2003, "Escalators, Palaces, Contemporary Art in Paris," Eye Level

At the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the escalators are on permanent display. Easily overlooked for their functionality, the multi-story escalators are monumental sculptures. They allow the exposed metal and glass museum to function like a shopping mall with the ease of leisure. They also reveal, with a certain mobile elegance, that a museum is a place for the highly controlled presentation of art.

This summer at the museum, French artist Daniel Buren presented his retrospective "Le Musée Qui N''Existait Pas (The Museum that Did Not Exist)." Video work by Buren has been installed along the escalators. The artist's installation continues into the gallery spaces and extends outside of the building. The exhibition is a total occupation of museum space. It is an institutional critique of the museum as a social creation with arbitrary boundaries and sanctioned control of the work. Within its boundaries, the museum presents what it considers to be art. Buren transcends the established spaces for presentation.

Buren began questioning institutional frameworks in the 1960's when he posted striped awning fabric over billboards and bus stop benches so to interrupt territories of social communication. He has also placed the stripes over gallery entrances and down the center of the Guggenheim Museum, disrupting other orderly spaces for art. An objective of Buren's work, both early in his career and in the recent retrospective, is to expose the way in which the presence of media in a given territory is an attempt at possession, restriction and propaganda. The placement of a flag, for example, is a claim on a territory, but for Buren, the claim is one of power and control. And the museum's claim of territory is a claim for the power and control of art.

Buren's retrospective title should really be followed by an exclamation point, (The Museum that Did Not Exist!). It is like a revolutionary Nietzchean shout at the institution, exposing the demeanor of a freedom loving artist trying to deny the relevance of an overbearing power. It implies that, for the time of the retrospective, the unstoppable "art of Buren" overtakes the architectural space and the institution, to the point that the museum becomes irrelevant and seems not to have existed. But though Buren is attempting to negate the existence of the museum, he ultimately affirms that both the museum and the exhibition do exist, at the very least, as objects of public fascination.

Throughout the museum, Buren's characteristic stripes appear in the form of light projections, paint, and constructed panels that traverse the galleries, going outside windows and through walls. Buren also sets up thirty monitors streaming live surveillance of the entire exhibition, putting the viewers in the position of surveying the entire property of the museum. The monitor installation suggests that existence requires continual supervision and defense. Surveillance is a critical strategy employed to protect a territory, to secure borders of substantial locations such as museums, most of which go unharmed anyway because of public obedience to the power of social institutions. By displaying the surveillance monitors, Buren encourages viewers to acknowledge that the space of the museum is ordained by the public, and that as with most surveillance, observing the actual building in detail is not something not that interesting to watch.

Post-Buren artists and curators have spent the last few decades dwelling in site consciousness, imposing art in all spaces, specifically those not socially designated for art. In the 21st century, institutional frameworks as well as site specificity and un-specificity are integral to the work of art. If artists like Buren have negated the museum as a space like any other, than any other space is suitable for art, even airplanes as curator Hans Ulrich Obrist demonstrated. Both site-specific art and unspecific art sites have revealed that art survives without the museum (one can wonder about the reverse). The question is no longer one of claiming and re-defining territories or museums but of inventing new territories that methods like surveillance does not yet know exist. For art, the method of subverting social surveillance is one of making and displaying art in new un-authoritarian spaces.

The concept of a contemporary art center implies a non-collecting art space that continually vacates itself for new art. In Paris, such a place is the museum that has never existed. Though there has been a recent increase in the number of innovative gallery spaces in the 13th district, such as Air and &:, the major contemporary art players in Paris are the institutions with collections. Both the Pompidou, which is officially titled the Museé National d'Art Moderne, and the State's Museum of Modern Art near the Seine, have established collections. Over time, the institution becomes privileged over the work and the focus on showing the collection takes precedence over showing the latest art. In early 2002 however, the site next door to the Museum of Modern Art became occupied by a new contemporary art space.

