Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 47, November 2002
Joseph Nechvatal
Review of Paul Virilio's 'Ce qui arrive' / 'Unknown Quantity'
'Ce qui arrive' / 'Unknown
Quantity' An Exhibition Conceived by
Paul Virilio November 29th 2002 till
March 30th 2003 Fondation Cartier pour
l'art contemporain 261 Boulevard Raspail,
75014 Paris, France http://www.fondation.cartier.fr/eng/expo/home.htm The avowed aim of the
Fondation Cartier exhibition 'Ce qui arrive' (What is
Coming; although the English title given for the show is
inexplicably 'Unknown Quantity') -- which was organized by
the now famously reactionary technophobe Paul Virilio -- is
that 'the principle of responsibility to future generations
requires that we expose accidents now, and the frequency of
their industrial and postindustrial repetition'. [1]
What is obvious in this highly controlled and academic
exhibition 'on the theme of accidents' is that this claim of
'responsibility' is fraudulent. Most of the exhibition is
deeply irresponsible. The word dreadful adequately describes
it. Precisely, the bulk of
this show is dreadfully irresponsible in its appropriation
of the 9/11 attack on New York City. As a downtown New
Yorker who experienced daily these ruins (thank god the
horrid smell could not be reproduced and exploited here), I
was offended by how facile the show is. It is really a vapid
presentation in that it aims to teach us that 'shit
happens'. Do we really have to dress this recognition up in
priestly black profundity and pretend it is art? Not only does 'Ce qui
arrive' / 'Unknown Quantity' irresponsibly lump the 9/11
attack into a 'museum of accidents' (it was no accident), it
wallows in the pathetic tropes of Romanticism by inviting us
to contemplate the smoky ruins of the World Trade Center
attack. Prominently featured was Tony Oursler's footage of
the fuming ruins, as it is the first thing we see projected
large when we descend into the downstairs 'Museum of
Accidents'. Also included was 9/11 footage shot from a
Brooklyn roof by Moira Tierney, and a re-packaged 'best of'
24 hour selection of Wolfgang Staehle's live web-cam which
captured from afar the attack and aftermath ('2001') -- here
now striped of its scale, neutrality, and live immediacy.
For me, such
apocalyptic-chic imagery is congruent with that of the
fervent Romanticism of Turner, Constable, and Friedrich.
Indeed the whole show reeks of Romanticism -- that cultural
movement (circa 1795-1840) inspired by the writings of
Edmund Burke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, as it focuses not on individual passions and inner
struggles or joys, but on fearfully transcendent 'big
picture' dramatic performances -- what are essentially
extenuations of Romanticism's Romantic Sublime. Indeed, 'Ce qui arrive' /
'Unknown Quantity' claims in its expensive glossy catalogue
that it attempts to explore Paul Virilio's most recent
writings of the subject of the increasing development of
accidents as an indirect consequence of man's inventions.
But in the show one thinks more often to the writings of
Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von Schelling, Friedrich von
Schlegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Novalis (the nom de
plume used by Baron Friedrich Ludwig Von Hardenberg). Or
even Soren Kierkegaard, who as early as 1836 noted that
Romanticism implies the overflowing of all boundaries. Yes,
the big-picture overflows the particular individual and
drifts into transcendentalist spectacle here. So as a (in
Virilio's words) 'homage to discernment', 'Ce qui arrive' /
'Unknown Quantity' fails miserably by its own terms, as here
Virilio only repeats once again the nihilism of, in his
words, the 'markets of the spectacle'. To repeat, it does so
by travelling in romantic images of the ruins of the 9/11
World Trade Center attack. Just as our televisions did not
show us any actual, mangled, dead bodies of the victims of
the World Trade Towers and Pentagon attacks, neither does
'Ce qui arrive' / 'Unknown Quantity' show anything intimate,
personal, or subjective. Nothing individual is examined in
terms of 9/11. Only more abstractions -- more mystifications
-- which attempt to symbolize. Such a symbolizing view of
smouldering ruins is entirely too abstract to, in Virilio's
expression 'learn to discern what is impending'. Yes, this doomy show fails
too by its own terms, in that Virilio claims it is 'a stand
against the fading ethical and aesthetic points of
reference, and the loss of meaning in which we are so often
now not really actors, but witnesses or victims'. If 'Ce qui
arrive' / 'Unknown Quantity' really aimed, as Virilio
claims, 'to provide a counterpoint to the excesses of all
kinds with which the great news media swamp us daily' by
presenting a 'museum of horrors, which no one seems to
realize always precedes and accompanies the upsurge of even
greater disasters', then he has failed by submitting to an
abstract aesthetic of the Romantic Sublime. This Romantic Sublime is
also true, if less so, of the two sculptural presentations
which take up and overwhelm the ground floor in an area
which Virilio calls 'The Fall' (how biblical). Here Lebbeus
Woods (with the collaboration of Alexis Rochas) has designed
a colorless trajectory field-installation for the main
exhibition space -- an installation that hypothesizes the
collapse of Jean Nouvel's building. This was accompanied by
a version of Stephen Vitello's World Trade Tower audio piece
-- a version that had all the charm of a funeral drone.
Gladly, Nancy Rubins contributed a massive and admirable
adaptation of her catastrophic assemblage 'MoMA and Airplane
Parts' (1995/2002) in the right side of this area.
According to Virilio we
need to 'inaugurate a new kind of museology and museography:
one which consists in exposing or exhibiting the accident'.
After seeing his show, I think that this idea is itself a
disaster -- a catastrophic disaster because besides having
all the weight of a kitsch disaster film, his exhibition is
something which definitely does *not* have the feeling of an
accident. Rather it is something which has only the *look*
of the accident. What we see and experience is something
highly controlled, something highly crafted -- thus
something pretending, and thus, one could say,
intellectually fraudulent. Jean Baudrillard says in
his influential book _Simulations_ that: 'Never
again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital
function of the model in a system of death . .
.'. [2] He
is right. After seeing Virilio's 'prefiguration of the
future Museum of the Accident' we do not need a real Paul
Virilio Museum of Accidents. We can enjoy the beautiful
films of Peter Hutton, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Conner, Artavazd
Pelechian, et al., outside of this dreadful and pretentious
context. By the way, the very day
before the opening I saw a woman struck by a car on rue
Raspail, the same street of the Cartier Foundation. Watching
her lay in the street bleeding, surrounded by other
rubber-necking pedestrians and soon cops, I thought to
myself, now do I need go see the Virilio accident show?
Indeed I did not. Nobody even shit their pants. Paris, France Footnotes 1. All quotes from the
exhibition catalogue. 2. Baudrillard, Jean,
_Simulations_, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 4. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Joseph Nechvatal, 'Review
of Paul Virilio's 'Ce qui arrive' / 'Unknown Quantity'',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 47, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n47nechvatal>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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