Originally in French, Gustave Affeulpin’s The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg (1976) is a fictional report on the construction and operations of an art center underneath the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France. Built in tandem with the museum that is internationally known as the “Pompidou”—native Parisians mostly refer to it simply as “Beaubourg”—the underground center that Affeulpin describes is not a copy but a double. Decidedly, not mimicking. Instead, co-existing. To present culture in its most incisive form, the infrastructure and organizing principles of this, the other center, must be collectively decided upon its public and its program progressively unfold in time, at the vision and inertia, so to say, of its constituents. Affeulpin uses the pseudonym “Albert Meister” to write a piece of fiction as a documentary account. The book is a vivid report on the life of a cultural place, and the inner-workings and mostly failings of an endeavor closer to a utopia blueprint than a concrete place.

The English translation of The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg, this version subtitled with the tag-line “An Interpretation,” was done by visual artist Luca Frei. Luca’s version includes notes and images, in-between lines and as illustrations, on the construction of the Pompidou and the first publication of Affeulpin’s book. And, as the subtitle he tags on to the original suggests, his is not a straight transliteration of a text from one language to another. The published work claims to be a new work. Intentionality here is crucial. While the book remains a work by Affeulpin, its current manifestation—in English, in print, in distribution and discussion—is made by Luca, highlighting while raising a bit of speculation around appropriation, literary, and citationality, literally.

The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg - An interpretation was co-published in 2007 by Book Works and CASCO, Office for Art, Theory and Design, Utrecht. The video here documents Luca Frei reading selected passages in the book, a program held on September 18, 2008 in conjunction to the Archaeology of Longing at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris.

When I asked him to talk about André Breton’s 1946 lecture in Haiti, the 83-year old Gérald Bloncourt said that he couldn’t exactly recall the details. “I was busy,” he added, “and preoccupied, carrying a gun in my pocket and guarding my friend Jacques Stephan Alexis, whose task that day was assassinating Lescot.”

Considered more a dictator than simply president, Elie Lescot was among those listening to Breton speak about surrealism. Pierre Mabille had organized that conference. And that Lescot was in the audience was not by chance. It was somewhat of a political affair. A surrealist himself and also a practicing doctor, Mabille was the French cultural attaché in Haiti. This was one of a series of conferences by Breton before his return to France, where he had fled from during World War II. Anyway, the plans to assassinate Lescot that day failed, and the young Haitian poets in charge of it escaped. Mabille, who was friendly with Stephan Alexis and Bloncourt arranged their protection, and immediately after brokered Bloncourt’s political exile in France.

This summer, when I arrived to the doorsteps of Gérald Bloncourt’s home in Paris, he knew I wanted to speak with him about something related. In articles describing that lecture, Breton’s presentation was figured as a catalyst to the revolution that ensued immediately after. His speech had been published immediately after in La Ruche, a Haitian newspaper edited by the poet Rene Depestre among others. At the government confiscation of that La Ruche issue and the imprisonment of its editors, what began as student protests ended in a larger demonstrations that led to the exile of many intellectuals.

It was actually while initially investigating the historic artist’s studio La Ruche in Montparnasse that I learned about the newspaper La Ruche. Things fell into place right after that. Gérald Bloncourt had just co-authored with Michael Löwy, Messagers de la Tempête. André Breton et la Révolution de janvier 1946 en Haïti (2007) a book published by Les Temps des Cerises in Paris—a copy of which I kindly obtained through the artist collective Société Réaliste. Having dealt with other types of doubles in the Archaeology of Longing, I invited Bloncourt to narrate the events surrounding that Breton lecture. Afterwards, he also read some of his poetry. This video is a recording of his talk, which was celebrated on the evening of September 18, 2008 in Paris.

