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"Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design from France: 1958--98," which runs through January 11 at the Guggenheim Museum Soho in New York, reflects a national obsession with both kitsch--the 1947 comic strip, is the source for Bertrand Lavier's paintings and sculptures. |
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| What is it about the French? by Michael Sorkin For many years, France seemed to have an architectural death wish. It wasn't simply that no work of interest was coming out of the land of Perret and Le Corbusier, it was as if an entire culture had forgotten its taste and sense of proportion. Paris was fouled with mediocrity, from the skyline-blighting Tour Montparnasse to the astonishing array of penitential projects in the banlieue. How to explain this incredible lapse, a country that had lost its eye? "Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design from France: 1958--98," an enormous exhibition running through January 11 at New York's Guggenheim Museum Soho (organized in conjunction with the Pompidou Center in Paris), offers some answers, many of them contained in a catalogue that is even bigger than the show. This is symptomatic of a common French malady: the compulsion to account. It's hardly an original observation (and not unique to the French), but no less true, that artistic production in the past 25 or so years has become entwined with theory to such a degree that the theory often eclipses the objects. Part of the underlying rationale, of course, is that art and architecture are obliged to seek out strategies of resistance and criticism to avoid being caught up in the larger culture of consumption, but this is a frail justification for the emptiness of so much recent work. If French art and architecture have been burdened by their allegiance to theory, they have also been saddled with the legacy of its dynamic predecessor: surrealism. The critical method of surrealism was essentially ironical, a stance that allowed things to be taken apart and reassembled in weird and provocative ways, turning conventional values on their head. Surrealism anticipated postmodernism, not simply in its louche skepticism and its devotion to new theoretical realms (psychoanalysis, in particular) but in its capacity for straight-faced, parodistic looniness. In fact, surrealism must surely be responsible for that still puzzling phenomenon of postwar France: the Jerry Lewis effect, which can be understood only as an ironic appropriation of kitsch and the re-representation of its content as critique. Needless to say, this kind of critical position is highly fraught. Imagine the leading lights of French artistic practice, burning at the excrescences of American-led consumerism, gazing at the dancing figure of Mickey Mouse like Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. The frustrations of an art that relies on any such surreal mimesis are obvious: For every smugly appropriated image from Disneyland, the Mouse delivers 10 billion of its own--and distinguishing the ironic from the original requires both connoisseurship of the most traditional (and ultimately lunatic) sort and the willingness to draw a very fine line between fetish and commodity. The fascination of French artists and architects with surrealism may explain why they're so often charmed by postmodernity in its more kitsch incarnations. Take, for example, one of the artists featured in "Premises," Bertrand Lavier, who contributes a suite of work called "Walt Disney Productions," life-size replicas of the phony abstract paintings and sculptures in a 1947 comic strip in which Mickey Mouse visits a modern art museum. The catalogue is worth quoting for its summary of the show's own delirious critical stance: "Rather than making a painting that was a copy of a cartoon (as a number of his contemporaries did), and rather than reclaiming some tired abstract painting under the pretext of simulation, Lavier took directly from the cartoon itself. Since the cartoon precisely simulated a body of images prevalent in Modernist art, he simultaneously succeeded in resuscitating abstract painting. Although he did so without theoretical effort and--since his short circuit was photographic--without an excessive quantity of turpentine." It's hard to know which failure of nerve is greater, that of the artist toying with the simulacra of the simulacra to "resuscitate" abstraction by yoking it to an Arp-like lexicon of cartoon shapes, or the too-clever-for-words tone of the catalogue and its dumb disdain for turpentine and technique. Not only is the art dopey--and this is a show about dopey art if ever there was one--the feeble character of its critique is revealed in its slavish replication of the original image. Disney is simply too much loved by all concerned for this kind of work to pose a threat to the battalions of imagineers who blanket the world with what can only be described as the real thing. At the entrance to the show there is a series of photographs of France's built landscape, which sets the tone. Commissioned by the French government as part of a WPA-like project to document changes in the environment, the images are at once tragic and bleak. Perhaps the most striking is a 1984 work by Robert Doisneau, Villejust. In the sky above a ravaged and alienated landscape dominated by high-voltage wires, an airliner descends, landing gear down. In the left foreground, two men wearing yellow gloves bend over what appears to be a cultivated field; on the right, a small industrial building is under construction. The French not only have a weakness for kitsch, they also have an affinity for the sort of technocracy evoked in these photographs, which