Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern

Black Kites, 1997. � Gabriel Orozco. Courtesy Tate Modern.

When TJ and I arrived in Paris last October for our 20-hour Nuit Blanche art bender, we readied ourselves for the eve ahead with a can of coke and a cigarette. Sitting in the square outside the Pompidou, TJ noticed a camera on a tripod a few yards away. Obligingly, I went over to investigate. There were signs taped down in front of the camera instructing readers of said sign to pose for a self portrait. A camera remote sat nearby for just that purpose. We excitedly snapped a few too many silly poses before skipping off into the white night, but frustratingly, I never found out who the artist was or what the project was, or even whether the thing was an arts project at all.

On our way to Notre Dame, I remember we pressed our faces up against the glass walls of the Pompidou to reveal the secret of the shadows we could barely make out while walking past. In a large room, we saw a fan whizzing around with rolls of white toilet paper elegantly swooshing down like a rhythmic gymnast�s ribbon. We saw a Citro�n DS with the middle cut out, then smushed back together like an oreo cookie without any filling. We both recognised the car but, between the two of us, we couldn�t manage the artist�s name. When the press release for the Gabriel Orozco show at the Tate Modern went round, the images clicked and I realised whose work we�d seen through the Pompidou�s windows.

I want to like this show. But I don�t. It depresses me. It�s like going on a first date with someone whose photos you�ve only seen on Facebook. Online, he�s not half bad; a bit pretty, witty messages. But when you�re across the table at The Ambassador, his prettiness is nice enough and his chat�s alright but by the time the starters have been cleared away the conversation�s flagging and relatively pretty just isn�t good enough. It�s not that this show is offensive or tedious or really, truly horrible, but that it�s empty. Like my terrible blind date metaphor, it�s empty but trying to hint at meaning through tired clich�s.

Relativism�s such a pain in the ass. It�s done the art world little good. The nightmare that is post modernity resulted in an approach that says it doesn�t matter what�s �good� or �bad� because everyone�s opinion is equally valid. I�m open to being wrong, but this strikes me as a load of old hair-loss replacement bollocks. Sure, we don�t all have to agree on what�s �good� � there would hardly be a need for art if that were the case � but criticism by its very definition must assume that some works of art are more worthy than others. Contrary to relativistic dogma, it�s a critic�s job to make judgements, but the increasing power of institutions and PRs means that most �criticism� tends to be expressed as art history or back-slapping positivity. Not that either of those are intrinsically bad � I love a good bit of back-slapping positivity and I love being excited about things � but reading the newspapers, magazines, and even blogs, you�d think that every single art show was an absolute masterpiece.

I�m getting a little side tracked.

One of Orozco�s more visually striking pieces, Black Kites, is a human skull with a drawn on black and white geometric pattern. The skull is wonderful to look at, briefly, but it has no power as a work of art. It solicits no emotional response, no feeling; it�s like looking at a trinket in a curiosity shop. So you can understand why I�m not comfortable when critics and curators say things like: �the skull, an organic reality, engages with and parries the attempt of the artist to impose a system, a sense of regularity and order.� Why do people still write like this? What does �organic reality� even mean? Here the truism holds that clouded language denotes clouded thought: such a statement entirely neglects the fact that nature has its own set of systems and rules, its own order. A black and white pattern isn�t �reason� to the skull�s �uncertainty�.

I look at Black Kites and I see a skull with a pretty pattern on it. That�s it. Nothing more. It doesn�t make me think about life, art, death, desire; but what Dave Hickey calls 'scholastic post-minimalism - "fast art" designed for the institutional, white-box quick-take.'

With so many of Orozco�s works, the concept or process has been privileged � chopping the middle out of a Citro�n DS and putting it back together, tracking down matching yellow scooters to photograph them as a pair, filling a chess board with nothing but rooks, displaying an empty shoebox, taking photographs of the steam of breath on a piano, extracting amusing phrases from obituaries to write out on banners � to the detriment of the visual effect of the physical work.