In one of the drawings by Emma Hedditch that is part of the exhibition Archaeology of Longing, there are two characters depicted in profile. One is lying down on the ground, or, well, at the edge of the paper; the other one is just above, leaning towards the first. Both figured with short hair, and barely rendered with soft pencil and minimal lines, their sexuality is left ambiguous. They appear, however, in a moment of intimacy, the hand of one slightly peeking in underneath the other’s shirt. Their thoughts and speech encircled in bubbles lightly drawn over their heads. “We have been thinking about longing as a part of capitalist thinking which reflects in all our relations. Longing is connected to ideas and feelings of scarcity.” This is some of what a character says to the other.

As part of this exhibition, Emma also performed a work along the lines of this drawing; video documentation is here included. The performance took place on the evening of September 18, 2008, at the Musée de Montmartre in Paris, which is the vicinity of the exhibition host and organizer Kadist Art Foundation. Aside from Emma’s performance, the evening program also included a reading by Luca Frei of his The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg—An interpretation, and a narration by Gérald Bloncourt of the events surrounding a lecture by Andre Bréton in 1946 Haiti. I will soon write about these presentations, too.

One of the galleries at the Musée de Montmartre inspired the decision to make the program there. It is the room (that is at most 18 square meters) dedicated to The Paris Commune of 1871, which started in Montmartre, and to the construction of the Sacre Coeur, which sits atop its hill. Condensed in this small gallery are items about the rise and fall of a historic political event led by working class struggle, along with documentation of the construction of its anti-monument, this was a basilica built, accordinging to David Harvey, to “expiate the crimes of the communards.” Disenchantment is at the heart of this display. The break of the spell that is the political awakening of the commune is the first sign of this, and the appreciation of a monument about but yet against their struggle follows next.

But, as I said, there are other reasons for choosing this museum as venue. Tucked in a quiet shaded street at the top of the Montmartre hill, the building that houses the museum was once the home of Auguste Renoir. In his Paris Des Avant-Gardes, Alain Rustenholz also tells that it is here where Renoir settled to paint Le Moulin de la Galette (1876). It was also the home of Émile Bernard and Raoul Duffy, and in 1906, of Suzanne Valadon and her son. She was the reason for why Erik Satie lived next door. In choosing this venue, I wanted to reactive the artistic life of this place with a live event and an artistic community, rather than through display and tourism.

Special thanks to Danièle Rousseau-Aicardi and Isabelle Ducatez at the Musée de Montmartre for collaborating with Kadist Art Foundation and hosting the program of September 18th, including Emma Hedditch’s performance.

Czech Republic has a legacy and currency of conceptualism, and, for that matter, a socio-economic history in which working socially has its own political connotations. It is not surprising that the Czech artists with most international presence are conceptualists. Think of Jiří Kovanda’s scheduled actions and happenings; Kateřina Šedá’s social projects; Jiří Skála’s writing performances; Barbora Klímová’s current reenactments of almost invisible performances originally held in public spaces during the 1970s, when the country was communist and ruled as Czechoslovakia. From these artists, it is the new interpretations of Kovanda’s work that is important to touch upon here. This is not because there is a direct lineage between Kovanda and the younger artists that I mention thereafter. Clearly, the intentionality and form of their work couldn’t be more diametrically opposed.

Here are some of Kovanda’s happenings: September 3, 1977. On an escalator … turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me. In another action dated the same and described simply as Contact, the artist wanders on an almost empty sidewalk and, as if accidentally, bumps or rubs his shoulders when he encounters a person walking in opposite direction. Some months earlier, this time in a park in downtown Prague, May 19, 1977, I rake together some rubbish (dust, cigarette stubs, etc.) with my hands and when I’ve got a pile, I scatter it all again. Schölhammer sees a purposeful and meaningful aspect of anti-socialization in Kovanda’s work. He proposes the artist’s “refusal to cooperate” as a political act.

Simple actions characterize Kovanda’s work, while a level of production and art historical or institutional frame is either used or required, to a lesser or higher degree, in the work of these younger artists. The distinction is telling of the times. The new readings of Kovanda’s work describe the contexts of art production and reception of Czech contemporary art, particularly for performance. They suggest the possible subjectivities at play in work done today from that of the recent past. The curator Georg Schölhammer argues that, “Kovanda tries to find gestures in his work to act against the manifest ossification of society in the late 1970s, to transcend it and to find traces of an expression of individuality.” According to the curator, the bourgeois public of Fordism in the West and the bureaucratic Socialism in the East are the societies in question.

