Letter from London: Parisian Break
June 8th, 2009 by Ben Street
Duane Hanson, "High School Student," 1990. Bronze, polychromed with oil, mixed media accessories, 70 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 17 inches. Courtesy Emmanuel Perotin Gallery, Paris.

(Disclaimer: this Letter from London is actually from Paris.)

Paris’s gallery zone, clustered for the most part around the Marais district east of the center, is so amazingly lovely and elegant that even the most vituperative conceptual art looks like a pithy witticism at a nineteenth-century dinner party met with high, tinkling nineteenth-century laughter. In the right light, it makes London’s galleries look snarky and scruffy. As Adam Ant so aptly put it, “Young Parisians are so French/not like me and you.”


Stephane Vigny at Galerie LHK. Photo: Ben Street.

Stephane Vigny, showing at Galerie LHK (as curated by Daria de Beauvais) shows an array of apparently unaltered building materials: a great concrete cylinder supported by museum-style brackets, corrugated plastic tubing sprouting from the floor, aluminum guttering snaking below the cornice. Vigny’s frank aesthetic is leavened by a lightly held, mordant wit. A door-sized sheet of glass leans against the wall, complete with obsolete peephole; masticated chewing gum lines the inside of the gallery window, like putty; a pencil sharpener is set into the wall at the artist’s groin height, called, inevitably, Glory Hole (yowch). While Vigny’s trenchant references to minimalism’s stony-faced employment of unadulterated industrial materials is sort of funny, if a bit passé (I mean, hasn’t minimalism been parodied enough?), where it succeeds is in his eccentric enjoyment of the doggedly ugly. The dominant sculpture—a prehistoric dolmen in concrete, made to appear like polystyrene—is slapstick archaeology, dumb as a brick, and perhaps unintentionally reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge.” It’s the visual equivalent of Nigel Tufnel’s explanation of the druids: “Nobody knows ‘oo they were…or what they were doin.’” Vigny’s work starts as a challenge and ends as a charm. It’s an old gag, but it still works.


Luca Francesconi at the Palais de Tokyo

Vigny’s concrete electricity pylons also feature in the new group show across town at the Palais de Tokyo. Laid as a pair in the entrance to the show Spy Numbers, they’re easy to miss around the artfully exposed concrete and laissez-faire industrial chic of the Palais (in fact, you sometimes have to double check that you’re seeing an interior design feature and not a Vigny). The Palais de Tokyo can veer towards curatorial contrivance, but Spy Numbers, which occupies a vast, split-level hall of the ground floor, holds together well, never forcing a relationship between works for the sake of a thesis. As a chronically myopic guy, I was drawn to Norma Jeane’s twin petri dishes, each containing 365 one-day contact lenses—a year’s worth of looking, crammed in like frogs’ spawn. Luca Francesconi’s To Lower the Mountains—four vaguely pyramidal chunks of rock displayed on pedestals—is actually the peaks of four Alpine mountains, lopped off by the artist on a hike and transported back down again, in a supremely quixotic act reminiscent of Hans Schabus. Willfully fruitless romanticism is ubiquitous in contemporary art, but Francesconi’s work manages to retain a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality that’s pretty rare in that particular sub-genre. Other works—cylinders playing recordings of the building’s electromagnetic activity, a complex apparatus designed to create an aurora borealis—make reference to the exhibition’s vaunted interest in mysterious radio signals and clandestine messaging systems, but that’s all for the birds. Spy Numbers brings a welcome blast of whimsy to an overserious institution.

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Posted in: Exhibitions, France, Installation, Letter from London, Painting, Sculpture Similar posts: Letter from London: Serra and Irwin , Serra at Gagosian London , New guest blogger: Elijah Burgher , Tim Hawkinson Down Under , Bantamweight Flickr Battle!