Hou Hanru: 'Parisien(ne)s
In: Parisien(ne)s. London: Institute of International Visual Arts in collaboration with the Camden Arts Centre, 1997, pp. 4-11
1. Reality
The Paris that exists in our minds is a city of artists and the birthplace of modern art. Since the mid-nineteenth century Paris has been associated with the expressions, freedoms and vitality seen not only as the essence of the modern metropolis but as central to the definition of modernity itself. What cannot be overlooked, however, as Raymond Williams [1] has emphasised, is that immigration has played a fundamental role in the formation of the image of the modern metropolis. Such a conclusion is doubtlessly true in the Parisian context. The presence and legacy of immigrant artists such as Van Gogh, Picasso, Gris, Miró, Tzara, Chagall and Brancusi helped create the idea we continue to hold, that Paris is the epitome of the city of art.
Today, Paris is negotiating an important period of transition and re-invention, or 'renovation' of its identity. Like most western cities, Paris is experiencing fundamental mutations across a broad cultural front, and its identity as a modern city is changing into a pluralist, multi-cultural and constantly changing post-modern city. These changes which can be traced back to French Colonial history, are tied to global post-colonial influences and they can be seen now in the unavoidable confrontations occurring between the different cultures and opposing political and economic interests that co-exist in Paris. Tensions between the local community and the wider society; centre and periphery; globalisation and national interests; representation and power; communication and neo-colonialism; and others, are now defining Parisian life. By foregrounding issues of exile and identity, international migrations are proving to be the most dynamic catalyst in this transformative process, providing the foundation for a new, contemporary, post-modern, 'Parisien(ne)' identity. But, like migration itself, this new identity is a constantly shifting one; it is, finally, a kind of de-identification.
Some of the tensions that these changes provoke have been exposed in a number of recent events; for example, in the polemics around the new immigration laws ('Les Lois Pasqua'), [2] in the recent event at the Eglise St. Bernard [3] and in the success of Mathieu Kassowitz's film La Haine. [4] As well as revealing an emerging climate of conflict between the new social order and established power structure, the impact of this film highlights the need for other artistic projects that recognise and respond to the transformation of Paris as "terre d'asile et d'assimilation (des 'autres peuples' aux Français) into "terre de différence".
2. Projects
In order to be relevant, a visual arts project representing the real Paris must be able to reflect the history of Paris in the modern era and respond to the constant shifts currently occurring in contemporary Parisian visual culture. It should also provide a view towards the future.
Now, at the end of the twentieth century, established visual codes are being constantly de-constructed and re-constructed, reflecting changing social formations. Metropolitan reality consists of both old and new social orders, and the conflicts arising from cultural difference contained within each, help drive social change. This leads to the centrality of the question of what is the identity of the 'Parisien', 'Parisienne', or,'Parisien(ne)'.
We cannot deny the decisive role of modernity in the formation of global culture, including non-western culture. However, cultural differences should not be understood in an entirely relativist manner, not acknowledging modernism's imposition of a supposedly progressivist model, of a historical dynamic over 'other' cultures, in order to recompose an equal world map of different cultures. If we do so we risk falling into a form of nostalgia for the exoticised 'other' of the colonial era. As was seen with Magiciens de la Terre, [5] in the Parisian context, despite the intention to overcome in-built Eurocentrism, there is great difficulty in discarding a folklorised or exoticised reading of the colonial 'other'. The deconstruction of modernism and modernity should entail a form of progress from, rather than denial of, the impact of modernity on international culture.
While a deconstruction of modernity occurs within the restructuring of global and local cultures, it cannot occur within a modernist ideology of 'cultural purism' which defines cultures and communities solely in terms of 'folklore' and 'tradition'. In contemporary Paris, a project intending to contribute to the city's cultural renovation should be conceived through a dialectical re-evaluation of the established modern and contemporary languages of representation. The process should be one of critique and reinvention, spawning new cultural practices that not only reflect but also generate the vibrant, constantly changing social condition emanating from Paris' new 'cultural hybridity'. A cultural project can only function effectively from what Homi Bhabha has termed a "Third Space", [6] in which co-existence of different cultures replaces the dominance of the 'mainstream', nationalist culture. It is this position which is the most coherent and secure for the reconsideration and reinvention of our culture. It implies that 'Parisien' identity, and identity in general, will continue to be a shifting process of identification, de-identification and re-identification.
