Dominique Ghesquière, terre de profondeur, 2013
(b. 1953, lives and works in Paris)
Originally presented at the CIAP de l’Île de Vassivière, the work of Dominique Ghesquière brings back a vanished landscape, flooded in 1950 to create an artificial lake. Made out of earthenware, the dried soil pushes up like a buried memory resurfacing. It is the memory of this soil still gone. The ground beneath our feet always covers another layer: past, ancient, original. There is a paradox within the materials: the ground with its friable aspect was made using a very hard material, allowing one to walk on it without damaging it. The network of cracks and crevices makes walking difficult, forcing us to watch where we step. For homo erectus, long used to walking with his head in the stars, gazing into the horizon, it is suddenly necessary to lower one’s eyes. The ground leaps out at us, a reminder of a moment when we ran close to Mother Earth’s surface, our noses burrowed into its odors. terre de profondeur [earth of depth] (2013) lays before us, underneath us, like the memory of that animal phase before verticalization in which Freud saw the beginnings of the process of civilization.
Willy Kautz, IL H O O Q, 2013
(b. 1975, lives and works in São Paulo)
The animated film IL H O O Q, displayed at the entrance of the Palais de Tokyo sets the tone chosen by the curators of the exhibition “All That Falls.” Why have artists, throughout the centuries, always been interested in the concept of the
fall? For his lecture during a conference in 2013, the philosopher and curator Willy Kautz chose to show an animated video rather than speak. This video takes as its point of departure the iconic romantic painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818) [Wanderer above the Sea of Fog]. After jumping into the clouds, suddenly the pictorial imagination fades into a photographic document. The wanderer falls on top of Yves Klein while he is performing his timeless Leap into the Void, causing a double suicide. Willy Kautz symbolically puts an end to the contemplation of the romantic subject and humorously describes “ the fall of romantic tradition, by creating a narrative in which the contemplation of the sublime is overtaken by its own aesthetic myth symbolized by the suicide of the ultimate reflexive subject. ”
Agnieszka Kurant
(b. 1978, lives and works in New York)
Agnieszka Kurant’s three little meteorites fall endlessly above their bases. They question the space between the two, asking, what is the base’s object when it no longer holds anything? Here, their rectangular forms suggest the skyscrapers that compose the New York City skyline, a sky defined by architecture – a sky now subject to speculation, where the air itself is for sale. This is part of what Kurant’s set of meteorites speak of – air rights. People don’t pay their neighbor for the right to build, but for the other’s commitment to not build further, so as to preserve the buyer’s “view”. As such, the skyline has become a negative, non-buildable space: the air of New York is symbolically fenced off by an invisible battery of contracts. Is everything for sale? The possibility of a collapse remains a possible freedom in this moment of “breathable” eternity – the hope for an event. It is also a tribute to Gino De Dominicis (1947-1988), whose numerous attempts at magnetic levitation and flight between 1969 and 1970 made an impact on the artist. Taking a cue from Duchamp, it is about weighing the value of things and caring for gravity by making catastrophe possible. Late capitalism, for Kurant, has brought on the dematerialization of art, where we literally sell nothing.
Urs Lüthi, Selfportrait from the Series “ART IS THE BETTER LIFE, 2002
(b. 1947, lives and works in Munich)
Art history is in danger of falling flat on its face, and not just because it’s a heavy weight to bear. Every artist is a weightlifter who must heft the excessive mass of art that precedes him in order to find his place. It’s as if he has to perform what would be a superhuman clean-and-jerk – holding up the entire pillar of art and himself. Now that’s a sport! And Urs Lüthi is a gold medalist. Art is indeed a dangerous exercise, having become an extreme sport on Sunday, 27 November 1960, when an artist decided to jump from the high tower of art that assails the heavens – when Yves Klein made his Saut dans le vide [Leap into the Void]. His flight, as gracious as it is eternally suspended, has since prompted in us the anxiety of art as a fatal plunge. An historic coup and pelvic thrust, that day, Yves Klein brought the fall into art history and introduced the world to the vertigo of art. It isn’t surprising that his name appears above Velasquez, Dürer, Mondrian, and Picabia, atop the colossal pile of books that Urs Lüthi, the scholarly athlete of art, carried with his own arms and legs. Before this photo, one feels that he is right – that it takes serious sporting shoes to be an artist these days.
