Centre Georges Pompidou

Soixante-six peintures d'un ordre carré dont l'architecture fait aussitôt passer celle du Centre Pompidou pour un décor compliqué. Telle est la première impression que produit sur le visiteur l'exposition rétrospective de l'oeuvre de Martin Barré qu'organise le musée national d'art moderne. Des peintures qui ne se peuvent voir autrement qu'« en vrai », et qui resteront donc invisibles pour le plus grand nombre ; les circonstances augmentant la part d'exclus. Si la description ne supplée pas à l'absence, peut-être permettait-elle de la ressentir, et de visualiser en retour ce qui doit absolument être vu : une série -des séries -de toiles accrochées à bonne distance les unes des autres, suivant un espacement qui semble signaler leur propre évolution, celle d'une peinture cherchant continument à se soustraire à elle-même en mettant à l'épreuve de sa pratique les cadres qui, rigoureusement, la rendent possible, et avec eux à exercer les regards qui se posent sur elle en quête d'évidence.

The PHASE project is a research project devoted to the study and the realization of systems of multi-modal interaction for generation, handling and control of sound and music. Supported by the network RIAM (Recherche et Innovation en Audiovisuel et Multimédia), it was carried out by the CEA-LIST for haptic research, Haption for the realization of the haptic device, Ondim for integration and visual realization and Ircam for research and realization about sound, music and the metaphors for interaction. The integration of the three modalities offers completely innovative capacities for interaction. The objectives are scientific, cultural and educational. Finally, an additional objective was to test such a prototype system, including its haptic arm, in real conditions for general public and over a long duration in order to measure its solidity, its reliability and its interest for users. Thus, during the last three months of the project, a demonstrator was presented and evaluated in a museum in Paris, in the form of an interactive installation offering the public a musical game. Different from a video game, the aim is not to animate the pixels on the screen but to play music and to incite musical awareness.

Close to its fortieth anniversary, the Pompidou
Centre, this (anti)monument at the heart
of Paris, also popularly known as Beaubourg,
has a distinctive trajectory in cinema. An
initial exploration of a selection of films in
which this unique cultural space appears suggests
the existence of a breaking point in this
trajectory, coinciding with the change of millennia
and the reopening of the Centre after
its renovation in the late 90s. Following an
examination of the building and its activity,
the article addresses its appearances in cinema
chronologically and thematically.

Si Jean-François Lyotard et Thierry Chaput avaient fait appel à de nombreux concepts pour la réalisation de l’exposition « Les Immatériaux », celle-ci avait été en même temps pensée pour s’adresser avant tout à la sensibilité des visiteurs. Ce paradoxe rendait la compréhension du public particulièrement compliquée, voire impossible. Dans cet article, il s’agit de montrer, par l’étude des différentes stratégies mises en place par les commissaires, comment cette mauvaise transmission du message était incluse dans le projet même de l’exposition.

If Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput used many concepts in the conception of the exhibition “Les Immatériaux”, at the same time it addressed above all the sensitivity of visitors. This paradox made public understanding particularly complicated, if not impossible. This article shows, by studying the different strategies implemented by the curators, how this poor transmission of the message was included in the project of the exhibition.

À travers une étude de cas de chacune des formes de délocalisation du musée du Louvre et du Centre Pompidou, sur le territoire français, en Europe, puis dans le monde, les stratégies de rayonnement de ces deux institutions nationales sont analysées par le recours à une approche comparative. L’expansionnisme territorial des deux établissements phares du paysage muséal parisien se caractérise par la valorisation de leur nom de marque, de leurs collections et de leur savoir-faire, qui est abordé en regard d’une pratique qualifiée de « franchise muséale ». Ainsi, le « musée franchisé » - déterminé par l’essaimage de l’institution mère détentrice d’actifs matériels et immatériels valorisables à l’étranger - permet de questionner le devenir des deux musées et, dans une perspective plus large, d’envisager quel sera le musée de demain.

