The artist Anne Imhof in the Paris Palais de Tokyo – Culture

When the artist Anne Imhof cuts up the exhibition rooms with panes of glass, as she did four years ago in her contribution “Faust” for the German pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale, it is not in order to create new spaces of meaning. In Venice, the underneath and behind, cordoned off by the glass, was a place for the performance artist’s action. In the Parisian Palais de Tokyo, which Anne Imhof plays with her installation “Natures mortes” from top to bottom in all rooms on its 20,000 square meters, there is currently no live performance. But glass walls, between which we walk corridors, curved rooms and labyrinths. Imhof’s principle of an artistic immanence in the glass transparency, which makes the specifics of the location a theme and the museum the material of the exhibition, reaches a new stage here. Quite different, however, than in the sense of a museum’s self-reflection. Anne Imhof, who mixes all material registers, is far from conceptual art.

For her carte blanche in the Palais de Tokyo, she had the neoclassical building that was built for the 1937 World Trade Fair completely cleared, except for the raw concrete pillars and perforated brick walls. From the partly sprayed glass panels – relics from an Italian demolition project – in the curve of the light-flooded entrance area down to the dark niches of the second basement, it unfolds a panorama of own works and guest contributions. One finds there the tension between daylight and night vision, contemplation and rebellion, anxiety and ecstasy, boxing match and embrace, which is characteristic of them.

Imhof and her guests also succumb to the catacomb aesthetic in the empty Palais de Tokyo

The sound compositions from alienated vocal and instrumental parts, screams, laughter and scraps of words, developed together with the artist Eliza Douglas, pour out of moving sound rail boxes over the presented works. In Elaine Sturtevan’s video installation “Finite Infinite” from 2010, a dog chases like a harried Sisyphus brother over the same field. In Cady Noland’s serigraph “Tanya as a Bandit” (1989), the American bourgeois daughter Patricia Hearst, who defected to her revolutionary kidnappers with a machine gun in hand, suggests that finality as redemption or ruin remains an option for our postmodern age.

With a broad, but discreet panorama of her own works, Anne Imhof fans out this tension between immersion and radical break in all the nuances of perception. Relics from the earlier works “Angst”, “Rage”, “Faust” or a film recording of several hours from the performance “Sex” (2019) in London’s Tate Modern are evidence of continuity. Repeatedly appearing metal installations, half bed, half grave slab, as well as an empty stage with a drum set ready, set the opposite accent and leave open whether something is already over or is still to come. Bright-colored oil painting series from Imhof’s most recent production frame the expectation.

Together with the four dozen guest exhibits, this creates attractive visual internal echoes. A half-hour video with the title “Wave”, in which Eliza Douglas hits the slowly rising tide waves with a whip on a crooked concrete slab by the sea, takes up the Sisyphus motif again. Swedish artist Klara Lidén’s dogged beating with a stick on a defenseless bicycle in the video “Bodies of Society”, on the other hand, which begins like a teasing caress, increases to seemingly groundless and senseless violence.

From the basement of the Palais de Tokyo, meanwhile, the beguiling clank of the tin kettle that David Hammons kicked in front of him in the performance “Phat Free” in 1995 while walking through the nocturnal streets of New York can be heard. The dead nature of the “natures mortes”, which symbolized the transience of all being as a still life in the form of wilting flowers, crumbly pieces of meat, lying around vessels or musical instruments in European painting, can also make some noise in our cities as a real object. In the Polaroid photos of Cyprien Gaillard, who lives in Berlin, of the Jägermeister bottles that were drunk at night and left lying on the street, or in Mohamed Bourouissa’s wall sculpture “The Ride” (2017) with historical photos of black cowboys in Philadelphia on car body parts, these objects are also transformed back into incarnate allegory.

With such a broad theme, however, the temptation to succumb to the catacomb aesthetic in the empty Palais de Tokyo is great. Anne Imhof & Guests did not resist her. The deeper you go down into the basement tombs with the sloping ceilings and vaulted floors, the more emphatically the day and spray figures stretch out their messages to us. The exhibition experiment tends towards demonstration. With the choice of a print by the archaeological fanatical Piranesi, a vaulted hall from the series “Camera sepolcrale”, the artist indirectly admits her fascination for ruin bombs herself. But why reduce this inclination right away in the same hall?

Open detailed view

With the help of a collage by the Dadaist Francis Picabia from 1920, which has only survived as a photo, Anne Imhof takes a pirouette to distance herself again. A plush sheep lolls with its tail between its legs in the middle of the title frame “Natures mortes Portrait de Cézanne Portrait de Renoir Portrait de Rembrandt”. It remains to be seen whether this little monkey makes itself small in front of the big names or claims to embody them. With regard to an unpainted picture entitled “Portrait de Guillaume Apollinaire”, Picabia explained that, unlike if he had actually portrayed the poet, nobody could claim that this picture looked dissimilar. Is the artist trying to suggest that her natures mortes are not nature morte? That would be a problem for the exhibition. Picabia’s friend Marcel Duchamp, who is honored at the exit with Sturtevant’s video reprise of the picture “Nude, Descending a Staircase” (1912), sometimes declared that there was no solution because there was no problem at all. This irony of non-commitment does not suit Anne Imhof’s weighty art. Because you have to use the stairs to find your way back from the depths of their topics. And there the artist leaves us pretty much alone with her installations.

Natures mortes. Carte blanche for Anne Imhof. Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Until October 24th. A performance program is announced from October 14th. Instead of a catalog, Anne Imhof helped design issue 31 of the in-house magazine “Palais” (French / English, 19 euros)