There�s nothing here to look at. In effect this exhibition is a promenade piece: it�s contemporary art that�s the product of a society with no attention span. You can amble through the entire show without stopping to pause for a single sustained look.  Hickey again perfectly encapsulates my desire for more than just food for thought: �I want an image that I can keep looking at, some kind of sustained eloquence, an image that perpetually exceeds my ability to describe it.�

This probably isn�t the place to get into a discussion about the importance of beauty, and I mean beauty as something that provokes a physical response, not simply as a box-ticking set of aesthetic guidelines, but art needs more than surface tricks to mean something, to move someone. It�s no good if you look at the work, aren�t moved, then read the explanatory text and feel more intrigued by the conceptual underpinnings of the work rather than the finished piece itself. This art has no power.  Orozco�s pieces aren�t persuasive. They don�t demand my attention or evoke a physical response. Witty though much of his work may at first appear, to me it just isn�t interesting.

a sleepless night

This piece first appeared in The Architectural Review.

Having grown up in a sprawling American metropolis, for me the best feature of many European cities is their easy navigability.  Paris is a particularly wonderful city in which to stroll and for one evening every year, during the Nuit Blanche festival, this quality is exploited and the city gets a dressing up with installations and events, glittering jewels on the wrists of a beautiful woman.  Nuit Blanche is one night when the city is entirely given over to the pleasures of wandering and of discovering.

Nuit Blanche is an idiomatic French phrase that literally means �white night�.  It�s often used to express the passing of a sleepless night, whether because of an uncomfortable mattress or one too many turns on the dance floor.  In the case of the first Saturday evening in October, Nuit Blanche refers to the all-night arts festival established by the forward-thinking Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delano�, in 2002. Delano� has done much to bolster Paris� cultural life: he is also responsible for the annual Paris Plage and the V�lib cycle hire scheme, both much loved by Parisians.

As for Nuit Blanche itself, every year this 12-hour festival � from 7pm to 7am � takes on a different theme.  This year saw less a theme, more a concentration around certain geographical hubs � Centre, West, East � to allow visitors more opportunities for ambling.

For its ninth year, Nuit Blanche was curated Martin Bethenod, director of Venice�s Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana.  The backbone of the programme consisted of 40 invited artists, but like any good arts festival, a fringe programme has also sprung up and many artists and galleries use the exposure to organise their own installations throughout the city.

Given that the festival takes place during the hours of darkness, it is hardly surprising that so many of the installations experiment with light.  Of these, the most effective was Thierry Dreyfus' deceptively simple light installation inside the Notre-Dame de Paris.  Dreyfus� piece, Offrez Moi Votre Silence, was remarkable for its ability to force a new reading of a familiar building.  Switching off all city lights around the church�s exterior, Dreyfus installed a series of internal floodlights which dimmed and brightened in a gentle rhythm, like a lung breathing inside the Notre-Dame.  When viewed from outside, the church was dark save for the glowing stained glass windows.

Perhaps Paris� most famous lighting designer, Drefus made an eloquent comment in a 2005 New York Times interview which coincided with the reopening of the Grand Palais: �What is the sense of lighting buildings at night to show what you see during the day? You have to bring another dream.�  The installation is testament to the strength of Dreyfus� vision.  On this evening the Notre-Dame feels different: less like a space for sacred worship, more a place to appreciate the power of secular creation.  Dreyfus� breathing light lungs have transformed the overwhelming grandeur of the church into a space that feels far more unified, serene, and familiar.  Shock and awe has been replaced by feelings of profound calm and composure: it�s a remarkable transformation.

