En toute chose

The new season at the Palais de Tokyo is focused on our relationship with “things”.

This odd idea of objectuality is presented as a cross-section of artworks that are distinctly worlds apart, composed through excursions and forays into the lands of magic, uncertainty and the unbelievable. The anthropological exercise of artists and curators in the show aims to indentify contexts that orbit around the idea of the object without saying the actual word, which is very simple and recalls the most precise concept of artificiality. This flow of works and curatorial choices is organised in a sequence of solo shows that – by aesthetically contradicting each other – mount up to an inventory of pleonastic objects and redundant practices.

  The egg-hatching of Abraham Poincheval – like Dorian Gaudin’s attempt to make a group of chairs climb the stairs – appear as a metaphysical revival of well-known processes. They don’t so much refer to the Duchamp-style political gesture of celibate machines, but rather the reactivation of a convoluted act of seeing. All this is helped along by oversized technologies and shamanic acts of faith. It is a strained return to Dadaism, yet loaded with semantic and ideological manifestations that, a century later, become reassuring techniques, purged as they are of any bold avant-garde temptations. Without particular torments, the object dominates the many chapters of an extensive exhibition in which the cult of the machine reintroduces surrealist sermons or mantras just like in modern-day trade fairs.

This position seems to be deliberately assumed in the installation by Emmanuelle Lainé, titled Where the rubber of our selves meets the road of the wider world. Despite being a freeze-frame of her work on architecture as a mental prosthesis, it is reminiscent of other fortuitous encounters such as the episode with a sewing machine liaising with an umbrella on a dissecting table. Given that the overall atmosphere is decidedly inspired by a theology of objects, and Lautremont truly seems like the curatorial skeleton in the cupboard, we duly find increasingly perfect sequences of titles. “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, for example, is the group-show title taken from a short poem by Richard Brautigan and distributed on the streets of San Francisco in 1967.

This is how the curator Yoann Gourmel reformulates the “The Feeling of Things” exhibition that he co-organised a few years ago at Le Platea art centre slightly further out in Paris’s suburbs, reapproaching the idea of making accessible theoretical spaces. Around the corner there’s the nearby Far East, in keeping with the aesthetics of impermanence that underpins the Japanese mono no aware attitude of much contemporary curating. At the Palais de Tokyo, the fashion is either to stage the total voids choreographed by Tino Sehgal, or exhibitions laid out (like tables) à la John Cage. In the case of “All Watched Over”, more than the show itself, what emerges is a magnificent list of fine works such as those of Mika Tajima, Maria Lund and Lee Kit. These artists deftly combine refined materials with a conceptual game composed with the essential parameters of contemporaneity. Their works feature an abundance of algorithms and jacquard fabrics, where the tension between internal and external presents viewers with a perverse trickery on their sentiments. And we as viewers feel at ease because we are educated and intent on migrating to other entertainment platforms. Inevitably, there is a clear affinity here with works that flirt with social media, hoisting up their faith in the numerical and without forgetting to copy a materiality inherited from interior design.

This section curated by Gourmel, which is also the most convincing, includes several other treasures. The captivating filmic pieces by Isabelle Cornaro and Marjorie Keller impose a showdown on the cinematic medium via the symbolic and economic value of objects. In the form of a triptych, Cornaro presents beautiful shots and compositions following her work’s recurrent practice of playing with the idea of decoration and fetish. Meanwhile, Marjorie Keller’s archive-like film titled Objection (1974) engages with the political aspect of daily life by mixing horror and documentary in a catwalk of objects from her childhood home.

The two artists Taro Izumi and Mel O’Callaghan, who enjoy the support of Sam Art Projects, confront the idea of spectacularity and the productive means needed to underline simple concepts. They appear to lend the season a vibrant heart, a spirit to believe in that qualifies the validity of the whole seasonal project. Taro Izumi chooses the path of parody and has Japanese culture on his side. As in Takeshi Kitano’s less successful films (and there aren’t many), it is humour that disrupts our habits and sets the scale of turbulence in reality. Everything – performance, video, sculpture and nonsense – is mixed with the idea of not emerging from our familiar space, and especially not from the space of an exhibition. Mel O’Callaghan, meanwhile, opts for the idea of a set, almost as if the contemporary had already forgotten the rituals and undertakings of Matthew Barney. The Australian artist appropriates the perilous acts of bird’s-nest collectors in northeast Borneo. If the body is a possible place of revelation and transcendence, his installation recalls the cleansed scene of much contemporary opera infused with seasonal aestheticism to ensure the survival of timeless music. Simpler actions and practices – such as those of Emmanuel Saulnier in Black Dancing – offer reconciliation with a spatial design that is far more in tune with the scale of these surroundings. What’s missing from the exhibition and many of these works is a poetic exchange between thought and situation. The production of objects ends up erasing the wonderful presence of the silence of things. A small Giorgio Morandi in any room of a museum will have already confronted us with the same problems in decidedly more accessible formats.

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