Exhibition Reviews

Class reflections on Le Palais de Tokyo

Isabella Levy on Dorian Guadin’s Rites and Aftermath

The installation by Dorian Gaudin at the Palais de Tokyo was very jarring.  The security guard laughed at each new person that jumped when the chairs did.  I jumped as well; to be fair the chairs came down with quite a clang.  Gaudin’s idea behind the installation can be ascertained with the following quote, “I let objects explore the limits of the exhibition space.  Here, there is a chair which sets off and tries to go upstairs.  There, a second one loses the plot and bangs its head against the wall.  Very little is required to be able to attribute a temperament to things; just a simple movement, and we start inventing stories about them.”

Although perhaps it was his intention for each viewer to attribute a story or temperament to each of the objects, I found that I was lost in the number of objects and movements in the rather large space.  There is every possibility that had I watched for longer that I would have seen more of a story.  For instance, a long sort of sheet of metal (?) moved almost in a wave like pattern, which caused other objects to move.  The secondary movement could almost be viewed as different plot points in the narration of the story, the first movement being the catalyst for the ensuing ones.  In this sense, a story can be invented, but whether there is temperament involved, or whether a story even needs temperament to be a story, is another question.  It is definitely true that humans need very little to apply temperament to objects, as evidenced by the way children play with dolls and apply stories to their dolls lives.  I wonder, however, if the objects need more human qualities, such as faces, to elicit that sort of reaction.  I think it would be worth another visit to this installation, and a longer viewing time, to see how I feel about it then.

Siddharth Seth on Lee Kit (“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”

Lee Kit’s installation is conceived as a “three-dimensional” painting. It consists of multiple projectors, placed on plastic containers, with dim (and often unclear) images projected onto the walls. Kit’s work is a reaction to the environment of Hong Kong (where he grew up), and the competitiveness that he feels has permeated into not only the economic sector, but also personal relationships. He tries to make use of everyday objects and rituals as an opposition to society’s constant drive for maximum efficiency.

I enjoyed Kit’s play on light, colors and composition. The way the installation was set up, there were multiple entry points (and exits), implying that there was no particular order in which to view the work. It was up to the viewer to make his or her way around it in a manner that they saw best fit. Through the use of projectors rather than screens, there was a clear implication of the difference between experiences and their representation.

Sima Shah on Marie Lund (“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”

Marie Lund’s piece within the Palais de Tokyo was visually minimal but intellectually dense. The installation consisted of one long hallway, leading to a larger room, with concrete flooring, and white walls that did not quite reach the ceiling. Along the walls throughout the hall and into the room hung 15 adjacent canvases bearing pink curtain-like images. On the ground, quasi-cylindrical stumps of concrete stuck out from the floor in a random order, and large copper sculptures lay interspersed throughout the larger room.  These copper sculptures bore a resemblance to different types of shells—most recognizably a large seashell and a peanut shell.

After my first walk-through, I headed to the museum’s description for further context. The installation is split into two major segments: “Stills” which consists of the series of school curtains on canvas, and “Attitudes,” the stumps of concrete modeled after the insides of jeans in movement (the seams are still visible up-close.) The three facets of Lund’s piece—the “Stills,” “Attitudes,” and shell-like sculptures, are all visually creative ways of representing quite ordinary objects. As the description suggests, they are unified through their demonstration of the passage of time—”Stills,” for example, denotes this passage through variances in light from one canvas to the next, imitating the passage of the day. “Attitudes” are, as the museum calls,  “frozen into paradoxical mobility,” at once a symbol of movement, but stuck in time through the concrete sculptures. The shell-like sculptures seem to fit less neatly into this category of time. The description suggests they represent a defensive exterior. Indeed, they interacted with the “Attitudes” as if to shield them.

There was a lot going on in this piece, conceptually. While the museum’s context provided some much-needed detail, they also provided many ways of organizing these concepts. Is this a piece about the passage of time, as I originally understood? Or, as the description also states, is it meant to make a statement about “communication between the inner and outer”? This is plausible–the “Stills” play with the concept of being inside versus seeing through to the outside world, the “Attitudes” bring the inside of jeans back to the outside, and we can now somewhat make sense of the outer shell coverings as they interact with the inner space of the jeans.

While both interpretations make sense, and are not mutually exclusive, I am more excited by the messages regarding the passage of time. In particular, I was intrigued that Lund chose to use sculptures and canvases to signify time passing, rather than video. Perhaps this brings us back to the concept of “paradoxical mobility”—in a sense, an underlying element of this whole piece. While it is dripping with signals of the forward movement of time, the installation is (temporarily) stuck in one place, only acknowledged upon the desire of the audience. As I observed each object stuck in a transitional phase, I grew increasingly aware of my experience of linear time. I watched the Sun’s rays slowly move along the Curtain Stills, and thought about Abraham Poincheval just rooms away, and whether he was experiencing the same passage of time as me, the Sun, or this frozen installation.

