EXHIBITIONS — JULY/AUGUST 2010

Before Present. And After Us the Flood — Annemasse
Fabienne Radi, July 2010

The Villa du Parc explores the place of ecology in contemporary art.

It’s not really the moment to tap Brad Pitt on the shoulder, saying “Well BP, how are things (1)?” Bonnie Parker (queen of the bandits, still rebellious) and Baden Powell (father of the scouts, ever prepared) likely wouldn’t much appreciate it either, but since both passed away prior to the first oil slicks, it shouldn’t disturb them too much. And apart from the fact that for a hundredth of a second, they call to mind a large British company specialised in the extraction of fossil fuels, now in the hostile spotlight of the news, the letters B and P also have a particular meaning among archaeologists and palaeontologists: they signify Before Present and represent a timescale which allows them precisely to situate in the recent Quaternary any fragment of sequoia bark or triceratops kneecap, thanks to the famous carbon 14; with the Present in question having been scientifically set at the year 1950 in our own Christian era.

Before Present is also the title of an exhibition which opened at the Villa du Parc on 4 June, i.e. several weeks after the destruction of the Deepwater platform off the coast of Louisiana, in what is an unfortunate coincidence for the Gulf of Mexico but rather interesting for the Annemasse region. So we turned off our TV, put on our boots and set out towards the Moillesulaz customs post and beyond.

Villa du Parc’s BP has no need for petrol pump attendants, you can help yourself: the labels and documentation provided to visitors are sufficiently complete and well designed to present the topic: questioning the place of ecology in contemporary art, without getting bogged down in the kind of moralistic considerations inherent in a subject of this kind.

The visit starts head-on with Dan Perjovschi’s drawings, rather effective Romanian itching powder thrown against the exterior walls of the veranda: the art market, the globalisation of capital, banking secrecy, and the Villa’s air-conditioning system are all raked over the coals. At the bottom of the wall, a pile of Jimmie Durham posters expound the theory that humanity is not a completed project. And visitors familiar with contemporary art have known for ages – the ages being exhibitions by Félix Gonzalez-Torres – that they can use a poster and take it home with them, giving them the chance to superpose a reflection on humanity over a fridge door decoration; art is not a project without paradox.

After this highly graphic warm-up, you enter into what could be the waiting room of a chic-bio-zen paediatrician’s office. An entirely troubling atmosphere due to the particularly successful association of works by Dan Peterman and Liam Gillick. Constructed on the floor, Peterman’s Accessories to an Event (1996-2010) consists of parts of artists palettes arranged as children’s picnic tables. If you look a little more closely, you discover that the parts themselves are not made out of wood but out of recycled plastic, hence their pastel green-blue colour (Perrier-Badoit-Vittel mineral waters from the nice parts of town?). The whole forms a collection reminiscent at once of IKEA, Lego and USM. Modularity, minimalism, ergonomics and environmental awareness.

Medical waiting rooms are often decorated with carefully framed watercolours or engravings, with generally abstract forms and discreet colours so as not to offend the patient’s sensibility and perhaps to make him forget that he will shortly find himself naked on the examination table. There are waiting room paintings just as there is elevator music. Often, the doctor’s glass-mounted degrees are recent additions to the collection, providing some welcome textual relief to patients starting to twiddle their thumbs nervously. In the same spirit, and echoing Peterman’s works, Liam Gillick’s poser series Public Information (2008) helps create this atmosphere of false harmony. Here, we see stylised designs in pastel colours, evocative of institutional ads for large industrial groups: a highly stereotyped woman with a facelift, typically accompanied by slogans along the lines of Opening to the World or Creative Solutions for Better Returns if not We’re Always At Your Side. Except that here, looking more closely at the images, you read instead “CLAIM THE PROFITS!”. Liam Gillick is the master at uniting recognition of sterilized codes with the instillation of vicious little phrases to create a subtle but lasting feeling of uneasiness, which doesn’t go away by taking Ibuprofen. The medical assistant is calling us… On to the next one.

You shouldn’t count on the projection of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster’s Atomic Park (2004) to regain your composure. Enshrouded in a sumptuously depressing melancholy and accompanied by a soundtrack which exudes anguish in all its guises, the film blends images of the White Sands desert – where the first atomic bomb was exploded in 1945 – with Marilyn Munroe’s desperate screams at the end of Misfits. Taken out of its context and without knowing the subject, the projection also suggests the idea of a tsunami: you see a giant dune in the form a motionless wave, waiting only for a gunshot to bring it crashing down onto nonchalant families playing ballgames beside picnic areas in a scene which could have come straight from a Jacques Tati film. On the verge of tetanisation, you take a deep breath and the staircase up to the next floor.

“What are 30 lined-up UV neon lights for, grandma
-The better to roast you, my child!”

