contemporary monkey

Palais de Tokyo: where caring goes to die

Thank the Art Gods on High for someone in the universe who is watching over each and every one of us gallery hustlers and museum freaks who just don’t have enough time in the day. Enough time in the day to pore over, wrestle through, sneer at and wonder through as much contemporary art as our brains can digest (if that’s what brains could actually do). It can’t all be absorbed by one man on a stiff budget in an average lifetime of wine, art and song. No one person can do it all; gallery-hop like they’re an escaped banker, buying airline tickets like its beer on a Friday afternoon. For that, we are hereby and forever in your debt, kind sir or madam, M. Curator, for what is probably the least impressive collection of art in the known and unknown universe: the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. You have killed my soul. Prepare to die.

I give you, the fellow art traveller, full permission to strike it off your list of places to see before you leave this earth. I can confidently state that the Palais de Tokyo is not part of any travel diary with the words “un-missable, must-have, once in a lifetime”. Or, if it must remain on your bucket list, surely its just and true place is behind the largest sisal twine ball in Darwin, Minnesota. It might then all make sense, this crazy life of yours. Ball of string: check. OK then, we’re off to Paris for the one cultural dustball that will finally put me six feet under. Who wants whiskey?

Having just returned from visits to both the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville De Paris and the Palais de Tokyo (they are separated by only a cafe - of course they are, it’s Paris). The difference couldn’t be more stark. French roast on one side, decaf on the other. On the Musee d’Art Moderne side: a thriving art hive of busy public-ness, of well-intentioned learning for French and non-French alike, of well-lined walls and floor space with, well, modern and contemporary art. Administered by friendly locals throughout (are we still in France?), I am amongst the coherently curated thread of an argument, an idea, a point posited by the curator, using pieces from the Musee d’Art Moderne’s collection and non-collection alike. Fortune has looked favourably upon me, for I have used my depreciating roll of money wisely. I shall eat this evening.

Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris: warning, contains more life

On the other hand, and the other side of the cafe, there’s the Palais de Tokyo. A static storehouse of forgotten and rotting art pieces, watched over by what appear to be three former bank security guards on holiday; standing, smoking, chatting with each other in France’s most ill-fitted suits. They look more at home inside a Metro underground station.

And of course, there’s the art - sort of. While the programme title promises a solitary thought by way of its title, “Dynasty”, the truth is the pieces appear to be more “We give up, see what you can do with it”. The video and wall lighting installations are either not working, or possibly that’s the point of the show: the ‘dynasty’ of 21st century western values, slumped to an unworkable heap of electrical cords that someone has pulled from the wall. Nobody is even trying here. Alongside the pieces are the lazy curator’s old friend, the unhelpful and completely worthless label, “Untitled. Mixed Media. 2010″. Gee thanks, now I completely understand where I am in the universe of modern man. The continual struggle for meaning and identity.

The Palais de Tokyo itself, the building that is, not the vacuous anti-life inside, is a promising space. It’s not polished, it’s not shaped like a former power station, and it’s not designed by a 21st century starchitect. It’s simply a beat-to-hell space, and a very large one at that. Unfortunately, the space is so large it reveals the weakness of whomever is supposed to be upholding the responsibility of public service. Unless you count driving foot traffic over to the Musee d’Art Moderne as a civic duty. Which, in this case, I’m willing to support.

Ad publication with some (cryptic) text

Take comfort, common man and woman, in knowing that the world’s finest museums and galleries are thinking about the plural “you” and your struggles in appreciating art. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not that they’re interested in your opinion. If they wanted that, as the saying almost goes, they’d box it up in a happy meal and demand that you swallow it whole. Instead, they’d rather suffer uninterrupted arguments between each other on strategies to get John and Jane Q Public (that’s you) into their world of Art of the Now, also known as contemporary art. They see the writing on the wall, and it says museums and galleries are for the likes of Lord and Lady Thickbottom, with their moneyed mansions, vast networks of wealthy friends, and Job-like patience to brave out the insane ranting of the world’s maddest and most mis-understood artist. Said writing-upon-wall also say museums are definitely not for most taxpaying suckers like you. Don’t blame me, you’re the wall writer.