Rachael Alfant on Isabelle Cornaro’s Celebration, 2013 (“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”)

Isabelle Cornaro’s works often pertain to the power of representation and the relationships that objects hold with the notion of value in art history. Her three-piece video installation, Celebration, features one centre screen projection of amorphous shapes and colors pulled from her own films, and two outer screens showing clips from the Disney cartoons: Alice in Wonderland, Fantasia, and Snow White. Each of the films is silent.

Cornaro says about her piece that the ambiguity of the status of an original comes from successive transformation processes (copies, re-uses), thus making up my work.” Watching all three screens was, indeed, disorienting, and the longer I watched, the more detached I felt from the art. I sensed that she was making a statement about perception and representation, in that watching each screen without the other two – so either watching just Alice in Wonderland or just watching the colors on the middle screen – wouldn’t have this sort of dizzying, detaching effect on people. I wasn’t able to feel like I was in – or understanding – the art, but it also seems like that may have been her intention, at least in part.

Talha Yousaf on Pedro Barateiro (“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”)

Pedro Barateiro’s contribution to “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” is particularly striking because of the apparent simplicity of the piece. My first reaction was to see if there was any pattern to the placement of the sculptures around the room. This was hard to do, given the dimensions of some of the sculptures. Eventually I discovered the design of each of the sculptures to resemble the smiling Amazon logo. Seeing the huge multinational’s logo being reproduced in an exhibit in an apparent random order immediately caught my attention and left me with more questions about the design of the exhibit.

I gained a better understanding of this piece through touring other parts of the exhibit and reading the description posted on Barateiro’s particular exhibit. The entire exhibit is meant as a study of the impact of the market economy and new technologies on the production of our emotions and their representations. Given this context, Barateiro’s piece could be interpreted as a reflection of the diffusion of companies such as Amazon in our daily lives; the different dimensions could represent the levels of dependence on Amazon for different people, or different ways through which Amazon and similar companies have made an impact on the same people. Thinking a little deeply about the exhibit’s purpose as a whole and Barateiro’s piece within it, I arrived at the conclusion that the smiling logo sculptures represent the positive emotional impact (as a smile would indicate) of mega-corporations such as Amazon on society.

While the piece was thought provoking, it was not immediately accessible given the lack of context available to us. This reaffirms the idea that a lot of contemporary art either assumes previous knowledge or does not place as much importance on being accessible to the casual viewer. On an aesthetic note, having some sort of opportunity to view the sculptures aerially (by either posting a picture of the exhibit from top or making smaller sculptures) would have made the resemblance to the Amazon logo more immediately noticeable. 

Heeyoung Sim on Abraham Poincheval

The first thing that struck me about Poincheval’s exhibitions was the way in which their spatial presences affected my experience with the works. In some ways, the bottle, the bear, the rock, and the glass box were all exceedingly large, taking up a great deal of visual space and demanding my attention. After all, they were large enough to house a human. At the same time, however, they were also shockingly small. Although I had known the living nature of his pieces before seeing them, the thought of being confined to such a limited space for such an extended period of time reinforced Poincheval’s amazing will power and “total physical and mental commitment” anew. The stone in which he enclosed himself for one week had a particularly visceral effect on me – even sitting in one open half of the stone was a claustrophobic and uncomfortable experience. Nestled into a human-shaped space with only rock before my eyes, I suddenly felt like I was inside a coffin or that I would be trapped there forever and was seized with a small moment of panic. I had initially been skeptical of the piece because of its absurdity, but after having sat inside the rock for a single minute, I suddenly understood why it would illicit an emotional and mental journey: a reflection of the body and its place in the world. Thus, the pieces affected me much more strongly in person than they had on paper.

