FILM/ART:
Travels to Dystopia : JLG in Paris

By Andréa Picard

Either way, Godard wins. Pitted in the French media against curator Dominique Païni, Le Grand Commissaire of the film-art world, whose flapping, self-important cape might conceal part of his face as he plots and plans, the scruffy, growling artist can claim victory. Not that this should have been a contest, hélas, but the duel was conceivably inevitable. The sacrosanct secrecy behind the Pompidou’s exhibition carte blanche curated by JLG, his first ever gallery show, was to be Païni’s swan song, his famed farewell to Paris’s most vital contemporary art space. In his tenure, Païni single-handedly introduced filmmakers into Beaubourg’s museum galleries—his Hitchcock show, co-curated by fellow Frenchman and current Montreal resident Guy Cogeval, is oft-quoted in cinephile circles. It’s doubtful that “Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences” left an indelible mark on the art world, however. (Certainly, from its conception was parsed the modus for Cinémathèque française’s second exhibition in their new Bercy home, on the pop-inspired Pedro Almodóvar. Their inaugural show was the father and son undue dialogue, “Renoir Renoir,” which was universally panned as facile and forced.) The Païni-Cogeval Cocteau show was manifestly less successful than Hitchcock (but more so than Renoir squared if we are to take up Godard’s vim for ranking in Vrai faux passports), with its overreliance on ephemera, Cocteau’s miniscule, illegibly cursive notes filling endless display cases. The emphasis on mirror images and reflection was inadvertently exacerbated by the array of reflexive glass through which the papeterie had to be read on one’s own squinting face. One left that show with a cramped neck and an aching back, regardless of age, the degree of discomfort depending rather on one’s height and endurance for yet another Cocteau love letter—the best, of course, being the one written to his aging mother.

Never mind homages and coincidences: the Godard show is so clearly not a Païni show (though it is arguably made up of both homages and meticulously orchestrated coincidences). It’s cluttered, disorderly, obnoxious, loud, discomfiting, and quite conspicuously devoid of art, apart from three paintings, all hung together in the first room (AVANT-HIER or Salle -2): a Matisse, a Nicolas de Staël, and another, unidentifiable to me. (One wonders how difficult it would have been to borrow Manet’s Olympia, a Godard favourite, from across the Seine.) While originals are few, the exhibition contains countless references to Modigliani, Manet, Titian, Goya, Duchamp, Dali, Brancusi, Vermeer, Rafaello, possibly even to Pollock and Rothko; “possibly” being the operative term in this sketch of a show, “possibly” never being possible in a Païni show. Godard’s three “chantiers” are littered with his tools, the red and black Sharpie markers, the photocopied and scratched-out, rejected and altered texts. On one level it’s more kindergarten than college—the pun that reportedly initiated this “Voyage(s) en Utopie” when Godard sought to transpose his ideas for a Collège de France course on cinema and its complex, storied relationship with the history of the 20th century. When the course proposal was rejected, Païni’s invitation in 2003 to mount an exhibition at the Pompidou provided a public outlet for Godard to expose his ideas, and to a broader audience than the academic setting would have provided. It’s quite likely that the Collège, with its pedagogical rigour and historical repute, would have remained the context of choice for Godard, with its promise of legacy and lueur. From this institutional superciliousness was born “Collage(s) de France,” a Godardian play on the academy that snubbed him. Yet the exhibition’s announcement proved to be premature, as this JLG-conceived show commissioned by Païni would see the light of day only in maquette-form by the former, and in a printed description in Cahiers du Cinéma by the latter, who sought to legitimize the costly project when signs of its failure abounded and their 30-year friendship had come to a very public end.

The April issue of Cahiers is a fascinating thematic number devoted to cinema’s excursions into the Art world—art with a capital A, as the French say. Cahiers reports this as a Historic (yes, capital H!) turning point for the seventh art, now worthy of acceptance by and praise from the museum world. While feeling ten years overdue, the topic is very de rigueur in Paris, where major museums like the Orsay and Louvre are commissioning films (Ange Leccia’s La Déraison du Louvre provides the cover image, creating a bookend effect with Laetitia Casta’s L’Oréal ad on the back) and the Almodóvar show is receiving international critical acclaim, as did the “Paris au cinéma” exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville.

Meanwhile, to paraphrase Jean-Michel Frodon, the Pompidou is completely overrun by film. In addition to Godard’s “Voyage(s) en Utopie,” the entire second floor of the Beaubourg is dedicated to their enviable film collection, mounted in a show curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud and entitled “Le Mouvement des images.” It’s a greatest hits ensemble of important avant-garde works from Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Len Lye, Hollis Frampton, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Rodney Graham, Rose Lowder, Christoph Girardet, Matthias Muller et al, in conversation with works of art dealing with lightplay, temporality, sequential editing, and collage/montage. From these one hundred or so works, three or four are actually projected on celluloid, the rest displayed digitally in flattened versions of themselves, though many will be projected in their original format down in the cinema where they ostensibly belong; meanwhile, Brakhage’s luminous Chartres series is projected in its original 16mm format in a fully-lit room, against a wall erected in order to create a black box to house a Nan Goldin slideshow. Need I say more? The cinema is being given its due by the museum world, yes, but the flagrant disregard for the filmic qualities of these works (those on display are naturally ones which thrive on formal experimentation, giving them their “art-like” status) is shocking.