Meanwhile, over at the (pick your favourite) music festival, (pick your favourite) 3D cinema, (pick your favourite) restaurant, concert hall, reading club, jazz house, cable show, or whatever else consumes the time of contemporary man and woman, people are discovering culture elsewhere. The endless sea of once common pounds sterling and dollars from 2006 are getting sucked down the drain of debt and bill paying, and nobody is finding the stopper anytime soon. Seems the precious museum and gallery are last on the list of invitees to the new economy of hunker down and turn the lights off.

For it is in the Summer 2010 edition of the Great Big Fat Book of Art Gallery Ads, or as they prefer to be called, ArtForum, where the condition of the present day museum is put before several insiders. By several, I mean 27. They are nothing if not thorough, these ArtForum publishers, and if they don’t have an ad from every single New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo gallery in their pages, I’d be shocked and disappointed at the same time. Of course by insiders I do NOT mean those that walk “inside” a museum or public gallery, flummoxed by what the artist considers to be art, with absolutely no clue as to why he or she bothered to re-construct this considerably sized mass of metal in the first place. By insiders, I refer to those that are currently museum staff, museum architects, museum owners, museum suppliers (or if you prefer, artists), as well as those anchored just off the tropically perfect island of Museumland: auction houses, universities, and even an ArtForum publisher. It’s like asking the owners of vinyl record stores what their views are on the iPod.

Art insiders are keenly aware of the problem, with the solution being a complex cocktail that includes you: Mr. Average and Mrs. Medium. Contributors of the issue use words like, participation, democratization, interaction, even “polyphonic exchange” (that’s discussion to you and me). They get the new media; the twitter, the google, the facebook, with their coarse and vulgar “inclusive” environments; they just have difficulty doing anything about it. It’s not that they lack intelligence, social commitment, heaps of money, to get you to see it their way; they simply forgot to ask you. Your phone must have been off.

The breed of people who buy Art Forum, however, don’t usually include the rough and unwashed of the world, which fits them snugly into the vertical market of art and academia. You’d only read ArtForum if you were interested in art. Not necessarily the appreciating of it, but the running of it and ensuring its bolt-hold onto exclusivity. If you’re a commercial gallery owner, you’d “read” ArtForum to ensure your ad is well placed upfront, well ahead of your competitors’ ads who are covertly stealing your well-placed clients. Unfortunately, museums and galleries are usually held in the public trust, so it’s quite obvious someone is missing from ArtForum’s jabbering on the state of play, and that “missing someone” is you. You and your small minded, limited thinking, shrinking bank account, politically correct choices, bringer of screaming children into the public realm, BlackBerry habit of typing at the wrong place and wrong time, burden of a citizen. But thanks for the tax dollars, Joe, we promise to spend it wisely.

After reading about half of the 27 essays (I’m not reading all of them - some aren’t even using this planet’s languages), it appears that the business life of a museum and gallery knave is one of hand-wringing and foreboding. Recommendations span from Crank up the Revolution (Olafur Eliasson) to the Capitalists are Coming to Replace the State (Jeffrey Kastner). By all accounts, you’d swear the museum system in the western world is crippled. Most essayists in this issue see the function of the institutions as an intermediary: provide the stage for what artists are currently producing. If the primary role of the museum is one of negotiation between you and the artist (or artists if you’re “polyphonic” enabled), then apparently the museum isn’t doing its job. I think we could have told them that if they’d just ask.

Xu Zhen is at least one part of MadeIn. Or not.

