“Coollustre”

The art critic and curator Eric Troncy’s show “Coollustre” ends with a beastly prank. Minimal, conceptual, and made entirely of Plexiglas except for its cushion, a dog bed sits enthroned at the end of the exhibition, the perfect culmination of the history of modern, postmodern, and contemporary art, by way of the economy of fashion, Sol LeWitt’s cubes, Dan Graham’s glass pavilions, and the relational aesthetic.

A true provocation, open to multiple interpretations, the ne plus ultra of recycling, Gucci Dog, 2003, is typical of Troncy’s exhibition practice. In “Coollustre” (a title borrowed from a Clinique beauty product)—the last segment in a trilogy that began with “Dramatically Different” at the Magasin in Grenoble in 1997, followed by “Weather Everything” at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, in 1998—the French critic has deepened his approach, putting works in relation to one another to suggest a narrative or cinematic flow. In this “production,” each room works like a scene in a movie. Take, for example, Katharina Fritsch’s Mönch (Monk), 1999, caught between Sylvie Fleury’s wall painting Egoïste, 1993, and Thomas Ruff’s photographs of constellations (18h24/-35°, 1990, and 22h00/-50°, 1992): a metaphysical portrait of an ascetic torn between the ego and the world. Another room, another scene: Xavier Veilhan’s La Route, scoreboard n°4, 2001, a brief “road movie” visualized by the changing intensities of hundreds of lightbulbs, complemented by Mark Handforth’s sculpture Tyre (Across the Universe), 2000.

But the underlying scenario is not imposed on the spectator: On the contrary, “Coollustre” offers a willfully ambivalent approach, open to all interpretative angles: some rooms playful, others gloomy, constantly pulling the viewer toward very different states of mind. Troncy’s approach, again, derives from the cinema: auteurist curating. This allows him to claim full responsibility for the subjective biases of his hanging and to sign his name to a montage of works by artists who are very different from one another—from Bernard Buffet to Philippe Parreno. In so doing, the codirector of Le Consortium, Dijon, runs counter to contemporary curatorial practice: While others go around the world with the goal of finding “new artists” and re-creating the liveliness of a particular art scene (English, Nordic, Mexican, Asian), Troncy surveys his own universe, takes the measure of his personal geography, and initiates a mental casting call for artworks. An example is the room in which spangles “painted” on the wall with 3M adhesive reflective sheeting (Stéphane Dafflon’s AM 002, 2003) and Fleury’s gold-plated shopping carts from “Série Ela 75/K,” 2000, seem devoted to the cult worship of the Portrait of God (After Richard Bernstein), 1998, a young male icon painted by Richard Phillips. And when so many exhibitions seem conceived to accompany a sound track of techno music, “Coollustre” remains silent: For mood music and pedagogical commentary, we must rely on song lyrics by Madonna, Radiohead, the Eurythmics, and others, applied to the walls. Impertinent, problematic, relational in its stance toward both artworks and viewers, “Coollustre” is clearly an exhibition marked by the approaches of the ’90s. But bringing into play a subjectivity traversed by the collective, it looks toward a new age for exhibitions and for post-curatorial experimentation.

—Jean-Max Colard

Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.