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Under the direction of Vit Havernek, the Prague-based nonprofit arts organization Tranzit has taken the task of publishing a series of books about these and other Czech conceptual artists, young and old. This editorial project is done in collaboration with JRP | Ringier in Switzerland. These artist’s books and catalogues are published in Czech and English, and are strategically distributed, allowing new points of contact and reception of these artists work internationally. The reference to Georg Schölhammer is drawn from one of these books: Jiří Kovanda (Prague: Tranzit and JRP Ringier, 2006).

Jiří Kovanda is represented by GB Agency in Paris, who kindly provided the image pictured above. One of the best exhibitions at that the gallery has been an unconventional retrospective of his work curated by Work Method. Work Method is a Paris-based curatorial agency run by François Piron and Guillaume Désanges to initiate and manage independently individual and collaborative projects, including art exhibitions, performances, programs and editorial projects linked with contemporary art.

Image above: Jiří Kovanda. “XXX. August 1977. Prague. I’m crying. I gazed at the sun for so long that I’ve started to cry. (Je suis en train de pleuré. J’ai fixé le soleil depuis si longtemps que j’ai commencé à pleurer.)” Courtesy GB Agency, Paris.

Today, forty-five years ago, musician John Cale performed Erik Satie’s Vexations once in the television program “I’ve Got a Secret,” a weekly show of CBS Television in America. This happened only a couple of days after the legendary performance of Vexations organized by John Cage. That concert lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes, and was groundbreaking. To date, it is considered to be the first public-complete performance of Satie’s composition. Cale was one of ten painists playing that night (the concert began on September 9, 1963). A couple of days later, The New York Times covered the performance with a diary-like report and documentary images almost taking the entire front page of the paper. The Paris-based Satie specialist, Ornella Volta, who directs the Archives Erik Satie, is currently working on a catalogue raisonné of Vexations performances. Among the several she has pointed out during informal conversations held over the course of this summer is the one in 1979 by Canadian artist Rober Racine. The abacus-like counter that Racine used in his performance to keep track of the 840 repetitions of this composition is included in the exhibition Archaeology of Longing.

I’m too sad to tell you (1971) by Bas Jan Ader. Click his name to visit a wonderful site.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been in residency at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, France. This is a private foundation initiated in 2001, which has been forming a collection of contemporary art, and organizing exhibitions and residencies. I am curating their upcoming exhibition, Archaeology of Longing (Archéologie de la Chine), which takes place at Kadist’s gallery from September 19-November 9, 2008.

With a title drawn from a short story by Susan Sontag, Archaeology of Longing is an exhibition bringing together a number of artworks, artifacts, and common objects. It begins as an investigation into disenchantment, soon digressing through the historical flatlands of interpretation and substitution. Far from melancholic, and closer to what can be described as politically intimate, the exhibition is an inventory of that journey.

Archaeology of Longing includes artwork by Alejandro Cesarco, Luca Frei, Emma Hedditch, Bethan Huws, Fabio Kacero, Rober Racine, Kay Rosen, Kateřina Šedá, Joe Scanlan and Lisa Tan; artifacts and objects on loan by several contributors, including Tania Bruguera and Archives Erik Satie; and exhibition furniture designed by Tomás Alonso. A series of events will take place as part of the exhibition. On the evening of September 18th at the garden of the Musée de Montmartre in Paris, Emma Hedditch performs a new work and Luca Frei makes a reading of his artist’s book, The So-called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg - an Interpretation. On the night of November 1st, Lars Svendsen gives a lecture on his Philosophy of Boredom at Kadist Art Foundation.

A collection of findings uncovered during this archaeology of longing is also available as a publication titled 84 handkerchiefs, an umbrella and some books.

Image: Lisa Tan, Hotel Principal Towels, 2008, C-print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy the artist and D’Amelio Terras, New York.