Some weeks ago, Manhattan saw the arrival of Hypnotic Show, one of Raimundas Malasauskas’ latest curatorial projects and certainly one of his most mesmerizing. The inaugural Hypnotic Show took place last year at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. I experienced its second iteration, which took place at Artists Space in New York.

Technically speaking, there are differences between mesmerizing and the practice of hypnotizing. But in today’s vernacular these terms are used inter-changeably. The first term derives from the name of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who is known as a predecessor of hypnotism. Working primarily in Paris, his used magnets for curing, and his trance, which is referred since as mesmerism, were based on some kind of universal magnetic fluid that, according to him, existed between people and was bound to gravity. This idea was highly debated during his lifetime.

By the nineteenth century, when the word hypnosis became current, the medical study of trance shifted to a study in psychology and away from physics. Hypnosis was used to study a patient’s physical and mental response while asleep. Some of the more successful experiments of deep trance are attributed to the late work of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) in his research of neurosis and hysteria. After some period of questioning and debunking, it was in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, that hypnosis was again embraced by the medical community, not surprisingly, by military doctors.

While there were many other practicioners of mesmerism, hypnosis and other forms of trance, it was Mesmer and Charcot’s peculiar medical practices that the popular image of the hypnotic séance is modeled from. The showmanship around hypnosis, however, has increasingly grown since Mesmer’s times. It is the dependence, the interest-filled and willing submission, really, of the patient to the hypnotizer that is raised to the level of awe or spectacle.

For Hypnotic Show, Raimundas commissioned several artists to create immaterial artworks to be tangibly experienced under hypnosis. While only a couple of contributions are drawings or images, the main submissions are succinctly drafted text pieces. These are descriptive texts detailing encounters with phenomena and art, written as instructive walks or detailed travels. The hypnotized wanderer enters in and out of scenes, encountering images, objects, and situations of different kinds. Like in dream state, many times these encounters suggest the hypnotized to define or name things, even on occasions to take authorship of certain artworks or moments that they come across.

This is how you begin to experience Deric Carner’s artwork: You are walking down a path. You are watching where you place your feet. There are loose rocks. You are surrounded by vegetation. It’s dark and dusty. The work continues until you recognize an object that is mysteriously rising from the horizon but that is, you think, quite clearly not the sun. The hypnotizer then transitions to another work, the contribution by Will Holder. This time you encounter an image of Elvis Presley. A poster that becomes three-dimensional. You find yourself interacting with Elvis.

These are only two of more than a dozen artworks commissioned by Raimundas, who hands the exhibition as script to a professional hypnotizer, Marcos Lutyens. To experience the exhibition, then, the public convenes at a gallery for the séance. In the backdrop, a video by Patrizio di Massimo rendered a seal in fade-ins and close-ups. In the foreground, the curator and hypnotizer lead the event. At Artists Space, there were about ten people who volunteered for hypnosis; they were in fact audience of the exhibition. The rest of us there, the majority, were merely spectators bearing witness to their experience. And while not in a state of trance, at least imagining what it could feel to be in that place.

In the press release—a document written as a responded list of Frequently Asked Questions—the curator described this unconventional and allegedly immaterial exhibition as “a temporary social structure for engaging into creative cognitive acts through shared practices of art and hypnosis.” At the end of the séance at Artists Space, Raimundas explained that he sought to place an exhibition in the brain. The weight given to physical site is interesting. It opened a discussion that is less about memory or imagination, than about sense and sensibility, or as he suggested, of neurology.

The windows quaked. Car alarms triggered. My heartbeat rises, and body shivers. The image on TV has suddenly changed to snow. I’m in the equatorial zone, and assume the roar is thunder announcing the start of a tropical storm. But now the sound is not of wind but of helicopter wings. I peek out and see. The clouds are made of smoke.

That thing I heard was a rumble from a bomb. There’s a building crumbled to the ground.

I am only in the fourth floor. I think. Blink. I chose to take the stairs. And there we are, the only handful of its guests of this almost empty hundreds-room hotel. Just there, standing in a high-ceiling lobby furnished in the fifties clinging to its forgotten grandeur with nostalgia. Us, in a rundown-downtown, now with chaos all around.

Earlier at the airport, I thought I’d missed the flight. Far from sweet is this evening in the valley of sugar cane.