Certainly immigrant artists play a vital role in the new formation of culture. They are not only simply representatives of their own cultures but bring new perspectives to established codes and practices as they respond to the challenges of surviving and participating in an often alien world. And, they constantly confront the question of their own identity. For them, life as well as art is a process of confrontation, dialogue, negotiation and (re)invention. Their experiences as subjects of the often harsh legacy of the colonial past and the equally harsh reality of post- or neo-colonialism have helped form the immigrant artists' response. The immigrant artist does not remain within the confines of any politically correct formulation, but reaches beyond and responds with what Raymond Williams has referred to as the "innovation in form". [7]
It is in this "innovation in form" that we can understand the importance of the work of immigrant artists. For the first time, the destiny of immigration and exile is no longer that of marginality in the Western metropolis, although this remains a highly visible position. As immigrants are more central in society, society is increasingly defined by immigration. Along with increasing forms of globalisation, migration, and travel, there are increasing displacements between and within 'First World' and 'Third World'. Immigration and globalisation are now embedded in the economic, political and social conditions of contemporary culture. A structural 'revolution' of metropolitan life is taking place in the flux of migration. The contemporary 'Parisien(ne)' is now one who travels between the city and the ends of the earth; the various displacements fill and simultaneously empty the city's spaces, while its boundaries are extended by their journeys and diverse trajectories. The 'Parisien(ne)' is being transformed from Walter Benjamin's "flâneur" into a 'voyageur'.
3. Strategies
Immigrant artists are at the forefront of the new 'Parisien(ne)' identity; their strategies embody many of the changes, tensions and re-evaluations which are shaping the city's new cultural agenda. The artists in this exhibition, Absalon, Chen Zhen, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Thomas Hirschhorn, Huang Yong Ping, Tiina Ketara, Sarkis, Sheen Yuan and Tsuneko Taniuchi, are among those who have made the most remarkable contributions to this process.
The fact that these artists belong to diverse backgrounds (they are from seven countries) and generations (their ages range from 30 to 60), and the fact that they maintain very different relations with the institutions and discourses of the art world, means that together they constitute an entire history, reflecting the evolution of immigrant contributions to the artistic and cultural life of Paris. The works in Parisien(ne)s have been conceived or selected specifically for the exhibition and represent a range of distinct and original strategies; effective contributions to the artistic and cultural 'renovation' of Paris.
As 'Parisien(ne)s', these artists investigate the social reality of Paris from particular, personal viewpoints, each searching for answers to the increasing sense of social crisis in the city. In his work, The Spasm of the Metro-Womb (1997), Chen Zhen relates the metro to an image of the womb. By building a womb-like space with sponge/foam material that incorporates a video projection of metro images accompanied by recordings of metro noise, he reveals the 'spasm' of the Parisian metro as a symbol of the current social malaise. But, by inviting the viewer into this space, to "return to the mother's womb", he also proposes a kind of social therapy.
If one can see travel as a metaphor for contemporary Parisian life in Chen Zhen's work, other artists in the exhibition have also explored this theme in both literal and more general ways. Considering his experience in Paris as a 'relais' of continuous displacement between memory and reality, Sarkis has developed his idea of the 'treasure of war' in the video installation, 9 Espaces mimes (1997). On nine video monitors covered with red and green satin, he recounts his life's journey as an artist-fighter through hand gestures that mime the 'potentials' of the nine studios, from Istanbul to Paris, in which he has made work since 1959. The nine studios are the satellite spaces of his life and work; at the same time the 'mimes' are an allusion to the mosaic of St. Sophia in Istanbul which tells us: "With the gesture, to bring everything to the scale of the hand [...]".
The relations between travel, displacement, memory and reality also play an important part in Tsuneko Taniuchi's work. Her project, My Sentimental Journey (1997), brings together images of an earthquake in the Japanese city where she grew up with others of marginalised and excluded people in Paris. The slide-projected images, along with sound recordings of conversations and music from different cultures and places, are shown in the intimate atmosphere of a tent, into which visitors are invited. Here, seated on mattresses, the viewer shares in the artist's experiences of travel, along with her inner struggle for identity while memory and reality, natural catastrophe and social disaster are confronting and overlapping each other.
Shen Yuan's work, San Wu Cheng Qun - In Threes and Fours, Or In Knots (1997), also focuses on the question of identity - in particular, the identity of an immigrant woman. Drawn to the architectural features of the exhibition space, its windows arranged along one wall like human faces looking outward, she uses hemp fibres to construct huge braids that are fixed to the windows with their ends laying interwoven across the floor. The image of the braids has a special meaning for an artist from a Chinese background: it is a symbol of woman as well as a sign of 'old China'. And on a more profound level, the braids also represent life itself in traditional Chinese thought.
In a modern capital such as Paris the boundaries between private and public life are constantly changing as the two spheres merge and overlap. The work of Absalon, who until his death in 1993 was one of the most prolific artists working in 1990s Paris, derives from an intense investigation of this issue. His ideal, purified and uniformly white environments are spaces for his own survival in a world where private life and personal identity are continually under threat from the public domain. These architectural, sculptural works are an expression of his ambivalent struggle for a utopia of personal freedom and for social change. The installations in this exhibition, Cellules (1990) and Prototypes (1990), are among the most remarkable of his oeuvre; the first being an example of Absalon's search for an ideal individual man's world, while the second suggests the inevitable displacements of reality. Together, they create a tension not unlike the tension of real life.
