Centre Georges Pompidou Research Articles

Chaosmosis: Ethical, Artistic, Political Stakes

Abstract: This essay introduces the concept of "Chaosmosis," as employed by Jean-Jacques Lebel for the collective exhibition of the same name at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2024. Considering the intellectual origins of the term, from the writings of James Joyce, Umberto Eco, and Félix Guattari, as well as Lebel’s close friendship with Guattari, it explains how "chaosmos" offers an ethico-aesthetic paradigm with which to conceive of and continue the surrealist revolution.

From ritual to performance: Ta'zieh in Iran today

Abstract As a practice and experience, ta'zieh lies at the crossroads between ritual and performance, collective lament and recollection, literature, and folklore. Focusing on the experience of the spectator, this paper discusses ta'zieh's liminal status and diverse functions in Iran today. This study is based on observations gathered during fieldwork in the fall of 2017 in Tehran (Grand Bazaar), Isfahan (Falāvarjān), and Kashan (Nushābād). By way of comparison, we further reflect on a video installation by Abbas Kiarostami presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2003, which challenges common assumptions about the aesthetic and religious effectiveness of ta'zieh. The contrast allows us to elucidate how, by renovating ancient narrative forms, contemporary Iranian performing arts partake in the shaping of individual affects as well as communal emotions.

Review: Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect

Review: <i>Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect</i>

Lessons from outside the classroom: performance pedagogies in Portugal, 1970–1980

In the 1970s, Portuguese performance art exhibited itself as a language of experimentation in the local artistic scene with increasing public visibility. This prominence, which led to regular festivals and live events, was, however, not accompanied by any formal education or the integration of performance into the curriculum of art schools. In this article, we argue that the Portuguese approach to a performance pedagogy occurred mainly through a double path. On the one hand, through the convergent actions of two important critic-curators with relevant international connections in the area of performance, namely Egídio Álvaro and Ernesto de Sousa. On the other, through the singular activities of an association of artists, the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC), which had an institutional relationship with the students’ academy (Associação Académica de Coimbra) of the University of Coimbra. The CAPC takes the pedagogical and performative utopia of an art-life relationship a step further, at a time which shared the ethos of the democratic revolution of 1974. This generation collaborated with the international performance scene, not only developing projects with Wolf Vostell, in Malpartida (Spain), but also organising an important exhibition of Portuguese performance at the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (1984).

Who killed Marthe Bonnard? Madness, morbidity and Pierre Bonnard’s The Bath

Abstract There is an ongoing revaluation of Pierre Bonnard, beginning with a retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1984 and witnessed most recently in ‘Pierre Bonnard; Painting Arcadia’ at the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco 2016. The resulting body of literature, from reviews to catalogue essays, operates to subsume Bonnard within the modernist canon. However, the gender ambiguities in Bonnard’s practice problematize these attempts to read his paintings using modernist tropes. In particular, his depiction of his wife Marthe Bonnard in the bathtub does not fit easily within the genre of ‘the bather’. Across the Bonnard literature there has been the occultation of a specific woman (Marthe), replacing her with the Ophelia stereotype through an extension of Toril Moi’s ‘death dealing’ binarism. As a consequence of reiterated speculation regarding Marthe’s mental health she continues to be characterized as the neurotic woman disintegrating in the bath/sarcophagus. This article argues that the Bonnard literature creates a deathly and deadly porous woman. Reviewing the weight of gendered metaphoric language the article will offer a reading of the bath series and Bonnard’s late interiors based on the recognition of his difference – a difference that ruptures genre.

What a Performance

From the late seventies until her death, british-born writer and artist anna mendelssohn (1948–2009) authored fifteen poetry collections and at least two dozen short fictions and dramas, often publishing under the name Grace Lake. A consummate autodidact, Mendelssohn's passion was international vanguardism, a truth exemplified by the writers she translated: in Turkey in 1969, the poetry of political exile Nâzim Hikmet; from the late nineties, the work of Gisèle Prassinos, the surrealist child prodigy celebrated by André Breton. Mendelssohn's devotion to a modernist legacy situates her within the British Poetry Revival, a label applied to a wave of avant-garde poets that surfaced in the sixties and seventies. Given that she spent her last three decades in Cambridge, Mendelssohn can be further located on the margins of “that most underground of poetic brotherhoods, the Cambridge Poets” (Leslie 28). Mendelssohn's poems appeared in journals receptive to experimentalism, among them Parataxis, Jacket, Critical Quarterly, and Comparative Criticism. In the 1990s, Mendelssohn was anthologized in collections released by Virago, Macmillan, and Reality Street. Iain Sinclair included her in his influential Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996); in 2004, she featured in Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points (Salt Publishing, 2004) alongside John Ashbery and Susan Howe. Her most readily available text remains Implacable Art (Salt Publishing, 2000). Increasingly recognized in her later years, Mendelssohn gave poetry readings at the University of Cambridge, London's Southbank Centre, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among many other venues.