Image: Pasado mañana (2008) by Judi Werthein, installation view at “Urgente! 41 Salon Nacional de Artistas” in Cali, Colombia.

In the following interview, the emerging curator Emilie Villez discusses the formation and recent work of the Parisian curatorial collective, Le Bureau/, and about the burgeoning French Association for Curators that she was instrumental in forming with other colleagues in the field. Aside from being active in those two organizations, Emilie writes, curates independently, and works at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris.

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One of the strongest exhibitions I saw in 2008 was From One Revolution to Another, presented during the fall and winter at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The exhibition was part of the institution’s Carte Blanche initiative, whereby an artist is given time slot in the schedule to curate an exhibition in the entire venue. From One Revolution to Another was Jeremy Deller’s carte blanche. The exhibition took the entire venue, and consisted of large and small shows and salons, including the eclectic “Folk Archive” made together with his collaborator Alan Kane.

One of my favorite components was “1984-2008. Ed Hall. Banners” (installation view pictured here). These were dozens of banners hung through two—the most spacious—galleries of the Palais. These were beautiful and attractive banners that artist and activist Ed Hall created for “organizations committed to social and political causes.” Hall selected the banners on display, which are on loan by their respective groups represented, and also made a banner for the Palais exhibition.

If this was one of the strongest exhibitions in my mind, the reason was proportion. And I do not mean the size of the venue or the scale of the work — two much-heard criticisms about recent exhibitions at the Palais. By proportions I mean to point to the social dimensions that the project embraced. The exhibitions that made From One Revolution to Another presented recent movements, from craft to politics, that create new communities and shape the cultural landscape of Britain and other nations.

This year, Deller got his carte blanche in the US for which he creates It is what it is: Conversations about Iraq, co-commissioned and presented by the New Museum and Creative Time. The project starts next month with programming in New York, and then extends nationwide as a cross-country tour. It’s curated by Laura Hoptman, Amy Mackie and Nato Thompson, with research by Shane Brennan, Sarah Demeuse, Ozge Ersoy, Jazmin Garcia, and Terri C. Smith.

This is the fourth and final video documenting the events organized in conjunction to the exhibition Archaeology of Longing at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris. I’ll continue making videos for Sideshows, but probably less regularly. Anyway, the video here shows excerpts from a lecture on boredom conducted by Lars Svendsen. The video is less than ten minutes, so it’s really just a fragment of an hours-long program, including a Q&A session with the public, which was interesting if a bit contentious—the lack of a psychoanalytic approach in his presentation was questioned. Lars’ response, “I don’t trust Freud.”

Indeed, in his book, A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars does not approach boredom with a psychoanalytic eye. Yet, while his exploratory investigation is not a psychoanalytic in a materialist sense, it still combines research drawn from the history of ideas to popular culture. It looks at boredom from many different sides, and, in its mix of philosophical references to literature to music, it succeeds in introducing one to the complexity that is, what the author deems, a modern condition of humankind. The book is organized in four sections—the problem, the stories, the phenomenology and the ethics of boredom. The video here combines at least a reference to the first two parts, including a brief mention of the typologies of boredom, and a bit of the importance around boredom and the making, or lack thereof, of meaning.

It was Tom Cruz who pointed me to Lars’ book, which he had reviewed for a journal some years ago. We took it upon ourselves to also analyze some of the works Lars had mentioned there, Crash and American Psycho among them. One piece that made a significant impact on me was Alberto Moravia’s Boredom from 1960. In this novel, Dino, a young, aristocrat painter can own anything except what he thinks is the genuine love from his disaffected model and lover. The search for meaning and impossibility of possessing certain things, which Dino represents, are the very characteristics of boredom.

In Archaeology of Longing, displayed were several copies of Moravia’s novel in different translations: a copy in the Italian, La Noia; in French L’ennui; the first English edition called The Empty Canvas and the most recent simply titled Boredom. The idea was not only to declare object as source in the exhibition. It was also to suggest that each translation offered a new interpretation.

The lecture “A Philosophy on Boredom” by Lars Svendsen took place on the afternoon of November 1, 2008 at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, France. The book, “A Philosophy on Boredom,” was originally published in Norway in 1999; its first English translation was published in 2004 by Reaktion Books.

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.

