Jeff Rian

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  print January 2014

  Philippe Parreno

  PHILIPPE PARRENO’S ambitious semiretrospective “Anywhere, Anywhere, Out of the World” is the first exhibition to fill the entire Palais de Tokyo. The artist has transformed the galleries into a total artwork–cum–mise-en-scène: a sensuously complex atmosphere of space, sound, and images, called a “dramaturgy” by its curators, Jean de Loisy and Mouna Mekouar. Parreno’s Gesamtkunstwerk is scripted around a score, pianist Mikhail Rudy’s rendition of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka (1910–11), which tells the tale of a puppet come to life and here functions as a model for making an exhibition do the

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  previews January 2013

  “David Bowie Is”

  “Always changing, ever evolving, David Bowie actualized the shift from young mod Brit to full-blown icon of pop, a stamp on people’s minds even now, as the exhibition title’s “is” reminds.”

  Always changing, ever evolving, David Bowie actualized the shift from young mod Brit to full-blown icon of pop, a stamp on people’s minds even now, as the exhibition title’s “is” reminds. Culling some three hundred items from the David Bowie Archive, including costumes, set designs, storyboards, films, diary entries, instruments, handwritten lyrics, and album art, the V&A will show an array of Bowies—from sixteen-year-old David Jones to Ziggy Stardust spaceman to impresario of glam rock and the New Romantics to late-’90s Alexander McQueen–cloaked

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  print October 2010

  “An Ideal History of Contemporary Fashion”

  HISTOIRE IDÉALE DE LA MODE CONTEMPORAINE (An Ideal History of Contemporary Fashion), a two-part show at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, in its first installment traced the twenty-year history of fashion’s democratization. Beginning with Yves Saint Laurent’s “Libération” of summer 1971 and running through nearly 150 fashion collections up to Jean Paul Gaultier’s irreverent cusp-of-the-’90s “Les Rap-pieuses” (The Religious Rappers), “Ideal History” marked the rise of prêt-à-porter, a moment when affordable designer clothes fit the moods and attitudes of a new consumer age before embracing

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  print Summer 2009

  Jean-Luc Moulène

  FOR THE ONGOING PROJECT “Documents,” begun in the late 1990s, French artist Jean-Luc Moulène creates photographs that explore the interconnections between public commerce and art. Two well-known series within this project are “Les Filles d’Amsterdam” (Amsterdam Girls), 2005—close-up portraits of naked prostitutes, crouching so that their shaved genitals have equal billing with their hard-looking faces—and “Objets de grève” (Strike Objects), 1999–2000, which document what Moulène calls “objects of altered production” made by striking French factory workers: bright red shoes, strike maps, political

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  print December 2007

  Mark Lewis

  Born in Ontario in 1957 but now based in London, Mark Lewis began as a photographer, then switched to making 35-mm color films, which are mostly unedited and generally run the length of a four-minute reel; transferred to DVD, they are projected as loops one after another. Lewis continues to take pictures of his film locations, and here, in the first installment of a two-part exhibition, he showed three recent films, none more than four minutes long, along with five location shots, including three for films shown here. (The second show featured three earlier films.)

  Isosceles, 2007, is a meticulously

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  print December 2006

  Véronique Joumard

  Light, in all its ramifications, is a primary subject of Véronique Joumard’s sculptures and installations—light sources and related paraphernalia, such as heat- and light-sensitive surfaces. She also pursues an art-historical endgame based on the readymade and on Minimalism’s laboratory aesthetic, while simultaneously looking for a softer vision of the electronic age’s omnivorous consumption of “all imaginable things,” to borrow a phrase from Yeats. The objects in her exhibition at Le Crédac, “Solarium and Other Pieces” (from 1985 to the present), as well as her occasional photographs and videos,

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  print Summer 2006

  Aleksandra Mir

  For her first solo exhibition in Paris, Aleksandra Mir—Polish-born, a Swedish citizen, and a New York City resident since 1989—festooned Galerie Laurent Godin with every variety of Mexican kitsch: paper flowers, salad bowls of plastic fruit, bread, and alphabet letters; a skeleton in a suit seated in front of a laptop; cacti painted on the wall; hanging bird cages with little bird skeletons; about a dozen pasted images of the defunct Concorde supersonic jet over headshots of Che Guevara; floral designs in kindergarten colors; found posters; collages of magazine pictures; notebook pages outlining

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  print February 2006

  Robert Mapplethorpe

  Hedi Slimane’s selection of works by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–89) followed earlier selections from the late photographer’s oeuvre by Cindy Sherman (Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 2003) and David Hockney (Alison Jacques Gallery, London, 2005). Slimane, Dior Homme’s artistic director as well as a photographer, steered viewers away from flowers and erotica toward portraits, still lifes, and several fetish objects. But the choices revealed his own penchant for rock music’s stylistic nihilism. (He dresses rock musicians and has made photography books about backstage ambiences.)

  In the entry gallery

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  print November 2005

  Alain Séchas

  “Jurassic Pork II” is the second installment of Alain Séchas’s comic-book story of a cat named Siegfried “on the trail of Jurassic Pork” hidden deep in a forest. Viewers were given adjustable-beam flashlights to examine the story’s cartoon cels, which wallpapered a large, machine-fogged room in which the only other sources of illumination were the flashlight eyes of a big, black, bat-winged, polyester-resin prehistoric pig, suspended in the center of the room between white resin sculptures of Siegfried and a larger-than-life Artemis, goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, and wild animals.

  Up to

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  print October 2005

  “Mots d'ordre mots de passe”

  Curators Cyril Jarton and Laurent Jean-pierre’s “Mots d’ordre mots de passe” (Order Words Passwords) gathered artists from across generations and media “to isolate and compare two strategies—order words and passwords—that operate in art as well as in politics.” Unfortunately, neither phrase was defined nor explained, though a prominently displayed press release informed us that the three consecutive rooms of the L-shaped Espace Paul Ricard were set up for order, passage, and combinations of the two, respectively. “Order words” would presumably represent the voice of authority speaking in commands,

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  previews May 2005

  “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era”

  They called themselves freaks and found their love style in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Herman Hesse novels, Beat poetry, and progressive rock, not to mention the hallucinatory drugs that made forms melt and time compress. Taking its title from the fabled California summer of 1967, this show of over one hundred artists of every stripe—Cecil Beaton, Jimi Hendrix, Milton Glaser, Yayoi Kusama, Lord Snowdon, and so on—revisits the heady, often tasteless, hippie era, circa 1965–72. In addition, documentary films, posters, magazines, multimedia installations, and more help

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  previews May 2005

  “Populism”

  For over a century, the politics of “populism” has been used to rail against big business and bad government—and to kindle a rise in nationalism and xenophobia. In four separate venues this summer, a forum of forty-two international artists (including Bernadette Corporation, Wang Du, Per Kirkeby, Erik van Lieshout, Cildo Meireles, and Sarah Morris) will address this political hot potato through such subthemes as mass media, globalization, surveillance, market industries, and religion. Two publications and a host of lectures