"Chambre 763" at the Hotel Carlton Palace - installation art, various artists - Paris, France - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, March, 1994 by Betty Klausner

Up a narrow flight of stairs, tucked away in a tiny hotel room and bath, this intriguing exhibition included the work of over 60 artists invited by the Swiss curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist to transform his temporary quarters at the Carlton Palace. Situated on the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse, the Carlton Palace is a typical hotel of convenience, centrally located, reasonably priced, anonymous. The show captured the peculiar feel of travel and hotel life, its transience, loneliness, adventure, work, fatigue and fun. The artists, many of whom are used to roaming the international circuit, met with brio the challenge of sending or making on site works relating to the notion and scale of a hotel room.

Crossing the threshold of room 763 the visitor stepped into an overwhelming, almost claustrophobic, environment. The paraphernalia of hotel life and travel, as offered up by the mostly European artists, left little space for viewers. Tacked to the walls were drawings by Nancy Spero, Otto Muhl and Ilya Kabakov, as well as three made in 1964 by On Kawara while he was staying at this same hotel. Hans-Peter Feldmann contributed a suitcase filled with his personal archive of photographs, Christian Boltanski's snapshots sat on the night table like family keepsakes, and Bertrand Lavier's manipulated photograph purportedly showed John Huston standing outside a similarly named hotel on the Riviera. Katharina Fritsch provided a vase, Isa Genzken a night lamp. For night reading there were books by Ed Ruscha and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Absalon's soundless videotape ran continuously on the TV, while the radio played Peter Fischli and David Weiss's taped music and news. Lawrence Weiner contributed postcard reproductions of his own work, and Paul-Armand Gette placed postcards of Monet's water lilies provocatively in the bidet. "From this moment until next time," read the cryptic phrase put by Douglas Gordon on the dormer window; below, on the floor, a stack of Allen Ruppersberg posters asked, "What is the difference between life and death anyway?" And there was much more, including a wardrobe stuffed with fantastically designed clothes by 10 artists.

The two works that for me had the most emotional resonance were the smallest and largest in the show, respectively. In the basin of the bathroom's porcelain sink, Lothar Baumgarten simply placed one large hairpin. Lying there in isolation, it evoked, as Mary Cassat's work does, the daily narrative of a woman patiently brushing and putting up her long hair, transforming herself as she prepares to move from the intimate to the public. Centered on the bed, meanwhile, under a mosquito net canopy, Annette Messager's doll bride with a stuffed male bird's head lay limply on a small pillow. Physically the dominant piece in the show, this installation elicted a fugitive sense of fragility that set the tone for the exhibition as a whole.

In the tradition of "Chambres d'Amis" in Ghent (1986), or "Home Show" in Santa Barbara (1988), or Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau home from the '20s (reconstructed in the 1993 Lyons Biennale), "Chambre 763" provided artists and audience with the opportunity to think about art in a straightforwardly quotidian context, freed of the mystique of the studio, museum or gallery. Teasing the boundary between art and life has long been one of modernism's principal concerns, and this show was a reminder that it is still a fruitful one.