Tatiana Trouve: A Stay Between Enclosure and Space

Article to be published in Sculpture Magazine, February 2010

Migros Museum, Zurich

Walking into Tatiana Trouve’s new exhibition – featuring wall drawings and installations – is like entering a parallel world: absurd, dream-like, puzzling, and haunting.  The first installation that confronts us, 350 points towards infinity, is composed of hundreds of metallic pendulums hanging from the ceiling to about 3 inches from the floor.  They all shoot out at different angles, as if frozen in time and space, creating an eerie sensation of arrested transition.  This elegant installation encompasses most of Trouve’s preoccupations: magic and illusion, dreams and memory, architectural intervention, psychological investigation, and the interplay of inner and outer spaces.

Trouve started her career in the mid-90s, when just recently out of art school, she embarked on a campaign of getting in touch with galleries to show her work, and employers to hire her.  Out of this mostly unsuccessful effort came her ongoing project, BAI (Bureau d’activites implicites), a modular installation that archives the processes of her development as an artist, and those of the works that she makes.  Trouve arranges correspondence and objects in various configurations and contexts for each new installation of BAI.  As she evolves and time passes, the BAI reflects this through its own physical layout and the objects exhibited within.  And through this continued psychological exploration, the exhibition of inner realms in an uncanny context, and the play with architectural space, Tatiana Trouve has created a unique modus operandi that is evident in her current work.

But the exhibition in Zurich also expands on these themes with several disturbing interventions in the museum architecture itself that bring to mind the dream world of Alice in Wonderland.  Miniature entrances force the viewers to squat to enter mysterious spaces decorated with seemingly arbitrary objects, like in Inchoativity, where a series of cylinders that look like radiators connected to long, thin vertical and horizontal pipes, link to each other with no practical purpose.  A folded mattress made of cement and tied to a pillar by a belt is suspended above ground.  All these objects and spaces seem de-contextualized and sterile, but there is evidence of the human touch in each one: in Inchoativity, the first thing we encounter is a pair of black boots in a corner, and drip buckets under the levers that would normally be used to adjust the heat level of the radiators.  In another installation, The Antechamber, one finds the remnants of a spill that bridges the space of the installation and the hallway: Art spilling into life, dream into reality.  Spill elements are repeated within the installation space on the walls, among the absurd mechanical combinations that hang and hover from above in meaningless perfection.

One of the most engrossing pieces in the show, From Here I Disappear, is composed of a long tunnel cut into the wall, interspersed with small translucent Plexiglas doors opened and closed at different angles, reflecting into and off each other, giving the uneasy feeling of peering into infinity.  To see the details of the structure, one must bend over in an uncomfortable position and peer through a mysteriously locked door that offers no answers, but elicits only questions.  It temps you to enter, and rejects you when you try.

The second part of the exhibition features charcoal drawings on the walls, and copper lines inserted into the wall and cement floor.  In these pieces Trouve plays with the viewer, initially creating the impression of traditional perspective exercises, but on closer inspection they turn out to be only illusions resulting from manipulated space and context.  In one of the four wall pieces called Envelopments, Trouve repeats the radiator motif and inserts it a dream-scape of barren architecture and life elements, including a seemingly deserted apartment complex, a fan, and a tree.  From this space copper lines emanate down the wall, and continue into the floor, again bridging the dream space (art piece) with reality (the space on which the audience walks).  Although 2-dimensional, the drawings become unusually sculptural as these copper lines come down the wall and dig into the cement floor, creating a sculptural drawing and a drawn sculpture.

The entire exhibit by Tatiana Trouve takes you on a trip down the rabbit hole, and brings you into a world where nothing appears to be as it seems.  It is the place in our subconscious where memories, images, and thoughts blend to create those little fragments of truth that we can never decipher.  Trouve’s exhibition is an ambitious and highly poetic journey, extremely well produced yet fragile and subtle.

Mircea Cantor at the Kunsthaus

To be published in ArtUS in January, 2010

The young Romanian artist Mircea Cantor, currently living and working in Paris, has become internationally recognized after some important museum exhibitions and representation with the prestigious Yvon Lambert Gallery.  So, as I was walking into the Kunsthaus exhibition “Tracking Happiness” expecting to see a considerable amount of work and even some monumental, I was surprised at the small space and almost undetectable installation.  The show features five works commissioned by the museum: two videos, and three object-based pieces.