‘Le geste architectural’; Symbolism and authority in the case of the Centre Beaubourg

Architecture seems often imbued with the notion of “gesture.” The term is mentioned in abundance both when architecture is seen as a discipline and when it is seen as a social practice. Arguments about it can be found in an artefact as well as in an act of design. In this context it may be revealed as an object to be claimed (i.e., a fetish), or stand for a trace or a carrier of meaning. Thus, in a wider scope, gesture may be discussed as a persistent – if not necessary – theme in the field’s culture. This essay examines “gesture” as a mediator between society (including culture and power) and the practice of architecture. This will be discussed within the framework of the competition for the Centre Beaubourg (later known as Centre Georges Pompidou). The heated discourse revolving around the expression “le geste architectural,” including the proposal to design the building literally as an open hand and thereby as a gesture of offering, will be explored. We will thus show how “gesture” simultaneously creates a multifaceted existence: at once as a token of validity and a symbol of truth and beauty, as well as representing the very danger of banality. Furthermore, we will show how the Centre itself – to which was attributed the character of a feat – becomes a “political gesture” carrying the sperm that spawned the type of “heroic architecture” that is so distinctive to the Fifth Republic. Finally, we will revisit “gesture” as a token taking part in a conundrum where the modern ideal ends up substituting genuineness with genius; and we will see this binary relationship in connection to all the “gestures” we discuss in the case of the Centre Beaubourg. On these premises we will propose that, before we ask to define “gesture” by its content, it is important to see it first and foremost for what it does; namely, that it acts as a nominator, and thereby as a mediator, and even a weaver, of the collective between architecture and society. This shift in perspective is critical, as it reveals that gesture plays a more dynamic role than any doctrine would like to have it. Ultimately, we hope to show that gesture can be seen as taking an integral part in the very fabric of architecture, instead of merely playjng a role in one of its many histories. This essay is based on existing literature as well as original research conducted in the archives of the Centre Georges Pompidou – to which we extend our gratitude for the access.

Another Walker Evans

Walker Evans has been in vogue in France recently, and it is yet “another Walker Evans” visitors could discover at the exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou between 26 April and 14 August, 2017. The Walker Evans exhibition, curated by Clement Cheroux, Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is Evans’ first major retrospective in France and signals an innovative departure in the appreciation of his œuvre. The photographs on view represented the very best of...

Lyotard’s pedagogies of affect in Les Immatériaux

This paper explores the continuing relevance to education of ideas about art and resistance that Jean-François Lyotard signalled in his curated exhibition in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris entitled Les Immatériaux. The exhibition was for Lyotard the ‘staging’ of a resistance at the dawning of an information age that challenged the prioritisation of computerised ‘data’ through the very deconstruction of data as presented in artistic form. While the implications of this event for art exhibitions are still being theorised and debated, it is the insight Les Immat​ériaux provides as pedagogical encounter that is the focus of this article. The paper explores the exhibition in the context of the immateriality of art and develops this argument towards a notion of artistic testimony that then culminates in an analysis for the pedagogical significance of the exhibition in the information drenched, highly networked context of contemporary education.

Piano at the ground level

&lt;p&gt;From observing the current dynamics of cities and the development of contemporary architecture, great criticism arises in response to the creation of iconic buildings as formal experiments that do not contribute to the local experience. Motivated by this criticism, this paper aims to analyse and understand the importance and the participation of architecture in the construction of a better public realm. The analytical method seeks to understand, evaluate and manipulate the main attributes of a public space based on the features that make it a platform for public life. The analysis focuses on the public realm in three areas of study- the space resulting of the interaction between the buildings, the interstitial space and the constructed spaces. The projects chosen to analyse consisted on iconic buildings by the architect Renzo Piano, due to his international recognition - a body of work shaped by the contexts in which they operate. The projects are situated in global cities and propose new configurations of public space: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Potsdamer Platz, Berlin; and Saint Giles Court, London. The analysis seeks the features that make architecture successful in the sense that it aggregates people and creates interesting spaces that favour human permanence; the paper evaluates whether the projects of Renzo Piano display these features. Each project has its own particularities. Starting with the dimensions, each project contributes to the public space at a different scale. Nevertheless, the variables analysed were the same for each context, and the effects were considered regarding the proportions and the programmatic possibilities offered by each. After understanding the site and its history, the study of the public life and its local attributes, this paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each building and how they contribute to the specific place. The interpretation of the results took into account not only the present, but also the lifetime of each project, raising some potential problems or successes for the future. It is possible to conclude that the three projects contribute positively to the public space, stimulating urban improvements and constitute good-practice examples, each at a different intensity.&lt;/p&gt;