But this was of no concern to the Cahiers. What mattered was the mounting controversy behind the forthcoming Godard show, the Commissaire having been fired or grown fed up with the project. Written in early February—three months before the scheduled opening—Païni’s reputation-defending, Adorno-quoting account takes up five pages in the magazine, a “what should have been” tale to which Godard will never reply, at least not in print. His silence says more than the curator’s obvious and somewhat sad attempt to protect his professional reputation in light of his grandest failure. Perhaps Païni really believed in the theoretical importance the puzzling show would have assumed, that the materialization of JLG’s ideas could have existed as artifact or works of art. He should have known he was suggesting the impossible, despite his avowal of history and beauty (both of which should no doubt begin in caps).

When the show finally opened almost two weeks after its official launch date, an eerie quiet marked its entranceway, the anticipation and controversy having seemingly dissipated into ambivalence. Attendance was very low that first week, the show’s numerous, scattered objects far outweighing the patrons. The ticket-takers wore grins as they welcomed patrons into the show, which actually begins outside of the gallery rooms where the title of the exhibition is imbued with signs of its aborted state. Naively scrawled on the wall in red marker is “Voyage(s) en Utopie À la recherche d’un théorème perdu JLG 1945-2005.” “Perdu” is written in black. “Archéologie du cinéma Collage(s) de France” below it is crossed out with a big, black X. The gesture seems both severe and playful, paradoxical adjectives which Godard has unremittingly satisfied throughout his career. Iconic images from Vermeer and Rafael are crudely pasted onto the wall, as is George Bush “en Cinemascope.” Welcome to “Salle -2,” a negative designation for Godard’s first gallery room. But before entering, there’s a disclaimer: “Le Centre Pompidou a décidé de ne pas réaliser le projet en raison de difficultés artistiques, techniques et financiers qu’il présentait.” This “he said/he said” written on the wall reoccurs later in the show. On a small shelf, the two discarded red and black sharpies are proudly displayed in a show of modesty and Dada flair. Thus begins the voyage into the debacle, an anti-show by an uncompromising artist who could not pull off his ideas within the established limits—what Le Monde called a “grandiose sabotage.” Godard should photocopy this histrionic statement and paste it right next to Racine’s Principe de la tragédie, like a reverse shot belonging to “le livre noir du contre-champs.”

The collage of images (of the scissors and glue variety, as well as a dizzying, holographic use of space), which assault, incite and compete with one another, is no different than that found in his solo basement project, the brilliant and epic Histoire(s) du cinema (1989-98). The same concerns are present here: Hollywood domination, Palestine, Bosnia, Fascism, political oppression, film history, love of cinema, passion in its various terms and guises, and the grander myths and narratives like History, Beauty, Tragedy, Love, Art. The 1200 square meters of exhibition space is divided into three rooms, which the artist (or had we best say filmmaker?) has labeled AVANT-HIER, HIER and AUJOURD’HUI. Considering the exhibition was three years in the making, that’s one year per room: “Trois ans de travail pour rien”, Païni has publicly declared; “X+3=1” Godard has written on the wall. Everywhere there is confrontational imagery and objects of restraint: fences, grates, bars, a dirty, broken chair, a soiled bed, discarded, dusty monitors. These Duchampian readymades further substantiate the claim for Dada, though there is a marked Surrealist ethos to some of the objects which seem to appeal to our subconscious, not entirely dissimilar from the antics of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, but without the goo. Mini-manifestos are launched through the crucifixion of classic works of philosophy. With its invocations of Freud, Georges Bataille (La Part maudite précédée de la notion de défense), Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson (Matière et mémoire), Werner Heisenberg, Karl Kraus, Emanuelle Levinas (Le Temps et l’autre), the show can be read as an ambitious intellectual thesis (take your pick, there are many options), or as a heavy-handed poke at the Collège de France. Both wear thin very quickly, or, to quote Godard responding to Anne-Marie Miéville’s criticisms in Après la reconciliation (2000), seen playing on one of numerous flatscreen monitors, “C’est pénible à la longue.” Exhausting indeed. “Nous retournous dans la guerre ainsi que dans le collège de notre enfance.” Name that philosopher. Name that clip. Name that tune. All of which Godard has, at one point, used in his filmmaking career. Thus, a classic case of French mise-en-abysme and a game of identification which is frankly better served in his cinematic essays, where the numerous and complex layers create a sculptural and deeply moving form of poeticism.

The original models for “Collage(s) de France” were made by the artist himself (yes, with glue, scissors, corrugated cardboard and other modest means) which he had hoped to see realized in lifesize form by the équipe Pompidou. Sadly, they compete with all the noise and rubbish around them, and certainly hold the key to what should have been Godard’s historic foray into the museum world. But they are oddly positioned and difficult to see, some of their proposed objects semi-realized behind bars, filmed and projected on tiny screens. Of course, had they been installed in proper display cases and lit appropriately, the anti-institutional and revolutionary spirit would have been suffused. This, conceivably, would have been worse for the artist, whose sense of rebellion is not one of a brat, as many have suggested, but rather one whose sense of hauteur exceeds that of his hoped-to-be presenter. The exhibition is rich in swipes at the Pompidou, which spent three years and likely an exorbitant amount of money to mount this show. Godard has certainly made a mess, though unlike Antoine de Baecque, I don’t believe he’s proud of it. On the other hand, Godard maintains his status as artist by not agreeing to compromise. Païni told Le Monde that he was ready to make concessions and present an imperfect yet exciting exhibition. Godard refused. He can claim victory, but at what cost?

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Film/Art: JLG in Paris b
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