The mural, I read, “breathes the colonial thinking and prejudices of its time.” The inscription on a pillar on the top floor of the Bourse de Commerce, the much-discussed contemporary art museum in the heart of Paris, contains a mild trigger warning: the restored fresco that spans the dome of the round, late nineteenth-century stock exchange building, shows the advance of the French commercial spirit and technology all over the globe, half-naked Indians welcoming men in tropical suits, folklorically clad exotics cheerfully proclaiming the blessings of the global undergo trade. On the edge, but thank God there is no ‘slave panel’ in between. Yet, the caption says, we no longer recognize ourselves in this.
In what then? The old trade fair has been transformed by architect Tadao Ando into a spectacular home for the collection of businessman François Pinault, a collection of ten thousand works by almost four hundred artists, many of them big names.
The eye-catcher at the opening was an installation by Urs Fischer. In the rotunda under the dome, the Swiss placed an exact copy of a famous sixteenth-century group of statues, The Sabine Virgin Robbery† But the copy was from used to be, and burned slowly. Visitors to the Bourse could watch the statue melt for six months.
With his work, Fischer directly confronted the arrogant panorama above: opposite the robust-assertive self-conviction of the late nineteenth-century commercial spirit and the unshakable belief in progress, he placed an installation that was permeated with a sense of transience, temporality, and vulnerability. A curator in an accompanying film talks about fluidity, transformation. Nonsense – the artwork slowly turned into nothing. You saw the tragic beauty of inevitable decay. The artist had placed chairs around the group of wax figures, each of which reflected the continents of the mural in the dome: they too slowly burned up.
The roundabout is now completely empty.
Many of the works in Pinault’s collection exude a similar spirit of deconstruction, fragility and uncertainty, the dismantling of dominant narratives. On the square in front of the stock exchange building is a silver-colored equestrian statue of the American Charles Ray, the artist who will succeed Fischer in the roundabout this spring. The Silver Boy on the Horse refers to classic equestrian statues, but the work, the caption states, “undermines the notions of power, assertiveness and masculinity that typically underpin the genre.” Because: “As is often the case with Charles Ray, the work questions a traditional archetype from the history of sculpture.”
How much deconstruction can a person endure, I began to wonder. Old stories, old structures have to be dismantled, but what if you are left empty-handed?
Is that fresco full of aggressive commercial spirit really that far away from us? At least the spirit of it seems alive and kicking. Books have been written about the rivalry between two of France’s richest men, François Pinault (estimated wealth $27 billion) and Bernard Arnault (estimated wealth $196 billion), who outdo each other in their love of the arts. Own museums, massively visited exhibitions, patrons, dizzying donations – they aspire to the status of contemporary Medici.
The world in which the two benefactors move looks more like the nineteenth-century painting than all that art about vulnerable, marginal bodies. Both men are leaders of genuine global capitalist expansionism. Together they pretty much own the global market for luxury goods, fashion, perfume, champagne, department stores – add a football team and a few publishers. Their love of art is instrumental – it gives their luxury brands cachet, our uninhibited consumerism shine. In this thoroughly capitalist context, all that art that endlessly critically questions society takes on something of a labia. A free indulgence.
“At the end of the post-modern show,” writes British cultural critic Stuart Jeffries in his recent book Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, “the exit is always through the gift shop”. The prejudices of previous generations have now been dispelled. Now to face our own blind spots.
This is where Bas Heijne writes about France and the world every two weeks from Paris.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 11, 2022
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