Matérialité de l'Invisibilité: L'archéologie des sens

104, Paris 75019

The title of this exhibition, Matérialité de l’Invisible is somewhat misleading. At least, I found it difficult to determine the relevance of invisibility to many of the works. In addition, the premise of the exhibition is not always clear. It brings together artists working in the NEARCH project, a European Commission supported project that explores the relationship between archaeology and heritage in Europe. But again, the works relate to this theme to differing degrees. The coherence of the exhibition aside, there were a number of very interesting pieces which, together with the creative and energetic space of the Cent Quartre Centre, made my rainy Sunday. An interesting piece by Julie Ramage, titled A Beautiful Town, that deals with the self-identity of St Denis, happens to coincide with the November 13 attacks. Another by Ronny Trocker doesn't have much to do either with the theme of invisibility or archaeology, but was compelling. On entering his Estate, we are met by a screen with a still photo of an unidentified migrant who comes ashore in a small dinghy. On the other side of the screen is a series of stop motion photographs superimposed on film of locals enjoying a day on the same beach. The discordance of photographs and films comes to represent the awkwardness of the migrant on European shores, casting a shadow over the heart of European identity and culture. These and some others stood out as quite effective, while others were not so captivating.

 

A Labyrinthe made of cardboard in the basement of 104

Before discussion of the exhibition, I have to say, a visit to the cultural entre 104 in the 19^th Arrondissment is  a must. Walking through what was originally a building constructed for the city of Paris’ undertakers, I was plunged into a world of rappers and jugglers, hip hop dancers and acrobats. Old people and young people, children happily running around. The building is built in the style of the industrial buildings of its era (1870s) such as the train stations down the road, and thus a treat to be inside. Daniel Buren’s windows cast coloured shapes on the ground even as the sun barely made it through the clouds on a rainy Paris day. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of the space is that it is accessible to everyone - all ages, ethnicities, cultural and class backgrounds. I was struck by its ability to do away with the hierarchies of traditional gallery and museum spaces.

Some of the works in Matérialité de l’Invisible were conceptually challenging, and yet the same audience from inside the halls spilled over into the exhibition rooms, looking at experimental films, wandering through conceptual installations, all doing their best to grasp the often elusive meanings. I was struck by the power that art has in a cultural centre such as this. As people discussed what they saw, and children of all ages, as well as senior citizens wandered through the rooms, I was impressed that the setting enabled the possibility that experimental, or at least vanguard, art might have an effect on people’s lives.

Agapanthe: Konné & Mulliez, Amas

For people like me who have an aversion to sugar for all of its chemical substance and toxic effects, Agapanthe’s Amas,  sculptures made of sugar were simultaneously repulsive and beautiful. Sugar wraps itself around everyday household objects, consuming them, taking them over, like a monster. But the sparkle and glitter of sugar as it crystallized around empty cans, candy wrappers and non-descript trash was simultaneously, somehow magical as it overwhelmed every object it touched. The contradiction of sugar as it eats into the fabric of daily life was powerfully represented.

 

Anish Kapoor, Ascension, 2008

The piece de resistance of Matérialité de l’Invisible is, unsurprisingly, the inclusion by Anish Kapoor. Ascension is a tornado-like column of smoke falling down from a ceiling fan, becoming vapour as it reaches the ground. Ascension is captivating, not only for its use of smoke becoming an object, but because more than any other piece in the exhibition, it shows the invisible made visible, and then turned back into invisible. This play with vision and materiality is typical Kapoor, as is his wont to make opposites coexist, impossibly. Thus, inside and outside are one and the same, just like the smoke or vapour is both material and immaterial, at the same time. For the children, the puzzling ambiguity of what the column was didn’t matter. They had fun when they played in and with it, deformed it, marveled at it, and immersed themselves inside of it. The children pointed to another ambiguity of Ascension: it is both image and object, even if it is an object always in integration.

