Protest Art in a Time of Protest: On Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in Paris
Both of these American artists, currently showing in Paris, use text to examine ideas of power and protest. What can their work tell us when viewed in the context of the messy reality of demonstration?Save to My Ocula
Protest Art in a Time of Protest: On Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in ParisSave to My Ocula
The French protests were already rumbling when I arrived at the opening of The History of Tears, Barbara Kruger’s installation at the Bourse de Commerce, in early October. For days, Paris had been covered in signs and slogans protesting the cost of living, poor conditions in schools and the Macron presidency. They appeared in front of schools, discarded by rubbish bins, graffitied on walls. “Macron, screw your teacher and not ours!” “Fashion and not fascist!” While coverage of the protests often described them as a general mass, the slogans themselves were specific—statistics on the amount of money spent on French police forces, for example, or student’s reports of being teargassed.
The mood at the Bourse de Commerce, by contrast, was fashionable and calm. Well-dressed art critics were eating chocolate cake. I took note of the current trend in haircuts (a precise shoulder-length bob) and clothes (unsurprising black).
Kruger’s is one of two new Paris shows that are primarily about text. Her show at the Bourse de Commerce (at the centre of a new rehang that focuses on photography) brings her signature black, white and red to the French museum. Over the Seine at Musée d’Orsay, Jenny Holzer has filled the space with texts from its archive, offering subtle commentary on the 19th-century collection and the violent world in which it was created. Both artists make their art from words—but each has something rather different to say.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Remember me), 1988.
Kruger’s installation takes over the central atrium of the Bourse de Commerce, a rounded space designed by Tadao Ando to transform a commodity negotiation centre into a home for French billionaire François Pinault’s art collection. Kruger has blanketed the walls and floor with text from three authors, George Orwell, Roland Barthes and Aimé Césaire, along with videos she made during the 1990s of angry individuals seemingly disparaging their partners.
The installation questions “power, pleasure, desire and disgust”, Kruger has written, producing “a narrative of profound struggle between the powerful and the disempowered, between the loved and the unloved, between winners and losers”.
In the curved, hard room, sound echoed quickly, such that the words melded with the chatter of visitors and footsteps reaching higher floors. I tried to make out the statements from the videos. “Don’t make me angry.” Or, “Look at you, you are so not fun.” On the floor, people walked over a line from Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949): “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” The white background for the text was beginning to get scuffed. On the press tour, the curator referred to Kruger’s “architecture of words”.
Installation views of Barbara Kruger’s work at the Bourse de Commerce.
Kruger’s selection of quotes paired well with one another—until one considered the space as a whole. On the wall, a sentence read: “Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear,”—lines from Aimé Cesaire’s Journal of a Homecoming (1939). I wondered what Césaire, generally known as the founder of the post-colonial Négritude movement, would think of the 1889 frieze on the ceiling of the Bourse’s central atrium above the installation. It shows a Black woman shading a white woman with a parasol while sparsely dressed natives cower in the face of industrial progress.
“Walking through the exhibition, one felt exhorted, but to what end?”
The sense of struggle produced by Kruger’s juxtaposition was loud and at times overwhelming, but oddly general, as if it reflected the idea of protest rather than the specificity required of protestors pushing for political or social change. To whom were these texts addressed, I wondered, and for what purpose? Walking through the exhibition, one felt exhorted, but to what end?
By the time of Jenny Holzer’s opening at Orsay last Friday, the protests had gained ground. France was preparing for a day-long shutdown, during which at least 550,000 people would march and chaotic looting would take over at night.
For Orsay, Holzer had built an archive of texts from the 19th century, along with a team of researchers and archivists. Some of them came from famous artists; others from figures visitors are unlikely to know, such as first-wave feminist Madeleine Pelletier. The quotes sit carved into marble benches, set across or gently askew from work to which they respond. The marble for each echoes the colour and energy of the artwork; deep red or swirling green. The benches recall the plinths elsewhere in the Orsay, which Holzer pointed out during the press tour. She was joined by a quiet man: a mason from the Pyrenées who had helped Holzer choose each piece of rare stone.
