Airs de Paris

by Charissa N. Terranova August 14, 2007

Airs de Paris, a rangy exhibition on the top floor of the Centre
Pompidou
, marks the 30-year anniversary of the Marcel Duchamp
retrospective that inaugurated the museum in 1977.

Marcel Duchamp...Air de Paris...Original 1919/reproduction 1977...Collection of Centre Pompidou


It is a show that is gangly in all the right ways. Like a sprawling city, it spills across media and knows no conceptual boundaries. The show unfurls yet another aspect of Duchamp’s ready-made: its inherent urbanism. Airs de Paris reveals that the ready-made is, much like the best of global cities in the 21st century, a protean urban body — here curving walls of colored modules, there a set of elided moving images, and everywhere a thing unique.

By introducing the ready-made to the world in 1913 — a bicycle wheel attached to a stool — Duchamp threw down the gauntlet in full-throttle dada fashion. His intention was to query the possibility, if not prove the impossibility, of making art in a world where the machine and the first airborne war, WWI, had proven the inconsequence of art and the insufficiency of the artist’s hand. The Duchampian gauntlet has since been thrown down over and over again, to the point that the logic of the ready-made has become the basic grammar of any artistic act. Though well nigh rote, it is worthwhile once again, if only briefly, to rehearse that logic, in particular in the writings of Thierry de Duve, who has provided the most lucid articulation of the ready-made since Duchamp (and maybe even more lucidly than the man himself).

Michel Blazy...Mouche sur pluie d'air...2001...Color photograph on PVC...70 x 50 cm...Courtesy Art Concept, Paris


Duve describes the logic of Duchamp’s ready-made in terms of “pictorial nominalism.”[1.] The ready-made is not so much about the details of the thing — the urinal called Fountain, the snow shovel called In Advance of the Broken Arm, or the postcard of the Mona Lisa called L.H.O.O.Q. — but about what the thing does. The ready-made triggers a set of responses that beg the question of the naming of art. Who names art? And thus what is art and what can it be? Is it the thing? The artist? The marketplace? The gallery space in which it sits? The podium or socle upon, or glass vitrine in which, it sits? Is it the discourse of publications that identify it as valuable? Is it the critic who writes? Is it the gallerist who backs the artist and her work? Is it the collector or museum that buys? Is it the professor who devotes her lecture to an artist’s work, thereby introducing it into the canon of art history? Is it all of these things or no thing at all but pure experience?

In paying homage to all things Duchampian — both the ready-made in general and the specific work Air de Paris, a sealed vial of Parisian air that Duchamp gave in 1919 to the Philadelphia-based collectors the Arensbergs, as well as the opening retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1977 — Airs de Paris extends pictorial nominalism beyond the institution, even beyond the streets, into the full-blown air of urban space.

The unspoken voice that haunts the exhibition is that of Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher and sociologist whose lifelong Marxist lucubrations culminated in 1974 with a theory of space. Beyond the Euclidean definition, space for Lefebvre was produced by the individual act, the workings of one’s mind and the system of capitalism. It could be urban, rural and rururban, a French neologism designating that which is in between. Lefebvre’s notion of space was a product of the long French tradition of human action in space, the protests of May 1968 being then the most recent. Lefebvre formulated his ideas in order to activate an idea that until then had been passive, to instill it — space — with the vécu, or the lived event. [2]

Fabrice Hyber...Pétrole - Pienture homéopathique no. 23...1992-2006...Collage, oil, charcoal, epoxy on canvas...191 x 365 cm...Collection Claude Berri, Paris


Airs de Paris embodies the spontaneity of the vécu in a polyglot of form and media and, even more poignantly, in its ample representation of young contemporary artists. Despite the death knell tolled by the ready-made for medium-specificity in all artistic endeavors, the exhibition’s two primary divisions are broadly delineated by medium. There are 10 separate gallery spaces devoted to art, the first umbrella category. About midway through the exhibition, visitors come upon the second category, galleries devoted to landscape, architecture and design. With the exception of Zaha Hadid’s maquettes, it is difficult to determine what makes a given work “landscape, architecture and design” and not “art.” The area devoted to the former is smaller, and though its presentation is no less prismatic, its scale lends it something of an ancillary feel.

