Dashed Expectations

A gallery or museum installation by a director whose films have become touchstones of the culture is a fashion. But it also has the potential for a true frisson, like a freeze-frame in one of their own films - a displaced experience where an audience that is by rights captive shifts to the contingent viewing of the visitor. Paris in June offered an auteur round-up, with three shows by three of cinema’s most admired and vital voices: »Voyage(s) en utopie« by Jean-Luc Godard at the Centre Georges Pompidou, »¡Almodovar: Exhibition!« by Pedro Almodovar at the Cinémathèque Française, and »L’ile et Elle« by Agnès Varda at the Cartier Foundation. These three projects nicely triangulate the options available to masters of their medium unable to resist the economy of the installation.
In very different ways, the Almodovar and Varda projects succeed by embracing the institutional frame. Never shy of the comic, Varda and Almodovar deploy either well-honed video vocabularies, as in the case of Varda, whose first-person essays have an organic connection to the framing of discreet installations; or unadulterated affirmations of the self, as in the case of Almodovar, who cast the galleries of the Cinématèque into his own celebrity bio-pic, complete with bronzed baby shoes, his first typewriter and camera, even his bedroom furniture. In contrast to these playful and self-possessed celebrations, the Godard project was a stern and fuming accumulation and should be by now a familiar story of his battles with the Pompidou. Indeed, it was familiar before seeing it, as I could not avoid hearing a consensus that the Godard show was a disaster and a sham.
Occupying the Pompidou’s South Gallery, Godard’s installation starts with a disclaimer, both emphatic and redacted: »The original piece, ›Collage(s) de France‹, has been cancelled due to disagreements between Jean Luc Godard and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Instead, Jean Luc Godard and the Centre Georges Pompidou have agreed to present a different project: ›Voyage(s) in Utopia‹.« From there we enter the first of three large galleries offered to, then reclaimed from, and finally abandoned to Godard. At this point, we can imagine two projects in one: the first comes with the well-gossiped fore-knowledge of Godard’s budget of one million euros, the absence of that budget’s visible manifestation, and the consequent resignation of the show’s curator Dominique Paini. This, we can imagine, is Godard’s testy refusal to offer what we come to expect from all of his work: a searching investigation of and for the image as a creative and political act.
The second version we can imagine is no less characterized by the absence of an image, but replaces it with an exercise in scatter familiar from younger installation artists (Hirschhorn, Rhodes, Sze), whose interventions upon the space of the museum might fairly, if generally, be described as exploded images. Despite the presence of objects such as a large model train, dozens of potted house plants, security fencing and scaffolding, the prohibition against images here is motivated by the despairing and damning sense that has characterized Godard’s work, albeit less withholdingly, since the outbreak of the Yugoslavian war. Godard’s meditations on war are well echoed in the installation, but also committed to their uselessness. To borrow the terms he offers in his 2004 film »Notre Musique«, from a scene in which he conducts a class on war and cinema, what we’re left with here is only the reverse shot, only the darkness.
One imagined version of the show omits the image as an obstinate and greedy refusal, the other enforces a prohibition of the image as a text without the implied redemption that an image can offer. Either way, the locations of this voyage are blind to their own histories, as any utopia would be, and doomed to repeat them.
The installation was to be the centerpiece accompanied by a massive film retrospective and a catalog of previously unpublished documents. From the catalog one can see how the planned »Collage(s)« appealed so strongly to the institution. As Paini says, »Jean-Luc Godard’s collaboration with a museum comes at a point in his œuvre when his work is not reaching the size of audience enjoyed by his early films, whilst his name has never been so frequently evoked and celebrated.« Indeed, the »Collage(s)« project grew out of a proposed seminar for the College de France based on his Histoire(s) du Cinema series, and which the prestigious university declined. With his archaeology of 20th-century history and cinema rejected by the university, the museum seemed the next logical place to go. Paini describes how the planned project »… absorbed the world into its space. Past and present were swept together to form a journey: the traces and evidence piled up, came together, were attracted to one another, and clung together in a furious clash of images… This exhibition was realized in its ideal form in the various models.«
The models Paini refers to are architectural models (»maquettes«) that Godard himself fashioned for nine chambers from crude and expressive materials. As remnants of the original »Collage(s)«, the models rest in the first of the three large halls making up »Voyage(s)«, titled »Avant Hier«, »Hier« and »Aujourd’hui« respectively. The models anticipate some of the final, full-size elements with a few overlapping arrangements, but without any of the historical progressions anticipated by Paini. Perhaps the most telling aspect is how video appears in the show.
Video appears in the first gallery on tiny, miniature monitors embedded in the walls, with whispering sound, showing the newest commissioned works, as though the scale of the models was being preserved for us, the full-sized visitors. In the second gallery we get slightly larger monitors in the wall showing scenes from his middle-period films, while stacks of large plasma screens lay strewn on the floor unused with their store tags still attached. In the last gallery we arrive at some functional Ikea furniture and a few large video screens, but they are only showing pornography or television sports or Black Hawk Down: the chamber of »aujourd’hui«. The most significant videos are the least visible while the most banal are the most available in the show. A couple of borrowed paintings, including an iconic original Matisse, are tucked low on to a wall, but unlit and matched for scale and position with a plasma screen showing Lemmy Caution. The accumulation of preposterous elements, elevated banalities and dashed expectations starts to feel palpable.
Returning to Paini’s description of the proposed exhibition that will never be, we learn that the unrealized videos were to form and accumulate over time in the museum as part of the show. Godard proposed to assemble the collisions and montages that were the basis for his seminar on history and cinema over many months, using both static and time-based works, evolving the installation into a video production studio as well as an architectural progression. Instead, »Voyage(s) in Utopia« devolves video with an accumulated sense of history’s vanquished, a museum effect exercised upon video until it is neutralized by the excess of television or disappears entirely.
One of the titles in a new, concurrent DVD release of Godard shorts is »The Old Place«, a 1999 commission from MOMA, New York, on art and the 20th century. In the video, Godard and Miéville studiously avoid the topic of the museum as institution in fulfilling the museum’s commission. Recalling films by some of Godard’s peers, we can trace the image of the museum as a provider, a source of collective, if selective, knowledge: the repositories of memory for Chris Marker, the places of happy discoveries made by Varda’s avatars, stores of essential Russian myth for Tarkovsky, origins of serialized knowledge for Peter Greenaway, the record of tragedy for Resnais. Yet, as Chris Marker reminded us in a well-circulated cartoon after seeing the installation, Godard’s most lasting image of the museum is the race through the Louvre in his 1964 film »Band of Outsiders« — otherwise the extensive and passionate examinations of art and artifacts in his films never privilege the institution where they are found. As much as the Pompidou museum may have imagined itself folded into Godard’s time-based process, and Paini’s text shows this to have been an irresistible potential, it is the static fact of the museum, the old place, which has never been incorporated into Godard’s actions.

»Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946 – 2006«,
Centre Pompidou, 11. Mai bis 14. August 2006

»¡Almodóvar: Exhibition!«,
Cinémathèque française, 5. April bis 31. Juli 2006

Agnès Varda – »L’île et elle«,
Fondation Cartier, 18. Juni bis 8. Oktober 2006