Cyprien Gaillard’s Archaeologies
Cyprien Gaillard’s Humpty\ Dumpty exhibition, combining new projects and others that have never been shown in France, is being held simultaneously at Lafayette Anticipations and the Palais de Tokyo (October 19th, 2022—January 8th,
2023, curated by Rebecca LamarcheVadel). An opportunity for Olivier Schefer to go back over the foundations of a body of work based on temporal collisions,
dialectics and analogies.
“I don’t have a studio,” Cyprien Gaillard often remarks. The artist conceives and develops his work over the course of his journeys to forgotten, abandoned or marginal sites. His videos and sculptures display a specific and very concrete relationship to architecture, modern and contemporary, but also ancient and archaic, which he tracks around the globe. Like Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson before him, he rejects the enclosure of the museum, the confinement characteristic of the White Cube. “‘Life’ in the museum,” Kaprow said, “is like making love in a cemetery.” When Cyprien Gaillard does exhibit in a gallery setting, he shifts its framework, disrupting its uses (without going so far as to re-enact a Smithsonian dialectic of the site and non-site), displacing the outside to the inside, the margin to the centre, since one cannot exist without the other. Michel Foucault rightly observed that “It is an illusion to believe that madness—or delinquency, or crime—speaks to us from a position of absolute exteriority. Nothing is more internal to our society or to the effects of its power than the misfortune of a madman or the violence of a criminal. In other words, we are always inside.The margin is a myth. External discourse is a dream that we continually renew.” (1)
Cyprien Gaillard renews this dream in his own way from one exhibition to the next. We are thinking, for example, of The Recovery of Discovery, a pyramid made up of hundreds of packs of Turkish beer, which was exhibited at the KW in Berlin in 2011. The sculpture had
more in common with punk than pop (despite a vague resemblance to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes) since it was given over to the public, the drinks being available to anyone who wanted them. It soon attracted a whole range of visitors who were strangers to the art world: teenagers, tramps, passers-by, many of whom had never set foot in an artistic institution before. Spectators contributed to the fulfilment of the work, which gradually decomposed into powerful fumes of warm beer and broken shards of glass in all four corners. Destruction is not an isolated or gratuitous gesture in Gaillard’s work. It is always underpinned by archaic references whose future it calls into question. Thus the shape of the pyramid, as well as the brand of the beer ( Efes, the Greek city of Ephesus inTurkish) conjures up the heritage of the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, the Babylonian ziggurats, to say nothing of the steps of the great reconstructed altar in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin,
which is freely accessible to all. The neartotal destruction of the work by the spectatordrinkers echoed that of ancient and mythical cities, replayed in the intoxication of a contemporary collective delirium of Dionysian proportions.
PIECES OF REALITY
By harnessing aesthetic and political issues specific to our time, Cyprien Gaillard’s work produces multiple variations on the poetics of ruins.This is further suggested by Desniansky Raion, a video from 2007 which successively features hooligan street fights in Saint Petersburg, aesthetic explosions of apartment blocks in the Paris region, accompanied by sounds and lights, and the filming of the circular constructions of a suburb of Kiev, reminiscent of Stonehenge. In terms of ruins, then, which are often assimilated to his work, Gaillard lays claim to two distinct lineages: the pictorial tradition of dilapidated monu
ments and the capriccio composite landscape, represented by Panini, Piranesi and Hubert Robert, and the in situ sculptures of land artists, including the entropic works of Robert Smithson. Gaillard’s “aesthetic vandalism” (2) makes use of operations that collectively refer to temporal collisions, dialectics and the principle of analogy. Between 2006 and 2009, the artist travelled to a number sites around the world (India, the United States, Mexico, France, Russia, etc.), Polaroid camera in hand, bringing back images which were then organised into series, the Geographical Analogies. (3) An analogy is not simply a resemblance between two things, it is a montage that brings together the identical structures of dissimilar things (like the analogy of proportionality: A is to B what C is to D). Analogies therefore unite things that differ from each other, or that fail to acknowledge each other, by means of an almost tremulous thread. In Gaillard’s work, the images devoted to the evanescence of the Polaroid are organised in a diamond shape, as if we were perceiving them through a kaleidoscope where the scattered and fragile pieces of reality had temporarily assembled. Each plate brings together architectural motifs (towers, facades, paving stones, etc.) that are distant from each other, both in space and in time.