The exhibition opens onto a small room dedicated to Duchamp’s Air de Paris, a reproduction of which is installed in a glass box centered on the back wall. A date painting by On Kawara makes a standoff with Olivier Babin’s The Day After (2007) an appropriationist take On Kawara’s work. Richard Fauguet’s untitled silhouettes of banal found objects in milky, storm-gray adhesive paper are stuck directly on the back wall. Hanging over and next to one’s head is Michel Blazy’s Pluie d’air (2007), made of finger-sized drips of black glue hung from filaments that force careful navigation of the space. Together these works concretize Parisian air in manifold ways — in a sealed bottle, in time (the yesterday invoked by the profiles of old stuff) and in small dollops of glue. In this chamber orchestra of form, the city resonates as a place of memory, a catalyst for its creation and the embodiment of its remembrance.

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec...Walls in Showroom of Kvadrat, Stockholm...2005...Interior photograph of showroom


Urbanism is also a site of global strife. This the message of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Outgrowth (2005), a wall of classroom globes installed on individual shelves. The globes bear bulbous growths fashioned out of taupe packing tape, and violent photos are stuck seemingly willy-nilly to the edges of each shelf. Conceptually related, but formally far different, Fabrice Hyber’s Pétrole – Peinture homéopathique No. 23 (1992-2006) is a palimpsest of stuff — doodles and drawings of people and oil spills layered in collage and epoxy. It is painterly in an iconoclastic way. She embarked on the work after visiting Arab countries in the early 1990s with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Frustrated by the Islamic restrictions on representation of the body, she began to translate the destruction and greed of humankind through hieroglyphs of drips and protoplasmic form.

Making a commentary that is more local than global — that is to say, focused more on Paris than the world — Abdel Abdessemed’s Zen (2000) is a video loop showing white milk poured over a shirtless, statuesque African male. The milk streams like liquid alabaster against the eggplant hue of the man’s skin. White against black and black against white, Zen comments in a minimalist video vocabulary on the sociopolitical tension created by the invocation of “pure Frenchness.”

Thomas Hirschhorn...Outgrowth...2005...131 globes on 7 shelves, wood, cardboard, tape...350 x 620 x 30 cm...Collection of Centre Pompidou


If Abdessemed’s moving-image piece creates an edgy mental space, then the multicolored partitions of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, installed in the space devoted to “Air(e)s Géographiques 2 – Paysages Verticaux,” carve out tight tangible space for the upright roving body. Designed for the showroom of the Danish designer Kvadrat in Stockholm, the vertical, undulating walls of attached cloisons, or modules, stand at a tilt, inviting touch.

Toward the end of this big and powerfully amorphous exhibition, Nan Goldin’s If My Body Shows Up (2007) extrudes the existential wonder of the mind into three-dimensional space. In this room-scale installation, Goldin has arranged personal objects and art from her apartment in Paris in order to create a self-styled wunderkammer. The space is reminiscent of the grotto-like apartment of Des Esseintes, the protagonist-decadent in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Å rebours. A single-channel video interspersing recently filmed scenes of lesbians with clips from mid-century neorealist Italian movies runs on a boxy television in the center of the room.

As with the pluralizing of Duchamp’s ready-made, from Air de Paris to Airs de Paris, this is a show about art in its plurality. Volume, experimentation and diversity constitute the specificity at work in this play of medium hypertrophically conceived.

1. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan with author (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 

2.  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991). 

Images courtesy the writer

Charissa N. Terranova is the Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies at UTD and the Director of the UTD Artists Residency Program.

2 comments

2 comments

steven cochran August 15, 2007 - 10:14

c,
fyi, the arensbergs never lived in philadelphia. they moved from new york to los angeles in the late 1920’s. their collection is in the philadelphia museum because they offered them (through duchamp, who negotiated the terms, as president of the francis bacon foundation[devoted to proving that francis bacon was the real author of most works attributed to shakespeare]) the best installation agreement. this is because during the 1930’s and 40’s most of the collections promised to the philadelphia museum went instead to the then new moma in manhattan.

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b.s. August 15, 2007 - 11:58

Rangy, adj.

1. Having long slender limbs.
2. Inclined to rove.
3. Providing ample range; roomy.

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