Poincheval’s most recent exhibition, œuf, allowed visitors to see him in person. Enclosed in a glass box with nothing but the most essential of provisions around him, he sat for the world to see like another painting or sculpture. I was surprised to find, however, that his presence created a strange experience of a subverted power dynamic. Although he was the one on complete display, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was the one being observed or if I was. Scanning the room with intelligent eyes, he seemed calm and content – almost meditative – inside of his tiny transparent home and unfazed by the gawking of the visitors. He retained a quiet dignity that made me invert my gaze back onto myself and reflect upon the nature of exposition. I was suddenly very consciously aware of my role as a looker, but also acutely aware of the fact that he was looking back at me and making his own conclusions as to who I was and how the exhibition was affecting me. If the act of looking was so integral to his performance (as evidenced by the glass), were we perhaps witnessing a second metamorphosis – that of his own under the conditions of his self-imposed confinement – parallel to the metamorphosis of the eggs? If I were to return in 21-26 days, would I see any visible signs of his experience, or would it be a purely metaphysical journey, limited only to the person who undergoes it? Was I supposed to be a receiver of change, watching both him and the eggs develop, or was I an agent of change, contributing to his internal experience? I also noticed that although Poincheval was alert and even friendly, at one point greeting someone with a smile and a “Bonjour,” visitors rarely attempted to speak with him and instead observed him as they would an animal at the zoo, watching his every small movements with fascination. I would imagine that visitors would never treat him as such an object if confronted with his presence in a more normalized setting. It was interesting, then, to see how the status of his humanity was somehow lowered simply by the presence of a glass wall.

Poincheval’s pieces were an immersive experience that made me gain a new appreciation for performance art. The vessels of his performances (the bottle, the bear, the stone, and the glass box) were of course an integral part of his work, but not nearly as important as the entire process itself: the act of actually living within these confined spaces. Although his art seemed absurd and admittedly even a little pretentious to me at first, I was able to appreciate it on an instinctive level in person.

Ann-Chandler Tune on JR (“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”)

The historical context behind JR’s “Chronicles of Clichy-Montfermeil” is just as important as the work itself.  The enormous fresco centers on the 2005 riots that began in the Parisian suburbs and spread throughout the entire country.  The story of these riots seems to foreshadow similar events that would occur later in the United States.   In October of 2005, two teenage boys died by electrocution (a third badly burned) while hiding from a police “stop-and-search” in a Parisian suburb that is mainly home to North African immigrants.  Given the already high tension with police, the death of these boys triggered a series of riots and rebellions across the entire country, and a state of emergency was declared for several months.  This event carries intense political and racial associations, and as an American viewer, is an especially relevant topic in light of the similar events that have occurred in the United States recently.  I would imagine that this work is considered to be especially radical to French audiences.

The work itself is a large fresco (over 150m^2 in size) consisting of over 700 individual photographs of the diverse members of the Clichy-Montfermeil community, all combined to form one large portrait.  The photographs are black and white, and the fresco is made to look worn, with scratch marks and tears in some places (although they are only visible close up).  Even without reading about this work or its historical context, I could identify the political and social tensions reflected in “Chronicles of Clichy-Montfermeil.”  I was struck by the sheer size and complexity of this work, which makes it difficult to take in all at once, and impossible to capture in one photograph.  I was interested to learn that according to the Palais de Tokyo website, this work will be permanently relocated to Cité des Bosquets (Montfermeil) after this exhibition.

Emma Oberman on Mel O’Callaghan’s “To Hear With My Eyes” 

The work of Mel O’Callaghan, an Australian-born artist who now lives in Paris, is currently featured at the Palais de Tokyo.  From what I saw when I visited last Thursday, it was clear that she is comfortable working with various forms of media, including sculpture, film, and performance art.  The first of her exhibits that I visited was titled “To Hear With My Eyes,” and featured several larger-than-life sculptures: a segment of a tree trunk, a giant bowl with a reflective surface, a gong suspended from the ceiling, and a sistrum (an ancient Egyptian rattle).  According to the artist, these objects are necessary components of a method of reaching ecstatic trance.  There is also a performance that accompanies these objects.  Unfortunately, it was much later in the evening, and I was unable to view it, but from the description, it seems that the performers subject themselves to various positions, which also helps them to subject themselves to the power of these objects.  This supposedly allows them to reach an altered state of consciousness. I was curious about the performance component of this exhibit, because from that description, I had a hard time picturing what this would look like.

Her other exhibit featured in the Palais de Tokyo was a film about the traditional harvesting of birds’ nests.  The Orang Sungai people perform this risky ritual twice a year.  While I was watching the film, I noticed an emphasis on the fear on the people’s faces when they are underground inside the caves where they harvest the nests.  This was made more apparent with close-up shots of their faces.  The inside of the cave was very dark, and it was clear that the people who went inside it were quite nervous about being there.  There was a scene in the film where the camera pans down from the forest outside all the way to the underground caves where this ritual occurs, and that visual definitely served to make viewers more aware of the immense distance between the harvesters and the world they normally occupy.  I also noticed that O’Callaghan seemed to highlight the fact that the harvesters are normal people, and that there is a disparity between the way they act when they are inside the cave and when they are outside.  They were portrayed smoking, eating, and drinking outside the cave.  However, inside the cave, they have no distractions, and are forced to confront their humanity.  This definitely plays into O’Callaghan’s overall theme about the importance of ritual in illustrating truths about the human condition.  O’Callaghan believes that the repetition of rituals can lead to eventual self-transformation, and this was evident in the art that I observed.