This summer in Paris, Le Bon Marché—considered the first department store, it opened in 1876 in a building designed by Gustave Eiffel—had an exhibition and section devoted to young fashion designers from Buenos Aires. Among the labels included was Juana de Arco, founded and directed by the Argentine designer Mariana Cortés. On exhibition were items of her newest Winter line (seasons are reversed in the Southern Cone). The theme, Skiing. I attended the fashion show that was part of BAF in February. The walk was tackled as performance: models slipped as if walking on ice, tripped as stumbling on snow, interrupting the gait as display and breaking the characteristic cool of these shows. The clothing design and fabric patterns were also playful. In a continuation of her research in regional history, its culture and ecology, Mariana’s was inspired by her research into Peruvian, Bolivian and Argentine traditional wear. The line is not stuck in the past, though.

Mariana Cortés designs and produces her own fabrics for Juana de Arco, whether these are knitted wools she makes or cottons she prints. While inspired by indiginous South America, the fabric patterns of her Winter line have a digital-kick, something that could be drawn from 1980 video games, what is considered today low-tech. (Not surprisingly, there is a cult-like following of Juana de Arco’s fashion in Japan.) But taking in mind that the loom is considered the first computer, this is not too far apart. Jackets are saturated with Bolivian wool-string pom poms. Peruvian inspired sweaters are here dresses or pants. Other clothing items are made with beavers here and here silk-screened in the fabric. Oh, yes, and that makes reference to the ecology of Argentina. “What?” I asked, perplexed, knowing beavers are not native to South America let alone to her homeland! Mariana had an explanation, a story really, as there is for every clothing item she makes: During the Peron era, a couple dozen Canadian beavers were imported to Argentina in hopes the industry there would cultivate them to use their furs for high-end fashion items and accessories. That industry never really flourished, and, as you can imagine, the animal was never attended. Now, there are about 200,000 beavers there—what can be technically called a beaver plague.

I went to kiss Jiří Kovanda at Bétonsalon—a re-enactment for him, first time for me. The kissing was one of the performances in Playtime, an exhibition curated by Bétonsalon’s director, Mélanie Bouteloup, and her colleague Grégory Castéra. In different ways, the curators played with the notion of performative display, redefining the use of the gallery, shaping roles for its staff, and orchestrating audience participation. In seeming complicity with the artists, the curators chose to leave the gallery pretty much empty, and instead exhibited, performed, or activated the artworks in different modalities and times. Some artworks were installed in closets and office areas. Others comprised audio works that played in portable CD players with headphones or were scheduled activities. Some others were listed in a checklist and shown upon request. I enjoyed this last modality the most, and here I briefly recount it.

Following the scholastic model of “show and tell,” in which a personal object is the starting point of a demonstrative conversation, a gallery attendant at Bétonsalon escorted me and a couple of others to a table with seating, where he calmly presented a series of images, books, and objects that he had drawn from a closet. He began his “show and tell” by talking about his outfit. A slim young man, he was wearing a sparkling white Adidas jump suit that accentuated his cool and relaxed demeanor. “It’s an artwork by Ryan Gander,” he explained, while pointing out an embroidered red stain the size of a bullet-hole located on his jacket roughly near his belly. Wearing matching gloves, our artwork-dressed interlocutor presented each artwork with calm self-assurance. This is this, and this is that, he said. He spent about five to ten minutes talking about each thing, concluding each factual presentation with a personal viewpoint or interpretation.

When the time came for what looked like a standard manila envelope but which was, in fact, a carefully designed and crafted package, the attendant removed his gloves to handle the piece. It was an artwork by Patrick Killoran, one in a series titled “Hand to Hand,” that like its title suggested a mail artwork that circumvents postal service. Betting on suggestion and affiliation rather than on addresses or the other usual postal types of information, each package was prepared in two sets and sent out into the world simultaneously. Before it reached its addressee, in time for the exhibition, the first envelope had only passed through the hands of a couple of people. The second one, however, which I confess passed through my hands, here in Paris, but was a day later held by someone else in London—had yet to arrive to its intended recipient at Bétonsalon. (Signatures and locations of couriers were chronologically listed in a form on the back of the envelope.) This time, our interlocutor saved his opinion and took it upon himself to be the messenger of the travel anecdote of its deliverer. It was a meta-conversation about delivery, if you will. And just when he was about to put the envelope aside to pick up the next work, a woman next to me interrupted him with: “So, what’s inside?” Our attendant, responding playfully with an “I don’t know,” opened the envelope to start another round of “show and tell.”

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.