8/14/2019 Neil Mulholland - Bertrand Lavier and Phillipe Parreno

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Bertrand Lavier, Muse d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 31 st May 22nd September 2002;Philippe Parreno,Alien Seasons, Muse d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 31st May 15th

September 2002.

Contemporary French art appears to be on the threshold of crisis, rudely awakened frombureaucratic slumber by the Right who, encouraging debate on museum privatisation, seek to

revoke massive increases in state funding introduced in 1982. These attacks on culturalstatism threaten French endorsement of the Euro Kunsthallen model, and may shift emphasisaway from neo-conceptual practices. Additionally, Nicolas Bourriaud perceives a waning ofcritical spirit in French culture. Committed to the work of emerging artists, Bourriaudsdressed-down Palais de Tokyo Site de Cration Contemporaine may serve as a corrective.Equally, it could exasperate the problem by pampering the few peripheral French art practicesthat circumvent urokunst. Siting an alternative space in the 16th arrondissement is notanironic gesture in the face of horizontal cultural coordination. To make matters worse, thePalais de Tokyo has been parading Parisian squat art; an alternative scene that has little tooffer other than misplaced hippie sentiment and attendant expressionist relativism. Despite itsfaults, the inclusive approach of the Palais de Tokyo does at least suggest that internationalprofile can no longer be the only desirable cultural aspiration.

As such, the Muse d'Art Modernes concurrent solo exhibitions of Bertrand Lavierand Phillipe Parreno may amount to nothing more than nostalgia; Lavier being a major Frenchfigure of the 80s and Parreno, of the 90s. Lavier engages with the intersection betweenmuseological endgames and consumer culture. His concerns may be semiotic, but his work isprimarily ironic and parasitic rather than erudite. Composition rouge, verte et jaune (1989)looks like a hard-edged abstract painting, but turns out to be a section of wooden sports floor.The semiotic implications of allegedly pure signifiers are probed only for the hollow applauseof the converted. Such works are the cultural products of an 80s France that understood therole of museums. Knowing his place, Lavier found these desublimating puns endlesslyamusing. A series ofRelief-Peintures (1987-91) are constructed from portions of brightlycoloured prefabricated building faades; Lothar(1999) is a pylon snapped off by Frances1999 hurricane painted silver to resemble a Modernist steel sculpture. Only when Lavierleaves literalism and uncooked juxtapositions behind do his museological musings becomeworthwhile. Walt Disney Productions 1947-1984 - an arrangement of paintings and sculpturesbased on a cartoon of Mickey Mouses visit to a Modern art gallery - works on the level of thepun certainly, but it has awesome psychological force. This realisation of a virtual space istruly nauseating; green and yellow walls enclose bright biomorphic polyester resin sculptures,mobiles and silvery abstract cartoon cibachromes. Laviers recent cibachromes,Harcourt/Grvin (2002) unite the glamorous chiaroscuro developed by Harcourt photographystudio in the 1930s with the gauche celebrity of the Muse Grvin wax museum. Taste apart,Harcourt and Grvin are equally accomplished mythologisers of Parisian clich. Byphotographing waxworks of contemporary figures such as Vladimir Putin and ArnoldSchwarzenegger in the now unfashionable Harcourt style, Lavier not only mocks the epochalpretensions of such individuals, but pricks at the heart of representations canonising power.More pressingly, Lavier prophesises the avaricious populism that we might expect if French

museums are privatised.

Parreno, like Lavier, is respectful of the institution, taking just as great care to producean exhibition grandiose in aspiration and solemn in tone. Parreno is also drawn todiscordance and conflation. The opening work of the exhibition, his short 35mm time-lapsefilm of growing Norwegian vegetation El sueo de una cosa (2002), is projected onto a RobertRauschenberg White Painting(1951) every 4 min.33Secs. (John Cage, 1952). The longpainful wait through Cages music while staring at Rauschenbergs equally uneventfulmonochrome is finally rewarded with breakneck rendition of genesis. Parreno hereappropriates time and space rather than material culture, he does not use objects butmemories, collective hallucinations, the dream of a thing. In this way he avoids Lavier scynicism, circumventing vulgar materialist questions that museological art tends to raiseverbatim, focusing instead on the structures of feeling that permeate culture as a whole.

Parrenos vision of the world is more nuanced, fragmented and estranged since he has faithin the ability of the imagination and our biochemical selves to reconstruct semiotic and spatialrelationships.Alien Seasons (2002) a video projection of a cuttlefish camouflaging itself by

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changing colour to match its surroundings can be read as a metaphor for the means ofsubterfuge by which Parreno leads his audience into an alien environment constructedaccording to his wishes. The shows final work Crdits (1999), extends this metaphor to afalse dnouement. A collection of coloured plastic bags hang from a tree planted in wasteground near a 1970s housing project. The luminous bags filmed under relentlessly changinglighting conditions, flutter in the wind and rain to the accompaniment of electric guitar by

ACDCs Angus Young. The sound, lighting and mise-en-scne continuously alter our readingof the video: extra-terrestrial, utopian, haunted, grunge, dystopian, stage-set, childrens game.Blaming the government for Frances allegedly low international profile may not be thesolution, for such exhibitions, like life, are movies without cameras, and such movies have nodirectors.

Neil Mulholland, Edinburgh, October 2002