After too many years of luxuriating only in its own past, attitudes in Paris
are changing. Following the success of the highly acclaimed Fondation
Cartier, architect Tako Ondo has already begun work on the refurbishment of
the former Renault factory that will become the Fondation Pinault.
Meanwhile, former Grenoble gallerist Antoine de Galbert has recently
announced that he will be opening his own foundation in the Bastille area in
2003. Foremost among all this activity, on 21 January Paris saw the long
awaited launch of the Palais de Tokyo, a centre for contemporary art that
aims to foster inter-disciplinary creation and to engage fully with the
implications of multiculturalism. All things considered, it seems that Paris
is seeking a new approach, one that brings to an end the conflict between
private and public interests that has dogged French cultural policy for so
long.
With its centre-stage positioning across the Seine from the Champ de Mars,
the Palais de Tokyo was one of the few buildings of the 1937 International
Exhibition that was made to last. Designed by a committee of architects in
the neo-classical style, it was paradoxically destined to become a showcase
for modern art. Officially opening in that role in 1947, it remained the
Musée National d’Art Moderne until the opening of Beaubourg (the Pompidou
Centre) in 1977. Since then, it has hosted various institutions and events,
including the Paris Biennial until 1982, the Musée d’Art et d’Essai, and the
National Film School.
It was in 1999 that the Ministry of Culture decided that the site – actually
the west wing only, as the building is shared by the Musée d’Art Moderne de
la Ville de Paris – should be dedicated to more contemporary manifestations,
and a new role for the Palais de Tokyo was born. Placed under the presidency
of France’s senior art critic, Pierre Restany, two directors – Nicolas
Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans – were appointed to set up and run the project for
the first three years.
At 39, Nicolas Bourriaud is the founder of two periodicals (Documents sur
l’Art and Perpendiculaire) and the curator of numerous international
exhibitions, including the 1993 Aperto in Venice. Born in 1960, Jérôme Sans
is an outside curator at the Milwaukee Institute of Visual Arts, has curated
in France and abroad, and was a teacher at Central St Martins College in
London, 1998-99. The directors’ backgrounds are not only international and
inter-disciplinary, but pointedly non-administrative; something of an oddity
in a country where public institutions are generally run by academic and
often wholly Franco-centric individuals (significantly, the French for
curator is conservateur). Even more unique, for France at least, is the
freedom they have been given to define the project.
The Palais de Tokyo is an experimental centre without a permanent
collection. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘it represents a desire to move
on to something else in Paris. It sets out to reflect French and
international creation, and become an echo of all forms of creativity, a
site where art will be in dialogue with other disciplines such as music,
fashion and design. It undertakes to be a place of creation rather than
consecration.’ In many ways it parallels the ICA in London or New York’s
PS1, something suggested by the presence of Alanna Heiss, director of PS1,
on its board of administrators. Both international and diverse, the board
includes artists, critics, museum directors and collectors, reflecting the
Palais de Tokyo’s openness to a diversity of cultural influences.
In fact, the way things are shaping it may become the experimental site for
Beaubourg, in much the same way as PS1 relates to MoMA. Not that anything
has been officially stated, but the intention is clear. Since its recent
refurbishment, Beaubourg has been redefining its role and has tended to
unify its various components; despite everlasting internal conflicts, it is
slowly taking on the mantle and shape of a more formal, museum-like
institution. Bearing in mind its enormous collection (of which over 4,500
pieces are loaned every year) and its huge blockbuster shows, ‘one cannot
help thinking that Beaubourg is getting standardised’, as the art writer
Jean-Michel Tobelem observes.
So it seems that the Palais de Tokyo is destined to take over one of
Beaubourg’s original key functions, namely that of being a risk-taking site
of artistic creation. Instead of dividing this task between several
independent departments, however, the Palais de Tokyo maintains a singular
centre of decision-making, thus hoping to avoid those familiar conflicts
born out of small group interests and the usual career building tendencies
of the large fonctionnaire-type institutions in France.
The job of rehabilitating the Palais de Tokyo was given to architects Anne
Locaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. Well-known for their low cost buildings,
they took advantage of the existing structure and created a varied, mobile
and changing space. In order to explain their general intention, Vassal and
Locaton make a comparison with the Djemaa El-Fna Square in Marrakesh:
‘Located in the city centre, permanently in motion, the square recreates
itself and changes throughout the day and night, at the whims of its
actors’.
The reference to North African culture, like the building’s name, echoes the
Palais de Tokyo’s desire to be open to ‘outside cultures’. This is further
evidenced by the first artist invited to work in the Salon, a discreet area
to be recreated by an invited artist or designer every six months. The first
Salon has been designed by Meschac Gaba, a Banyan artist who has installed
the eleventh room of his Museum of Contemporary African Art: the Lounge,
part of a developing virtual project begun in 1997. While relaxing in Gaba’s
‘lounge’, visitors are confronted by both African art and that of Western
institutions, with the intention of inviting the audience to question the
role of the modern museum and its mechanisms.