Article publié dans le catalogue qui a accompagné la retrospective sur Frank Gehry au Centre Pompidou entre le 8 octobre 2014 - 26 janvier 2015.

Dans Aurélien LEMONIER, Frédéric  MIGAYROU (dirs.), Frank Gehry, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2014, pp. 116-125.

409 pages, 98 color illustrations and 97 ink drawings.
Available in paperback and hardback at Amazon. e-book at Peter Lang Publishing: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4331-3959-8

"Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art" is a student textbook and teacher manual in cultural studies that capitalizes on the little exposure liberal arts students have to architecture, and the widespread popularity of Paris across the curriculum. Designed for a college course in the humanities, the book is also suitable for a High School course or a study abroad program in Paris.

The student textbook focuses on Paris, which throughout history has been the stage and experimental ground for artists and intellectuals from all over the world, making it the crucible of western thoughts and consummate material for an interdisciplinary study. Each chapter presents a cultural movement such as the Gothic, classical, romantic and modern that are predominant in the Parisian landscape. The interdisciplinary approach promotes critical thinking, inspiring students to identify and translate esthetic concepts from one discipline to another, and explore, for instance, what impressionist literature or cubist architecture might be.

Please cite as: Susan Holden, "Possible Pompidous," AA Files, 70, 2015, 33-45. 33 When L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui announced the international competition for the plateau Beaubourg in October 1970 Georges Pompidou had been president of France for little more than a year. Coming to power in the wake of the civil unrest of May 68, one of his earliest decisions was to create a landmark building in the heart of Paris that would reassert the city's pre-eminence in arts and culture, as much as it tried to appease the very same rioters who had been barricading streets and throwing cobblestones at police cars. In the process he hoped to signal that he was a new kind of president, and to succeed where his predecessor, Charles de Gaulle, had failed. For De Gaulle had attempted several times to develop Beaubourg as part of a grand plan for the Marais quarter that envisioned the construction of a vast transport hub, hotels and a conference centre. But in deciding to treat Beaubourg as a separate project, Pompidou managed to successfully prise it from the political stalemate in which the larger scheme was mired. In this wrestling for control, he was also aided by the fact that the site was then conveniently available for immediate development, having been razed in the 1930s as part of the wholesale demolition of the îlots insalubres of central Paris -a prelude, of sorts, to the large-scale urban renewal that would transform the face of the city in the 30 years after the Second World War, the so-called trente glorieuses. The idea behind the Centre Beaubourg was that it would bring together different arts and disciplines, providing a home for both the Musée National d'Art Moderne (MNAM) and France's first open-access public information library. The cultural emphasis of the project was perhaps surprising, given France's postwar preoccupation with economic growth and technology-driven innovation -the supersonic Concorde jet was successfully tested in the year Pompidou came to poweras much as it also seemed to jar with the President's well-established reputation as a philistine. However, Pompidou recognised the political currency of the arts and culture. During the interwar years, the Popular Front had mounted campaigns for the democratisation of culture, and the impulse was sustained by the postwar movement to align the task of reconstruction with a unification of the arts under the abstract aesthetics of modernism. De Gaulle made these cultural trends an explicit agenda of the State by setting up the Ministry for Cultural Affairs in 1958. Out of this, at the initiative of its first Minister, André Malraux, came the regional Maisons de la Culture.

Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is the culmination of six years of research, initiated by guest curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. On display is a comprehensive exhibition about the Egyptian Art and Liberty group (A&L) – an eclectic group of artists, writers and intellectuals prominent in the 1930s and 1940s. Amina Diab reviews this exhibition, which brings together almost 300 artefacts relating to the group's work.

In this essay, I undertake an analysis of the first exhibition curated by Didi-Huberman, L’ Empreinte (Imprint), which took place in Centre Pompidou in 1997. In this project, the French philosopher and art historian intentionally bypassed the usual products of artmaking, instead choosing to focus on what is left alongside this process. The project in Centre Pompidou transferred the technique of imprinting into the context of art of the 20th-century, investigating the tactile transmission of form from one surface to another. I will examine how Didi-Huberman’s attempt was influenced by the notion of survivance of forms, formulated by Aby Warburg, and how it offers an alternative to traditional approaches to original/ copy issue.

