By Laura McLean-Ferris
Paul Kneale, Rotherhithe / Chanel, 2014 stolen neon sign, perspex, chain, transformer. Courtesy: the artist and Evelyn Yard, London
Cashmere, silk, velvet. This is what luxury has traditionally felt like. Or so we are told by advertising. Billboards, magazine spreads and moving images everywhere tell us how it feels: such soft touches are implied even when seducing us to purchase skin creams, chocolate, or fabric conditioner. As a city, Paris is a historic home for luxury, with a rich tradition of interpretative writing on the moral and societal implications of ostentation and finery, from Jean Jacques Rousseau (‘luxury corrupts at the same time the rich person and the poor one, one by the possession the other by covetousness’) to Thomas Picketty (in periods of great inequality ‘the past tends to devour the future’). In our present moment, in which the luxury market is enjoying a crescendo, the city is the seat of power for many luxury brands, and these ‘houses’ ever-increasingly make their influence on art felt through patronage, collections, museums, institutions and so on.
A brief survey of some luxury brands with prominent art foundations and collections: LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) owners of these eponymous brands as well as Céline, Marc Jacobs and Givenchy, directed by the businessman and art collector Bernard Arnault, is on the brink of opening a grand new museum in the Bois de Boulogne. The flamboyant, Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis-Vuitton pour la création (The Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation) resembles a vast glass flower unfurling its petals and will, after eight years of construction, finally open to the public later this year. Kering, the company that owns Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney and others, is, in turn, owned by Francois Pinault and his family, who also own Christie’s auction house. Pinault’s vast contemporary art collection, as is well known, is held in Venice after Parisian development laws stumped his plans to build a foundation on Ile de Seguin. The Fondation Cartier begins a yearlong celebration this month, in honor of its 30th anniversary. Chanel paid for exhibition space at Palais de Tokyo last year, in order to stage a cream-plush-carpeted exhibition based around its star fragrance Chanel No. 5, whilst Pernod-Ricard’s Fondation d’Enterpirse Ricard, which is close to the Tuilleries, has been operating for more than a decade, administering a significant prize to a young artists each year.
At a moment in which young artists seem more interested than ever in using branding and marketing strategies as a material in their work, in Paris it is palpable that luxury brands prop up artists, public institutions and galleries. This spring I spent some time thinking about current conceptions of luxury at the home of another new foundation in Paris’s Marais – the Fondation Galleries Lafayette – which was established last year by Guillaume Houzé, the young directeur de l’image et du mécénat (director of the brand and sponsorship) of the Galeries Lafayette group, the famed high-end French department stores. The site for this new art foundation is a block of old offices that were once occupied by administrators for BHV, another department store owned by the group a couple of doors down, which is to be refurbished by Rem Koolhas, and will open to the public in 2016. Even a refurbishment of a historic building is a tricky feat in the face of Paris’s protective planning restrictions, though one always has to concede that natural light is a great luxury for a capital city, which Parisians are granted by same laws that prevent a proliferation of skyscrapers that would block it out.
But before that refurbishment, Fondation Galleries Lafayette has been running a pre-emptive programme, Lafayette Anticipation, which was conceived by in-house curator Francois Quintin. The raw building and abandoned offices are currently being used as residency studios for artists. Several of the office studios are meanly carpeted rooms resembling the box rooms of a private detective agency, whilst shared space, including a kitchen and long lime-green table, had something of a youth club feel to it. And yet, all this began to seem, especially in a city notorious for its tiny spaces and high rents, like a great form of luxury, as groups of artists were granted studios, time, budgets and assistance without the necessary pressure of shows. Artists-in-residence throughout the spring included Will Benedict, Mimosa Echard, Eloide Seguin and Cally Spooner, many of which have emphasized production and performance rather than exhibition.
Simon Fujiwara, New Pompidou, 2014, performance documentation, February 14th 2014. Courtesy: the artist and Fondation Galleries Lafayette, Paris; photograph: © Nicolas Giraud
In February Simon Fujiwara gave a performance in the largest studio at Fondation Galleries Lafayette, where he had been producing a monumental sculpture for his nearby exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. The sculpture is a copy of an architectural fragment of the iconic nearby museum, inspired by a rumor that the Pompidou’s original director Pontus Hulten made plans for an exact replica of the building to be fabricated. Fujiwara’s sculpture, however, like a layercake, was fabricated with materials such as the swampy earth and weeds of the Marais area and long-stem roses like those adorning the tables of Le Georges, the restaurant on the roof of the museum. Fujiwara’s performance was a series of spoken footnotes which explicated his choice of materials, and much pomp was in play when roads were closed and traffic was stopped as musicians led a solemn procession of the sculptures from Fujiwara’s studio to the Pompidou a few metres away. Yet the relationship between the producing and performing foundation and the exhibiting museum was conspicuous.
Compagnie MUA& Emmanuelle Huynh, Emanticipation, un laboratoire, 2014, performance documentation, March 21st 2014. Courtesy: the artist and Fondation Galleries Lafayette, Paris; photograph: © Sylvie Chal-Liat
However, though many of the ‘Anticipation projects’ appeared to have ample budgets and support, most privileged a ‘lab’ form for experimentation in which workshopping and performance has been emphasised. The choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh, for example, was able to invite a group of collaborators for her project Emanticipation un laboratoire including the young dancer Volmir Cordeiro and artist Richard John Jones to workshop questions around the nature of labour with dancers and philosophers. In April the fashion historian and magazine editor Anja Cronberg Aronowsky held a salon inviting designers to explore the narrative elements to their work through storytelling. As Quintin describes it, because the institution is still in a period of ‘thinking more precisely about what the foundation will be, and what the philosophy of it will be, we can invite groups of artists to work here and that will help to define our ideas about production and participation.’