Figures in History

The latest publication by the much discussed and broadly received French philosopher Jacques Rancière is actually not that new. Figures of History compiles two essays, “The Unforgettable” and “Senses and Figures of History,” which were written on the occasion of the exhibition Face à l’histoire at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1996. The first text discusses several documentary films that were shown in a program accompanying the exhibition. The second part is an account on history painting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries written as a catalogue piece. In both essays, Rancière introduces the idea of an age of history that replaces the established rules of the representation of great individuals and memorable events by the egalitarian appearance of individuals and objects in a common visual space.

Torture, Terror, Digitality: A Conversation with Tony Cokes

Post-conceptual artist Tony Cokes's Evil series (2001-present) interrogates the ideological underpinnings of the on Terror. Through the critical reframing of appropriated texts and images, Cokes infuses a new legibility into material that has remained largely hidden in plain sight. Refunctioning streams of poorly read/ forgotten information, Cokes creates an architecture of wreading (1) for the digital age. Cokes is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. His works have been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Centre Georges Pompidou and La Cinematheque Francaise in Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe; and Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the Getty Research Institute. What follows is taken from a series of exchanges, via email and in person, begun in February 2015--when Cokes presented his work in the context of Distracted Wreading [From Structural Film to Digital Poetics], an exhibition at Union College in Schenectady, New York. JENELLE TROXELL: I'd like to discuss your Evil series and how it relates more generally to your extended body of work. Could you say a few words about the series in terms of how you conceived of it and some of its overarching themes? TONY COKES: The Evil series came about in the period after the events of September 11, 2001. Besides feeling inundated by seeing more American flags than I recalled from any earlier period in my life, I was struck by the return of the concept of evil to contemporary political discourse. The repeated use of the term (often in juxtaposition with its alleged opposite) seemed to be puzzling, yet highly rhetorically effective during the years of the George W. Bush presidency. Phenomena like the ongoing War on Terror, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Department of Homeland Security's color alert system really frightened and angered me and required a response. I began collecting articles, mostly journalistic, some theoretical, to map these things as they happened. I was particularly interested in these texts as or hidden in plain sight. I was also aware that other artists were working with similar materials (multiple projects based on keyword searches of Bush's speeches, for example), and I wanted to align with those practices as a small act of solidarity and resistance. My premise is that a different reading protocol and context might produce new conditions of possibility and legibility for these already widely, yet poorly, read events/histories/articles. JT: From where does the title derive? TC: The title came to me through an encounter with the interview On Evil: An Interview With Alain Badiou conducted by Christopher Cox and Molly Whalen, which appeared in Cabinet magazine in Winter 2001-02. Excerpts from the interview became text elements in Evil/Shrink (2003), the first completed work in the series. That first video, which featured footage taken of Manhattan before and after 9/11, was composed of two excerpts from a large, still incomplete multichannel installation project called Shrink. That project was to feature three simultaneous yet different views of the same area of the New York City skyline accompanied by a variety of theoretical, artistic, and journalistic texts. All the video was set to the same soundtrack: a set of songs from the 1998 album Shrink, produced by the Bavarian experimental rock band the Notwist. JT: Do you see this project as an elaboration of some of your earlier concerns? TC: I think my work has always had an interest in reframing/ disrupting already existing cultural artifacts (visual, textual, or sonic) to produce different possibilities for reading and meaning. …

“Changing games”. Ways of receiving Marcel Duchamp

A conference on Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre was held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1977, a few months after the inauguration of the new Centre Georges Pompidou, marked by the first solo exhibition of Duchamp’s work in France. The two events were coordinated by Jean Clair. Mindful of the fact that the artist’s bibliography at that time ran to “more than 350 titles”, Jean Clair was pleased that the contributions of the guest authors (among them were Hubert Damisch, Gilbert Lascault, Jean Suquet, Andre Gerv...

Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day ed. by David Bradshaw, and Rachel Potter (review)

Reviewed by: Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day ed. by David Bradshaw, and Rachel Potter Susan Mooney BRADSHAW, DAVID, and RACHEL POTTER, eds. Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Oxford University Press, 2013. 240 pp. £37.50; $80.00. This cohesive collection of essays provides a sustained narrative of the permutations of censorship of literature dealing with sexuality and religion. The linked studies will fascinate specialists, students, and lay people alike for their deft historical detail, insights, and range of views on how literature has been censored in Great Britain since 1857 with the Obscene Publications Act of that year. David Bradshaw and Rachel Potter have expertly arranged nine near-perfect chapters by seven contributors on the topic, covering the history in chronological order primarily, as well as by topics. The editors inject a huge amount of content into a concise, comprehensive package. In fact, at times one misses more historical discussion and more detailed references to archival and other sources. But this is a small quibble. There is no other book like this in censorship studies, on censorship in Great Britain, or elsewhere, that explains the history while touching on some of the most salient cases in courts and in the media in such a lucid, nuanced way. This is the history of the book at its best. By comparison, to cite just a few works in the compendium of censorship studies, on censorship in France, there is Censures: De la Bible aux larmes d’Éros; Le livre et la censure en France (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Bibliothèque publique d’information, 1987), which has a broader historical sweep and beautiful illustrations; and La censure en France à l’ère démocratique (1848-...): Histoire culturelle (ed. Pascal Ory, Bruxelles: Complexe, 1997), which more closely parallels Bradshaw and Potter’s volume in form, scope, and quality. Prudes does not aim for the theoretical preoccupations of Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (ed. Robert C. Post, Santa Monica: Getty Foundation and Oxford UP, 1998), but it does trace a similar territory about how the forces of censorship help to create the very literature they would seek to suppress. One of the best chapters is chapter 3, “Circulating Morals (1900-1915)” by Nicola Wilson, which deals with the extensive censorial influence of the British lending libraries. Often, in other write-ups of authors’ travails with censorship (such as Thomas Hardy), these libraries are mentioned fleetingly, but without truly clarifying what they did to prevent the publication of literature that offended their directorship and some of their customers. Here Wilson illuminates the situation as it unfolds in the early century, explaining the libraries’ repeated and deleterious (but at times productive) impact on the emergence of literature that would challenge readers’ concepts of how the world should be and how art can function as a conduit and place of inquiry and fascination. Also of note, chapter 5, “James Douglas: The Sanitary Inspector of Literature” by Bradshaw, shows how one individual had a pervasive impact on readers’ reception of literature [End Page 511] and challenged presuppositions about taste. The quotations from Douglas’s columns and other correspondence are amazing samples of the public (and not so public) discourse of censorship. In this way and many others, the editors and authors show how censorship is not merely shaped by a unitary law duly and repeatedly enforced. Rather, literature and censoring forces (the “prudes”) are revealed as rising to meet each other in a strange kind of tango that produces a long-lasting tension, and has both readers and writers contemplate how writing about sexuality can be connected politically with freedom and liberalism. Also welcome are considerations of how US literature and its censorship influence the British scene, and the changes and pressures leading up to the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959, such as the continuing influence of the press in drawing attention to contentious works and the role of English-language publishers located outside of Great Britain (such as Olympia Press in Paris) of authors Lawrence, Miller, Nabokov, and others. The book is enriched by accounts of numerous individual...

A neurological disorder presumably underlies painter Francis Bacon distorted world depiction.

A neurological disorder presumably underlies painter Francis Bacon distorted world depiction.

Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History

For a long time now, many have considered art history to be in a state of crisis. In the last decade, numerous publications have attempted to reimagine the discipline, addressing its future or even...

Dada Dance: Sophie Taeuber's Visceral Abstraction

In a recent landmark exhibition on the intersection of art and dance, Danser sa vie, the Centre Georges Pompidou displayed an enigmatic photograph identified as the artist Sophie Taeuber dancing at...