La significación crítica del Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) de Montreal es decisiva en la interpretación y sistematización de proyectos clave de la arquitectura del
s. XX. Uno de estos casos paradigmáticos es
el proyecto Fun Palace de Cedric Price y Joan Littlewood. Los fondos de CCA proveen una información privilegiada en forma de dibujos y material textual para explicitar este proyecto. En él, se propone una estructura y planta liberadas para dar cabida a un nuevo concepto de centro cultural durante los años 60: móvil, en permanente movimiento y contacto con lo circundante. Ello, además de sus influencias
y consideraciones culturales previas, tendrá importantes implicaciones en la arquitectura para equipamientos culturales de los años posteriores, siendo el Centro Pompidou, proyectado por Richard Rogers y Renzo Piano, uno de los ejemplos más claros.

In the summer of 1971, Ove Arup & Partners and Piano+Rogers Architects presented to the French government what they called a "3-dimensional wall" as part of their project bid for the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris. This would resolve structural and expressive questions and unite three elements in a spatial sequence. The architects imagined the 3-dimensional wall as a 3D sequence of screens that would create original and interactive effects. The engineers saw it as a structure that, described as "brut," aspired to become a manifesto for a new metal structure in cast steel. Through recourse to a systematic analysis of published and unpublished sources and of interviews with the architects, engineers and administrators involved in the project, this paper reconstructs the evolution of the Centre Pompidou's 3-dimensional wall from its initial conception to the gradual loss of its original layered structure.

Aproximación a la 'High Tech Architecture' tomando como punto de inflexión el Centro Beaubourg (Pompidou) de 1971-77, donde cristalizan muchas facetas tecnológicas tanto pragmáticas como utópicas tras la WWII, abriendo nuevas expectactivas en un mundo cada vez más globalizado que demanda una respuesta de "estilo corporativo" para las élites del tardocapitalismo.

El planteamiento parte del estudio de las fuentes de la 'High Tech', desde las más lejanas en el tiempo (Paxton, Contamin/Dutert), pasando por las de la 1ª Modernidad (Le Corbusier, Giedion, Owen Williams, P.Chareau, J.Prouvé), las de la arquitectura de posguerra (Saarinen, Enrenkrantz, K.Roche & J.Dinkeloo, Stirling) hasta las utopías de los años 60 (Fuller, Archigram, R.Banham, Y.Friedman, C.Price) que cristalizan en el concurso del Pompidou ganado por Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers y Gianfranco Franchini en 1971.

A partir de esa obra se estudia la evolución de la Arquitectura 'High Tech' de sus 3 principales valedores (N.Foster, R.Piano y R.Rogers) en diversas etapas, que desembocarán en el cambio de milenio en una vertiente 'Eco-Tech' al introducir la variable de la sostenibilidad y eficiencia energética como justificación técnica de la nueva generación de edificios de alta tecnología, llegando al paroxismo de la "deslocalización" en base a la programación del comportamiento energético del edificio al margen de otro contexto que no sea el bioclimático, ignorando variables tan importantes para la arquitectura como son el paisaje, la cultura local, los hábitos de los usuarios, etc.

