| NEXT ISSUE  |  BACK ISSUES  |  CONTENTS |

The second of three Printemps de Septembre to be curated by artist Jean-Marc Bustamente breaks away from the annual festival’s traditional focus on photography, with Cindy Sherman the medium’s only representative. Sadly, her contribution is one of the least interesting: a series of self-portraits as clowns from 2004 seeming old and somewhat tired. Their installation, however, in the circular base of Le Chateau d’Eau is reminiscent of a merry-go-round and conjures up the dizzying sensation of the show’s title ‘Vertiges’.

Used merely as a guiding thread in this very personal selection of artists, the vertigo concept is most clearly articulated in the exhibition at Les Abattoirs, which opens with a bang with Jean-Luc Moerman’s psychedelic wall paintings. Inspired by the sinuous patterns of tattoos and incorporating neon and pierced plexiglass, Napalm.002 and Tabularasa Hurricane (both 2005) spill over from one wall to another, and seep across the floor. As with each work presented in the festival, Moerman’s are given room to breathe and are carefully contextualised by their neighbours, here installed between Philip Taaffe’s recent layered optical canvases and the reworked Pop of David Reed’s brushstroke paintings, such as #318-2 Hermaphrodite II (2004). These lead the visitor into a room of Siobhan Hapaska’s extraordinary sculptures moulded from opalescent fibreglass (reminiscent of Patricia Piccinini’s Car Nuggets (1998)). Hapaska’s amorphous shapes combine high technology with natural fibres, whilst echoing certain forms of Henry Moore’s oeuvre. The bear-like Change (2002) is a large grey form carrying a bundle of firewood on its back, juxtaposing the impersonal fibreglass with the simplicity of a traditional human chore. Sunlight (2004) is a round yellow form balanced on a hay bale plinth, sporting a plume of corn ears that emerge from polished bullet cartridges.





Fred Tomaselli’s collages in the subsequent gallery also combine the natural and synthetic; elaborate compositions unite images of insects and butterflies with anatomical drawings and hallucinogenic pills, all encased in layers of resin. Following the chemical sublime of Tomaselli’s work, the visitor discovers Chloe Piene’s automatic drawings and powerful Blackmouth video (2003), whose raw expression provokes an emotional vertigo. The short film depicts the artist in a dark wood, smeared with dirt, gyrating as if in torment, the images accompanied by a slowed audio track that distorts her cries into deep animalistic howls.

Equally mesmerising is Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s Single Wide (2002). A single looped shot spans from a distressed woman in her truck, round the trailer-house she has just abandoned and into which she is about to ram her vehicle, back to the woman as she carries out this act of frustrated vengeance. Its claustrophobic intensity and endless re-enactment defy cinematic plot conventions, creating a hypnotic tension.

Bridging the gap between narrative and structure, Franz Ackermann’s multi-dimensional installation Songline (1998-2002) – encompassing Brazilian Modernism, suicide bombers, a religious icon slideshow, and optical illusions – is presented alongside the sober work of little-known Stéphane Benoît. Beginning as small sketches based on computer games or snippets of architectural diagrams, the works are transferred onto plaques of lacquered aluminium, usually featuring one or two flat panes of colour, recalling the work of Toby Paterson.

Downstairs, Les Abattoirs is dominated by two imposing structures. Björn Dahlen’s Black Hole (2005) is a static reverse explosion, a constellation of furniture and found objects spiked on long pieces of wood. His interest in the mythology of science and DIY approach to realising a cosmological phenomenon lend the work a humorous touch. Franz West’s immense Agoraphobia (2005), a knobbly pink worm of a structure that appears to have escaped from a Roald Dahl story or Philip Guston painting, successfully tackles the enormous gallery space, thus conquering the fear suggested by its title.

Elsewhere in the city, the festival presents Anne-Marie Schneider’s sexy line drawings, potent with immediacy (Untitled, 2005). Unfortunately her paintings fail to maintain such poignant simplicity, tipping over into kitsch faux naivety. Similarly disappointing is Stéphane Calais’ & the moon is a cheese (1999), an ineffectual labyrinth of polystyrene panels shaped to resemble slices of Edam.

However, the weakest elements of the Printemps are its flirtations with New Media, particularly Jennifer Steinkamp’s decorative wall of computer animated flowers (Jimmy Carter, 2002) and Diana Thater’s wishy-washy Pysche (2005). In the latter, which is as feeble conceptually as visually, the windows of the Espace EDF Bazacle are covered with blue filters ‘to echo the blue of the Garonne [river] outside’ and sad-looking pot plants are bathed in orange light. A bank of screens presents close-ups of the rare Monarch butterfly, while large video projections capture this species in flight. Thater seeks to reawaken our sense of the sublime in nature through its technological presentation, but, unfortunately, the resulting installation is neither beautiful nor awe-inspiring.

Gerhard Merz’s minimal intervention at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (Archipittura, 2005), however, is the epitome of understatement. Fascinated by the idea of flawed beauty, Merz draws from a text by Gertrude Stein concerning the rarity of masterpieces. He installs white neon strip lights on the ceiling of the school, in circular formation in the entry rotunda and in two parallel lines running the length of the main gallery. The lower two-thirds of the walls in this space are painted with white gloss, the shiny surface dotted with numerous black hairs, as if from the paintbrushes. This beautiful space is at once clinical and soiled, perfect and faulty, the unyielding light revealing the inherent failure of the artist’s work.

ZOË GRAY

 | NEXT ISSUE  |  BACK ISSUES  |  CONTENTS |