| It’s been a while since I first understood that no one can discover the contemporary French art scene simply by going to the Georges Pompidou Center. However, if you stay in Paris for, say, longer than four weeks, you can discover a lively, visceral and often subversive type of urban art. The so-called street art is political and even militant—often displaying for us the real heartbeat of the old city. This is because many contemporary artists decide to stay somewhere on the margins of the official art market and, thus, start organizing themselves in the street. |  |
Art as Protest: Aux Arts Citoyens – Nina Zivancevic
It’s been a while since I first understood that no one can discover the contemporary French art scene simply by going to the Georges Pompidou Center. However, if you stay in Paris for, say, longer than four weeks, you can discover a lively, visceral and often subversive type of urban art. The so-called street art is political and even militant—often displaying for us the real heartbeat of the old city. This is because many contemporary artists decide to stay somewhere on the margins of the official art market and, thus, start organizing themselves in the street. This always implies a certain commitment—this new generation of artists has already worked under the cloak of a new urban guerilla, taking over the city of Paris by turning it into an open gallery; their own playground. The idea is that art is not only meant to be shown to the gallery owners and the institutions, but also to art lovers walking the streets of Paris and to “casual passers-by.”
In 2005, an artists’ organization and a collective called Art Dans la Ville organized an underground show entitled “Urban Section” with 15 contemporary artists to comment upon the daily life of the city. Some of these artists, such as Speedy Graphito, Noart and Paella Chimicos, have already worked in the realm of artists’ local politics for a long time. Thus, their presence guaranteed an intelligent and interesting participation in this year’s show entitled “Aux Arts Citoyens” (Take Art, Citizens). And indeed, some 50 artists who participated in this year’s show had a lot of things to comment upon: the daily life in France has gone entirely downhill. Not only have we had two months of students’ demonstrations against the so-called “First Employment Law,” which announced that anyone could be “hired and fired within,” but we’ve also had anti-right-wing racial conflicts and huge riots against minister Sarcozy’s draconnian immigration laws. All these events have produced a huge reaction, and the artists were the first to show their honest dissatisfaction with the present situation to more than 20,000 visitors in a busy Blancs-Manteaux space nestled in the hip, Le Marais area of central Paris.
Their task this time was to express their “graphic” (read: political) ideology just before the elections in various formats. For instance, expressions via graffitti art were placed on official voting panels, and the display of various flags, posters and flyers with political imagery as well as video projections dealing with the same painful subject matter of “life in Paris which does not function the way it should” were also put on view.
Within this specific scope too, we have seen Speedy Graphito’s cartoonish poster showing Eiffel’s tower as a pawn on a huge political chess board with the subtitle, “The game’s over” written underneath. Similar to Noart’s explicit slogans of “politics equals cancer” and “religion-syphilis,” we have seen Miss.Tic, a French female version of Keith Herring, who offers us the pro-immigrant poster stating, “we are all illegal around here.” We’ve also seen an even more vitriolic acid-cartoon entitled French Cuisine by THON, who depicted the National Front’s right-wing heroes Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marina as a national treasures. Trash Anderson’s God Save the Queen poster alludes to the endangered species of French culture and national heritage, namely to the popular night club Queen, which is more like a living symbol of gay underground culture in France—one that is threatened to be closed down and bought by foreign capital investment.
The ultra-avant-garde group 10/10 suggests an even more radical solution to the cultural problems—a “bottle of plastic nitrogen” on a street flyer, whereas Paella Chimicos offers a few of his larger-than-life weird cartoons which dread censorship but, at the same time, grant us a clear vision of what’s going on in this, and any other, contemporary society. With his installation of piggish and dog-like sculptures of babies kept on a leash and entitled Domestic Babies, Prune comes close to Jonathan Swift’s concept of “selling off babies who are treated worse than pigs,” a notion even larger than that of child abuse. VLP’s logo incorporating the phrase “Utopia—that’s my life” neatly sums up the spirit of this entire show, which also boasts the participation of various, committed contemporary writers who supplied titles, texts and excerpts from their work to encourage the presentation of their visual colleagues. Here we are likely to find a text of an American, Hakim Bay, who is a political guru writer who speaks of the importance of the Terrorisme Poetique, the Poetics of Terrorism or, even better, the Poetics of Terror, and where we could find a more suitable expression for the practise of our daily political doings?
All in all, the show “Aux Arts, Citoyens” deserves not only to be seen and reviewed but, above all, it deserves to be practised and understood in the light of art’s position in this world’s true context. As one of the participating artists, Roma Napoli, justly remarks: “It’s a pity that one out of 10 visitors to this show understands the real message behind each and every work,” but then adds, benevolently, “though I must admit that the same goes for any passer-by in the street who observes grafitti art.”