Michael C. McMillen, The Entropic Taxi; Final Destination, 2014
(b. 1946, lives and works in Santa Monica)
Strange, rusty doors have been placed here and there. Above one of them hangs a sign that reads “ELSEWHERE.” Indeed, on pushing open these doors, the visitor enters into another world, both familiar and strange. Is it a laboratory or an artist’s studio? We are surrounded by a variety of materials, books, boxes, bottles, chains, old suitcases and the remnants of obsolete technologies. Little floating moons receive the passing images of a vanished world. In what seems like a landscape from a waking dream, an improbable vehicle has fallen in from another world. The dreamlike impression is reinforced by a sense of uncertainty regarding the stability of the scene. Echoing the ghost cinema of Room 37—a screening room in the Palais de Tokyo that remained walled in for years—short films are projected onto unusual surfaces. Thus the Grande Lune [Great Moon] seems straight out of a Georges Méliès film, or is it the sphere from the famous Prisoner Number 6. These familiar objects are illuminated by troubling gleams of light, creating tiny breaches offering a temporal fall.
Deimantas Narkevicius, Once in the XX Century
(b. 1964, lives and works in Vilnius)
“Statues also die,” as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker said in their documentary from 1953. How many Lenin statues have thus died since the fall of the Berlin Wall? The downfall of tyranny is often accompanied by falling stones. Only yesterday one saw protestors in Kiev toppling over statues of Lenin as they danced. Deimantas Narkevicius made a film in 2004 about a statue of Lenin being taken down that once stood in the center of Vilnius, using Lithuanian television archives and an independent journalist’s video footage. The images of the overturned statue symbolized the fall of the Soviet bloc and the liberation of the people. The artist plays these images of the dismantling backwards. What we see is a crowd raising a statue of Lenin. As it is uprighted, the stone colossus comes to expose the blindness, the debasement and the submission of a people for years on end. In the end, Once in the XX Century (2004) erects a monument to the 20th century closed eyes. In order to open them. How many statues of Lenin are still standing in the world?
Daniel Pommereulle, Tobogan
(1937 – 2003)
Daniel Pommereulle is a precocious artist whose journey was marked by the history of his century. He abandoned painting in 1962 to become an actor for Éric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard. As a young conscripted soldier, he served out his military service during the Algerian war. Close to Guy Debord, he participated in May 68 with his tract À la violence [To Violence]. Called an “objector” by the critic Alain Jouffroy, he assembled “charged objects” that he sometimes called Urgences [Urgencies] (1967). Often out of sight or reach, they target internal scars, pointing to the violence of a status quo and encouraging revolt. His Tobogan [Slide] (1974) was one of the works shown in the exhibition Fin de siècle [End of the century] in 1975 at the CNAC (National Center for Contemporary Art). The monumental steel curved tube gleams in the shadows, its slippery surface is an invitation to slide. With a triangular piece of metal protruding at one end of it, the sculpture is sharp, incisive, trenchant like the blade of a thought. Here, the only outcome would be the fall onto a razor blade.
Jimmy Robert, Sans titre (Ompdrailles)
(b. 1975, lives and works in Brussels)
A large black and white photographic print rests on a wooden bar fixed to the wall. The photograph represents The Death of Ompdrailles. This monument of Belgian sculpture symbolizes both the beginning of colonialism and the homoerotic subtext of the novel that inspired the sculptor. Ompdrailles, The Fighters’ Tomb (1879) by Léon Cladel tells the story of Ompdrailles, a man of androgynous and virile beauty in love with an unattainable woman, and the object of hatred and envy from his fairground partners. The bronze cluster, commemorating the death of the hero carried by his trainer who worshiped him amorously, was made by Charles Van Der Steppen in 1892. The exacerbated muscularity and the heroic nudity refer to the historical monument genre. But what history is being shown here? Another history—hinted at—transpires and produces a shift. On the other side, the artist’s body falls and slides along the base of the statue.