Some of the texts speak directly to the art. In front of Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell (1880–1917), Holzer had placed a quote from his lover and mentee Camille Claudel, in her typical all caps: “I AM POWERLESS TO PROTECT YOU FROM THE HARM I SEE.” Elsewhere, Holzer had paired Paul Cézanne’s La Femme Étranglée (The Strangled Woman) (1872–1876) with a quote from Pelletier: “WOMEN SHOULD GET USED TO CARRYING A REVOLVER WHEN GOING OUT IN THE EVENING OR PROMENADING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE.”
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The benches had quickly become integrated into the museum—on the day of the press visit, each already held visitors sitting or lounging, who disregarded the small signs that indicated the marble’s fragility. “I’m going to have a heart attack!!” a curator said as we came across a woman drinking water on a bench facing a sweet Berthe Morisot painting of a woman rocking a cradle (The Cradle (1872).
The subtle intervention of the benches drew attention to work that a viewer might otherwise ignore. I likely would have walked by Gustave Courbet’s Spring, Stags Fighting (1861) had Holzer not selected it for her show. But I was surprised by its kinetic violence. Next to it, Holzer had placed a quote from Courbet’s contemporary, Jean-François Millet, “ART IS NOT A DIVERSION. IT IS A CONFLICT.”
Holzer played with this theme of violence in various ways. Her selection often drew out the brutal history and atmosphere in which many of these paintings were made, or to which they responded: the siege of Paris in the 1870s, in which the German army stormed the city, followed by the Paris Commune—in which a revolutionary government seized power—and then its fallout. The show suddenly became a potent reminder of the long history of violent protest and repression in French culture. The fighting stags, charging one another with their crown-like antlers, inadvertently offered the context for the political scene coinciding with the opening.
In a room full of historical artworks, Holzer had hung what she called her “redaction paintings”, silvery blowups of government documents whose most sensitive information is shaded out. One showed maps from a presentation given to George W Bush in the lead-up to the Second Gulf War. Others presented documents discussing what was legitimate in war and “enhanced interrogation tactics”. Across from them hung a monumental painting by Fernand Cormon, which shows Cain, weathered and thin, in exile as a punishment for murdering his brother (Cain (1880). On the carriage, his wife tries to comfort her young sons. Red hunks of meat hang from their convoy. Across from Holzer’s documents, the brutality of the painting and the cycle of reprisal it shows seemed even more potent and raw.
“Holzer’s work evoked the contradictory nature of social movements and the possibility that they fail”
A ticker-tape roller hung across several galleries, similar to Hozler’s 1989 Guggenheim installation. And for the first days of the show, text from artist letters and other archival material were projected on the façade of the building, amid the increasingly confused and angry atmosphere in Paris.
A protest movement can have a propulsive force of its own. Demands make way to movements, which mutate according to their own whims and energies. And yet one cannot see them clearly without remembering the original, precise seed for discontent. Art, by nature, is not the same as a protest slogan. But in the two shows, there seemed a marked difference between evoking the theory of protest and the messy realities of specific grievances and struggles.
By bringing together the carefully chosen texts to frame much of Orsay’s art, Holzer’s work evoked the contradictory nature of social movements and the possibility that they fail. In one of my favourite pairings of the show, we see a self-portrait of Courbet, The Desperate Man (1844–1845). He stares at the canvas, anxious and fearful, his hands running through his hair. Courbet made this work early in life. When he had to flee France due to his activities in the Paris Commune, he took the painting with him to Switzerland and changed its name to Despair. I thought of the ongoing evolution of the protests in Paris, the growing sense of repression and fear, the anger of the students. Courbet looked terrified. Holzer had placed a quote by Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother, which seemed an answer to the man in the painting. “GIVE ME REALITY, THE DANGER ITSELF.”—[O]