Can you ever really know someone, a country, or a culture? Armed with the worldwide inter-webby thing, a plane ticket to just about anywhere, and a credit card that purchases just about anything on the planet, you’d think our capacity to be global pals of the highest order is a cinch. What is it we don’t know? Want to meet people from all over the world, but don’t have the wherewithal? Line up a four week holiday to South Africa in June and the world comes to you. Constantly wondering what all the hub-bub is about of, say, the politics in Georgia, shifting borders in Armenia, or football teams of Togo? An iPhone in your pocket is all you need to pull down as much data as your battery allows. But honest data doesn’t make it easy to grasp the details.

This month at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery is a show from a Chinese art collective called MadeIn. There is a large amount of work in the gallery, so the term “collective” could mean a small Chinese village of 200,000. And this is exactly the point MadeIn are making in their show called, “Seeing One’s Own Eyes”, how much of the world is understood through cliche. MadeIn’s work enables the platitudes of the Middle East, including the sympathies of the region’s locals, with the caricatures of the “tourists” (that would be us westerners with our ample supply of guns and ammo).

In one section, enclosing about 8-10 mixed media works, each about 8 feet by 15 feet wide, reflect someone’s interpretation, or subjective opinion, of the current realm of the Middle East. American’s like me will see this as one more smirk at our country’s muscularity, bullying, short-sightedness; just more censure that the world piles onto every American, as if we’re all standing shoulder to shoulder against the world. And while the trite remarks might be somewhat warranted, it’s becoming an increasingly old story. I was mostly annoyed.

anti-American? or anti-indolent?

However, while the work uses mixed media, the images are painted cartoon-like, suggesting less than earnest comments. The images reflect what someone in Shanghai might perceive the Middle East to be from thousands of miles away, viewed through a skewed lens of the Chinese media, knowing it’s probably not completely true. The proposition is one that hints toward our inclination to shape subjective, even lazy, views into absolute fact.

I can’t leave without commenting on the over-zealous copy from the exhibition guide suggesting that MadeIn is a Chinese collective, that pretends it’s a Middle Eastern collective. Ikon Gallery state that Xu Zhen, a single man, is indeed MadeIn, which in itself pretends to be a Middle Eastern Art Collective. That’s more than a bit optimistic, as firstly, I don’t think one has to go that far to make the point about cliche which they were successful in constructing. Secondly, no visitor is going to think that, so why even make it up? It’s not like MadeIn needs to be more than once removed to prove their point. In fact, if you’re going to the trouble of inventing another layer, why not keep inventing layer; why stop at two? Why not suggest the Chinese artist Xu Zhen is pretending to be a Chinese artist collective, which is pretending to be a Middle Eastern Collective, which in itself is pretending to be an American collective, which might really be a British collective, pretending to be Chinese. Isn’t it all so circular and mind-bending, and self-reflective and black-hole-like? Who’s got drugs?

Antony Gormley: Breathing Room III

When men imagine themselves driving cars; we usually picture ourselves in an environment that suits the particular model. A Bugatti Veyron on Germany’s Nurburgring with the landscape visibly blurred as we roar through the air. Inside a Mitsubishi Evo, we’re tearing up a dirt track off-road, sliding around sharp bends in the trails of Northern Europe. Tucked away in a polished Bentley, we maneuver quietly through a quaint village nestled in the middle of England, with a name like, Chipping Bloodlet or something equally outdated, secluded away from the ugly world of commerce.

The English: a fashion unto themselves

Ladies, when you shop for fashion, you’re likely picturing yourself wearing a black slinky dress at the next opening gala, or a comfy but fine leather jacket for a first date, or perhaps a massively large, conspicuous looking hat at a Derby Day lunch. Again, such a hat requires a suitable place; a town with a fitting name like Paisley-upon-Biscuit. Oh dear me, such is the life of the leisure class.

Back in the land of the cosmopolitan, when the artist Antony Gormley thinks of people, because he often does think of people, he prefers to put the human being in its/our proper environment. Given a comparative act of measurement, how do the average joe and jane bloggs stack up. Where do they belong, and is there really a need for towns like Chipping-before-Wenlock?