This preoccupation with the relationship between private and public is also shared by Tiina Ketara. However, in contrast to Absalon's refined introspection, her work explores the processes of communication and contact between the individual and the communal. In her photo-installation, Socks (1997), she records people's reactions to a pair of socks knitted by her deceased grandmother, compiling a catalogue of absurd and humorous responses to the reality of ageing and death. With the socks functioning as the leitmotiv of the project, she photographs people from different cultures posing and interacting with the socks, dramatising their various reactions to the unknown history of these relics and the idea of loss that they symbolise.
In You and I (1996), a robot-replica of the artist, she enquires into the relations between public and private, the communication between self and other, as a provocative challenge to the audience and herself. Lying on the floor and equipped with a sound device, the robot asks the audience to come closer and help 'her' stand up. She then speaks of the difficulty of survival and the illusion of reality. It is as if the viewer is presumed to be in direct contact with the artist's body and in direct communication with the artist. The reality is a mechanical replica of the artist and the supposed human communication is replaced by mechanical indications of communication. At the same time, the artist's self has become ambiguous so that she herself can hardly tell the difference between the real self and the false one. Involved in this conversational process, it becomes clear that communication is unavoidably contradictory and challenging.
An essential concern of contemporary art has been to re-examine and challenge the dominant discourses of art and culture, especially those embedded within institutions. In the Parisian art world, institutional discourses and their influences represent a hegemonic power, and behind it lies an entire 'petit bourgeois' ideology. How to deconstruct such hegemonic power has become one of the most important, urgent tasks for those artists who would pursue genuine creative freedom. Thomas Hirschhorn has developed a whole strategy around resistance to and critique of institutionalised formalism and aestheticism. Underpinned by a wonderful sense of irreverent humour, his work is always provocative, forcing the spectator to face a chaotic, uncontrollable and constantly surprising world, while reflecting on the human condition and the affective power of art. His project for this exhibition, Record-Jonas (1997), is a form of 'laboratory', consisting of a long table on which an array of 'unidentified forms' are displayed. A greenhouse-like structure, made of transparent plastic curtains, encloses and defines the space, and details of the 'unidentified forms' are re-presented on video.
As an Iranian Jewish woman in exile, Chohreh Feyzdjou (who died in February 1996 during the preparations for this exhibition) had devised another strategy with which to resist established institutional discourse. She 'recycled' her paintings and objects, transforming them into blackened 'relics', that signified her memories and the common destiny of those in exile. But also by 'naming' these relics 'products of Chohreh Feyzdjou' and selling them in her 'boutique', she symbolically rejected the common notions of 'work of art' and 'exhibition'. Her last major installation in Paris in 1995, Boutique Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou, was a monumental expression of such resistance. The re-making of the Boutique in London is an event that pays homage to its creator.
If this exhibition did not directly address the post-colonial question, it would be missing an essential element, since this issue is not only a fundamental aspect of Parisian life but also plays a large part in artistic, cultural, political and economic conditions internationally. As a Chinese artist living in the West, Huang Yong Ping is acutely aware of these conditions, and for him the context of London in 1997 is especially significant, bringing into sharp relief colonial history in Hong Kong and its post-colonial reality, as well as referring to the broader picture of British colonialism and its legacy. His new work, Da Xian - The Doomsday (1997), is a new development in his ongoing critique and deconstruction of Western cultural-political hegemony (one of the most important directions in his extremely rich and powerful body of work). In his work enlarged replicas of porcelain bowls made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the British East India Company are installed at the gallery entrance and through its foyer. Images of Western concessions in Hong Kong are painted on the bowls and each contains many different kinds of food all labelled 'best before July 1997' - the date Hong Kong reverts to Chinese rule. The work suggests the coming of the 'doomsday' for colonialism and its myth.
It is here that one can see the exhibition Parisien(ne)s not only as a specific project demonstrating a specific Parisian history, but also as an effort to open up a space in which more universal debates about our cultural renovation, which is and continues to be a necessity of life in these times of global migration, can be introduced.
[1] Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, Verso, London/New York, 1989, p.45.
[2] Les Lois Pasqua. The new immigration laws proposed by the French Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, in 1993, which render immigration into France more difficult than ever before and change the notion of the French nationality from 'les droits de la terre' to 'les droits du sang'. The laws have caused fierce debates and dramatic consequences in French society.
[3] Eglise St. Bernard. On 18 March 1996, 300 Africans required regularisation of their status as refugees in France. While waiting for negotiations with the Government, they were supported by human rights organisations and given shelter in the Eglise St. Bernard for two months. The government subsequently refused all negotiations and ordered police to clear the church on 23 August after promising to 'regularise' some individual cases. Since then a large number of Africans have been expelled by the Government on special flights. However the event has provoked serious political discussions about 'Les Lois Pasqua' and the question of immigration in France.
[4] La Haine was the winner of the Prix de la Mise en Scène, Cannes 1995 and the César du Meilleur Film 1996.
[5] Magiciens de la Terre. An exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande Halle La Villette, Paris, France, 18 May - 14 August 1989.
[6] "It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew." - Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge London/New York, 1994, p.37.
[7] Williams, op cit, p.45.