Jonathan Monk
Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
View of the Superdome session, Palais de Tokyo, 2008. Private collection, Germany. Courtesy Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris. Photo : Didier Barroso
For ‘Time Between Spaces’, Jonathan Monk has distributed a group of nearly 40 objects throughout two rooms in the Palais de Tokyo and the mirroring Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Across his broader oeuvre, Monk consistently recasts or extends conceptual art’s most emblematic strategies, and ‘Time Between Spaces’ is no exception. The exhibition’s altered bicycles, grandfather clocks, canvases, furniture, and walkie-talkies draw much of their meaning from external and ideas-based sources. Yet when it comes to the artist’s choice to work between the two exhibition spaces, his typical array of conceptual references don’t rally round. The significance of the paired venues is far from self-evident.
Works come in doubles or two-part groups that are separated between the spaces. After a Bigger Splash and Before a Bigger Splash (both 2006) reproduce David Hockney’s 1967 A Bigger Splash without the eponymous splash that graces the original. The two paintings are, to all intents and purposes, identical: things are as dead calm after Hockney’s gesture as before. Surrounded by installations, Monk’s non-splash seems to signal a certain loss of faith in painting’s ability to extend beyond the single, short-lived moment it records in perpetuity. Other works rely on the spectre of conceptual art’s greats to substantiate their own pedigree. In the ‘Meeting’ series, a location, date, and time for a meeting are inscribed on the two galleries’ walls. They appear as a newly contingent extension of On Kawara’s date paintings, relying on someone else – not to mention the artist’s fulfillment of his own bargain – for their successful completion. Other points of reference include Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner and Marcel Duchamp.
While the Palais de Tokyo’s cavernous galleries echo with the painfully loud sound of smashing bottles (from Arcangelo Sassolino’s neighboring installation), the stone-floored Musée d’Art Moderne is silent but for the footsteps of visitors looking for Mondrians. Though Monk understandably resists the language of site-specificity or institutional critique, he is unable to prevent the two museums’ environmental and institutional differences from becoming a preoccupying theme. His works just aren’t up to it. Do the spare displays really represent the sort of ‘ubiquity’ that would ‘allow us to thwart the linear progression of time’, as suggested by the exhibition text? The equation of duplication with ubiquity is less than convincing. Monk should either augment his conceptual grounding, or recourse to more formal visual persuasion. When he does, in Nothing Turning Around by Itself at the Palais and We Feel Lost Without You (both 2008) in the Musée, we finally understand his evocation of an exhibition ‘somewhere between the two exhibition areas’; the flashing reflections on this group of spinning mirrored disks are just unrecognizable enough to seem like portals to elsewhere. Here is a ‘third’ place that fulfills Monk’s goal to evoke ‘time between spaces’.
As it stands, rather than ‘undermining the museum authority vested in a work of art by taking away its sacred aura and inscribing it closer to the public’, as the accompanying text claims, ‘Time Between Spaces’ seems designed to inspire a certain anomie: that of the uninitiated museum-goer faced with objects that demand to be met half-way, in a space whose immediacy is at once preoccupying and insistently ignored by the powers that be – twice over.
Sarah-Neel Smith
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
