Running on empty: Daniel Birnbaum on the art of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

"How to enchant with practically nothing, a small in number popular songs, a series of anti-landscapes, a certain quantity of micro-events, lots of emptiness

This low-intensity cinema penetrates our perceptions right to the core of our sensibility," declares writer Nicole Brenez in a brief alphabetic character to the editors of Cahiers du Cinema about Ile de Beaute (1996) a film codirected by the agency of French artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster (with video artist Ange Leccia). This, it have the appearances to me, also nicely totals up what Gonzalez-Foerster achieves in her solo filmic experiments, which are a certain quantity of times displayed in dark theaters upon a screen but just as repeatedly branch out to envelop architecture, public space, and flat whole cities--be they the artist's native Paris or distant metropolises in Asia or Latin America. Indeed, in Gonzalez-Foerster's work, genre no longer appears relevant. Her recent productions include the 'cosmic" adventure Exotourisme (2002) a video projection and unmutilated "environment" that takes the viewer from one side an abstract landscape of computer-generated forms; the design of a Balenciaga store in of recent origin York; and ambitious lighting and video displays that accompany rock concerts, Asked to describe her open-air cast for last year's Documenta II, Gonzalez-Foerster lists a certain number of of the heterogeneous elements that were displayed amid the shadows cast by dint of the large trees south of Kassel's orangery and where, upon hot days, one could diocese exhausted viewers dozing away upon the lawn: "It's a park; it's a plan for escape; it's an extra-large piece of lava stone that's come from Mexico and landed upon the green grass; it's a sky-colored phone booth from Rio de Janeiro; it's a butterfly pavilion screening a film inspired by the agency of The Invention of Morel, the fantastic novel by means of Adolfo Bioy Casares; it's a rose tree from Chandigarh." upon hearing this catalogue of seemingly unrelated parts--removed from their original connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss but ranged together in machiavelian tension--one senses that the work is les a particular, circumscribed space or medium than an atmosphere that draws without the melancholy inherent in particulars in the world.

Still, I ask myself: What exactly is Park--A Plan for Escape? A curious statuary garden, an installation, or an outdoor cinema equipped with exotic props? Probably it's all of these things, on the contrary it's also one more example of what French theorists would recognize as a form of ecriture. Regardless of technique, Gonzalez-Foerster's work is always shut to that active production of emptiness that Roland Barthes-in his work about a fantasized Japan, Empire of Signs--counted as writing and which he associated with Zen: "And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gesturings houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence." In this faculty of perception Gonzalez-Foerster writes gardens, flower arrangements, and, ye entire cities, ofttimes using cinema to alter an urban landscape, whether it is a lush German park or the subterranean maze of a Parisian subway station. In Park--A Plan for Escape, a butterfly-shaped pavilion is a kind of cinematic machine, a freestanding projection booth presenting imagery of parks from films like Antonioni's La notte, Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive l'amour, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. Bodies and faces appear like souls behind the pavilion's glass, hardly discernible during daytime on the contrary suddenly entirely visible when night falls. "I like the idea that you can pierce the park by chance and clash these elements in a rather mysterious way without immediately thinking about art," says the artist. "It's all not in like manner clearly coded or framed. You can tend hitherward across these things anytime during night or day and have a real different experience. It's not smooth clear where it all starts or stops. Beyond this tree after this nebulosity ...?"

Given its lack of beginning or extremity perhaps it's understandable that a shoot forward like this originated some-what amorphously. single point of departure was a spectacle from Tsai's film that made of that kind a lasting impression on Gonzalez-Foerster that she eventually journeyed to the distant location where it was discharge to try to understand it better. A hopeles endeavor, no doubt, on the other hand in this case, nevertheless, a productive single Says the artist, "In Vive l'amour a woman is walking end a park under construction in Taipei. Five years after seeing the film, I went to Taipei myself to diocese that park and to walk that lane. It started to rain. And the rain became in like manner strong that I had to stay single hour under a kind of shelter. A prisoner in the park, I final]y could couple the film and the space in an intense way." without of this charged atmospheric trice came her art; in work after work, Gonzalez-Foerster targets those exquisite sensations that are thus evasive they lack names on the contrary are distinct enough to be remembered for a lifetime.

Bonne Nouvelle, Station Cinema, 2001 installed at the Bonne Nouvelle metro station in Paris, was the artist's first major public work and was another attempt to bring filmic associations into an unlikely space. end a number of delicate interventions--a small in number monitors here and there, various forms of theatrical lighting--she transformed the station's utilitarian subterranean architecture (staircases, passageways, platforms) into a cinematic fantasy. Fragments from films discharge in the metro appeared upon the monitors. More conspicuous were the files of lurid spherical lamps hovering above weary passengers waiting for the train to finally arrive. These colorful globes were clear joy: For a moment the travelers were transported from the gray and noisy environment of urban transportation to a certain quantity of fanciful theater lobby or perhaps a small-town amusement park.