recall early Antonioni films where refineries belch flames to the punctuating sound of jets overhead. If anything describes the character of most postwar French architecture, in fact, it is this technocratic style, which can also be seen in the alienating, undetailed architecture so deftly skewered by Jacques Tati and Jean-Luc Godard in films like Playtime and Alphaville. Most of the art and architecture in "Premises" shows an affection for these grimscapes that--like the obsession with pop culture--is thinly disguised by irony or parody. This seems both a form of commentary (Paul Virilio documents the horrifying but butch tectonics of the bunkers in Hitler's Atlantic wall and then builds a church that looks just like one) and of co-optation, but it amounts to a version of the Stockholm Syndrome, falling in love with one's captor. There's a high banality that suffuses the work, an embrace of ugliness or silliness. One notable exception is the Pompidou Center. If any strictly architectural event had a galvanizing impact on French postwar architecture, it was this building in the heart of Paris, which was designed in 1970 by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, an Italian and a Brit. (Filled with work by Piano, Rogers, Koolhaas, Kroll, and the Smithsons, the show takes a somewhat expansive view of what exactly it is to be French.) Drawing on an expressive high-tech vocabulary, the building simultaneously celebrated the technical character of its architecture and offered--in its vast floors of open space--a new take on the undifferentiated spaces that were so prevalent in the architecture of the period. The Beaubourg infused the bare-bones rationality of the technical construction with a sense of joy, reconnecting with the tradition of Viollet-le-Duc, Labrouste, Eiffel, Perret, and Prouvé. (The best recent French work follows this example, particularly that of Jean Nouvel, who is by far the country's leading architectural talent.) For the most part, though, the show reflects the fact that the French architecture machine has been working overtime in the last 30 years without any compelling idea about its future. The so-called grands projets, with which Mitterrand sought to leave his mark, were all characterized by Modernism at its most reductive: the pyramid, the triumphal arch, the point grid--projects in which magnitude was held to supersede the necessity of detail. This megalomaniac tradition in French planning and architecture has a fine lineage, from the monarchy, through Haussmann, and down to Le Corbusier, whose superb work from the Fifties and Sixties forms a point of departure for the show. The curators propose Peter and Alison Smithson (the British team widely acknowledged to be the parents of the New Brutalism) and French architect Yona Friedman as anti-Corbs, erstwhile "humanizers" of his "formalist hegemony." Never mind the soul-deadening character of their work and the intellectual hoop-leaping necessary to describe their functionalism redux as anything but brutal--their real effect was to reestablish the unstoppable grid as the default of urban planning. Indeed, Friedman is best known for a series of sketches of a megastructure floating 15 meters over Paris on enormous columns--an aerial interpretation of the Plan Voisin, Corb's project to replace a vast area of the city with slab blocks. Friedman's fantasy returns periodically, in the form of the Florence-based Superstudio's famous globe-girdling grid or, in a more domesticated version, in Bernard Tschumi's art school in Le Fresnoy, where a metal roof containing various technical installations floats over the tiled roofs of older buildings on the site. Liberated to indulge itself in the dull ironies of postmodernity, this tradition of grandiosity produced a series of grotesques, most strikingly in the hyper-scaled projects of the Spaniard Ricardo Bofill. He delivered what must surely be a conceptual death-blow to the large-scale housing project with buildings in Paris, Montpelier, and elsewhere, styled in a witlessly inflated classicism, in which monster precast concrete Corinthian columns enclose bathrooms or kitchens. Crossing the line between surrealism and megalomania, this work was preternaturally influential. The result was not simply a bending of the rules, but an obviation of them. In the right hands, this might have been pleasingly anarchical, but in those of so many practitioners, it simply led to incoherence. The voyage of Christian de Portzamparc is exemplary. Although he's an architect of obvious talent, I've never found his compositional sensibility persuasive: klutzy is the word that springs to mind, probably because he collages hackneyed forms (the architectural equivalent of those "Walt Disney Productions"--wavy roofs, angled windows, standard-issue curtain wall) into ensembles that fail to transcend their origins. I'm not altogether sure why I found "Premises" so annoying. It's not the pedestrian installation or any single piece of art or architecture, although the percentage of winners does attain a historic low. I suppose it's because the show--in its immensity, the sheer weight of accumulation--is actually so successful in reproducing the style and the mood of its subject. It becomes another installment in the ongoing story of the grands projets, mistaking size for content, amalgamating weak ideas and unappealing forms into something that trivializes art and architecture. I just kept wondering why these people can't get over themselves, lighten up, and get serious. |
Keywords:
"Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design from France: 1958-98," Guggenheim Museum, French architecture, Bertrand Lavier, Paul Virilio, Christian de portzamparc, Pompidour Center