The Site de Création Contemporaine now occupies one half of the immense former World Universal Exhibition building, The Palais de Tokyo. The building was brought into existence in 1937 for the purpose of displaying new technology and has changed in function and theme several times. Currently, theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans lead the direction of the physical and online space. The Site de Création Contemporaine in many ways functions as an anti-museum because it avoids institutional methods of collecting, conventional hours, and the conservative audience that typically funds art spaces. Despite the colossal stone building, a "palace" with architectural traces of former glory, the interior space has been simplified to raw industrial basics, without much demarcation from the work of one artist to the next to the book store to the café. There is an attempt to provide a blended, authority-less place with later evening hours aimed at younger artists and audiences, contemporary music performances and low-art graphic advertising. Co-Director Bourriaud's curatorial style is one of great liberty, characterized by the museum's lack of physical dividers for a less controlled presentation of art. He takes risks in exhibiting many previously unknown artists and those artists working with highly unconventional media. In his texts, Bourriaud defends new conceptions of the artist as DJ, as nomad, as smuggler, among other things. He is an advocate of Pierre Huyghe's Traffic which included a bus ride video installation, Liam Gillick's Coca-Cola Painted Walls, Maurizio Cattelan's use of live animals and other works and methods of art-making that challenge the standards and the spatial designations of art.

For a recent work at the Site de Création Contemporaine, artist Kendell Geers exploited the lavish amount of undivided physical space by creating borders. The artist adorns the entrance to an exhibition space with a velvet curtain and instructions to remove one's shows, calling attention to the ritual of crossing over into sacred space. Beyond the curtain is a deep, unlit room, large enough for a group or large-scale exhibition. At the far end from the entrance, one floodlight illuminates a single pedestal with a Plexiglas box. In the box, a match. Geers titled the work, The Terrorist's Apprentice, implying the base and timeless nature of attack as signified by the instant potential for fire. Geers simultaneously constructs a sacred "art space" and exposes the desire to destroy sacred space. The work unveils the situation of socially constructed boundaries for territories: the problem of establishing one place as more sacred than any other results in a constant threat of attack. The museum and even the liberal contemporary art center, only exist as long as long as they are protected, as long as boundaries are supported both financially and socially and they avoid unexpected, radical attack, which can at times be the goal of an artist.

Both Buren and Geers address the artificiality of socially constructed borders. These artists are exhibiting work in Paris at a moment when borders are of increased political significance. Paris is the capital of a nation that in the last year has joined the E.U., the new life of the European economy that is dissolving boundaries and assimilating national identities. The democratization of European social space has begun in a terrorless snap, not through brutal destruction of borders but through peaceful unification of co-existing borders. While the boundaries of the museum are part of the art of Buren and Geers, the national boundaries of the E.U. remain relevant to the daily lives of many individuals. There are a set of countries for example, whose existence within the new borders is waiting to be acknowledged. A British artist has already established a website that guides such displaced Europeans to continental access without national papers (http://irational.org/borderxing). His work is an art project that indicates the way in which the internet can cross borders of power and function like an unlimited black market. The existence of a black market or an anti-museum in many ways inhibits serious attack on the real markets or established museums. The Site de Création Contemporaine for example, actually began with State funding, officially as a way to demonstrate the government's interest in current art. The anti-museum is allowed to exist so that the other museums can continue exist without the threat of being usurped. Freedom is permitted within peacefully established, co-exiting borders for the E.U., online, and museums in Paris.

There is a freedom of crossing the levels of the Centre Pompidou by escalator. One can see one exhibition and move onto the next work without much effort. Freedom within a territory however, is not the same as freedom to cross over territories, to abolish the idea of restriction, or designation, or symbolic demarcations of power. Buren, who spent two decades radically plastering the city of Paris so to abolish separatist ideas about space, once chose a very limited freedom. During the 1980's the city "honored" him by allowing him a prominent but contained square plaza at the Palais Royal where he was permitted to create anything he wanted. He placed some stripes on some pedestals and then simultaneously, apparently content with the attention and amount of space he received, his radical, unauthorized art around the city disappeared. Buren's unlimited freedom was exchanged for a contained freedom that gave him the prominence and visibility of a Palace's courtyard. If for Buren the museum is problematic as a highly controlled place for art, perhaps it is because he wants to control the territory with his own work, as he recently demonstrated at the Pompidou.

At the Site de Création Contemporaine, Bourriaud refers to artists as brokers of desire. For a post-Buren artist, the presentation of art within controlled space is not the only consideration. The artist not only negotiates a territory, but must also negotiate ideas, aesthetics and importantly, the fascination of the viewer. As Buren demonstrated with the surveillance installation, it is the viewer, not the museum or the artist, that has the power of observation, a power that can cross borders across museums, galleries and other presentations of art. The freedom to look or not to look, that is the unbound power of the viewer to which artists often appeal.