Jonathan Hogeback on Emmanuelle Lainé’s “Where the rubber of our selves meets the road of the wider world”

Emmanuelle Lainé’s “Where the rubber of our selves meets the road of the wider world” displaces personal, used objects within a framed mechanical space. The effect of this combination is images of machines that feel oddly human and wasteful. The display is set-up with multiple walls painted to resemble, when stacked and viewed from the front, the actual exhibition space itself, having once contained these large, unidentifiable machine-like sculptures. A viewer can walk in between these giant printed images, distorting the perspective from the view at front to reveal even more surprising objects behind the walls—forgotten coffee cups, photos of groups of people staring back at the camera, discarded metro tickets, a half-eaten candy bar, etc.

This exhibition seems to emphasize, at the very least, the carelessness of a limited perspective. Viewed from far away, it can almost seem to be a flat, 2D image on a wall—or a simple, three-dimensional set of sculptures. But the interactivity of the space—the different frames through which viewers can look and change their perspective on the piece by simply moving around and inside of it—imbues the audience with a kind of power to engineer their own view. A complete understanding of the piece is only possible if the viewer is willing to stand and walk, to look through different holes, kneel to investigate an object sitting at the base of the stairs (some sort of animal bone). By interacting with the space and walking among its objects, the simple, front-facing image of the piece is deconstructed and questions are raised about not only the presentation of the piece itself, but about the ecosystem of the objects within it. As you get closer to the images of towering machines, they’re shown to be only representations—what does this deception do? Is the towering figure disarmed by a human change in perspective, or does this speak to a human’s lack of understanding when it comes to machines, and a bigger picture regarding industry? Can we only see the disassembled mess, and not the entire picture? Or is there a benefit to disassembling the work behind an image and diving into its individual parts?

Lainé’s emphasis on perspective, and the necessity of interaction and movement within a piece, is also a larger message in her other work “Incremental Self: transparent bodies,” which asks the viewer to combine the perspectives from different video screens in a space that’s set with plain work benches. Peculiar about the two pieces, I think, is the fact that in both works there are images and video taken of the space in the past that reveal they were once populated with objects and sculptures no longer there. Lainé’s emphasis on perspective and interaction with a work is also one that seems to be focused on imagination—the necessity to see a piece not only as it is from all possible angles, but to understand its past and its potential.

Denay Rogers on Mika Tajima (“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”)

Mika Tajima was born in Los Angeles in 1975 and currently resides in New York City. Her work focuses on the intersection and interaction between the human body and the machine body. Since 2015, Tajima has been working on a series of pieces collectively titled Meridian. These pieces incorporate sculptures and installations to reconstruct data flows into colored pulses in real time. The pieces from Meridian currently on display at the Palais de Tokyo use parts of office chairs inspired by the shapes of the human spine. These pieces light up, and are meant to depict the inner workings of the human emotional experience. Light bulbs strung from the ceiling flicker on and off according to a programmed algorithm that was too created to capture the human emotional experience.

In addition to the pieces from Meridian, four pieces from Tajima’s latest work, Negative Entropy, are on display at the Palais de Tokyo. These four pieces take the form of abstract “acoustic portraits,” as described by the artist herself. These portraits are woven on Jacquard looms, with the patterns corresponding to spectrograms of sound recordings from industrial sites; digital data; and affective experiences.

At first glance, the chair is not obvious in the piece from Meridian, but as I approached the work I could make out the arms and legs of the chair. I have a difficult time connecting the arrangement of the chair parts to the structure of the human spine. Nor do I understand Tajima’s choice of structure for the piece overall. I do understand the connection between the affective zone and the lighting of the chair piece and of the light bulbs, due to my studies of neurobiology. I think that visually and three-dimensionally depicting this neurological concept is fascinating, and really drew me closer to the piece. The thin white outer layer of the chair piece reminded me of nerve tissue, which also strengthened my understanding of Tajima’s aim.

Tajima’s chair piece at the Palais de Tokyo

 

The portraits from Tajima’s Negative Entropy work are beautiful. The colors work together very well, and the blending between the colors is very smooth. They really do look like sound recording images, and the use of color in these recordings makes me think of hearing very vibrant yet steady sounds.

I had a harder time connecting this these pieces to the affective zone concept Tajima centered her pieces around in her previous work. Tajima meant for the patterns on the looms to represent affective experiences, but to me they more closely resemble continuous and steady sound recordings, which is not what comes to mind when I think of emotion. I would have expected to see much more extreme and sporadic spikes in the streaks if the work was to truly capture human emotion, although it is possible that I may just be missing Tajima’s purpose behind these pieces.