Building the Revolution

Narkomfin Communal house © Richard Pare 

Former soviet architecture is monumental, industrial and cold and that melancholy makes me wonder how life was before the revolution ? 
One photograph by Richard Pare captures almost by accident the loneliness of a communal house in Moscow : with its dinning room and its pilled turquoise walls, the reproduction of Raphael's Sistine madonna above the chimney, the little Pushkin statue and the faded flowery cloth on the table, this apartment is infused with the passage of time, testimonies for a lifetime not spent in leisure but working in factories. 

Pare's photos of Power stations, derelict buildings and abandoned rooms now standing like post-apocalyptic background with their obsolete machines and futuristic enginery brings to mind scenes of surreal work conditions. 


Brazil © Terry Gilliam

Mind-altering spaces

Alice in Wonderland © Jonathan Miller © BBC

Everything is so queer today ...
if I am not the same then the next question is who in the world am I ?
Ho ! That's the big puzzle : who am I ?
says Alice, while sipping at the "drink me" bottle.

Tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, peyote, kava or betel seeds : the cultural differences between what is legal and what is not (cannabis grown in England is illegal but prescribed as medecine in California), and the thin line between drug and medicine somehow allow mind-altering substances to permeate cultural habits and re-define moral ethics. 
Governments not only play a part in the drug trade, from the history of opium transport between China and England to the funding of the recent conflict between Afghanistan and the West, the drug trade also shapes the world by building empires (like the british one).

Laudanum #5 © Tracy Moffatt © L. A. Galerie - Lothar Albrecht

Before the 1920's Drugs Act, poppy was legally grown for its medicinal properties, provoking the mingling of drugs' discovery with medical research and the spreading of risky substances in laboratories and pharmacies : children coughing syrup containing opium was sold in pharmacies, along with eye drops and dental kits containing cocaine; Sydenham's Laudanum, a tincture made from morphine and codeine, became popular as pain relief in the 17th and 18th centuries, bringing the hallucinogen experience to victorian homes. 


Mescaline drawings © Henri Michaux

Artists self-experimenting with psychedelic drugs and hallucinogens hunt art and literature. Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium eater in 1821 relates an accidental addiction to Laudanum while curing pain. Beaudelaire's Les paradis artificiels or Lewis Carroll's stories under mushroom influence inform what Aldous Huxley calls a new art of seeing the world; an altered spatial experience made visible by Henri Michaux automatic/ seismographic mescaline drawings. 


Phonokinetoscope © Rodney Graham © MUDAM

By staging Albert Hofmann cycling through the Tiergarten in Berlin on the day he discovers LSD, Phonokinetoscope re-creates the first trip under chemical hallucinogen, a mixture of vivid colours, distorted sounds and recurring thoughts where senses melt into one another.














Shulgin's Laboratory © Michael Rainer

And then there is Sasha Shulgin, the grandfather of exctasy who spends the 70's and 80's setting up a laboratory in his californian home.
Thanks to a license on the behalf of the Drug Enforcement Administration that gives him the right to possess and synthesise the chemical of MDMA, Shulgin invents and experiments with more than 150 drug compounds. 
Research conducted on psychedelic drugs in the sixties is linked to the treatment of depression and post traumatic stress disorder, an aspect of MDMA still invested today by underground therapists like Shulgin.
After trying mescaline, psylocibin and exctasy, Shulgin saw drugs as tools for the mind; a critical thing in his view since our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit.

A flock of finches

© Celeste Boursier-Mougenot 

Once, I walked from the chaos of a noisy street into the cool darkness of a church and sat to meditate : from the silence of the sacred space emerged the creaking harrowing sound of a chair sliding along the floor. 
Orchestrated by electro-magnetic captors installed outside the church, the chair was following the movements of the street's passers-by : it's with an apparent economy of means - a chair, an invisible system -, that Celeste Boursier-Mougenot uses the acoustic of objects for his soundscapes.


From here to ear © Celeste Boursier-Mougenot © Peter Whyte © Xippas gallery

The Curve gallery is now showing his last work From here to ear.

Passed a metallic-chain curtain, the gallery opens onto a seaside promenade plunged in semi-obscurity. On the walls are videos of closed-up hands playing guitar. The sound that emanates from the videos doesn't fit the visual experience but reproduces the videos' amplified signal. In immersing confusion, electric guitars can be heard at the far end of the gallery which builds anticipation.


From here to ear © Celeste Boursier-Mougenot  © Xippas gallery 

The display reveals a set of musical instruments used as feeding apparatus while a flock of 40 finches is repeatedly fleeting back and forth in a fascinating manner. 
Landing on the strings of amplified basses and guitars and perching on the top of cymbals to feed and drink, the birds transcend the space, filling it with a cascade of sounds.
While deambulating around the space, the viewers contribute to the birds' motion agenda so that the combination of the two flows determines the musical pattern. The delicate choreography of the birds contrasts with the wild sonorities induced from the guitars : the fragility of their hypnotic dance questions our human scale , challenges our presence in the room. If connections inevitably occur, viewers never truely interact with the birds; an invisible force almost separates us from their relentless activity, until the soundscape initiates a fleeting point, an atemporal window between human and animal realms.


