Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Acquaalta

Palais de Tokyoby Joseph Nechvatal

Published at Hyperallergic as Mourning the Death of Art on the River Styx

http://hyperallergic.com/232412/mourning-the-death-of-art-on-the-river-styx/

Acquaalta exhibition view, photo: Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie

Xippas, Paris; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York & Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin. ©

ADAGP, Paris 2015

If you already know that a shadowy entertaining wizard has recently been swimming in

the heart of art, a small boat excursion in the dark sounds more like summertime

diversion than enlightening art. And indeed it is.

Presented during the summer season of the Palais de Tokyo called Le bel aujourd'hui

(from a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé), Acquaalta refers to the annual flood in the

Venetian lagoon. In Paris’s Acquaalta, we enter into a goth macabre-light relation to

flows of shimmering cultural entertainment. This time as a damp, dark, overshadowed

corridor of mortality, one that raises certain gloomy considerations concerning existential

loneliness within increasingly immersive spaces and technologies, and the risks of

constant entertainment as the condition of contemporary art. Is there any life after death

for entertainment free aesthetics? How can it be that the climate crisis, the political

immigration problem, the biodiversity crisis and the deepest financial crisis since 1930s

in Europe have done so little to undermine the supremacy of entertainment in art?

Acquaalta exhibition view

This amusement theme in place, a black water sensory and auditory experience is to be

had in the French old wave relational art tradition. At the moment, on the other side of

the esplanade of the Trocadero at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris is a year

long (ending May 15th, 2016) presentation of “House of Horrors” (Le Train Fantôme)

(2010), an American Appropriationist adaptation of this interactive aesthetic of spectacle

and anti-intellectualism by the recently deceased Elaine Sturtevant. It is a simulation of a

fun fair ghost train ride, replete with skeletons, bats, mournful organ swirls, Ku Klux

Klan characters and Frankenstein's monster. Donated by the artist, who passed away in

Paris at age 89, and her dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, the work has now been added to the

permanent collection.

Acquaalt’s sham Venetian canal is more of this sort of relational art-as-fun-house stuff

that plays with theatrical lighting; this time of the small carnival variety. The French

artist from Sète, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, (who represents France at the 56th Venice

Biennale with “revolutions” (2015) (three mobile trees)), has flooded the Palais de Tokyo

with blackness and water, creating a nearly mysterious extravaganza: a dark lake where

visitors are invited to row black boats in the semi darkness, surrounded by fleeting human

silhouettes. The route on foot or by boat ends on an island at the end of the stream/lake

where a pile of seats/sculptures are available for visitors to repose and watch the

haunting/phantasmagoric image noise projections amplified on the walls. Images of

obfuscation are captured from participants and transmitted live as wobbly silhouettes.

The notion of randomness is at play here as well because the visitor might find her

picture on the wall shimmering and multiplied, or not.

Acquaalta exhibition view, photo: Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie

Xippas, Paris; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York & Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin. ©

ADAGP, Paris 2015

Acquaalta exhibition view

I’m no gondolière, so I chose to merely take a lakeside promenade. The inescapable

thought reference is to the Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman of Hades who rows dead

souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the

world of the dead. Yet looking at it reminded me of that lovely figure skater turning loops

on a frozen slab as part of L’Expedition Scintillante – Acte 3: Untitled (Black Ice Stage)

at Pierre Huyghe’s Centre Pompidou show last year. Though smaller in scale, the

location of the Boursier-Mougenot show also pressed mental comparisons to another

generation X artist, Philippe Parreno’s vast but fey exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out

Of The World, also at Palais de Tokyo last year (the year of Nicolas Bourriaud’s pinnicale

of curatorial influence, before recently being fired from his head post at the École

Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts).

I must say that Acquaalta felt obscure and half dead (in a decent way) mostly because of

the minimal drone accompaniment. Boursier-Mougenot is known for placing music in the

middle of his work and Acquaalta appropriates the intensity of the downtown drone

music scene that developed around La Monte Young. One hears hints of the drones of

Pauline Oliveros, Sunn O))), Eliane Radigue, Charlemagne Palestine, Yoshi Wada, Phill

Niblock and the younger J.-P. Caron. I say half dead because Boursier-Mougenot’s

version of dronology (zombidrone, as he calls it) lacks intensity and listening staying

power.

The wispy images appearing on the walls are those of visitors processed by software that

captures contour lines. Thus visitors “comes to haunt the place” and are “inseparable

from the work,” according to the artist. As such, curator Daria de Beauvais has allowed

Boursier-Mougenot to create a moist cliché of psychic space that appears to me conjoined

with the lost 60s-70s humanist dream of the decline in the art object's sequestered,

fetishistic standing. That is fine for summer play lands, like Disneyland’s ride The

Haunted Mansion. But when the tide turns and the trendy relational flood retreats,

Boursier-Mougenot’s temporary playful exhibition will most likely be washed away from

the shores of the history of art, leaving hardly a ripple.