Ce livre n’a pas de précédent : avant sa publication conjointe en ukrainien et en français, aucun ouvrage ne retraçait de manière synthétique l’histoire de l’art ukrainien depuis le tournant des 19e-20e siècles jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Sa réalisation est l’aboutissement d’un projet commun engagé depuis deux ans par les Editions ArtHuss de Kiev et les Nouvelles éditions Place.
Souvent sous les feux de l’actualité́ au regard des enjeux géopolitiques qu’elle représente, l’Ukraine reste une grande inconnue. Une révolution permanente. L’art ukrainien contemporain et ses racines propose une immersion dans l’art contemporain ukrainien, l’un des plus vivants du continent européen, malgré́, ou peut-être grâce à la situation tendue dans laquelle se trouve le pays.
Alisa Lozhkina, commissaire d’exposition reconnue internationalement, inscrit cet art dans un parcours qui prend son origine à la fin du 19e siècle, passe par l’avant-garde, le réalisme socialiste et les courants qui s’épanouissent après la fin de l’URSS.
En Ukraine, art et société́ sont à ce point entremêles que cet ouvrage se lit également comme une histoire politique et sociale – de la révolution bolchevique à la révolution orange (2004) et à celle de Maïdan (2014), qui ont été́ retransmises sur tous les écrans du monde.
L’engagement social et l’exigence d’un regard sans concession – souvent photographique – sur la réalité présente comme sur le passé de l’Ukraine caractérise les œuvres de ces artistes et fait sans doute leur principale force. L’artiste devient immanquablement historien, qui intervient pour sauvegarder les œuvres du passé, qui dirige parfois lui- même un musée, et ce, tout en se situant au cœur des événements politiques, qu’il ne s’attache pas seulement à comprendre ou à illustrer, mais aussi à provoquer.
Le texte est richement illustré, avec une matière documentaire inédite. Les reproductions des œuvres contemporaines proviennent pour la plupart des collections des artistes eux- mêmes.

Alisa Lozhkina
Historienne d’art et commissaire d’exposition, elle vit à Kiev. De 2013 à 2016, elle est directrice adjointe du Mystetskyi Arsenal, le plus grand musée d’art contemporain d’Ukraine. De 2010 à 2016, elle est rédactrice en chef de Art Ukraine. En 2014, elle co- organise l’exposition « Je suis une goutte d’eau dans l’océan. L’art de la révolution ukrainienne » à la Künstlerhaus de Vienne et au MOCAK de Cracovie. En 2018, elle est commissaire en chef d’« Une révolution permanente. L’art ukrainien aujourd’hui » au Ludwig Museum de Budapest, exposition pour laquelle elle est nominée au Global Fine Art Awards de New York.

Igor Sokologorsky
Docteur en philosophie, responsable de l’aire géographique « Modernités russes » du Labex Comod (université de Lyon), il dirige la collection « L’art à l’écrit » aux Nouvelles éditions Place. Il a été attaché culturel à l’ambassade de France à Moscou (2010-2014). Il est le traducteur d’« Une révolution permanente. L’art contemporain ukrainien et ses racines ».

Cyrille Zola-Place
Editeur et écrivain sous d’autres noms, il dirige les Nouvelles éditions Place.

Lundi 3 février, à partir de 18h30
En présence de l’auteure, Igor Sokologorsky et Cyrille Zola-Place Bibliothèque Kandinsky – Centre Pompidou, niveau 3
La conférence se tiendra en Anglais.


https://www.centrepompidou.fr/ http://bibliothequekandinsky.centrepompidou.fr/ https://carnetbk.hypotheses.org/
https://www.nouvelleseditionsplace.com/

Sergio Birga’s 1976 painting, “Main basse sur la ville,” features the construction of Beaubourg in the Halles Quarter, and the way postmodernism incorporates anthropomorphism in its design even after the “death” of the Renaissance subject. By showing the developers’ failed attempt to fill in the “Trou” des Halles, Birga’s painting indicates the postmodern to be a condition rather than a style, with its center a self-engulfing hole, deconstructed from its threatening banlieue. He also offers a postmodern version of the Vitruvian Man in an off-center, partial and feminine anthropomorphic model.

Download the sample chapter, "Gothic Paris: Notre-Dame and the Île de la Cité," from www.mayspangler.com. The Teacher Manual e-book (753 pp., 18 b/w ill., 59 colored ill.) for “Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art” is available for download from Peter Lang’s website. For textbook and manual examination copies, please contact [email protected] or 1-800-770-5264.

