«The Ventriloquist: Philippe Thomas»
Art in America, New York, May 2001, p. 154 to 159
Some time in the early 1990s, I came across a thin paperback with the bland title Insights.
Despite the unpromising title, I was intrigued by the mysterious, quasi-abstract photo on the cover and by the name of the author, Laura Carpenter, a woman I knew to be a Texas art collector who had subsequently opened an interesting gallery in Santa Fe. What kind of book would a collector-turned-dealer write, what kind of "insights" might such a person have to share? If nothing else, the book might be good for a laugh, I thought, half expecting a slew of self-indulgent, vanity-press musings.
As I flipped through the book, I saw that it was a journal. I also immediately noticed a rather impressive range of literary references: Pessoa, Borges, Nabokov, Maurice Blanchot. Wow, I said to myself, what kind of collector-dealer reads Blanchot, that most subtle of French theorists? As I began to examine the book more carefully, I realized two things: first, that the journal recorded a conceptual art project of same kind in an art gallery and, second, that it was extremely unlikely that Laura Carpenter was the author. I ruled her out not so much because of the literary references - after all, it was possible, even if highly unlikely, that this art world mover and shaker was an avid reader of Blanchot - but because of the internal evidence that pointed to the author being an artist, probably French, writing during a visit to New York. A curious mystery, I concluded, as I placed the odd volume on my shelf.
It was only later - in the pages of the Print Collector's Newsletter, as I recall - that I learned the identity of Insight's true author: Philippe Thomas, a French conceptual artist who made a practice of assigning authorship of his work to his patrons. I had been vaguely aware of Thomas's work and knew that he had emerged on the international art scene in the early 1980s, as part of a collaborative artistic team that called itself Information Fiction Publicité (IFP). After he left this group in 1985 (the other members were Jean-François Brun and Dominique Pasqualini), he pursued his own projects under the guise of a fictional public-relations agency called readymades belong to everyone® (it's the New York launch of this agency - which favored lowercase letters and a registered trademark symbol - that is recorded in Insights). Following a battle with AIDS, Thomas died in Paris on Sept. 25, 1995, at the age of 44.
Last fall, exactly five years and two days after Thomas's death, an extensive retrospective of his career opened at the Museum d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). This show, which is on view at the Magasin in Grenoble, France, through May 13, takes on the considerable challenge of presenting the oeuvre of an artist who sought to efface his own presence from his work. The exhibition may be titled "Philippe Thomas," but apart from a couple of early experiments in concrete poetry, there is not a single piece in the show that carries Thomas's name.
As a result, the nomenclature of his art can get pretty confusing. Take, for instance, Sujet a discretion (Subject to Discretion), the first work Thomas created after leaving IFP (The IFP works he participated in chiefly comprise light boxes showing self-reflexive images: an audience watching a movie, a check made out to IFP from a collector, a group photo of Thomas, Brun and Pasqualini.) In 1955, he made 11 works titled Sujet à discrétion, all of which consist of three identical color photographs of a stretch of sea and sky. A label identifies the first seascape in each work as an "anonymous" view of the Mediterranean, the second one as a "self portrait" of Thomas and the third as a "self portrait" of the individual who has bought this particular Sujet à discretion. In a further attempt to distinguish these visually indistinguishable images, the first two seascapes in each set are labeled as "multiples," white the last is termed a "pièce unique" (because it has been, in effect, signed by the collector).
The power of seemingly identical words or images to generate different meanings was a subject dear to Thomas's heart. Insights includes a page about the last shot of Godard's film Contempt, in which the camera pans past a statue of Ulysses and then across a Mediterranean vista. It's unclear, Thomas observes, whether Godard intends the shot to be understood as a neutral camera maneuver or as a representation of Ulysses's subjective point of view. "We, the spectators, cannot be sure if it's the camera or the mythological hero who should have the last word," he writes, under his Laura Carpenter disguise. In his own games of image attribution, Thomas concocted similar ambiguities.
If, with Sujet à discretion, one has to read the labels to learn the identities of the "authors," in another work, Souvenir écran (Screen Memory), the name of the person to whom the piece is credited is considerably more evident. This 1988 piece consist of a 6 1/2-by-10-foot movie screen stretched taut within a boxlike black frame. The structure lies on the floor, like a platform or low stage. Standing precariously in the middle of the white screen is a clapper board on which one can read the name Christophe Durand-Ruel, the title Souvenir écran and the year 1988. (A Parisian gallery owner, Durand-Ruel is a descendent of Paul Durand-Ruel, the famous art dealer of the Impressionist era.) As French critic Daniel Soutif indicates in the catalogue of the current retrospective, the title is a Freudian term for a memory that hides another, more troublesome memory. When Thomas included Souvenir écran in "Feux pâles" (Pale Fires, an homage to Nabokov), a complex, museological show he curated at the capcMusée d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux in 1991, he pointed out (via an interview in which his comments are attributed to a capc curator) how the white screen is a reference not only to cinema but also to monochrome painting ("Feux pâles" included monochromes by Gerhard Richter and Alan Charlton). The "emptiness" of monochrome painting, suggests the ventriloquist artist, can be understood as a screen memory for the representational images that have been excluded or repressed by modernist abstraction. And where have these repressed images gone? Onto the cinema screen, of course. It's a neat conceit, but, typically for Thomas, one that requires a little serious cogitation from the viewer.