At the top of the stairs, Edith Dekynot’s installation Soleil Public (2008) is installed on the wall like a gigantic electric fly-killer, fly-roasting included. Yes, OK, Dan Flavin, minimalism, dematerialisation, distortion of one’s perception and all that. Yes, but fine, The Fly, Cronenberg, teleportation, Jeff Goldblum being mutated in his caisson… you can’t fight against images like that either. You pass between Didier Marcel’s famous Trees (2008), doubtless a little thin to shelter us from harmful rays but highly attractive with their trunks looking as though they were covered with sugar icing. Look, there are some with traces of fluorescent pink: is that the madwoman who, having kissed a Cy Twombly painting, succumbed to the ambient eroticism of the forest (2)? It’s true that all those poles mounted on wheels… Unless she has has borrowed one of the 470 nail varnishes exhibited in the next room by Nicole Hassler (Varnish Life, 2010) to violate the installation’s artistic integrity? We’re well aware that the colour was used by Marcel himself, but that doesn’t prevent us from making this somewhat idiotic link between the two works.

Turning 180°, we find ourselves face to face with Jimmie Durham’s the fountain of the two birds (1997), a work with a kind of DIY aesthetic uniting a watering can, a jerry can, sections of pipes, bottles and a plastic basin. Except that here there are no birds, no water, to borrow the punchline of a cheap joke. On the other hand, all the rest has been meticulously chosen in terms both of colour and form and is perfectly installed on the wall to produce an impeccable work. Thirst is not a completed project? With a dry throat, we proceed into a large room strewn with symmetrically laid-out electrical extension cables, a fraction too aesthetically arranged (Untitled. Electrical Extension Cables and Power Strips, 2010, Véronique Joumard). On the wall, black and white images of neural networks by the same artist. The whole is somewhat predictable (3), but that’s to be able to contact you more easily, my child, whispers grandma (the same one who was roasting in front of the neon lights by the staircase). One almost expects to see men in white appear to wrap us in an immaculate white sheet with straps on the sides. We rush into the last room, a little uneasy.

The ground of this final room is covered with a huge carpet of rubber slabs made from recycled tyres, on which is written Before Present (2010, Renaud Layrac). A kind of giant doormat for the 84 little daughters of a Gulliver who has escaped from geological time. Will we be propelled into the Middle Pliocene if we step foot on this work, which lends its name to and closes the exhibition? No leap in time to speak of, nothing happens at all, if it isn’t that you suddenly find yourself at the ideal distance to discover the Gowanus series (2009, Edith Dekyndt) on the opposite wall. The short-sighted will see a collection of photos of UFOs: all those milky white spots harmlessly invoke encounters of the third kind so dear to Spielberg. But we’ve got it all wrong, the artist has photographed the most polluted canal in Manhattan (the Gowanus) and the spots are bubbles of petrol shining on the surface of the water. Grace in the gutter.

We go back downstairs feeling somewhat sated, and at the bottom of the stairs, we mistake a door for the exit to find ourselves confronted with two helmeted Cerberuses who answer to the sweet names of Start & Finish (BP, 2007) and keep guard over Statistical Landscapes (BP, 2008), painted with waste oil. Just next to them, Katharina Hohmann tries to persuade us that Another World Is Possible (2010), but since she ran off without tidying up her mess (stencil, paint and ladder) we have a hard time believing her.

Once outside, the BP effect seems to have contaminated the natural surroundings. We look at the lawn in the park with a paranoid eye, for fear that it might take its revenge à la Brautigan or conceal dirty, old ears à la Lynch (4).

And before getting back into a vehicle which consumes a shameful 10l per 100km (and not even diesel), it occurs to us that the Villa du Parc exhibition has been rather successful: not putting us to sleep with an educational lecture hidden beneath an aesthetic veneer, but instead pulling us towards other dimensions by creating an unusual formal progression conducive to narrative proliferation among works of different styles, qualities and registers.

To summarise the sensation in a prosaic formula, let’s say that we’re not sure we’ll turn off the tap while brushing our teeth (that would be the educational effect) but there’s a fair chance we’ll inspect the bristles of our toothbrush from now on for signs of having been marked with a troubling strangeness.

Before Present. Exhibition at the Villa du Parc in Annemasse until 22 September 2010. Works by Edith Dekyndt,_Jimmie Durham, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Nicole Hassler, Katharina Hohmann, Véronique Joumard, Renaud Layrac, Didier Marcel, Dan Perjovschi and Dan Peterman.
http://www.villaduparc.com

(1) The original, “ça gaze?” has both the sense of “how are things?” and is a play on the verb “gazer” which is literally “to gas”.
(2) In 2007, enthralled by Cy Twombly’s work, a young woman kissed one of his paintings on display at the Yvon Lambert Collection in Avignon, leaving the imprint of her lipstick on the canvas and thus claiming responsibility for a gesture both amorous and artistic. Cy and Yvon were not at all receptive to this argument.
(3) Another play on words: “téléphoné" here has the sense of “predictable” or “visible a mile off” but comes from the verb “téléphoner”, “to telephone”.
(4) Revenge of the Lawn, Richard Brautigan, 1962-70; Blue Velvet, David Lynch, 1986.

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