© Celeste Bousier Mougenot

From here to hear was previously shown for the Estuaire in Nantes, a shipping harbour between river and ocean. 
As Celeste suggests, beyond principles of chance and hazardous beauty lies a desire to find less subjective ways to compose music, such as observing - and re-thinking - life's diverse currents of activities as auditive matter.
His sensory landscapes mirror nature's sacred geometry to reveal processes of harmonic and chaotic complexity. 

Thanks to Celeste Boursier-Mougenot.

Chasing Napoleon

Chasing Napoleon, Palais de Tokyo, 2010




























Unacabine (and the original in an FBI basement) © Kusmirowski

Why is Theodore Kaczynscki's manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, kept secret by american services alongside his memoirs ? what frightens so much the american system now he is strictly isolated under police control ?
To understand america's public ennemy,The Unabomber Book Collection by Dora Winter's collective builds up the escapist strategies while Robert Kusmirowski's Unacabine give existence to Kaczynski's flee into the wild.
The presence of his shed in the gallery space of The Palais de Tokyo challenges its legitimity : what makes the difference between the shed he lived in, the lived object, and the fake one ?
The door that asks to be opened, the incapacity to enter, deepen the mystery : the enclosed house encapsulates the uncanny nature of radicalism and extremism as a choice of life, freezing a time forever gone and inaccessible so that Kaczynski's motivations remain terra incognita, his borderline personality won't be framed.
The imperceptible nature of truth, frontiers between real and unreal, are reinforced by an empty plinth on the side of the shed where Thomas Friedman has placed A curse. The aura of the shed and the invisible malediction mirror each other's faith in the tangibility of the unseen.


Spider Hole © Christoph Buchel © Dazed & Confused  

Further away, we can climb inside Christoph Buchel's Spider hole and experience how to hide - like Saddam Hussein. 
Through the exhibition, escapists flee via devices - shed, hole, airvent, drain -, remain invisible from surveillance and control.


Nathaniel knows © Taro Nasu © Ryan Gander

Their disappearance suggests the existence of parallel dimensions : Ryan Gander breaks into the Palais de Tokyo as if coming from an heterotopia of wilderness, a lost hedonist paradise as the title Nathaniel knows suggests (Andre Gide, Les nourritures terrestres). 















Vorkuta © Micol Assael © Andre Morin

After the critical reference to american capitalism and Napoleon's imperialism, Micol Assael's re-enactement of a communist gulag mirrors the collapse of all systems : in the absence of the worker, Vorkuta's engine is empty of its potency and those who stood in the way of the regime have disappeared.

With Paul Lafolley who explores spatial dimensions, the escape from the constraining boundaries is total. Utopia becomes a suspension between the possible and the impossible, the invisible - or para-normal - recalls the existence of multivers and their "total non-existence". When he affirms having temporary left our physical world during an electroshock in 1961, it somehow reflects Kaczynski's enforced mind control during his C.I.A. funded studies as we wonder how much the stress tests impacted on his sanity.
The chosen year 1977 - that according to the Palais de Tokyo refers to a time when the Unabomber survives by himself in his cabane in the Montana, or when Paul Laffoley finishes his odyssey, refers above all to a time zero - the birth of punk -, an apolitical, subversive dimension and collapse of values.
Now if we go back to the beginning of the show, For the dogs (...) a prelude for piano by Erick Satie and David Allen is being played on such high frequency that it can't be heard by human ear : a sound piece, and a wave field that we didn't perceive, which does exist outside our realm of senses.

The Drawing room

Drawing 100 © Vong Phaophanit

Drawing can be related to performing when it records a process of external transformation, of self power, of cathartis. In the context of a residency, such as the Centre for Drawing, drawing for the purpose of drawing doesn't respond to a practical demand (like when drawing to keep record or inform) which makes it difficult to know how to start, even more difficult to know how to stop.
Artist Vong Phaophanit stretches the nature of drawing by qualifying it as " the most basic of acts (...) without a specific function ". He compares his position in the isolation of the Drawing room in front of the blank paper, to the one of being like a sponge absorbing external sounds breaking through the walls (sounds of the outside world, coming from the sculpture workshop area behind his room and from a nearby primary school). When looking at his drawings in that perspective it's very affirming of what they encompass, it makes it clearer to the eye that they recall sound vibrations and are " results of an experience of the unconscious (...), moments of vacillation between consciousness and unconsciousness. "