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TAles from The CiTy: Paris
words CHRISTOPHER MOONEY A Cy Twombly kissed by a demoiselle sculpture by Jean-Pierre Raynaud that
d’Avignon, 878 cars torched on New was jackhammered to bits in a Paris
Year’s Eve and 260 neglected Daniel car showroom. Its car-salesman owner
Buren columns threatened with wanted to move it; Raynaud refused,
demolition by Buren himself: vandalism then agreed to its destruction. In
takes many forms in France, the France, as in the US (but, shockingly,
country that, back in the Thermidorian not the UK), the ‘moral right’ of the
days of the Revolution, coined the artist outweighs the proprietary rights
term. Of late, the defacements and of the owner; only an artist can
destructions are manifestly more destroy his own art. (Unlike earlier
creative than the lopping off of a works destroyed by Raynaud, the debris
statuary nose. Not that there is from this piece was also destroyed,
anything particularly imaginative not sold off as smaller works of art.)
about setting a car on fire – 50 to
100 are torched in France every night. In 1871, Gustave Courbet said Paris’s
Nor is planting a red pucker on a white Vendôme Column was ‘devoid of
canvas any more noteworthy or less all artistic value’ and should be
heinous than taking a hammer to a destroyed. The column came down –
Duchamp urinal or cracking an arm off the first Dadaist art event – but then
Michelangelo’s Pietà. Buren’s bluff, the revolutionary government collapsed,
however, is of a different stripe. and so the column went back up (the
bill for its re-erection was sent
When the columns were first sunk into to Courbet, who died, broke, the day
the Palais Royal’s cour d’honneur in before the first payment was due).
1986, in what at the time was a car
park for the Ministry of Culture, Courbet didn’t make the column, and he
detractors won a stop-work order from didn’t actually destroy it, and maybe
the courts and added their voices to it wasn’t/isn’t art, but that’s not my
the public outcry surrounding the point. Record numbers have attended
doomed socialist government. Yet unlike Courbet’s just-closed show at Paris’s
Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981), Grand Palais – cosponsored by Le
which was carted out of Federal Plaza Figaro. Like Buren, Courbet, the
in New York in 1989, Buren’s columns original enfant terrible of French art,
survived the early vitriol and, though has been domesticated (he even brings
never maintained properly (the fountain in the paper), and absorbed into the
stopped working eight years ago), are orthodoxy. If notoriety is an essential
now among the most popular attractions element of the avant-garde; if art,
in Paris. as Serra argues, must be ‘purposely
useless’; and if artists have a moral
right to prevent damage to their
Vandalism takes many forms
‘honour, integrity and reputation’,
then perhaps Buren should go through
in France, and it’s
with his threat. Forget for a moment
how much fun you had on that Carsten
getting more creative
Höller slide at Tate Modern. Should
tourist brats be allowed to climb
on abstract minimalism? Should their
The Sarkozy government, smarting from parents be allowed to throw coins
criticism of the Louvre satellite in at it, or use it as plinths for their
Dubai, a new free-admission-to-museums snapshot portraits?
policy (with no museum budget
increases) and Time magazine’s biennial In another example of artistic
‘Death of French Culture’ article, vandalism, Paris-based conceptual
quickly announced a €4 million artist Gaspard Delanoë, running
renovation plan. What’s interesting for mayor against the incumbent,
is that no one other than the odd Bertrand Delanoë (no relation),
crank bloggeur complained publicly – writes in his platform that he wants
not even Le Figaro, which spearheaded Vieux Paris torn down and replaced
the campaign against the ‘Burenisation with ‘magnificent buildings design-és
générale de l’art actuel’ in 1986. by Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel and
Philippe Starck’.
Also interesting, Le Figaro didn’t
bother covering the same-week story Delanoë is joking. So, I think, was
of Cube (1986), a site-specific Buren. So, I think, am I.
ArTrEvIEw 52
columns_March.indd 52 29/1/08 12:41:08
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