PARIS—ArtInfo’s Paris correspondent takes us on a tour of some of the most interesting museum and gallery shows in the French capital, including a joint Anselm Kiefer exhibition at two of the city’s most prestigious galleries; and politically hard-hitting installations from Gary Hill at the Foundation Cartier of Contemporary Art.

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MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Foundation Cartier of Contemporary Art
“Gary Hill: Guilt and Frustrum”
Through Feb. 4, 2007

Sculpture/installation/video artist Gary Hill, in his two stunning, new, large-scale works created for his solo exhibition at the Foundation Cartier of Contemporary Art, reflects on art, money and guilt, offering work that questions our symbolic construction of the world.

The Foundation Cartier is flexing its muscle to provide a platform for American artists critical of the current political situation. Frustrum and Guilt, the two works on view, appear playful, but also politically hard hitting, as the sound of a bullwhip cracking echoes through the exhibition's halls.

“We have a tendency to characterize Hill's work as a video artist, but it’s only one way of his expression,” says Foundation Cartier curator Ellen Kelmacher. “He’s interested in the place of art, the body, the spectator, and it goes beyond that into performance.”

In Frustrum, a gigantic virtual eagle trapped in a pyramidal electrical tower flaps his wings against power lines. Hill's attention to detail can be seen when the tips of the eagle's wings cause ripples in an oil pool, blurring its reflective qualities.

In the middle of the pool is a 24-carat gold brick with words that can't be seen. Then, on the mezzanine level, what is inscribed on the gold is clearly displayed by video projection: “FOR EVERYTHING WHICH IS VISIBLE IS A COPY OF THAT WHICH IS HIDDEN.”

Among its many layers of metaphor, the piece draws a symbolic parallel between the end of the Roman Empire and the situation of America today.

In Guilt, the artist invokes distance by using a telescope focused on his angst-ridden face that's stamped on a series of gold coins located at various angles at the opposite end of the room. Hill's voice is heard fragmented and echoing, while, hypnotically, the coins slowly turn (with a complete rotation made every two minutes).

On the reverse side of the coins are flagellation scenes in which the artist's buttocks are whipped by a laurel branch. Like the “In God We Trust” engraved on U.S. currency, these coins are engraved in Latin with expressions such as, “ARS EST CORPUS VILE,” (“Art is a worthless body”). Art is shown as a valuable, but broken, fragmented and mistreated body.

The artist, in this portrait of a guilty conscience, conveys disgust as he literally and figuratively fights an array of conflicting emotions and thoughts that trace the world’s turmoils and inequalities; but by admitting his own guilt, he demands that spectators claim their responsibility as well.

The thresholds between language and image, silence and sound, lightness and darkness have been of primary concern in Hill's work since he began working with sound and video in the early 1970s. He won the Lion d'Or for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1995 (and has done memorable experimentations with video installations at the George Pompidou Center). But in this show, Hill's mastery of multi-media techniques has gone to another level.

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and Gallery Yvon Lambert
“Anselm Kiefer: Für Paul Celan”
Through Dec. 2 at Yvon Lambert; and through Nov. 29 at Thaddaeus Ropac

Anselm Kiefer asked for this exhibition to be at two of Paris’ premier galleries—Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and Gallery Yvon Lambert—for his homage to the poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), a Romanian Jew and one of Germany's greatest writers after WWII, who was forced into exile in France and died there.

From the beginning of the 1970s, Kiefer has found inspiration in the exploration of the German identity, the history of his birthplace and in the deep layers of mythology—for Kiefer, the roots of man and mankind. Apart from his reading of great scientific works and his passion for astronomy, Kiefer is also fascinated by Shamanism.

From the ’90s, Kiefer has been passionately studying the Kabbalah, which has equipped him with a plethora of symbols and myths on the origins of the world—and with an endless wealth of interpretation and commentary. These divine and mythological iconographic elements are infused by Kiefer with contemporary history.

The paintings presented in this exhibition are based on a series of photographs taken by Kiefer of the surrounds of Salzburg, Austria. These immense landscapes of empty, harvested fields, glazed with mud or snow, captivate the viewer with their distant perspectives. The medium of paint evokes the texture of earth with an impressive presence that lacks no force.