Inviting an artist-run space to inhabit a nascent institution is one way to define an organization around artist practice. In February, Quintin invited artists Paul Kneale and Raphael Hefti to create a project based around Library +, a space that they ran with Megan Rooney in disused library in Rotherhithe, London until they were evicted. This now homeless organization and a selection of members from its wider network were invited to come and spend time in Paris workshopping Hefti and Kneale’s chosen topic ‘Pleasure Principles’, an investigation of modern pleasure, which they returned to showcase with a public progamme in over a weekend in March, together with an even larger network of invited writers, artists and poets.
Harry Burke, 2014, performance documentation at Pleasure Principles. Courtesy: the artist and Pleasure Principles, Paris.
It was striking how expensive and even luxurious it seemed to first gather such a loose network from Europe and America with a barely defined purpose. It became clear that for many of the artists, a group residency in which artists can choose the participants is a somewhat rare event, a luxury in itself, though the resultant programme had most of the raw scrappiness that one associates with artist-run spaces. For an evening of poetry readings, given by Harry Burke, Quinn Latimer and Rooney, among others, each sat at a plain desk with a bunch of red roses and read aloud. The artists made meals for one another in the space and served fresh fruit and oysters, in celebration of their short time together. Bonny Poon delivered a deliberately shambolic electronic musical performance, during which she and a fellow performer appeared to collapse on the dusty floors of the main studio-cum-exhibition space, which strewn with pasta, as the giggled into microphones or looped spoken phrases of romantic banality such as ‘I made a beautiful PDF’. In the studio exhibition curated by the artists much of the work was self-consciously lo-fi – sound recordings, stolen materials, bits of paper and cheap materials such as clay and drawings.
What was interesting about the relationship between the Fondation Galleries Lafayette, however, and the visiting artists, was the way in which several of the artists self-consciously responded to their invitations by considering their own co-option by the Parisian luxury market, rather than ignoring the fact. Rooney’s contribution to the project was to make a poetry sound piece for the Galleries Lafayette flagship store on Boulevard Haussmann that was handed to visitors on tiny iPods, which encouraged a certain ruminative distance from the shoppers and the goods on sale, and allowed a certain kind of isolating, illogical daydreaming that voiced her exclusion or distance from what was being offered. Her voice delivered thoughts as though she was making a list: ‘Big blooms smelling ripe after days of silence / Natural angels swooping and groping, tied up in legacy, agitated by leader / Souls on the outskirts, flickering European lights.’ Kneale’s sculpture Rotherhithe Chanel (2014), in the studio show, is part of a series the artist has made with the neon letters used to spell ‘Rotherhithe Civic Centre, Library and Assembly Halls’, which he stole from the closed-down library space when the collective was being evicted from that space. Rearranging the letters of a sign historically used to designate a educative, public space to spell the name of luxury brands, in this case Chanel, known for monochrome, boucle jackets and the 2.55 quilted bag, Kneale demonstrates awareness of the circular traffic between not-for-profits, private corporations and public institutions, as well the as his own various brandings as an artist. The provenance of the neon letters here might acknowledge the transference of responsibility for art from public institutions from states to brands, miming the movement of a neon meant to designate a building as a public space to its arrival as an art object within a privately owned institution.
Quinn Latimer & Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, Some City, 2014, HD video. Courtesy: the artists
Latimer’s video made with Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, Some City (2014), is a silent text with video backdrops which appear to follow a reader’s eye across various publications and magazines, which speaks about privacy as a form of luxury, imagining a city made of the fabric of privacy itself. The speaker imagines the solitude of thought as a form of pleasure: ‘At readings or lectures I stare into the monitor of air / and wish the speaker’s words were on paper, that I might read her / in my own voice, or the voice I have crafted for her: / half her, half me. Pleasure of that meeting. Its dark water / Also: that privacy. Its pleasure; a voice.’ An intellectual pleasure in the meetings of minds is called forth here. However any modern discussion of privacy also calls forth the nature of state surveillance, which suggests that privacy itself is becoming a luxury that may become the privilege of the wealthy few.
Discussing the current vogue for poetry, Latimer recently wrote about the ‘art world’s place as graceful economic host and beneficiary for so many other creative worlds in crisis’. Historically in Europe, the term ‘luxury’ was associated with vice, and was something to be avoided, though it lost its pejorative taint in the 17th century, in the birth of consumer societies Paris and London. It is always, however, related to the question of economic inequality. Though the Pickettys of this world are designating the effects of such inequalities on a world stage, this low-key set of events raised some subtler questions for art. What will be constituted by luxury in an age in which luxury brands have ascended to become the most powerful patrons and commissioners, to the extent that art institutions are built on their successes, and in which art is the luxury good par excellence. How is luxury is evolving to encompass elements of life that were previously not considered luxuriant activity, such as privacy, time, higher education and reverie. For now, in Paris, the luxury brands are setting up shops for artists on an exclusive street paved in opulence. But in the best cases the traffic still occasionally manages to go both ways.