The eponymous main video is projected on the large back wall of the gallery, engulfing the majority of the space, as viewers move back to be able to experience the entire area of the screening.  The well-produced video features a choreographed dance, set to hauntingly minimalist music composed by the Romanian Adrian Gagiu, performed by a group of eight women. They are all wearing the same white dresses, on a white background of white sand and white walls, holding beige straw brooms, and revealing small areas of pink skin.  They dance in a circle, each one methodically and ritualistically sweeping over the footprints left by the woman ahead of her, rhythmically moving to the echoes of Adrian’s composition.   The futility of our temporary impact in the world is clear– it can be easily erased, and trace of our existence can easily disappear.  But the subtext intended here, according to the curatorial statement, is that we live in a world that records our every move, tracks our lives through cameras, credit card and electronic data collected on the internet, which can all be quickly erased and with it the evidence of our existence.  This very specific meaning though, gets lost in the poetic and atmospheric choreography.  A more philosophical and general meditation on the ephemeral nature of our own marks seems more appropriate.

(For a complete recording of the video, click here )

The second video, Vertical Attempt, is much less complicated. A flash of a scene that lasts one second on the screen of a small TV laid on the floor in a dark corner of the gallery space reveals a child sitting on a kitchen counter trying to cut with a pair of scissors the stream of water coming out of the faucet.  Then darkness for seven seconds. And again the scene. If you catch it, with its nuances and details, then you have experienced it.  If not, you might feel confused about its connection to the rest of the show, like I did.  But persistence won over, and I watched it several times to finally feel its humor, and see the futility of the child’s experiment.  Its placement in the gallery suggests that it might not be considered as important as Tracking Happiness or the other pieces, but with better positioning, this short yet strong piece can leave an impression.

An extremely small painting, Angels and Satellites, is hung on the wall opposite Tracking Happiness. We see the earth in the middle of the canvas, as if from a great distance, surrounded by angels and satellites, both acting as surveyors of our moves and lives.  Although  angels are usually welcomed, yet satellites evoke our fear of loss of privacy, both orbit the earth, watching us from up high.

Like a Bird on a High Voltage Wire, a large-scale sculpture of what looks to be an abacus, stands lit in the middle of the room.  On closer inspection one sees that instead of beads, the abacus has spoons hanging on the wires, creating a pattern of two back-to-back isosceles triangles, one of wooden spoons, and the other of metal.  Cantor explains that this piece deals with the lack of true freedom of movement that we experience in a world that continues to track our every step, as the spoons, much like birds that get electrocuted from a high voltage wire, remain attached.  Leonard Cohen’s melancholy lyric resonates with the piece and with the show as a whole: “Like a bird on a wire…I have tried in my way to be free.”

Cabaret Voltaire: From Dada to Nietniet

“In French it means “hobby horse”. In German it means “good-bye”, “Get off my back”, “Be seeing you sometime”. In Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right”….The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.” -From the dada manifesto read by Hugo Ball at the first public Dada event on July 14, 1916

And with that declaration, Hugo Ball launched one of the most influential and important (anti-) art actions of all time, Dada.

Zurich of 1916 was the gathering place for refugees from war-torn Europe, a place where people came to find peace and stability.  It was also a relatively permissive environment that had a history of accepting the revolutionary ideas of Europe’s disillusioned intellectuals, including Lenin who was preparing his own revolution in 1916.  Therefore, it’s no surprise that artists, political activists, intellectuals, and regular citizens weary of the fighting and death in their native lands swarmed to Zurich, getting together at bars and cafes, planning new revolutions (political and otherwise) and discussing till all hours of the night the “future society”.

Among these refugees were Hugo Ball, his soon-to-be wife, Emmy Hemmings, Tristan Tzara, the Janco brothers, (Marcel, George, and Jules), Arthur Segal, Jean Arp, and Richard Huelsenbeck, the future founders of Dada and its home, the Cabaret Voltaire.  Many of the group’s original members were Romanian Jews escaping the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic tendencies rapidly taking shape in Romania, while others were Germans escaping the war.  They were united by their conviction that the horrors around them, the death and destruction, were rooted in outdated bourgeois values that still governed Europe, and that that societal order, with its inequalities and brutality, needed to be destroyed for another, more human, to be created.

And it was with this desire to destroy accepted values and tradition that Hugo Ball went to the owner of a bar in the old town of Zurich, the Hollandische Meierei, to ask its owner, Ephraim Jan, for the back room, to be used for a new project: a cabaret with singing, theatrics, music, visual art exhibitions, and all sorts of other performances that would disturb bourgeois sensibilities.  It was called the Cabaret Voltaire after the French philosopher who once had also challenged the status quo with his enlightened ideals, it opened for the first time on February 5, 1916.

This first event was not much different from the cabarets or soirees that Ball had organized before in Berlin.  Most artists involved came from an expressionist or futurist background, while the music was relatively tame and mainstream in those modern art circles.  But with time, the performances became more and more daring, pushing the limits of respectability to the ultimate climax on July 14, 1916, when the first soiree essentially dada took place.

