Maison-Cerveaux

'Maison-Cerveaux' or 'Brain-Houses', as the curators translate the more elegant French title, brings together old and new works from a dozen artists, half French, the rest predominantly from Belgium, Germany, and Holland, who offer various interpretations of domestic architecture as an extension of the self.

Long before houses and homes, dwellings were sacred places in miniature - ziggurats of the mind. Palaces were modelled on temples and tombs, evolving from our obsession with death and the hereafter. Cities were centres of universes: imago mundi, image worlds modelled on the heavens. Making reference to this, Hreinn Fridfinnsson presented photographs of House (1974), a tiny white house in the centre of a volcanic isle, suggesting the Earth as the centre of a revolving galaxy. Dwellings are, indeed, the ultimate nexus-points in our comings and goings, and houses themselves convey information about our historical lineage from imago mundi to suburban tracts, from unanimous art to private expression. They represent our obsession with pattern and number, structured relationships and codes. In this vein were Michel Aubry's The Music Room (1989) - a wood-lined niche with banquettes surfaced with pentagons whose patterns were based on Pythagoras' perfect fourths and fifths - and Matthias Lengner's heavy cardboard flats, which explored the relationship of pattern to modular structure.

Houses are also our personal shield against the forces of nature, each other, and entropy. The 'house is the brain', the curators write, 'an extension of the body, as a sanctuary'. This reminds us that houses aren't only ancient things but comfy (from the Latin confortare, to strengthen or console), personalised dwellings that developed in bourgeois society - the properties of people who lived in walled 'free' towns and worked in their houses. Angel Vergara (a Spanish artist living in Belgium) installed a Broodthaers-style café, made false money, and filled rooms with drawings of himself clad in a white sheet like a Buddha. Basserode, for The House of Words (1991), filled a large, dark room with shallow water, in the centre of which was a small meditation house with a chair. Patrick Van Caeckenbergh contributed three works: Tortoise (1990), a tortoise shell - the mythical foundation upon whose carapace the world sits - with ceramic mushrooms fixed inside; Alembic (1994), which outlined a theosophist's alchemical scheme on canvas; and Living Box (1979-1984), a black-curtained privacy nook for home or studio.

The curators categorised houses into two main families: the first 'a critical vision of home and its social context'; the second 'reconstitutions of... mental universes'. This second group represents the differentiated self-improvised environments - homes as private palaces, ateliers as external sensoria. Though stylistically diverse and including all manner of representation, many of the works in the exhibition suggested that 'home' is nomadic, improvised out of prefabricated structured (bought or rented) and re-appointed from the inside to accommodate our sensory and emotional profiles. 'Maison-Cerveaux' included two portable homes, one of which actually functions so long as an electrical outlet is available: Absalon's Cellule No. 1 (1993), a pristine, white ready-to-tow artist's caravan, exhibited outdoors at Noisiel. The other portable home, shown in the Reims courtyard, was Stephane Calais' cut-in-half van, whose wood-lined interior stuffed with foam looked like a craftily improvised hovel for a street dweller. Fabrice Hybert's The Shrinking Walls (1990), was a mini-labyrinth of canvas screens covered with graffiti-like notations - a kind of anti-home. Inside at Noisiel, Jimmie Durham installed skeletons of housing material - grey plumbing pipes, a wooden post-and-lintel - punctuated with talismanic objects, such as a boy's head peeking out of a pipe, and tagged with word plays: 'garçon' (boy), 'garou' (wolf), 'gargouille' (gargoyle).

A house is where you set up home, and what stood out in 'Maison-Cerveaux' was this idea of the house as portable dwelling. Oddly enough, such a house is a descendant of the plain houses first developed in the Low Countries during the 17th century, which bred the middle-class virtues of work and moderation from which artistic antiheroes and antiheroines (like Emma Bovary) struggled to differentiate themselves. Today houses are 'brain houses' where freelance nomads work and where artists create counter-environments. But here there is a language discrepancy: Germanic languages distinguish house from home, while the French maison serves both roles and must be understood in this context. Older houses in France descend from chateaux, and modern houses borrow from Le Courbusier's clinical 'machines for living'. Perhaps glass and steel towers loom even larger in relation to the smaller domain of art for there was no suggestion of them here.

But exhibitions like this are amalgams of curatorial and artistic projection. While the exhibition's strength was the attraction of the subject itself, 'Maison-Cerveaux' scraped the tip of one of culture's largest icebergs, identifying the symbolism of the house while avoiding its history from Edenic bliss to our own nomadic lifestyles and uninhabitable skyscrapers. Art galleries are themselves 'brain-houses', periodically cleansed to allow the next improvisatory representation to occur. With a few notable exceptions, such as Andrea Zittel (not included), whose entire Greenpoint Brooklyn house is an art work, architecture played a greater role in art during the 70s than it does among younger artists of the 90s. Paradoxically, and in spite of its wandering, unresolved (if not unresolvable) perspective, 'Maison-Cerveaux' succeeded because it offered as many questions concerning the house as a structured centre as it provided answers in its diverse selection of artistic analogues to one of our most primary attributes and means of self-definition.