At play in the palace: the Palais de Tokyo, France's brash new antimuseum for the 21st century, presents the art of today—and tomorrow—as a continuous, ever-mutating event - Report from Paris

Art in America, June, 2002 by Sarah S. King

Amid great fanfare and some controversy, the Palais de Tokyo, billed as Paris's new "site for contemporary creation," opened to the public on Jan. 22. Established by the French ministry of culture and communication in 1999, it was realized in response to growing pressure from members of the French contemporary art community who blame their government in part for France's diminished presence on the international scene.

Touted as an "arts laboratory," the center will have no permanent collection and mount no large-scale exhibitions dedicated to a single artist or theme. Instead, loosely modeled on New York's P.S. 1, it will feature overlapping group shows and small solo displays by emerging and underknown artists. In keeping with its unconventional format, the facility is open from noon until midnight, six days a week. It employs, in place of museum guards, what its quirky information pamphlet calls "mediators"--support staffers who "prowl" the spaces ready to answer questions or to "dialogue" with any visitor who wishes to engage them. The innovative interdisciplinary agenda includes performances, lectures, musical events, a study program, international workshops for young artists and a weekly on-site radio program. Other upcoming projects include the launching Of the Tokyobook Collection, a series of books that record the responses of prominent cultural figures to art-related questions formulated by Palais de Tokyo staff members; the Platform, an 8,600-square-foot meeting place for "cultural agitation," in the form of debates, concerts and fashion runway shows; and TokyoTV, a simulated television station for which 25 international artists have collaborated on a pilot program. Future exhibitions will feature artists Pierre Ardouvin, Franck David, Kendell Geers, Laurent Moriceau and Wolfgang Tillmans.

The building, whose vast interior resembles an abandoned warehouse, comprises approximately 54,000 square feet of public space. But unlike P.S. 1, this raw industrial-looking vault is situated in a tony neighborhood, the 16th arrondissement, within a short distance of other, more traditional museums. Originally built for the 1937 World's Fair, the two-part Palais de Tokyo structure has ever since housed in its east wing the Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris. The west wing, which now bears the original name of the whole building, previously served as the Musee national d'art moderne--today situated at the Pompidou Center--and subsequently as a repository for the art holdings of France's national museums. Most recently, it was a photography exhibition space.

Along with grumblings about an incongruous location and unorthodox programming, controversy also arose over the selection of art critics Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans as the center's codirectors. The two are considered outsiders by many in the French institutional art milieu, and their 1999 appointment, though limited to a nonrenewable three-year term beginning in late January 2002, was greeted with much skepticism. In a placating gesture, Catherine Trautmann, then minister of culture, set up an "administrative council" for the Palais that includes art critic Pierre Restany; artist Daniel Buren; P.S. 1 director Alanna Heiss; Bice Curiger, editor in chief of Parkett and curator of the Kunsthaus Zurich; Jan Debbaut, director of the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Jean-Hubert Martin, director of the Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf. Departing from standard French museum practice, Sans and Bourriaud have started an association to raise private funds that will supplement the center's meager government-subsidized annual budget of $1.3 million, thereby allowing the pair greater programming autonomy. They have already proved surprisingly successful in obtaining foreign corporate underwriting from major firms like Pioneer, J.A.S. Hennessy & Co., and Bloomberg, newly elected New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's global financial-news enterprise, which cofinanced the opening exhibition.

The facility was refurbished by architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal on a tight budget of less than $4 million. They opted to keep the building's original glass ceiling and to leave the loftlike space in a semifinished state, with pock-marked walls revealing large fissures and sections of exposed brick and electrical circuitry framed by crumbling plaster. According to the directors, the open design, "without a single interior wall," allows for a creative flexibility and "improvisation" that is very much in keeping with the experimental nature of the site. The three-level space also includes a bookshop, an "anti-cafeteria" and a bar. The admission fee is five euros ($4.40).

The Palais de Tokyo's inaugural shows featured over 35 international artists. The cavernous central exhibition hall was punctuated with large-scale, often interactive installations and art works that offered a wide range of themes in a diversity of mediums. These included Wang Du's daunting 11 1/2--foot-high wire-mesh garbage can filled with old newspapers and television sets broadcasting European news footage, and Meschac Gaba's Salon from his ongoing itinerant project "The Museum of Contemporary African Art." Gaba's installation featured sofas, games, a piano, library and Internet-ready computers. Virginie Barre's scattered life-size latex sculptures of menacing figures and murder victims suspended from the ceiling or crumpled on the floor in pools of plastic blood address urban violence, while Subodh Gupta's towering silver sculpture of cooking pots intermingled with aluminum replicas of guns suggest the infiltration of violence into everyday life, a development now rampant in her native India. Matthew Ritchie's abstract wall paintings on vinyl that combine sinewy organic shapes with numerical diagrams, along with Gunilla Klingberg's undulating ephemeral sculpture made of rice-paper lamps from Ikea, simultaneously reference the natural environment and industrial production. Navin Rawanchaikul's humorous installation Super(M)Art satirized the commercial aspects of the art world via elements like an enormous fresco, based on Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, portraying a bevy of famous art personalities from the 20th century. Another impressive installation, Kay Hassan's re-creation of a Johannesburg street, featured photographic portraits, a bicycle, abandoned luggage, cigarette butts and other debris.