Running on empty: Daniel Birnbaum on the art of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Daniel Birnbaum

"How to enchant with practically nothing, a few popular songs, a series of anti-landscapes, some micro-events, lots of emptiness ...

This low-intensity cinema penetrates our perceptions right to the core of our sensibility," declares writer Nicole Brenez in a brief letter to the editors of Cahiers du Cinema about Ile de Beaute (1996), a film codirected by French artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster (with video artist Ange Leccia). This, it seems to me, also nicely sums up what Gonzalez-Foerster achieves in her solo filmic experiments, which are some times displayed in dark theaters on a screen but just as often branch out to envelop architecture, public space, and even whole cities--be they the artist's native Paris or distant metropolises in Asia or Latin America. Indeed, in Gonzalez-Foerster's work, genre no longer seems relevant. Her recent productions include the 'cosmic" adventure Exotourisme (2002), a video projection and sound "environment" that takes the viewer through an abstract landscape of computer-generated forms; the design of a Balenciaga store in New York; and ambitious lighting and video shows that accompany rock concerts, Asked to describe her open-air project for last year's Documenta II, Gonzalez-Foerster lists some of the heterogeneous elements that were displayed amid the shadows cast by the large trees south of Kassel's orangery and where, on hot days, one could see exhausted viewers dozing away on the lawn: "It's a park; it's a plan for escape; it's an extra-large piece of lava rock that's come from Mexico and landed on the green grass; it's a blue phone booth from Rio de Janeiro; it's a butterfly pavilion screening a film inspired by The Invention of Morel, the fantastic novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares; it's a rose tree from Chandigarh." On hearing this catalogue of seemingly unrelated parts--removed from their original contexts but ranged together in subtle tension--one senses that the work is less a particular, circumscribed space or medium than an atmosphere that draws out the melancholy inherent in objects in the world.

Still, I ask myself: What exactly is Park--A Plan for Escape? A curious sculpture garden, an installation, or an outdoor cinema equipped with exotic props? Probably it's all of these things, but it's also one more example of what French theorists would recognize as a form of ecriture. Regardless of technique, Gonzalez-Foerster's work is always close to that active production of emptiness that Roland Barthes-in his book about a fantasized Japan, Empire of Signs--counted as writing and which he associated with Zen: "And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence." In this sense, Gonzalez-Foerster writes gardens, flower arrangements, and, yes, entire cities, often using cinema to alter an urban landscape, whether it is a lush German park or the subterranean maze of a Parisian subway station. In Park--A Plan for Escape, a butterfly-shaped pavilion is a kind of cinematic machine, a freestanding projection booth presenting imagery of parks from films like Antonioni's La notte, Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive l'amour, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. Bodies and faces appear like ghosts behind the pavilion's glass, hardly discernible during daytime but suddenly entirely visible when night falls. "I like the idea that you can enter the park by chance and encounter these elements in a rather mysterious way without immediately thinking about art," says the artist. "It's all not so clearly coded or framed. You can come across these things anytime during night or day and have a very different experience. It's not even clear where it all starts or stops. Beyond this tree, after this cloud ...?"

Given its lack of beginning or end, perhaps it's understandable that a project like this originated some-what amorphously. One point of departure was a scene from Tsai's film that made such a lasting impression on Gonzalez-Foerster that she eventually journeyed to the distant location where it was shot to try to understand it better. A hopeless endeavor, no doubt, but in this case, nevertheless, a productive one. Says the artist, "In Vive l'amour a woman is walking through a park under construction in Taipei. Five years after seeing the film, I went to Taipei myself to see that park and to walk that lane. It started to rain. And the rain became so strong that I had to stay one hour under a kind of shelter. A prisoner in the park, I final]y could connect the film and the space in an intense way." Out of this charged atmospheric moment came her art; in work after work, Gonzalez-Foerster targets those exquisite sensations that are so evasive they lack names but are distinct enough to be remembered for a lifetime.

Bonne Nouvelle, Station Cinema, 2001, installed at the Bonne Nouvelle metro station in Paris, was the artist's first major public work and was another attempt to bring filmic associations into an unlikely space. Through a number of delicate interventions--a few monitors here and there, various forms of theatrical lighting--she transformed the station's utilitarian underground architecture (staircases, passageways, platforms) into a cinematic fantasy. Fragments from films shot in the metro appeared on the monitors. More conspicuous were the rows of lurid spherical lamps hovering over weary passengers waiting for the train to finally arrive. These colorful globes were pure joy: For a moment the travelers were transported from the gray and noisy environment of urban transportation to some fanciful theater lobby or perhaps a small-town amusement park.