This man lives in a Chipping-upon-village

You might have encountered a Gormley sculpture, as he’s famous for installing human-type shapes in, mostly, the British landscape. Perched on top of buildings, rooted in rocky beaches, fondly overlooking English cities, even submerged in flooded cathedral crypts. Gormley was also responsible for One and Other, the idea of placing the public on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square to give them their hopeful 15 minutes (x 4) of fame. If Gormley isn’t obsessed with modern man’s position in space, I don’t know who would be.

In London, at White Cube Mason’s Yard, Gormley reverses the perspective to work on the perimeters that instead surround the human in its habitat. He lets us maneuver about the place, providing an occasion for us to measure not only ourselves, but other visitors and how we compare with each other. Sealed in the basement of the White Cube, following endless stairs downward, filled with the sudden dread of thinking do I really want to walk back up, is an intersecting group of 15 white frames made of glowing, wooden scaffolding, taking over the whole of the room. Think of a Damien Hirst installation without the shark, formaldehyde, or the glass. And definitely without the the stupid title (”The Feeling of Looking Silly in the Mind of Someone Who Claims to be an Artist”). Also, very much larger than Hirst’s productions.

Hirst-Super-Mare

When I say glowing, I mean each 1×1 inch length of wood, joined to make multiple boxes, is painted with some sort of phosphorescence that glows for about 15 minutes, before needing a recharge. The recharge, as it happens, is a blinding bolt of white light from heat lamps concealed in the ceiling, flipped on for about 30 seconds. This of course suggests that viewers are all walking around in the dark when the overhead lamps aren’t on, bumping into each other if it weren’t for the brightly lit wooden posts giving off residual energy. Ugh, that light was on far too long. I probably looked horrible, and I know some of my fellow gallery-goers, who were until recently cloaked ghosts, could use a fashion do-over.

Now that the light’s are dimmed again, time to get on with the business of measuring ourselves. The installation includes my favourite activity in art: participation. Because it’s (nearly always) dark (ish), you have free clearance to touch things. Well, not people of course. You can fondle the structure as long as you don’t leave the sculpture wobbling, because the remonstrating Irish girl at the front will otherwise hurl her way toward you, possibly unsheathing a weapon, to “caution” you. Not that this happened to me, of course. I’m much more surreptitious. Still, visitors are encouraged to walk amongst the wood, as it were, and do their best not to damage anything on the way through the “pine forest”. Also, because this is the British Republic of Health and Safety and Please Pray that England win the World Cup, the sign at the front door says you’re on your own if you clobber yourself on the head. Clobbering oneself, however, would be a good use of the structure for personal measurement: “I guess I was too tall for that wooden timber, must be about 6 feet tall that beam. By the way darling, do you have a tourniquet?”

“Breathing Room III” (or 3, or Three, however you want to confuse your guests) as it’s entitled, is not only a probe for how we as humans fit in with the world - including other people in it - but it’s a great place where you literally cannot read anything; including any redundant titles or copy for the installation. My first instincts on entering galleries is to avoid what some over-ambitious young gallery employee might have written about the importance of the installation. It’s much easier, and more interesting, to get straight on with the art - minus the enthusiastic wordsmithing. Gormley’s site is one that must be experienced directly as an image and structure to be a part of. And if it’s in a dark room with other curious individuals, even better. The only things missing are beer and wine.

The upstairs neighbors at White Cube

Tom Friedman: funny man

Pubs are probably a fertile incubation space for art. All sorts of unhinged, but nonetheless possibly valid ideas begin life in a pub amongst friends, usually after at least four quick pints. Laced with alcohol, people say the most outrageous things which nearly always require proof of concept outside the fantasy world of your local pub. Proof that must come at a later time, because, well, everyone’s busy drinking and saying rubbish things at the moment. Remind them in the morning.

