Douglas Gordon at the Rodin Museum

Here Star Trek plays a kind of cameo in the context of the Rodin Museum's summer program. The exhibition, Works in Progress: Rodin and the Ambassadors, will reactivate the reinterpretation of the influences that the French sculptor has indelibly projected onto contemporary art. Douglas Gordon's video work from 1995, Star Trek: Predictable Incident in Unfamiliar Surroundings, is the only work presented individually in a small room on the first floor of the Hotel Byron. The reference to the renowned The Kiss (one of three versions in marble is on the ground floor) is more than evident, in particular in the curators' intentions, who see this video installation by the Scottish artist as a play of references with the idea, shared with Rodin, of working with series, fragments and repetition. Douglas Gordon proceeds with a sampling of rare Star Trek kiss scenes in which Captain Kirk is variously involved in lucky iconic clichés—which were then re-filmed, slowed down, and set in a playback loop—which generate surprising plasticity; just as the figures in Rodin's marbles are repeatedly approached and then abandoned. Rodin described his own iconic sculpture, not very enthusiastically, to Paul Gsell, "It's just a great ornament sculpted in a banal way which focuses on two characters instead of opening wide horizons to the dream."

Gordon confers upon the installation the overriding sloppiness of some of his own projects, setting up a run-down home-theater with the movie projector placed on beer cases. The little quirk refers to a French label that was very famous at the end of the 1800s but then fell into disgrace in the 1970s and is now the star of a lightning revival. The work still maintains the seduction of the images, rescued from the flows in which they are normally drowned; in Gordon's manipulation, Captain Kirk, either as seducer or seduced, becomes the silent subject of a contemporary monument to the libido of fictional heroes. In the museum courtyard, the exhibition extends this game of appropriation—this time introducing us to real monuments by the artist Urs Fischer. Starting from obscure biographical details, Gordon generates a large tribute to M.me de Ponty and her circle, Zizi and M.me Satin. The poet Stephane Mallarme is hidden behind the banality of the pseudonym with which he signed his food columns in late 19th-century fashion magazines.

The sculptures, painted bronze casts, are very similar to chewed gum that marked, and still mark, the artist's un-monumental aesthetic that has been present since his early beginnings. This group of sculptures prepares the viewer for a route that branches off into ten chapters: shaping, smoothing, assembling, combining, etc. In each of these, closer connections are created between the artists in the exhibition and Rodin's process-oriented approach.

From plasticity to texture, here understood as a skin in which Beuys's felts are compared to the studies of robes in the various versions of the monument to Balzac. Many small and precious masterpieces recovered from museum displays as well as from its fabulous holdings and from museum storage. It is a parade of curious works, in random order by Nauman (Butt to Butt), Broodthaers's eggshell assemblages and other very well-selected works by Twombly or Marcel Duchamp. The list is a long one of the other compelling 20th-century and contemporary artists that complete this bizarre diplomatic corps. Until September in the austere space in the rue de Varenne, different attempts at teleporting will continue in which the figure of Rodin unexpectedly reappears in the midst of cutting-edge artistic research.
Ivo Bonacorsi

Star Trek: Predictable Incident in Unfamiliar Surroundings
Musée Rodin
until 04.09.2011