Nathalie Joffre, Apparitions

Nathalie Joffre, Data History Voyage

Another artist whose work I found compelling, more for its conceptualization than it’s aesthetic was that of Nathalie Joffre. In Data History Voyage, she uses three pieces in different media to overlay the narrative of the excavation of an archaeological site she was filming with that of the memory of her computer files. Joffre’s was one of the smartest juxtapositions of science and art that simultaneously embraced questions of memory, history, and their narratives to find the gaps and spaces, the black holes of the past, so to speak. In those black holes--the invisible--disappeared the critical information that would enable a comprehensive history and story of what her film, the film in general, attempts to document. This discourse on the narrative of film leads onto the history of the archaeological site in excavation. The multi-media work bridged the past, present and future, as well as the myriad possibilities of visual media.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014 @ Palais de Tokyo

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

British wonderboy Ed Atkins has an installation at the Palais de Tokyo that anyone who claims to keep up with the art world will need to see. At 32, Atkins has made quite an impression on those who matter with exhibitions at MoMA, a single artist show at the Serpentine’s Sackler Gallery, a solo exhibit at the Tate Modern, the ICA, Venice, and the list goes on. The impressive CV was enough to entice Irina and I to see Bastards following our visit next door to what was, by comparison, the genteel Fontana exhibition.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

Ribbons (2014), adapted for the Palais de Tokyo, is a three channel, high definition video installation in which Atkins explores the latest language in image production. Morphing between filmed footage and digital imagery, Atkins uses everything from traditional video and cinematic strategies —blurring, lens-flares, scratches, sound and image editing — to the latest computer graphics for which he apparently does all his own coding. There’s no doubt that the technical dimension of Atkins work is inspiring. His command of the image and its multi-form production is impressive, speaking to the agility of image integration and technical literacy of his generation. Likewise the form is exciting in its reflection of the way that we receive and process visual information.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

Irina and I, two women of a different generation, may not have been able to identify with or in the images, but both of us were convinced that Atkins’ Ribbons was more relevant and more interesting than Godard’s latest film, Adieu au Language (2014), a film we had seen the week before. Atkins, unlike Godard who claims to converse with the latest image technology, actually uses the most contemporary visual and sonic language as he moves in and out of as well as along a spectrum of digital possibilities. Atkins creates a more convincing adieu to language than Godard’s soporific dabble with 3D imaging. Words for Atkins are text messages, made visual before disappearing to be replaced by the next words or image, they are reduced to marginalia, scribbles on a body, snatches of poetry, quotations emptied of meaning, unfinished.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

The protagonist — who seems to shift in and out of identification with Atkins is a troll, apparently. But mostly, he is obsessed with his sexuality, distractedly getting involved with those great British pastimes — getting drunk and falling over—until he is deflated, literally, through computer generated animation. The Palais de Tokyo identified the character in the three narratives, on three large discrete screens, his voice resonating through the space, as Atkins. But it isn’t, it’s an actor. Admittedly though, the identity of the actor is not important, in fact, the confusion of identity reinforces the anonymity of the artist. It might as well be Atkins, his alter ego, bellowing with pride and then deflated, defaced or effaced. He is often surrounded by pint glasses, pouring drinks, being drunk, getting high, sticking his tongue, his nose, then later, his penis through a hole, wedging himself under the table. It is all about Atkins even if he is not in the videos.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

The sound for the exhibition was brilliant. When Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion was sung, the three voices resonated and intertwined through the sound of the three different screens. And then, at other times, we are completely surrounded by the sound when standing before the screen to which it relates, and there is no interruption of the sound from the other screens. Bach mutates into burps and farts and then Randy Newman who is, in turn, interrupted by email alerts.

If technically Atkins’ installation is brilliant, even mesmerizing, conceptually it lacks maturity. We also become aware of Atkins’ identity through the musings and convolutions of sound and image. With his obsessions of drinking, speaking, fucking, with an occasional search for reality, Ribbons comes across as the work of a young, ego-centric heterosexual artist who does not yet have the depth to allow for the resonance and profundity of those he quotes, such as Blanchot and Lacan. As captivating as it was, the irony wasn’t strong enough to convince me that this is anything but a straight boy’s glib view of the world. Atkins could develop his work in a number of different directions, and his success as an artist will depend on which of these he chooses. But for the moment, to me, he’s still a 32 year old young man with work to do. 

