Since 1997, Marc Jacobs has been infusing the world’s largest luxury group, LVMH, with contemporary art via collaborative fashion collections with artists such as Richard Prince, Steven Sprouse and Takashi Murakami. Certainly the nexus of high-fashion and high-art is nothing new, and within Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, the company’s fairly new gallery, the space is what it is: a luxury store. Sharing a name with fashion’s most iconic brand, it is a brazenly commercial space for selling. Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton opened in 2006 in the center of Paris, with an eye towards cultivating a relationship with fine art, and, along with Jacobs’ collaborations, infusing the company with a bit of a cultural and intellectual aura.
Curator Hervé Mikaeloff’s show, titled Perspectives, brings together 16 new works by Camille Henrot and Odile Decq, two established, female French artists, in an attempt to understand the space and the world of viewpoints. Odile Decq is an architect who has just completed an extension of the MACRO (the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome), while Camille Henrot, a 31-year-old visual artist, has been pre-selected for the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2010. The meeting of their two visions gives the Perspectives exhibition all of its meaning. Themes of voyage, displacement, and otherness are central to the selection of work represented in the show.
Camille Henrot observes the inauthenticity of objects through the eyes of the other. Her interests lay within the origins of man as constructed through myths, objects, and the symbolic trail that they create. Travel, ethnocentrism, and memory are all central focuses of her practice. For Perspectives, Henrot has constructed her own Musée Imaginaire, a personal anthropology where the exhibition is the theater. Through video, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography she explores journey and misunderstandings, reduced understandings of otherness. Her Objets Augmentes consist of ephemera like a mobile phone, a pair of scissors, a mirror, all immersed in a bath of tar so as to transfigure themselves into the unrecognizable. Her work consists of a reappropriation of the objects it distracts and a distorting of objects known as symbols of modernity. Through her video work, Henrot leads us back in time accompanied by stray dogs through Egyptian excavations (Cynopolis), then to travel in space only to find ourselves waiting for airport departures and arrivals in various cities (Arrivals/Departures) that are either now extinct or just recently birthed. These works seems to evoke diversion, especially in the history of art and art practice, without any systematic approach.
Architect Odile Decq’s three installations combine steel, metal and glass to create dominating optical illusions and surprise; head-on, sensitive and playful architectural signatures. Le plongeon du funambul (The Plunge of the Tightrope Walker) is presented outside on the building’s panoramic terrace to simulate the city of Paris as a pool, as if the spectator were about to dive in. Ligne de fuite et Homéostasie (Creepage and Homeostasis) in the space’s lobby comprises two spheres, essentially black moons, one of which is filled with air and toy with the idea of balance and space. Decq creates impressions of depth and horizon where really there is none in Architecture Mobile‘s red and black carpet, strewn with skyscraper silhouettes. Through Decq’s various, vaguely vessel-like forms, the artist transforms Louis Vuitton’s fashion Mecca into a point of departure.
Unfortunately, it is at this point that the exhibition stumbles: while the show is a thoughtful attempt to reexamine everyday perspective, it fails to regard perhaps the most ironic perspective: that of Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton itself. Since the recent economic plight in both the United States and Europe, consumer remorse and guilt is only exacerbated though superficial purchases and conspicuous consumption. Justifying the purchase of a designer handbag is much easier when the object is akin to cultural and artistic craftsmanship. And so it is no surprise that many luxury brands have recently focused their attention on culture and the arts. What resounds most in Perspectives is the irony that the modernity and post-colonialism critiqued in the works of Henrot and Decq were always part of the same historical development – late capitalist globalization. And Louis Vuitton, with it’s iconic LV stamped on everything from handbags to Hummers, is no innocent player in this field. It’s a shame then that the show remains inert and scarcely impossible to disassociate the works from the brand itself.
Perspectives in on display at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton from June 4th to September 5th, 60 rue de Bassano, Paris.