0ther works that I saw at MACBA were more straightforward, even jokey. Propriété privée (Private Property) from 1990 consists of a roughly 325-square-foot section of parquet flooring, in the middle of which stands a sign reading "Jedermann N.A. propriété privée"-before the piece was sold, the sign read simply "parcelle a céder" (lot for sale). (Added by the anonymous Canadian collector who bought the work, "Jedermann NA" combines the Yiddish word for "everyone" and initials standing for North America.) With its expanse of square tiles, the piece immediately evokes one of Carl Andre's Minimalist floor pieces, but the "private property" sign, which in effect declares the work off-limits to visitors, rejects Andre's practice of allowing the public to walk across his modular metal sculptures. Such seemingly democratic protocols are illusory, Thomas seems to say, because works of art are always owned by someone and bound up in legal and economic systems which limit the rights of the public over them. Significantly, he replaces Andre's industrial steel and copper with parquet, a type of flooring favored by many museums.
One of Thomas's best jokes didn't involve an art work at all. It came in the form of a public lecture he gave at the Pompidou Center in 1987. Titled "Philippe Thomas decline son identité" (although the primary meaning of the phrase is "Philippe Thomas declares his identity," décline can also signify "declines"), the lecture seemed at first unremarkable-a young artist discoursing on his work and its theoretical implications, at times reading from a prepared text, occasionally responding to interjections from the audience. It was only when those in attendance filed out of the auditorium that the real nature of the piece was revealed. Available at a table set up just outside the door of the auditorium was a volume containing the script for the event that had just ended, those who paused to examine the 40-page publication (attributed not to Thomas, of course, but to a certain Daniel Bosser) learned that every ostensibly spontaneous action Thomas had performed during the lecture, from clearing his throat to reaching for a glass of water, had been written out is advance. The booklet even contained the verbatim comments from two audience members-in fact, a pair of Thomas's carefully coached artist friends.
As did quite a few innovative artists in the 1980s, Thomas sought to draw attention to the role of marketing and economics in art-making and to critique the lingering, romantic notion of authorial autonomy. But he also seemed to delight in that most ancient ambition of art: the creation of illusions, The Pompidou lecture is one example of this tendency. Others can be found in the pages of Insights, where he recounts, with obvious satisfaction, the misunderstandings fostered by his readymades belong to everyone® project at Cable Gallery. (For the run of the show, the gallery was freed up to look like a corporate public-relations agency, staffed by Thomas and a secretary.) Carpenter/Thomas writes: Nicole (one of Cable's owners), only half amused, just told me that following the mailing of our invitation, she has already had two people worrying about the reason for the closing-down of Cable (they asked her if the agency replacing it on 611 Broadway should be put on their "mailing list").
The same thing an hour ago (the wrong frame, once again) with those two salesmen who, no doubt because they didn't find our decor inspiring enough, asked if we would take a look at their new office machines.
Thomas's highly self-conscious art-about-art clearly owed a big debt to Marcel Broodthaers, the Belgian conceptual artist whose fictional museum was at once an homage to and a criticism of the institutionalization of modern art. (Thomas's taste for cool, self-referential readymades and densely coded jokes also suggests the influence of French affichiste-turned-conceptualist Raymond Hains.) Like Broodthaers, and unlike so many subsequent American practitioners of institutional critique, Thomas often imbued his projects with a sense of playfulness. In a group of color photos taken in 1990-01, mundane-looking street scenes in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Lisbon contain subtle references to the artist: a newspaper tossed into a gaffer carries an article on Thomas's work; visible through the window of a French postal van is a fragment of a poster advertising Thomas's "Feux pâles" show, a still-life arrangement on a café table includes a Portuguese banknote carrying the image of Fernando Pessoa, the great 20th-century poet famous for writing under numerous names and styles.
As his frequent citations of Pessoa and Borges suggest, Thomas was entranced with the idea of fictional authors. But, interestingly, most of his fictions of authorship were short-lived. I didn't believe for very long that Laura Carpenter was the author of Insights; the deceptive nature of the Pompidou lecture was revealed almost instantly; and no one except the most casual or oblivious of viewers fell for the line that the works in Thomas's various shows were creations of the collectors whose names appeared on the labels. And, in fact, he didn't really try to conceal his games of authorship. He wasn't interested in perpetrating hoaxes. On the contrary, to works like a 1988 ad that invited collectors to help "write a new chapter in the history of contemporary art," he made it perfectly clear that readymades belong to everyone(R) was engaged in selling the authorship of art works. If he enjoyed creating illusions, he took even greater pleasure in shattering them.
Even though he never signed his works, Thomas couldn't avoid other basic conditions of art-making. Like more conventionally minded artists, for instance, he made work that fluctuated in quality. His series of bar-code paintings are too obvious and limited in meaning to be effective satire, and it looks to me as if the readymades belong to everyone® exhibitions that took as their subject previous readymades belong to everyone® exhibitions collapsed under the weight of their own self consciousness. But when in top form, Thomas was a wicked, witty and effective commentator on the commodification of art and the rise of the managerial artist, signaling the dangers of these phenomena even as he incorporated their logic into his very self. He was also that rarest of animals, an artist who was able to translate complex literary and philosophical ideas into visual art without falling into crude equivalencies. Although still little known in the U.S., Thomas has had a major impact on a subsequent generation of French artists (I'm thinking of figures such an Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez -Foerster and Pierre Joseph).
This exhibition is a well-deserved tribute to both his achievement and influence.
Raphael Rubinstein