Most of these artists, specifically Ball, Tzara, the Janco brothers, and Huelsenbeck, were well read in contemporary political theory, and sympathized with anarchic ideals.  Hugo Ball was a great admirer of the Russian anarchy theorist Mikhail Bakunin, who had also spent time in Zurich , but a few decades earlier in the 1870s.

Influenced by Bakunin’s ideas, Ball and his friends started to apply his theories, which Ball considered “to be Dada in political disguise”[1], to their new mode of art creation, whose name they also conceived anarchically, by chance.  The legend goes that the name for what they were doing was adopted by randomly sticking a knife into a dictionary and finding under the blade the noun dada, hobby-horse in French.  Conveniently enough, the name also means “yeah, yeah” in Romanian, or “yeah, right”, an obvious slap in the face to the tradition of “isms” epitomizing theory, order, and reason in the early 20^th century. Once dada became an international phenomenon, with adherents in all major world cities, artists started debating the origin of the name, claiming it as their own finding.

In the introduction to the first and only issue of the publication called the Cabaret Voltaire, where the idea of dada first appeared formally at the end of May 1916, Ball wrote a humorous account of the process of launching the cabaret, “When I founded the Cabaret Voltaire, I was of the opinion that there ought to be a few young people in Switzerland who not only laid stress, as I did, on enjoying their independence, but also wished to proclaim it. I went to Mr. Ephraim, the owner of the “Meierei” restaurant and said, ‘Please, Mr. Ephraim, let me have your hall. I want to make a cabaret.’ Mr. Ephraim agreed. So I went to some friends of mine and asked them, ‘Please, let me have a picture, a drawing, an engraving. I want to have an exhibition to go with my cabaret.’ And I went to the friendly press of Zürich and said, ‘Write a few notes. It shall be an international cabaret. We want to do some beautiful things.’ And they gave me pictures, and they wrote the notes. … It is to exemplify the activities and the interests of the cabaret, whose whole endeavour is directed at reminding the world, across the war and various fatherlands, of those few independent spirits that live for other ideals. The next aim of the artists united here is to publish an international periodical. This will appear at Zürich and will be called ‘DADA Dada Dada Dada Dada.’”

Unfortunately, the cabaret soon closed in June 1916, but dada was just beginning.  The Dadaists, despite an internal conflict brewing among them, rented a room for one night at the Waag Hall and there they held the historic July 14 Dada Soiree, which officially launched dada with Ball’s first version of the manifesto (anti-manifesto), Tzara reading his own manifesto, Huelsenbeck reading his phonetic poem, more wild performances, absurdist literary readings, avantgardist works of art, and general chaos.  Every gesture and every move was calculated for the most impact and shock in the audience, thus ensuring the group’s aim of destruction and negation of acceptability, aesthetic, and reason.  If art until then had been based on aesthetic, then dada was anti-art, and these performances were hideous and disturbing, like the war around them.

After the closing of the Cabaret Voltaire when Mr. Jan could no longer take the madness, the artists associated with dada moved on, first hosting regular exhibitions at Galerie Dada in Bahnhofstr 19, which also closed soon thereafter in June 1917, then to other cities bringing dada ideas with them and establishing local dada branches.  Those that didn’t remain Dadaists went on to create great work in other movements, particularly Surrealism.  However, Hugo Ball, who actually separated himself from Dada in early 1920, turned to Christianity and retired to Ticino until his death.  Tzara went on to establishing the Dada school of thought and become its main promoter and leader.

Since its closing in 1916, the building housing the Cabaret Voltaire on Spiegelgasse 1 has gone through many transformations.  In 1989, the space was a Teen ‘n’ Twenty disco, with only a plaque with the word dadaismus on the building, commemorating the cultural revolution’s origins.  But in 2002, while the building’s owner was considering turning it into offices, a group of artists, among whom Mark Divo, a conceptual artist now living in Prague, squatted the building and started a series of dada performances and festivals to raise awareness of its history and importance.

The excitement generated by these events were noticed by Swatch CEO Nick Hayek, and along with the Zurich City Social-Democratic Party and architecture magazine “Hochparterre”, petitioned the city government to open an arts center dedicated to dada at the location.  Swatch promised a few million francs in funding over a five-year period, with the expectation to sell its dada watches in the center’s shop.

And thus, in 2004, Cabaret Voltaire, funded by the city of Zurich and private funders, opened its doors as an institution.  What would have thought the fanatically anti-establishment dadaists about this institution dedicated to what cannot be institutionalized?  In one of his letters to Tristan Tzara after his break with Dada’s  direction under Tzara’s leadership, Hugo Ball, the original co-founder of the movement wrote, “I have another system now. I want to do it differently….I declare hereby that Expressionism, Dadaism and other “isms” are the worst type of bourgeoisie.  All are bourgeoisie, all bourgeoisie.  Evil, evil, evil” (Ball, Briefe, September 15, 1916, p 62-63).