The teacher manual provides detailed commentaries of all documents presented in the student textbook, with analysis that will be engaging to a scholar but also accessible to instructors without a background in architecture, literature, or art. The wide variety of pedagogical features gives flexibility for instructors to fit their specific areas of interest, as well as those of the target audience. Among those, preamble activities and timelines introduce chapters’ main idea, observation questions build critical reading and analyzing skills, interactive activities foster cooperative learning, and projects lead to oral and short film presentations.

espanolLa significacion critica del Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) de Montreal es decisiva en la interpretacion y sistematizacion de proyectos clave de la arquitectura del s. XX. Uno de estos casos paradigmaticos es el proyecto Fun Palace de Cedric Price y Joan Littlewood. Los fondos de CCA proveen una informacion privilegiada en forma de dibujos y material textual para explicitar este proyecto. En el, se propone una estructura y planta liberadas para dar cabida a un nuevo concepto de centro cultural durante los anos 60: movil, en permanente movimiento y contacto con lo circundante. Ello, ademas de sus influencias y consideraciones culturales previas, tendra importantes implicaciones en la arquitectura para equipamientos culturales de los anos posteriores, siendo el Centro Pompidou, proyectado por Richard Rogers y Renzo Piano, uno de los ejemplos mas claros. EnglishThe critical importance of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) of Montreal is decisive towards the inter...

To kick the habit of conventional scholarship this article appeals to the affective draw of the archive via an imaginative pedestrian peregrination. It takes a walk through the uneasy spaces of Vito Acconci's 1972 work Anchors and listens to the dialogue of conflicting voices which still demand to be heard, forty years after their construction. It becomes unclear who is initiating the dialogue; the text is hard to read and perverse. The resulting disorientation of Anchors is matched by a later, larger, exhibition in Paris: Les Immatériaux, co-organised by French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Here the labyrinthine confusion of spaces, sounds, smells and sights acts out an excess of information, echoing the affective intensity of Acconci's Anchors. However, the parallel between Acconci and Lyotard comes through a stumbling manner: eager to avoid the foot-fall that forms a well-trodden path the aim is to keep moving. We cannot dust off these archives whilst reclining in a recumbent posture; we must leap to our feet and become participants in their performance. Neither must we aim to decode the unarticulated voices which grunt and girn their way into our reading. Such bodily emissions were termed the ‘affect-phrase’ by Lyotard, not in order to decipher their meaning, but to acknowledge their effect in leaving conventions of communication provocatively unfulfilled. Let us proceed on foot.

This article focuses on the exhibition Les Immatériaux curated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput at the Centre Pompidou in 1985, and more particularly on its soundtrack. The exhibition was devised around the question of "postmodernity", and aimed to reflect an era where the question of intangibility was becoming more and more present with the development of new technologies. Visitors were given wireless headphones to wear as they wandered around the exhibit, so that they could listen to a specially recorded soundtrack. However, the soundtrack, which broadcast texts of writers and philosophers but also recorded sounds-music and various noises-that had been chosen to resonate with the developed themes in the exhibition, led to much confusion among visitors. In this article, we will examine the initial intentions of the exhibition team concerning the soundtrack and its broadcasting system by comparing them with the visitors' experience.

This essay is part of the catalogue dedicated to the exhibition "Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster 1887-2058" at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 2015. It proposes an analysis of the work "euqinimod & costumes" (2014), that displayed part of the artist's own archives, a collection of autobiographical fetishes – “vestemes”, “erotemes”, or “biographemes” – handkerchiefs, textiles, clothing, costumes. The text originally written in French is followed by its translation into English.

