Comment: Letter from Provence

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Wilkin, Karen

Our next outing is to Marseilles, to see exhibitions and connect the school with art supply stores. The first stop is the minute Galerie du Tableau, run by my friend Bernard Plasse, a former art critic immensely knowledgeable about contemporary art and possessor of the most impressive moustache in France. (Worth the detour, as Michelin says.) The gallery, which has an ambitious, eclectic international program, is so small that only one work can be displayed at a time (hence the name); at openings, people cluster in the narrow street, viewing the show through a large arched window. The current exhibition, by a young French photographer, atypically includes two images high on the wall. Armed with Bernard's advice, we head down smart shopping streets towards the port, past boats, dock litter, and crowds of promenaders reveling in a glorious day that finally hints at spring. We thread the narrow streets of La Corbeille, the oldest part of the city, now peppered with official signs announcing municipally-sponsored improvements "to insure decent housing." Our goal is La Vieille Charite, a superb complex of High Baroque buildings, at the top of the hill, once a plague hospital, saved from destruction by hippie squatters in the 1960s, now a cultural and exhibition center.

Bernard has recommended two shows, "Meditations: Mediterranee," video installations by an Italian group, Studio Azzurro; and an exhibition of drawings, artist's books, and constructions in steel by Jean-Francois Coadou, another friend, whom I had embarrassingly failed to call, not sure if we would get to Marseilles. Coadou's exhibition is tucked into the hollow square of pale stone arcaded buildings framing the complex. Low, massive, four-square steel sculptures are arranged in a grid. Implacable and compelling, they are like nothing but themselves, but also reminiscent of both heavy machinery and architecture. Drawings, arcane diagrams, written texts, and pages from collaborative projects are interesting additions, but Coadou's mysterious, brutal constructions are the main event.

The symmetrical courtyard of La Charite is dominated by a handsomely proportioned chapel crowned with an oval dome where part of "Meditations: Mediterranee" is installed. We enter the darkened space and are immediately disoriented. A swirling video "carpet" fills the entry floor, shifting, apparently in response to footsteps, from sea, to abstract pattern, to mosaic, and more. As our eyes adjust, we discover rows of video screens in the apses on either side of the central plan building, a changing litany of iconic, exquisitely selected and composed images of Southern Italy, Greece, North Africa, and the South of France. Lavender fields and orchards cut to dissections of traditional crafts and their modern equivalents-handsome, nostalgia-provoking, but not remarkable. In the center of the former chapel, though, is a vertical stack of screens, with a wooden platform and wooden tripod before it. The image, a synchronized composite, plunges us into the sulphur fields of Pozzuoli, as forbidding as one of the ancient entrances to Hades. We watch the curling smoke, vaguely interested, when suddenly a visitor stamps on the platform. The sound is alarmingly amplified; and in response, the images on the screen blur and vibrate. When they calm down, they have become artifacts from Pompeii; they hold for a while, then revert to smoldering wasteland. Each stamp, the noise and tremor an abstraction of the horror of the terremoto, reveals new tightly-cropped, beautiful images before returning to the grey, haunted landscape: domestic objects, casts of bodies, and frescos from the ancient world; near-kitsch religious statues from modern, still earthquake-prone Italy; flaming lava. Without resorting to easy narrative, the installation suggests the continuity and fragility of Mediterranean civilization, reminding us of the simultaneous remoteness and seamlessness of the past. Only when the cycle repeats do we manage to pull ourselves away. Elsewhere we find additional interactive installations about saltworks, North African architecture, and vacationers-the entire spectrum of the modern-day Mediterranean. It's all on a high level, but the earthquake piece is clearly the most achieved and resonant.