C�leste Boursier-Mougenot, of recent birds-in-the-Barbican fame, exhibited an older project, Harmonichaos from 2000.  One of the perks of Nuit Blanche is that you get to snoop around buildings not regularly open to the public.  Boursier-Mougenot�s comically-sinister, harmonica-playing hoovers are installed in a salon in the beautiful H�tel de Lauzun, on the banks of the Seine.  A private townhouse, the H�tel was constructed during the reign of Louis XIV and its ornate and rich interiors have seen hardly a change in the following centuries.  The sumptuous room where Boursier-Mougenot's hoovers are displayed serves as a delicious foil to the late-80s aesthetic of the old hoovers, and the weezing whine of the harmonicas creates an atonal, modernist kind of symphony. 

Respite from the demands of this sleepless night were provided by Louidgi Beltrame�s enlightening film about Gunkanjima, screened in the �cole Nationale Sup�rieure D'Architecture in Belleville, an area increasingly known for its community of up-and-coming artists in eastern Paris.  At 5am, Beltrame�s hypnotic film of Gunkanjima�s ruined buildings was most welcome.  In all honesty, it�s difficult to judge the accuracy of my response to the film given the circumstances, but it was exactly what was needed at the time: slow-moving images of a dystopian-Disney fantasy, a coal-mining island long since abandoned.  Off the coast of Nagasaki, the island was populated by workers from 1887 to 1974 and then left to crumble thereafter.  Beltrame�s camera makes no ideological or moral statement; it only shows what�s left of this bizarre island, which resembles the ghostly remains of a depressing work camp.  The pull of the place is undeniable and Beltrame has done a great service simply in bringing it to light.

Though not as successful as it might have been given that the space was too small and that a gaggle of teenagers seemed to have used it as a bed for the night, Fay�al Baghriche's piece, Snooze, brought Nuit Blanche to its end.  A pitch-black room in the H�tel d�Albret was filled with 300 alarm clocks resting on shelves lining one wall.  The clocks ticked away all throughout the evening, until at precisely 7am, the alarms all went off in (near) unison.  While the noise of the clocks wasn�t quite as deafening as I expected, the idea of trying to arrive on time for an alarm clock to go off is playful and amusing.  As is the notion of the alarm clock as an Alice-in-Wonderland-type symbol: 300 alarms go off and one turns from night-time dreamer back into day-time doer. 

Sleepless nights

Ryoji Ikeda, spectra [paris]

Commissioned for Nuit Blanche Paris, 2008

Paris may be the �City of Lights� but Ryoji Ikeda�s blinding tower of light, spectra [paris], elevates the clich� from banal to stratospheric. This new work by the Japanese artist was commissioned for Nuit Blanche, the city�s annual all night contemporary arts festival. Ikeda�s initial proposal was to make the 210-metre tall Montparnasse Tower disappear by surrounding it on all four sides with light. This proved to be a technical impossibility but also a stroke of luck, for the installation undoubtedly benefits from the Tower despite its unpopular appearance. A ghostly and compelling alternative imagining of the Tower, spectra [paris] softens the skyscraper�s harsh fa�ade, supplying an awe and delicacy lacking in the original.

The 64 floodlights are arranged in an 8 x 8 formation, two metres apart, so that visitors can walk between and interact with the lights. The grid of lamps is accompanied by a matrix of speakers, broadcasting a 30 minute looped pattern of sine waves of varying frequencies. The audio element transforms the ephemeral lights into an altogether more physical sensation: an aural skin for floodlit bones.

While spectra [paris] acts as an artistic affirmation of the Tower, it�s also a sublime experience in its own right. The lights and sounds of spectra teeter precariously between sensory pleasure and pain: the high-pitched frequencies are sometimes unbearable and the lights are too bright to look at directly. But this environment is primal and addictive and when you start to walk away, an immediate desire to return takes over.

Initially I wasn�t convinced the installation would work, given the relatively low lines of Paris�s skyline. Ultimately the location couldn�t have been more appropriate. Had spectra [paris] been near the Eiffel Tower, it would have been obvious and self-defeating; anywhere else, and it would have been operating in a vacuum. Ikeda�s installation provides a new lens with which to view this sky-scraping behemoth, rendering it simply stunning, no mean feat given this is one of the least attractive buildings in a very beautiful city.