Research-oriented art refers to a kind of research-creation that deploys artistic technics to think of and solve problems. It does not aim at producing art objects and knowledge; instead, it creates wisdom as the aesthetic spirit of art. As contemporary art becomes participatory, socially engaged, and/or social practice, understanding research-oriented art is necessarily part of the aesthetic work of the artist. Three major areas express the relationship between art and research: art as a tool in scientific research; art research on human experiences and their life worlds; and the postanthropocentric research-oriented art. Focusing on the “Prehistory: A Modern Enigma” (2019), a major exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the article examines the category of “prehistory” as an example of research-oriented art. Prehistory is not merely a concept used in sciences, historiographies and popular cultures since the 19th century, it is also a metaphor in modern and contemporary art. Prehistory in a research-oriented artwork breaks down the correlation between the mind and the world, resolves the epistemological distinction between idealism and realism, and ultimately expresses an essential value of human intelligence not as what it knows but the active knowing itself.
研究性艺术指以研究为导向的艺术，其最终目的不是生产作品和知识，而是通过运用艺术智能来思考和解决问题，并且创造以审美为基础的艺术的智慧。在当代艺术成为参与式，社会实践和社会工作的趋势中，要理解艺术家的工作就需要理解创造智慧的研究性艺术。艺术与研究主要有三种关系：作为科学研究的艺术技术；关注人的经验和世界的艺术研究；超越人类中心主义的创造智慧的研究性艺术。本文用法国蓬皮杜中心2019年的展览《史前史：一个现代之迷》为例来阐释“史前史”不仅是科学，历史叙述和流行文化的概念，而且也是现代和当代艺术的一个比喻。在研究性艺术中的史前史打破了人的思维与物的世界之间的相互依存关系，消解了理想主义和实在主义在知识上的区分，最终表达了的人的智慧的价值不是被动的知识内容，而是主动的知道行为。

This paper represents a critical engagement with Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical and prescriptive exposition of the condition of existence within current Western ‘hyper-industrial’ societies. I contend that Stiegler’s oeuvre is permeated by a complicity with capitalist distinctions, practices and forms of exploitation, as he restricts agency and the possibility for social transformation to the Western middle-class. The argument is developed thus. I proceed by offering the reader, through a Stieglerian approach, an illustration of the pharmacological dimensions and aporetic effects of the digital news media upon memory, work and proletarianisation. I then identify Stiegler’s prescriptions and motivations for a deproletarianised future as being shadowed his depoliticised outlook, as he seeks to oppose consumerism, leaving capitalist and colonial social relations untouched. Finally, I highlight the ethnocentricity and classism which permeate Stiegler’s work, impeding possibilities for emancipatory politics.

À l'occasion de leur nouvelle exposition « Une histoire, art, architecture et design, des années 80 à aujourd'hui », le Centre Pompidou met à l'honneur l'art contemporain libanais, dans une section intitulée 'L'Artiste comme archiviste'. Parmi les exposants, Walid Raad, artiste de l'archive s'il en est, dont est exposé We Decided To Let Them Say " We Are Convinced " Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way, Beirut '82, City V (2005). Portrait d'un artiste et de son concept, et focus sur My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair : A History of the Car Bomb in the 1975-1991 Lebanese Wars–Volume 1, une autre oeuvre de l'Atlas Group qui complète les problématiques soulevées par le musée parisien.

Cet article porte sur l’exposition Les Immatériaux organisée en 1985 au Centre Pompidou sous le commissariat général du philosophe Jean-François Lyotard et sous le commissariat de Thierry Chaput, et plus particulièrement sur sa bande sonore. Cette exposition, conçue autour de la question de la « postmodernité », se voulait être une réflexion sur l’époque autour des questions d’immatérialité qui devenaient de plus en plus présentes avec le développement des nouvelles technologies. Pour parcourir les différents sites de l’exposition, les visiteurs se voyaient remettre à l’entrée de l’exposition un casque audio sans fil à coiffer dans lequel était diffusée une bande sonore. Mais loin d’être une aide à la visite, la bande sonore diffusait des textes d’écrivains et de philosophes, ainsi que des passages sonores enregistrés – de la musique et des bruits divers – qui avaient été choisis pour entrer en résonance avec les thèmes développés dans l’exposition. Il s’agira dans cet article de mettre en perspective les intentions initiales de l’équipe de l’exposition concernant la bande sonore et son système de diffusion avec l’expérience qu’en fit le public.

