and images together (both electronically generated) were so hypnotic that I fell asleep. In the heat of the non-air-conditioned former abattoir, lulled by images and sounds in motion, was a surprisingly restful experience.

 
Univers de particules d'eau dans Au-delà des limites

The installations are a coming together of electronic and organic, technology and nature, human, and flora and fauna. We watch sunflowers grow, birds and butterflies flying, flowers blooming, stars falling water cascading, and figures walking. The exhibition as a whole is a living digital organism constantly churning out new images that make a sharp break with our daily lives, thus whisking us off to a dreamlike world. While I did think the world created was more interesting from a technological and design perspective, the effect of being lulled into an organic world of pure relaxation by the computer generated in a former abattoir was interesting.  

Ryoji Ikeda, Continuum @ Centre Pompidou

Ryoji Ikeda, Code-verse, 2018

Ryoji Ikeda is back at the Centre Pompidou with two new compositions, Code-versa, and A [continuum], both from 2018, in an exhibition in Galerie 3 titled Continuum. I find much contemporary digital visual art to be unconvincing, primarily because it is so often an image shot with a digital camera that does very little with the medium. Ikeda’s work is everything that the run of the mill digital art is not. It’s complex, intricate, multivalent and best of all, it pushes the boundaries of sound and image, aesthetics and technology.

Ryoji Ikeda, Code-verse, 2018

Ikeda’s work is impressive because it works on multiple levels. On its intellectual dimension, the artist polyphonic compositions “compress vast, dense mass of data together,” and pushe a single pitch (in this case, a piece in which five hyper-directional speakers emit a piercing, almost nauseating sound, the infinite tones of the note A) into infinity through treating frequencies as pure materials. And on another level, Ikeda's creations are endlessly fascinating and invite the computer, sound and music illiterate to enjoy them physically and mentally. It’s difficult to pull ourselves away from the pieces as we become mesmerized by a search for logic and order, for beginnings and endings that don’t exist, and for the perfect place from which to experience them.  

Ryoji Ikeda, Code-verse, 2018

Not being among the viewers who understand the computer coding that creates the sound/image manipulations, I can only give the layperson version of the exhibition. In the hypnotic code verse our attention is held over time as we are sutured into the dizzying, multi-dimensional optical art created through the permutations of sound and images resulting from Ikeda’s computer coding. The long screen moves through what start to resemble images of an interstellar out of space journey seen from the cockpit of a flying machine, leading us into another world. At other times, the icons moving across the screen looking like a creeping cursor, and at still others, the shifting to a two dimensional floor that transforms into a sky, and then shifts perspective to take us back to three dimensional time travel.

Ryoji Ikeda, A [continuum], 2018

In the second white-carpeted and white-walled room, the five hyper-directional speakers emit the infinite permutations of 'A' resulting in a work that will never repeat itself across the ten week run of the exhibition. The sound is piercing to our ears and penetrates our consciousness, leading to a corporeal experience on the slow path to headaches and nausea. Ikeda explains the noise of the installation to be generated through subjecting his data (in this case the multiple instances of the note 'A' played by orchestras and musical instruments around the world) through his individually coded programs. The end result is a manipulation of time and space through the materiality of sound.

Ryoji Ikeda, A [continuum], 2018

Ryoji Ikeda, A [continuum], 2018

Afterwards, I went upstairs to the Chagall. Lissitzky, Malévitch exhibition (which is not about their work, but rather, the story of the Vitebsk School of Art which Chagall opened in 1919). The exhibition is mildly interesting, but what consumed my thoughts as I walked around was the fact that Ikeda could well be understood as a twenty-first century El Lissitzky. Certainly both artists are looking to push the boundaries of the medium of their respective moment, they are looking to move beyond what is possible in and through representation, moving into and exposing dimensions of creation and consequent existence not yet articulated. The major difference between the two being that for El Lissitzky art should always focus on its political concern, whereas Ikeda’s codings seem to stay on the level of the aesthetic. Which is not to say that Ikeda’s work couldn’t be used in the service of social critique, but he is not using technology against itself as were the great Soviet abstract painters of the early twentieth century.