review of céleste boursier-mougenot: acquaalta
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Art review of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: Acquaalta at Palais de TokyoTRANSCRIPT
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot
Acquaalta
Palais de Tokyoby Joseph Nechvatal
Published at Hyperallergic as Mourning the Death of Art on the River Styx
http://hyperallergic.com/232412/mourning-the-death-of-art-on-the-river-styx/
Acquaalta exhibition view, photo: Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie
Xippas, Paris; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York & Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin. ©
ADAGP, Paris 2015
If you already know that a shadowy entertaining wizard has recently been swimming in
the heart of art, a small boat excursion in the dark sounds more like summertime
diversion than enlightening art. And indeed it is.
Presented during the summer season of the Palais de Tokyo called Le bel aujourd'hui
(from a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé), Acquaalta refers to the annual flood in the
Venetian lagoon. In Paris’s Acquaalta, we enter into a goth macabre-light relation to
flows of shimmering cultural entertainment. This time as a damp, dark, overshadowed
corridor of mortality, one that raises certain gloomy considerations concerning existential
loneliness within increasingly immersive spaces and technologies, and the risks of
constant entertainment as the condition of contemporary art. Is there any life after death
for entertainment free aesthetics? How can it be that the climate crisis, the political
immigration problem, the biodiversity crisis and the deepest financial crisis since 1930s
in Europe have done so little to undermine the supremacy of entertainment in art?
Acquaalta exhibition view
This amusement theme in place, a black water sensory and auditory experience is to be
had in the French old wave relational art tradition. At the moment, on the other side of
the esplanade of the Trocadero at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris is a year
long (ending May 15th, 2016) presentation of “House of Horrors” (Le Train Fantôme)
(2010), an American Appropriationist adaptation of this interactive aesthetic of spectacle
and anti-intellectualism by the recently deceased Elaine Sturtevant. It is a simulation of a
fun fair ghost train ride, replete with skeletons, bats, mournful organ swirls, Ku Klux
Klan characters and Frankenstein's monster. Donated by the artist, who passed away in
Paris at age 89, and her dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, the work has now been added to the
permanent collection.
Acquaalt’s sham Venetian canal is more of this sort of relational art-as-fun-house stuff
that plays with theatrical lighting; this time of the small carnival variety. The French
artist from Sète, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, (who represents France at the 56th Venice
Biennale with “revolutions” (2015) (three mobile trees)), has flooded the Palais de Tokyo
with blackness and water, creating a nearly mysterious extravaganza: a dark lake where
visitors are invited to row black boats in the semi darkness, surrounded by fleeting human
silhouettes. The route on foot or by boat ends on an island at the end of the stream/lake
where a pile of seats/sculptures are available for visitors to repose and watch the
haunting/phantasmagoric image noise projections amplified on the walls. Images of
obfuscation are captured from participants and transmitted live as wobbly silhouettes.
The notion of randomness is at play here as well because the visitor might find her
picture on the wall shimmering and multiplied, or not.
Acquaalta exhibition view, photo: Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie
Xippas, Paris; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York & Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin. ©
ADAGP, Paris 2015
Acquaalta exhibition view
I’m no gondolière, so I chose to merely take a lakeside promenade. The inescapable
thought reference is to the Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman of Hades who rows dead
souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the
world of the dead. Yet looking at it reminded me of that lovely figure skater turning loops
on a frozen slab as part of L’Expedition Scintillante – Acte 3: Untitled (Black Ice Stage)
at Pierre Huyghe’s Centre Pompidou show last year. Though smaller in scale, the
location of the Boursier-Mougenot show also pressed mental comparisons to another
generation X artist, Philippe Parreno’s vast but fey exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out
Of The World, also at Palais de Tokyo last year (the year of Nicolas Bourriaud’s pinnicale
of curatorial influence, before recently being fired from his head post at the École
Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts).
I must say that Acquaalta felt obscure and half dead (in a decent way) mostly because of
the minimal drone accompaniment. Boursier-Mougenot is known for placing music in the
middle of his work and Acquaalta appropriates the intensity of the downtown drone
music scene that developed around La Monte Young. One hears hints of the drones of
Pauline Oliveros, Sunn O))), Eliane Radigue, Charlemagne Palestine, Yoshi Wada, Phill
Niblock and the younger J.-P. Caron. I say half dead because Boursier-Mougenot’s
version of dronology (zombidrone, as he calls it) lacks intensity and listening staying
power.
The wispy images appearing on the walls are those of visitors processed by software that
captures contour lines. Thus visitors “comes to haunt the place” and are “inseparable
from the work,” according to the artist. As such, curator Daria de Beauvais has allowed
Boursier-Mougenot to create a moist cliché of psychic space that appears to me conjoined
with the lost 60s-70s humanist dream of the decline in the art object's sequestered,
fetishistic standing. That is fine for summer play lands, like Disneyland’s ride The
Haunted Mansion. But when the tide turns and the trendy relational flood retreats,
Boursier-Mougenot’s temporary playful exhibition will most likely be washed away from
the shores of the history of art, leaving hardly a ripple.