THE FIRST THING ONE HEARS is the sound of rapid-fire typing. Projected onto an otherwise dark wall kitty-corner to the exhibition entrance, words flash into view and then disappear in an ongoing stream of text. The ephemeral lines (for example, LOTS OF DIFFERENT INSTRUMENTS / MUSIC WITH A GOOD BEAT—GUITAR, DRUMS) occasionally recall Lawrence Weiner propositions, linguistically conjuring things not otherwise present to the viewer’s senses. They accompany a monitor silently playing the 1968 film The Party and reflect a hired typist’s unique, uninterrupted attempt to describe the movie’s confounding soundtrack, images unseen. It’s an unassumingly heroic effort. Starring Peter Sellers and set at the home of a Hollywood bigwig, the movie unfolds largely as a succession of comic set pieces, many of them heavily reliant on sight gags, against a near-constant and increasingly chaotic babble of mutually interfering conversations, the aforementioned music, and acoustic miscellany. Small wonder, then, that the typist periodically hesitates. The steady blinking of the cursor dramatizes listening itself.

The earliest work in this engaging show, Pierre Bismuth’s The Party, 1997, exemplifies his longtime interest in the creative dimension of even the most mundane operations. Revising Joseph Beuys’s famous maxim “Every human being is an artist,” he suggests that self-professed artists, in turn, are distinguished only by their conscious determination to assume this status. At the Pompidou, The Party also serves as an emblem for the exhibition as a whole. The show, organized by Jean-Pierre Criqui, is expertly installed in a single long gallery and mostly eschews chronology in favor of something more like convivial groups (an analogy reinforced by the entrance-adjacent Liquids and Gels, 2013/2021, whose clear glasses and tumblers filled with synthetically colored substances irresistibly recall oversize cocktails). The presentation invites visitors to linger among some forty-nine objects, spanning the vast array of methods and materials deployed by the French-born, Belgium-based artist over the past quarter century.

Represented in particular depth, with fifteen examples, is the long-running series “En suivant la main droite de . . . ” (Following the Right Hand Of . . .), 1999–. Here, Bismuth has taken a piece of footage—his sources include Hollywood movies and classics of French cinema, a clip of Matisse drawing and the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination—and traced the movements of a selected individual’s dominant hand. The results are sprawling, frenetic scribbles, which he reproduces in various formats. Some are shown as drawings in felt-tip marker on glass atop stills, others as freestanding doodles; one, titled En suivant la main droite de Marilyn Monroe dans “Some Like It Hot,” 2006, and installed at the exhibition entry, is blown up to cinematic proportions. Most compelling, however, are two videos featuring animation, allowing viewers to follow the tracing in real time. En suivant la main droite de Sigmund Freud, 2009, and—a rare work to follow a left hand—En suivant la main gauche de Jacques Lacan—L’âme et l’inconscient (Following the Left Hand of Jacques Lacan—the Soul and the Unconscious), 2012, are nothing short of hypnotic. Visualizing gestural itineraries always already latent in the found material, the accumulated squiggles take on a life of their own, bringing to mind elaborate thought and speech bubbles, phantom presences, and phallic excrescences—an optical unconscious of another sort.

And yet even as Bismuth embraces the ingenious potential of minimal actions, he is well aware of the contradictions all too often inherent in strategies purporting to undermine or evacuate the cult of artistic personality. Witness, in particular, a new work realized specifically for this show, the 2021 Portrait du collectionneur (Portrait of the Collector): a Saab 900 given by Herman Daled to the artist, who then redid the vehicle’s interior, emblazoning the upholstery with the names of artists in Daled’s legendary collection of Conceptual art. The license plates, meanwhile, both read HERMAN. An elaborate assisted readymade in its own right, the result is a pointed send-up of the paradoxical inflation of the value attached to the artist’s name—and, in this instance, to the collector’s as well—in the age of appropriation and detournement. Here, Bismuth’s observation rejoins a distinctive current in postwar French art and criticism, one that has tended to read the Duchampian readymade (note that proper-name modifier!) as the very apotheosis of artistic privilege.

In a conversation with the artist published in the accompanying catalogue, Criqui astutely notes Bismuth’s “very marked sense of the absurd, of the burlesque—of an urge to ‘deflate’ pervaded by a spirit of playfulness.” As this exhibition equally reveals, however, what might appear at first simply as a good time often turns out to contain utterly indigestible elements. This is literally true of Liquids and Gels, with its TSA-inspired title: These “cocktails,” laced with common toiletries, refer to the counterterrorist strictures now imposed on carry-on luggage; the work has been updated in light of the pandemic to include hand sanitizer. But it is also true, more complexly, of The Party. Throughout the film, Sellers, who is white, appears in brownface, playing a bumbling Indian actor. The Party is not the only source material in Bismuth’s repertory shot through with racist caricature: His 2002 The “Jungle Book” Project—one of his best-known works, also on view in Paris—appropriates the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book, combining audio tracks from various overdubbed versions to produce a new one in which every character speaks a different language. Scrambling the original movie’s colonialist codes, The “Jungle Book” Project simultaneously highlights Disney’s own cultural imperialism.

Taken together, the two detourned films—almost exactly contemporaneous with each other and with the rise of Conceptualism itself—speak to the profound saturation of even the most apparently lighthearted pop-cultural artifacts with racist stereotypes. Bismuth, for his part, declares in the course of the same conversation with Criqui that The Party appealed to him simply for its “dynamic” soundtrack, adding, “The film itself meant nothing to me.” His professed indifference to content, a veritable hallmark of Conceptual and neo-Conceptual practice, evokes a long line of historical precedents. Yet this detachment registers differently today. Who appropriates what, and to what end? The question goes beyond proper names, opening onto the continued ramifications of the asymmetrical and often violent histories to which Bismuth’s sources bear complicated witness.

“Pierre Bismuth: Everyone is an artist but only the artist knows it” is on view through February 28.

Molly Warnock is a NOMIS Fellow at eikones–Zentrum für die Theorie und Geschichte des Bildes, Universität Basel.