The opening hours of the Palais de Tokyo are of paramount importance in its
attempt to enter the twenty-first century. The centre is open from noon to
midnight for, as Jérôme Sans puts it, ‘only tourists, people of private
means or artists can afford to visit a museum during the day. Our opening
times must be the leisure hours, like cinemas and theatres, and not the
times of administration.’ Likewise, Bourriaud enjoys ‘the excitement that
occurs after nightfall. Being open at night should be obvious since it’s the
time when art openings take place, when the art crowd usually meets up, so
why not make it the usual time for experiencing an exhibition?’
This marks a significant shift for Paris, a city that still suffers from a
tendency to see art as something precious to the point of being sacred, a
view largely originating in the post-war cultural politics of André Malraux
who, according to philosopher Jean Lauxerois, ‘created the artefact of an
autonomous and remote world, which exists as a negation of reality’. In tune
with the public’s leisure time, the Palais de Tokyo invites a more informal
and less institutional understanding of how we might experience art. It
might also prove theorist Thierry de Duve right, when he posited that the
accomplishment of postmodernism will only take place once art is thought of
as but one component of the entertainment industry.
Initially the main exhibition – a group show comprising twenty emerging
French and foreign artists – will last four months. Neither a thematic show
nor simply a sequence of solo exhibitions, the choice of artists will help
determine the broad lines of the Palais de Tokyo’s programme for the years
to come. In the words of its opening press statement: ‘Unlike their
predecessors, these artists do not undertake a direct critique of the
society in which they live: since that society has “gone crazy”, they just
borrow its defining features and exaggerate them’.
Other solo shows and projects are also taking place throughout the centre,
commissions such as Mélik Ohanian’s Island of an Island, loosely conceived
around a volcanic island that appeared off the coast of Iceland in the
sixties, and Navin Rawanchaïkul’s super(m)art, whose first major solo
showing in Europe offers an overview of art, past and future. Each month,
outdoor commissions – the Tokyoramas – invite the public to literally share
the subjective pathway of an artist or designer through the local
neighbourhood. Lastly, an important education programme has been set up,
with artists in residence and a training scheme for would-be curators.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this project is its funding. The
Palais de Tokyo receives State support to an annual tune of 1,753,000 euros,
yet even this is not sufficient to fund its entire programme. Hence the
centre is also supported by private sponsors, such as Bloomberg and the
Caisse des Dépots et Consignations; who together will be providing an
estimated additional 1,784,000 euros.
Interestingly, State and private funds are evenly matched, and this
near-balance has become a landmark in the history of French cultural policy,
for the State has always been suspicious of hidden corporate interests in
the private sponsorship of the arts. For years, art supported by private
investors has been considered somehow ‘impure’, the common belief being that
art would lose its freedom the day it fell under the singular rule of the
marketplace. As the editor of Artpress, Catherine Millet, observes, ‘one
frequently hears gallery owners complaining about [public] institutions
forbidding them to exhibit an artist at the same time as them, and, if they
did, to expect forthcoming bad relationships’. The apparent inertia that has
dogged French art for years can thus, in part at least, be explained by an
over-dominant State that, while suffering from a shortage of means,
nevertheless has had difficulty reconciling public and private interests,
and has as a consequence stifled private innovation.
The opening of a public institution both willing and able to work with the
market represents an important move by the French State. However, although
this indicates what Bourriaud defines as ‘a wish to move on’, it does not
mean this new contemporary art centre – and by implication the whole
emerging scene – is to be simply market-oriented. While many admit that the
dominance of the State has to be balanced by private investors, Jérôme Sans
explains that ‘in London you also have an official art: that of the market.
Today, if you don’t belong to the yBa trend, you do have to struggle to
carve a niche for yourself. We don’t want to fall into this trap either.’
Bourriaud sums up the Palais de Tokyo’s answer to this dilemma: ‘During the
cold war, several countries called themselves the Non-Aligned States and
decided they did not want to belong to either of the two Cold War blocks.
They took advantage of both systems and yet kept their autonomy. That is
exactly our ambition.’
But perhaps the final word should go to the Palais de Tokyo’s Honorary
President, Pierre Restany. An astute commentator on art since the early
fifties, Restany maintains that what is at stake is nothing less than ‘the
survival of free communication amidst a generation which is directly
confronting all the temptations of media standardisation’.
The Palais de Tokyo opened on 21 January 2002. The main inaugural exhibition
continues until 12 May, withMélik Ohanian (until 17 March), Navin
Rawanchaïkul (until 31 March) and Meschac Gaba (until 8 September).
www.palaisdetokyo.com
Antoine Baralhé is a freelance writer and critic based in Paris