The artist Tom Friedman, I imagine in my mind’s eye, must be a pub drinker with several demented friends at the ready. The results of his imagination actually do prove something half-baked to be possible. I can imagine Friedman saying, “I’ll bet I can make anything out of styrofoam and a lick of paint.” To which his friends laugh uncontrollably, and bet him even more pints that he couldn’t. Then I can imagine Friedman having a staggering memory, and recalling the next morning his bet about making anything out of “…what was it…oh yeah, styrofoam and pints…wait it was paint. Styrofoam and paint. Right, I’ve got my day ahead of me….”

The results of his big night out (remember, the pub night out part is my addition to the story, not his genuine working habits) can be seen in a London gallery with a wide range of everyday items. When I first read about this in the May issue of Art Review, I must admit my eyeballs nearly floated back in my head. Another replicant from the ready-made moment 100 years ago wants to prove they can re-animate Marcel Duchamp. After reading the materials list, however, my mind was changed forever. You’d never know by looking at it, but what resembles strings, are actually paint fibers. A peeled banana, a breeze-block, a rose, a gavel, pencils, even torn cardboard - all styrofoam. Random objects arranged in haphazard compositions are not so much ready-made, as just-made. Friedman has persevered to construct a paper towel dispenser made of styrofoam that looks more like something out of Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day in the Toilet. Flowing from the mouth of the dispenser is a thin layer of paint made to look like paper towel. It’s a brilliant riposte to any artist who pulls a tin can out of a rubbish bin, calling it art because the ready-made represents man’s inhumanity to man.

Tom Friedman; user of everything

Tom Friedman, I’ve also discovered, is obsessive about finding beginning and end points of art, employing Buddhism in large measures to hunt down these mileposts. Based on his earlier works, he certainly has the monastic patience of a man in solitary. Friedman once started a day off with one toothpick, resolving then to create something more grand, with more toothpicks. 30,000 toothpicks later, his sculpture resembled a splintery galactic explosion. He stopped at 30,000 because, well, the project could go on indefinitely; and really, doesn’t 30,000 get the point across? Personally I would have stopped at about 100 toothpicks because I wouldn’t have thought to purchase the 30,000 to begin with. Also, I can’t imagine a project with 30,000 of anything in front of me. Think of the missed pub time.

Thankfully someone like Tom Friedman exists if for no other reason than assigning him the patience to wait out an idea and jumping on it before the flimsy idea floats off to the lost island of forgotten ideas. The search for the beginning of something; or maybe it’s the end of something else, was a key starting point for him. To Friedman, beginnings and endings can be the same thing. When he says that filling something up is the same as making it completely empty, it sounds like something the physicist Richard Feynman would say. Once when he,  Friedman, not Feynman, couldn’t quite figure out his next move, he cleaned out his studio, boarded up the windows, and painted the whole space completely white, with the intention of determining a new starting point for his art education. It must have been a personal, big-bang moment. The very next day, Friedman began focusing on one object each day in his freshly constructed clean room. On Day 1, a metronome; day 2, a plate; and so on. Each day he asked questions of the thing’s existence. What is it, what’s it called, why does it take up the space it does, what’s it doing here, why am I talking to it…He then asked questions of his relationship with the object as a viewer. He was playing you and me as gallery and museum groupie. For a time, Friedman did nothing but think about the object and himself in this universe of one small white room, like a mini-museum, seeking out his “point A”.  More importantly, hoping it led to something worthwhile, like “point B”. His process reminds me of the end of the film “Castaway” when the Tom Hanks character is literally at a cross roads to his future. The difference is that Friedman has more to think about than simply turning left or right. He’s got infinity ahead of him.

about as useless as a real one

Another of his projects involved a jigsaw puzzle. As he got closer to the end of seeing the final image, he pulled all the pieces away from “interlock” mode, separated the pieces with a few inches of floor space, and laid everything out in grid-like fashion. You couldn’t tell what the puzzle was a puzzle of, until you looked at individual pieces. Only then could you make the synaptic leap to imagine the bigger picture.

Tom Friedman may be my new comedy art hero, even if he doesn’t think his work is supposed to be amusing. But there I am, just me staring at his objects, asking questions like, why is this here, what’s its purpose, what’s it doing near me, why am I laughing?