France’s artists are caught today between a standing as a cultural exception and the international art discourse outside the country’s boundaries. Many want to maintain their independence, while at the same time demanding state funding. But France’s institutionalized cultural protectionism can only lead to new dependencies, to a kind of schizo culture, which lacks the necessary intellectual distance to itself.
»We will not be taking part in the ‹GNS› exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo«. Shortly before the exhibition’s opening at the end of May this year, the artists’ group »Bureau d'études« simply backed out. According to the pamphlet published by the artists on the Web, the idea was to shake things up a little in a period when the dismantling of the social state continues unchecked. After all, the Palais was only producing opium for the masses. Founded by Xavier Fourt and Leonore Bonaccini, the Bureau makes use of devices such as the »tangential university for autonomous knowledge and autonomous powers« (http://utangente.free.fr) to map, on the Web, economic and political power structures. Their contribution to the »Global Navigation System« show was to have consisted merely of hanging up posters in the Paris Métro. Nicolas Bourriaud, second director of the Palais de Tokyo and curator of the show, wanted to have one of their works in the Palais as well. But that wasn’t the only thing that got the actionists agitated: the worst part was that Bourriaud had refused to accord their work the appropriate respect. This was allegedly a sign of neo-conservative exploitation policy, forcing them to leave the show. Bourriaud had formerly worked successfully with the artists in the group. »Backing out on such short notice right before the opening«, he said, visibly irritated, on the opening evening, »is immature and unprofessional«. And identifying him with the archenemy was simply childish: »If you want to change something through art, you have to exhibit. If you refuse to exhibit, you will remain ineffectual«.
How, then, can one have an impact today as an artist, without letting oneself be exploited by the commercial interests of the market or the hegemonic agenda of the state? French cultural production currently portrays itself roughly like this: on one side stands Mr. Hyde, the flourishing market for spectacle. Partially sponsored by government funds, this side presents blockbuster shows with widespread audience appeal featuring big-name artists such as Botticelli, Picasso or Magritte. On the other side: Dr. Jekyll, state cultural promotion brachiated into innumerable individual institutions. France has adopted the »exception culturelle« as its official label. After successfully finagling a temporary exclusion of cultural goods from the liberalization of the international market in the hexagon at the 1993 GATT negotiations conducted by the World Trade Organization (WTO), this triumph was henceforth used as a pretext for the creation of a protectionist art world.
»For the past twenty years France’s cultural policy has been determined by the work of Jack Lang«, says Antoine Perrot. As artist and president of the Federation of Artists and Authors (FRAAP), Perrot has been coordinating and bundling the work of artists’ cooperatives for the past three years. »This has brought art a great deal of structures, funds and venues«, he continues, »but today we are forced to acknowledge that the institutions have been shut off from us for at least ten years now. It is impossible to fathom the reasoning behind arts funding. The artists are being increasingly left out of the process«. l Despite an enormous cultural budget, which was just raised by five percent to a total of 2.6 billion Euros, »fine arts is the only field in which no new jobs were created«, says Perrot. The lion’s share of the national budget goes to the huge Parisian institutions – the Opera alone devours six times as much in subsidies as all the provincial theaters combined. This explains why more and more artists are turning to Europe for answers to the question of what is to become of artistic work in the future. The fourth »interprofessional« congress of contemporary art took place at the end of November in Metz under the title »The European Challenge of Contemporary Art – Interrelationships and Cooperations«. The problem here as well was that museum directors, art dealers and curators were pondering issues that should really be the concern of the artists themselves. The artists hardly have a say in things at all these days.
»The French art scene is blocked by civil servants«, in the opinion of Jocelyn Wolff, who just opened a dynamic gallery in the eastern part of Paris. »In France there are too many state-funded ‹helpers› for art«, he criticizes. »Take the AFAA for instance. It’s certainly a praiseworthy institution, but it’s done very little to promote real collaboration between international artists«. Wolff works without one cent of subsidies – out of pure conviction. »I would rather spend an afternoon talking on the phone with collectors and art journalists than deal for an entire day with public servants representing government art sponsorship«. The young art dealer is by no means a neo-liberal rip-off expert. He invests in his artists, is passionate about what he does and takes a great many risks.
For many artists, this abundance of business zeal inspires mistrust. -- for example, for Michel Thion, author and artist. In an e-mail newsletter he notes with vexation that Lyon is looking for a librarian who, in addition to the appropriate university degree, also has business administration training. »Art is not a commodity«, Thion states defiantly. Artists associations, such as the activist »horschamps«, are also battling the commercialization of culture. However, all of these activists have not yet been able to produce exciting exhibits that could have an impact on the international art discourse. An alternative arts scene is nowhere to be found in the city of high rents and endless museums.
The painter Stéphane Belzère, who splits his time between Paris and Berlin, regards the precarious situation of artists as one reason for the immobility of French art production: »The Squats, in which many young artists exhibit, often do more harm than good. It’s different in Berlin, where somewhere in the city an exciting off-project is always being put together for a limited time. There, it’s about the art – that’s what attracts people. The art one sees in many of the Paris Squats is often of poor quality, a side-effect of the fight for survival«. This as well is a consequence of an art promotion policy that concentrates on major structures and representative portions of the arts world instead of building an infrastructure in which artists can truly act independently.
Artists’ struggles, stuck as they are between fighting for survival and hoping to get some pocket money from the state, have become a French specialty. An ongoing discourse on the possible impact of art beyond or against the imperial interests of the state or of commerce is notably missing. Instead of analyzing this complex or surfing on the waves of competing interests and thereby deconstructing them, many artists fall into a kind of defensive paralysis, simplifying things, looking for old, familiar enemies. This spawns contradictions like the discussion round between artist Guillaume Paris and philosopher Jehanne Dautrey on the topic of the »inhumanity of commodities«, held in »Espace Paul Ricard«, funded by the manufacturer of the anise-flavored aperitif of the same name. No doubt the manufacturer made the money to build and maintain this arts space by selling exactly one of those much-criticized »inhumane commodities«.
In his works, 37-year-old Guillaume Paris satirizes the world of consumer goods, making visible the way in which goods shroud themselves in myth, how they become objects of desire for us, while letting us believe that we are purchasing them of our own free will in our capacity as «empowered» subjects with a world of goods at our fingertips. In actuality, the artists themselves are also caught up in a web of interests and power structures, and not simply standing up to a Disney-esque industrial magnate or cultural bureaucrat. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze once analytically described the capitalist »schizo«: the separation of subject and object, in which the former »covets« the later and believes that this desire gives him mastery over the object. His analysis can be understood as a critique of Western bureaucracies, which are marked by a growing separation of the government from the governed. »There is a fundamental affinity«, the philosopher writes, »between the work of art and the act of resistance«. In order to make this affinity effective, and escape the logic of the schizo relationship, a fundamental change is needed, especially in artistic work. What’s needed is intellectual distance, above all distance from oneself. In France, the »exception culturelle« and its side effects are making it difficult to achieve this kind of distance in today’s art world.
Translated by Jenny Taylor-Gaida