Dès le début des années 1980, par la multiplication des programmes musicaux, mais aussi par l’apparition des premières chaînes musicales, MTV en tête, le clip vidéo apparut comme un nouveau format audiovisuel en pleine expansion. Outil promotionnel voulant gagner en légitimité artistique dès ses premières années, le clip se tourna vers le cinéma, mais intéressa également rapidement les artistes plasticiens. En effet, ces derniers, attirés par cette nouvelle forme de création, furent nombreux à réaliser un ou plusieurs clips musicaux dès le début des années 1980, en marge de leur carrière artistique.
Si la critique cinéma s’intéressa très rapidement au clip, l’institution muséale lui consacra, quant à elle, différentes expositions en France mais aussi aux États-Unis dès le milieu des années 1980. Cet intérêt rapide des institutions pour le clip pose différentes questions, compte tenu de la nature de ce dernier. En effet, le clip, outil promotionnel conçu pour la télévision, n’a pas, a priori, sa place au musée. Pourtant en 1985, celui-ci fait son apparition dans deux expositions en France, Les Immatériaux (1985) et Paysage du clip (1985), ce qui marqua l’entrée du clip au musée, mais également le début d’une certaine reconnaissance par le monde artistique. Il est ainsi question dans cet article de s’interroger sur les conséquences du déplacement du clip au musée par l’étude des deux expositions précédemment citées, mais également dans le cadre de l’exposition Playback qui, 20 ans plus tard, revenait sur l’influence du clip dans la création artistique. Ces trois expositions majeures concernant l’admission du clip au musée nous permettent ainsi de dessiner les rapports complexes que l’institution muséale entretient avec cette forme télévisuelle depuis les années 1980, de sa reconnaissance à une remise en question de son exposition muséale.

On the narration and background of the 151⁄2 hour adaptation for television by Rainer W. Fassbinder (1945-82) of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Filmed on 16mm, restored digitally, 35mm copies were drawn from the refinished work by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and Bavaria Media GmbH. Screening: December 2007.  Screened over two days at Cinema 1 of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Architecture seems often imbued with the notion of “gesture.” The term is mentioned in abundance both when architecture is seen as a discipline and when it is seen as a social practice. Arguments about it can be found in an artefact as well as in an act of design. In this context it may be revealed as an object to be claimed (i.e., a fetish), or stand for a trace or a carrier of meaning. Thus, in a wider scope, gesture may be discussed as a persistent – if not necessary – theme in the field’s culture.

This essay examines “gesture” as a mediator between society (including culture and power) and the practice of architecture. This will be discussed within the framework of the competition for the Centre Beaubourg (later known as Centre Georges Pompidou). The heated discourse revolving around the expression “le geste architectural,” including the proposal to design the building literally as an open hand and thereby as a gesture of offering, will be explored. We will thus show how “gesture” simultaneously creates a multifaceted existence: at once as a token of validity and a symbol of truth and beauty, as well as representing the very danger of banality. Furthermore, we will show how the Centre itself – to which was attributed the character of a feat – becomes a “political gesture” carrying the sperm that spawned the type of “heroic architecture” that is so distinctive to the Fifth Republic. Finally, we will revisit “gesture” as a token taking part in a conundrum where the modern ideal ends up substituting genuineness with genius; and we will see this binary relationship in connection to all the “gestures” we discuss in the case of the Centre Beaubourg.

On these premises we will propose that, before we ask to define “gesture” by its content, it is important to see it first and foremost for what it does; namely, that it acts as a nominator, and thereby as a mediator, and even a weaver, of the collective between architecture and society. This shift in perspective is critical, as it reveals that gesture plays a more dynamic role than any doctrine would like to have it. Ultimately, we hope to show that gesture can be seen as taking an integral part in the very fabric of architecture, instead of merely playjng a role in one of its many histories.

This essay is based on existing literature as well as original research conducted in the archives of the Centre Georges Pompidou – to which we extend our gratitude for the access.