All Images Courtesy of the Artist

William Kentridge, Five Themes, Jeu de Paume

When I first saw William Kentridge’s work at the Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, I was mesmerized. I was fascinated by the seemingly endless layers, both literal and conceptual, of images that were always in the process of transformation, being drawn, changed, erased, added to. The process of inscription and erasure, and the animation of the inanimate through stop motion technique reminded me of the early animation of filmmakers such as Emil Kohl, who, like Kentridge was engaged in the meticulous creation of narratives out of charcoal lines. And as spectacles of magic and wonder, Kentridge’s worlds were as fantastic as those of perhaps the cinema’s greatest animator, Georges Méliès. In Kassel, I was also struck by the self-referentiality, not only thanks to Kentridge’s omnipresence throughout his films, but as Tom Gunning has discussed, in the visualization and thematization of looking, processes of perception, techniques of observing, the mechanics of the cinema and its predecessors. In all of these Kentridge seemed to be involved in an examination of the distortions of images and the worlds they create, and the eternal process of setting right those distortions. While today, the lines between media are so often blurred in contemporary time-based art, even rendered indistinguishable, in the late 1990s, such innovations were only just beginning. So the fact that Kentridge was a painter, a drawer, a photographer and filmmaker all within a single frame of moving images, made his work radical, while the complexity of its concerns was provocative.

As if that was not enough, the substance of Kentridge’s narratives was also powerful and urgent: discourses on South Africa, its history, and all its troubles were represented by Kentridge at a time when it was still too soon to know what the impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings would be. All of these, as only the most obvious of the layers in films such as Felix in Exile (1994) and Ubu Tells the Truth (1996-97), made his work compelling and exciting back then.

Over the years I have followed Kentridge's career, and though I have never seen one of his operas, one of the most interesting developments for me has been the extension of his creations into a whole spectrum of media. In the same way that he paints, draws, engraves, sculpts, photographs and films within a single frame, over the past ten years his films have spilled over into the worlds of opera, installations that might be sculptural, or perhaps they are miniature theaters (it’s difficult to say) or cinemas even. A number of works in a variety of media are on view at the recent exhibition of his work at the Jeu de Paume, Five Themes. Included here is Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005), which I have written about elsewhere, as well as his latest work Learning from the Absurd: The Nose (2010).

In Spring 2010, Kentridge staged Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose with Valery Gergiev at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The moving images for the production have been transposed to a room in the Jeu de Paume, as a multiple screen, surround work that expands through shadow plays, poetry, shadow plays, archival film re-usage, images in process that come together as an the ode to Russian constructivism, all mixed in with Nikolai Bukharin’s 1937 testimony before the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party, and a blaring of communist marches all repetitively looped into infinity. In characteristic Kentridge style images, music, hastily drawn charcoal lines, immediately erased and replaced, are cacophonic, assaulting, and yet, they evoke a gentle absurdity, that reminds us of the energy and ambiguity of the extraordinary events of the Revolution, particularly, as it has been theorized in its influence on creativity in post-Revolutionary Soviet Union.

Kentridge’s works are outstanding, if for no other reason than that they do something art and film today struggles to do: they work on so many different levels, appealing as well as being accessible to a everyone. Audiences who know about the German colonization of Namibia and the slaying of the Herero people in turn of the century West Africa will see a whole different level of meaning in Black Box/Chambre Noire. Similarly, visitors to Five Themes familiar with the pre-history of cinema and processes of animation or discourses on structures of looking and modes of perception, will be equally challenged and captivated by these video installations. However, what is so impressive about these creations is that even as they challenge intellectually, culturally, historically and politically, audiences who lack the political, cultural and artistic references will also sit mesmerized before the works, taking them in from beginning to end.

This is partly to do with the way the maquettes are arranged by the Jeu de Paume so that we are invited to sit before the films and installations, viewing them as a performance, and partly because of the way Kentridge constructs the pieces. Black Box/Chambre Noire for example represent parts of Mozart’s Magic Flute which is itself one of the most accessible operas, and the fragments that play on the soundtrack are the most popular and widely known. Added to this, Kentridge includes computer-operated puppet figures dancing across screens, as drawings and even as objects on a miniature theater stage, and these figures are a sheer delight to watch. This all, together with the element of magic and the animation of the inanimate gives all these works a lightness and a joy that is all too often missing from the esoteric works that comprise today’s experimental and avant-garde art.

So all in all, I think these works are layered and challenging and complex, but what I am still left wondering is, once we have seen one installation by William Kentridge, do we need to keep going back for more? Does he incite new and exciting revelations with each new installation? I have not yet decided. But I will say, with Five Themes, for example I was delighted by two bronze sculpture scenes that I did not previously know: Bridge (2001) and Promenade II (2002). Like the films, Kentridge has turned bronzes into something ephemeral, in process, infused them with the unpredictability of a parade in motion, while all the time foregrounding their sumptuous tactility, the beauty of the material in which they are cast.