THE ARCHIVAL SITUATION OF GEORGIAN CINEMA

The Archival Situation of Georgian Cinema Jerry White (bio) [End Page 10] Although Georgian cinema enjoyed some international attention from the late 1950s to the 1980s, it is no longer a central part of broad arguments about world cinema. That is even more true of the country’s silent-era filmmaking, which, when it is discussed at all, is too often consigned to being a quaint subsection of Soviet cinema. But the archival situation in Georgia is unusual, and moreover, it is rapidly changing: sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. As I try to show here, a lot of good work is being done there, but it is impossible to ignore the serious material deprivation that defines most of the country’s cinematic institutions. To put it in a post-Soviet way, this makes the question “what is to be done?” seem nearly impossible to answer. [End Page 11] SOME RECENT HISTORY The republic of Georgia (known in Georgian as Sakartvelo) has a long history of being dominated by neighboring Russia, having been a quasi-imperial possession since 1800.1 In the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, the country enjoyed three years of independence, first as part of the short-lived Transcaucasian Federation (also including Armenia and Azerbaijan, it lasted for a few months of 1918), and then as the social-democratic Menshevist state of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (which lasted until the Bolsheviks invaded in 1921). The successor state was the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, which, like other Soviet socialist republics, lasted until 1991. Among Soviet republics, the cinematic situation of Georgia was quite solid. Its regional film studio (known as Georgian Film Studio or Sakhkinmretsvi) was second only to Ukraine’s in terms of films produced and resources available, and the 1950s saw the emergence of a group of internationally well-regarded auteurs. These included Tengiz Abuladze and Rezo Chkheidze (who often worked together, most famously on the 1955 film Magdana’s Donkey) as well as Mikhail Kalatozov (Mikhail Kalatozishvili, who began making films in Georgia before directing such classics of Soviet cinema as 1957’s The Cranes Are Flying and 1959’s The Letter That Was Never Sent, to say nothing of his film maudit of 1964, I Am Cuba), Otar Iosseliani (whose Georgian films Falling Leaves and Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird were widely acclaimed and who has worked in France since 1984), and Sergei Parajanov (who was born in Tbilisi and made films there as well as in Armenia and Ukraine). This sense of international excitement about Georgian cinema persisted well into the 1970s and 1980s; the February 1977 issue of Films and Filming featured Derek Elley’s laudatory article “Light in the Caucasus,”2 and 1988 saw the Centre Georges Pompidou’s publication (as part of its “cinéma/pluriel” series) of Jean Radvanyi’s comprehensive and equally laudatory anthology Le cinéma géorgien.3 Three years later, Georgia would be independent again. The early years of independence, though, were difficult, beginning with a coup that was directly followed by a three-year civil war. That civil war was mostly fought over the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where ethnic conflict would also lead to a short but still traumatic war with Russia in 2008 (during this later conflict, Georgian forces had to pull back, and Russian forces continue to occupy these areas). By the time the civil war ended, Eduard Shevardnadze (who had served as Gorbachev’s final foreign minister) was president. The Shevardnadze regime was marked by political instability and continual anxiety about (mostly low-level) corruption; its breaking point came during the 2003 parliamentary elections, which were widely seen as having been rigged in favor of [End Page 12] pro-Shevardnadze parties. This led to the peaceful Rose Revolution, wherein after massive protests, Shevardnadze stepped down and the Columbia-educated Mikheil Saakashvili was elected president in 2004. In the parliamentary elections of 2012, partially because of widespread accusations of (again, mostly low-level) corruption and police brutality, as well as because of lingering anger about the 2008 war (where Saakashvili was seen by some as overly provocative toward Russia), Saakashvili...

The Convergence Effect: Real and Virtual Encounters in Augmented Reality Art

The Convergence Effect: Real and Virtual Encounters in Augmented Reality Art

Écrire l’histoire des expositions : réflexions sur la constitution d’un catalogue raisonné d’expositions

Writing the history of exhibitions : reflections on the framing of a catalogue raisonné of exhibitions. If museum objects and artefacts need to be documented, how can we account for the work of the museum in its most visible form, namely the exhibition ? The article aims at questioning the notion of the catalogue, in its various forms, taking into account its recent evolution in respect to the exhibition. Indeed, is the principle of establishing the most complete inventory of the work of an artist or collection applicable to an institution production in the form of exhibitions ? The Centre Georges-Pompidou appears as an exemplary case study. In the framework of its program of research and globalization, this institution develops, since 2010, a reflection on exhibitions history. Analysing this initiative thought for facilitating the documentation and cataloguing of all exhibitions while focusing on the critical success of past initiatives, will allow us to consider the exhibition as a cultural object that can be historically put into perspective.