The operation that presides over most of Gaillard’s work therefore seems to be dialectical in nature. “Dialectical” was Smithson’s favourite word, together with “entropy”. (4) Reading history in a dialectical rather than a causal or linear way amounts to building bridges between realities and temporalities that are far removed from each other. Gaillard’s videos proceed by means of a dialectical, material archaeology, as Walter Benjamin described it in his Arcades Project. Gaillard carries out an archaeology of modernity, collecting the objective traces, the fossil realities of our time. Like Baudelaire’s rag and bone man, he combines the debris, detritus and ruins that bear witness to the survival and transformations of past and contemporary eras. These synchronous associations and collisions produce disturbing, explosive videos that sometimes “brush history against the grain”, to quote Benjamin again. (5) In the first sequence of Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009), filmed in the Mexican city of Cancun in Yucatán, two shirtless American students are shown organising a drinking contest, tequila bottle in hand (intoxication, again), the brand of which is Alma Azteca, literally “the soul of the Aztecs.” Another sequence shows a member of an American gang, dressed from head to toe in red, performing a ritual dance in front of the
Mayan ruins in El Rey, behind which stands a former Hilton hotel in the shape of a pyramid. All this to the sound of background music taken from a 1980s cartoon, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a fusion of Mayan archaeology and science fiction.
One of the takeaways from this overview is the question it addresses to architecture, and to the uses we make of it. By means of his works, Gaillard questions contemporary policies of conservation and restoration. What to preserve and what to destroy?To what extent is the restoration of a building the restitution of an original, rather than its incurred loss or even its transformation? Is it possible to restore a building without erasing the traces that time has left upon it? These questions had already been raised by Aloïs Riegl in Le Culte moderne des monuments, where he showed how the Moderns distinguished between monuments’ historical value and their age-value.
FRAGMENTS OF AN EXHIBITION
For his beautiful and unsettling Dunepark (2009), Gaillard organised the (quasi-)archaeological excavations of a former German bunker from the Second World War, located in a suburb of The Hague. Given over to the area’s inhabitants and children for a few weeks, like a Smithsonian sandbox, this monument (or anti-monument), excavated by trucks and bulldozers, was worthy of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969). Gaillard exhumed a buried, repressed and unclassifiable memory. It is true that the artist’s research often focuses on the rubble and strata of recent history. At the Venice Biennale 2019, his video Ocean II Ocean, set to haunting funfair music, presented incredible images of cranes dumping decommissioned subway cars into the ocean in New York State, following a first sequence of images of underwater fossils and ammonites embedded in marble subway corridors in Moscow, Kiev and Bucharest. As if the marine cemetery was turning into into a fossil species. As if destruction and (re)creation were linked by an underground thread.
For Humpty\ Dumpty, presented simultaneously at Lafayette Anticipations and at the Palais de Tokyo—broken fragments of a single exhibition or the interlocking of two exhibitions (the ambiguity persists)—, Cyprien Gaillard will be presenting several recent videos and sculptures, as well as a surprising intervention in and around the Quartier de l’Horloge near the Centre Pompidou. Gaillard, a tireless surveyor, reveals himself to be deeply melancholic here. By focusing his attention on the mechanism located in the Passage de l’Horloge-à-Automates, a sculpture made by Jacques Monestier which was inaugurated in 1979 and broke down in 2003, Gaillard seems to have found his machine to go back in time, or rather to disassemble it. The artist oversaw the dismantling and (partial) cleaning of the strange protagonist of this brass automaton, Le Défenseur du temps, which had been exposed to hostile natural elements. The clockwork mechanism was wound up backwards at an accelerated speed, as if in search of irremediably lost time. This curious sculpture, plucked from oblivion, midway between a machine by Tinguely and an ingenious piece of clockwork, becomes the fragile defender of a mistreated modern memory which is gradually being erased by the current construction sites of Greater Paris, in the name of a relentless struggle against entropy.
1 Michel Foucault, “L’extension sociale de la norme,” Dits et écrits, t. II [1976-1988], Gallimard, “Quarto,” 2001, p. 77. 2 Hal Foster, “Vandal Aesthetics,” Cyprien Gaillard, The Recovery of Discovery, Verlag der Buchandlung Walter König, 2011, pp. 51-52. 3 Cyprien Gaillard, Geographical Analogies, JRP Ringier, 2010. 4 Olivier Schefer, Sur Robert Smithson. Variations dialectiques, La Lettre volée, 2021. Smithson also believed that “architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. I propose a dialectics of entropic change.” Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, University of California Press, 1996, p. 304. 5 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images, Minuit, 2000, p. 86.
Olivier Schefer is a writer and philosopher. He is a professor of aesthetics at the Université Paris I. Having translated and interpreted the theoretical work of Novalis, he recently published the essay Sur Robert Smithson. Variations dialectiques (La Lettre volée, 2021).
Cyprien Gaillard
Né à born in Paris en in 1980
Vit et travaille à lives and works in Berlin Expositions personnelles récentes
Recent solo shows:
2022 Fondation LUMA, Arles
2021 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
2019 TANK Shanghai; Accelerator Konsthall, Stockholm; Museum Tinguely, Bâle Expositions collectives récentes
Recent group shows:
2022 Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles ; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki 2021 Palais de Tokyo, Paris ; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin ; GAMeC, Bergame
2020 Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
2019 Biennale de Venise ; Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles