Like the clubs of the petty gentry that once surrounded the Sun King, the French art scene is centralised in Paris with closed, narcissistic circles of power. At their margins: avant-garde art centres, ambitious foundations, curatorial working groups or project spaces organised by artists. Sometimes oriented towards open exchange, sometimes focused on internal working processes, they form a vague field where new forms sprout at the edge of the aristocratic acres of art that live from them without being aware of it.
At the car park
»I got to know your works 20 years ago at the art academy in Rouen. Today I was able to see them for the first time live.« The no-longer-quite-so-young man blushes, and the 68-year-old Franz Erhard Walther is embarrassed. His geometric textile sculptures, which need to be activated by visitors, are legendary. » I stopped showing them in the 1970s. At the start of the 1990s I started doing them again under pressure from museum people. Crazy: young people always think they are recent, but I did the works in 1966 or 1968.« The viewers, around 80 artists, critics, art fans, curators, art-centre directors, are enthusiastic about their »simplicity and precision«, as the artist Benjamin Hochart puts it. Walther’s important contribution to sculpture in motion cannot be found in the Centre Pompidou or the experimental Palais de Tokyo. It is found at the edge of a large car park opposite a polytechnic college, surrounded by the towers of a dormitory town with 21,000 inhabitants, 45 minutes southeast from Paris.
On guard in the vanguard
CAC director Pierre Bal-Blanc works in Brétigny-sur-Orge as an »incorrigible offender«: someone who is enthusiastic about art and who conveys this enthusiasm. He is much in demand and has just staged his performance overview »La monnaie vivante« in Tate Modern and an art-film programme in Centre Pompidou. He has turned the concrete cultural centre at the edge of the Paris suburban desert into a meeting place for the vanguard of the art field with works by Roman Ondák, Artur Zmijewski and Hans Walter Müller. Local politicians don’t much like the ambitious programme, which in their opinion is »only done for the Parisians«, and recently forced Bal-Blanc to tear down a work by David Lamelas. Now he is looking for other possibilities, and Paris will possibly lose one of its top players – only a few people will notice.
Promotional trips
For many Parisians, the ring road »Boulevard Périphérique« is an insuperable obstacle. A handful of connoisseurs come to the exhibition opening at the CAC Brétigny in the special shuttle bus provided. A »broad audience«, collectors or art museum directors, let alone politicians for cultural affairs, are not to be found here. Despite this, the CAC is the nucleus of a new dynamism in Paris – a movement towards new themes and forms that is motivated by adventurous gallery owners, critics and curators who are open to discussion, and artists interested in research. Simple yet effective tools show their »secret publics« the way. The »TRAM« map lists 28 venues on the outskirts of the Île-de-France; the »Taxi TRAM« does tours to places like Vitry-sur-Seine, Noisiel and Saint Ouen-l’Aumône. Larger Paris institutions are also included: the Palais de Tokyo at the Eiffel Tower and the collectors foundation »Maison Rouge« near the Bastille, now even the Grand Palais with its megalophile »Monumenta« wants to be put on the plan – anyone who takes the trouble to get on the shuttle is enthusiastic and forthcoming. Everyone wants a public like that to visit.
Brothers
»Secret publics« are small peer groups that form around an interest or goal. Freud called such social groupings »primary mass«, a group »of individuals that have replaced their ego-ideal with one and the same object and have thus identified with one another in their ego«. They are held together by a horizontal distribution of energies, like a brotherhood: »it is not the descendents but the collaterals that first establish a lineage«, as Jakob Grimm, one of the most famous brothers in cultural history, put it. According to Freud, the brotherhood of the primal horde joined together to topple the father figure – also one reading of the French Revolution and its »fraternité«. In today’s Republic, the circles stand on the margins as the Freemasons did in relation to the royal court: they are a supplement, not a threat.
In secret
Distance is necessary to make processes of thought possible, to try out new things and even to fail. So it is a condition necessary to production to be »in secret« with regard to the market, networks and the public. In Paris »intra muros«, artists, curators and foundations have been setting up such working spaces: like the Bétonsalon, which has been opened not far from the new National Library with a connection to the university; or residence programmes carried out by partly private initiatives such as the »Dena Foundation « or the »Kadist Foundation«, which also has its own showroom. At present it is showing the continuation of »société anonyme«. The first part of this exhibition in the art centre »Le Plateau« was criticised for sometimes hermetic, visually inaccessible works. The curators Thomas Boutoux, Natasa Petresin and François Piron want to give scope to the artists’ research processes and activate the exhibition space as a thought generator. Their enthusiasm is contagious only to a point, and even the information flow of their actions only targets a few recipients. In fact, »secret publics« consist less of recipients than of protagonists.
Springboard
Not a few of them jump from the edge into the big art pool of Paris: François Quintin, the director of the Collège, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne art centre in Reims, has just gone as gallery director to Renos Xippas in the Marais district. Jocelyn Wolff, start-up gallery owner in the east of the city, introduces Franz Erhard Walter to the capital with a show in May. The 38-year-old Evarist Richer, who has been ignored by the French scene for an incomprehensibly long time, has just given his first solo show in the Schleicher&Lange gallery. The gallery owners, interested in conceptually mature works, had recruited him after a spectacular exhibition in »La Galerie « in Noisy-le-Sec, a city villa surrounded by low-rent apartment blocks in the »distant banlieue« in the north-east of Paris. Director Marianne Lanavère wants to »put the works at the focus« instead of staging »self-reflexive exhibitions« and dares again to ask big questions with art.
Free spaces
Richer’s work starts out from similarity; with his work on scientific and aesthetic forms, he leafs through the picture atlas of modernity. In keeping with this, he is taking part in »Ultramoderne«, a group exhibition in the Breton art centre »Passerelle«. »I went from Berlin to Brest«, its director Ulrike Kremeier said, »because there is something to do here.« In the free spaces at the periphery, she sees a chance of working more in-depth with artists without pressure to succeed. With a handful of directors from other art centres, she is working on a partnership between the DCA, the association of French art centres, and the ADKV, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (Federation of German Art Associations). An independent profile and international partnerships are also a survival strategy: the art centres, often in a precarious situation, are looking for distinctive positionings that bring them the potential for promotion offered by the »secret publics« - and, in the long term, make their work noticeable from Paris as well. Initiatives at the margins – of the city or of public interest – are the driving force behind the motor of art not despite, but because of, their location. The future of French art is growing on vague terrains, for explorations are most productive where nothing is yet clearly defined.
www.cacbretigny.com
www.tram-idf.fr
www.betonsalon.net
www.denafoundation.com
www.kadist.org
www.frac-champagneardenne.org
www.noisylesec.net/index.php?id_rub=galerie
www.cac-passerelle.com
www.dca-art.com
Translated by Timothy Jones