There’s a lot going on in the labyrinthine spaces of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where a sprawling exhibition considers the impact of 20th-century French thinking on art made in the United States from the 1970s to the present. Sometimes it’s inspiring; at others, it’s confounding.
“Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought,” which runs through Feb. 15, signals the institution’s return to its “carte blanche” model, in which an external guest — an artist, curator or collective — is given free rein to conceive and stage an exhibition without limits.
This time around, the Palais de Tokyo, which is known for its avant-garde approach to exhibition-making, has invited the Chicago-born art historian and curator Naomi Beckwith to take up its blank check. Beckwith is currently the deputy director and chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and was last year appointed as the artistic director of Documenta, the prestigious — but in recent years politically fraught — contemporary art mega-exhibition staged twice a decade in Kassel, Germany.
Many will be looking to “Echo Delay Reverb” for hints of Beckwith’s style and approach to large-scale thematic exhibitions, and for a taster of what we might see in 2027 at the first Documenta to be helmed by a Black director and an entirely female team.
Who’s to say — the two settings have radically different natures and contexts — but “Echo Delay Reverb” is undoubtedly ambitious, deeply researched and, perhaps most critically, created for a curious, capable, thinking audience. (I struggle to think of an institution outside France that would stage such an avowedly intellectual, ideas-heavy show with the assumption that viewers would, of course, meet them halfway.)
The exhibition unfolds across five themes, seven rooms and 56 artists — not all of whom are American. The curators say they want us to think of the nation state as “porous,” although that is quite difficult in the present moment, American or otherwise. (There’s always a gap between theory and praxis.)
Bright orange walls introduce each theme — dispersion, institutional critique, the nonhuman, desire, and abjection — with a text that outlines the key ideas and their thinkers, who are shown in jaunty photographs that contradict the idea that they are elitist academics or just not much fun.
Roland Barthes, for instance, whose “death of the author” theory tells us the work of art is not confined by its creator’s intentions, is caught at an awkward angle mid-dinner, and Michel Foucault, the great philosopher of power structures, is shown tripping on LSD in Death Valley in California.
Simone de Beauvoir, the pioneering feminist philosopher who declared that “a woman is not born but made,” is hanging out on a staircase in her bathrobe. (This doesn’t seem as much fun as what the boys are up to, and, in spite of their substantial contributions, female thinkers are the minority in this show.)
There are also many dozens of fantastic, frequently gorgeous and moving artworks on display. How do they relate to the work of these writers, and to the impossibly multifarious umbrella of “Francophone thought”? The answer is that they do and they don’t, a situation that is as fruitful and exciting as it is perplexing.
In some cases, the references are direct. “Oriana,” a recent multichannel video work by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, transports Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel “Les Guérillères” to a post-hurricane Puerto Rico, where the book’s band of female militants make their way through a lush tropical landscape. A 2010 series of untitled watercolors by Paul Chan show costume designs for “The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Opera” — an unrealized collaboration between Chan and the American artist Gregg Bordowitz.
Other connections are more oblique, or formal. But one of the difficulties of presenting complicated theoretical ideas as broad-stroke themes is that their specificity and nuance, and to a degree their force, is lost.
The section on desire is deliberately nonprescriptive — all desires are welcome! — but it is also a visual grab bag. In the part devoted to abjection, a complex philosophical concept irreducible to goopy physical matter, the works themselves are powerful, with examples by Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, PopeL. and other masters of body horror and cultural critique, but grouping them together by their shared aesthetic flattens their differences and makes them seem more basic than they are.
Art that takes text and language as its subject and material is a strong point across the exhibition, with stunning installations by the American polymath Renée Green, who crops up in a number of rooms, and the South Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In the display devoted to Hak Kyung Cha, who was murdered at age 31, in spare works that span poetry, performance and video — including the storyboard for an unmade film — she tears up texts and throws them into the air, or writes them on windows and body parts.
Of the exhibition and its capaciousness, Beckwith said in an interview on the Palais de Tokyo website that she was “drawn to the disparities, the misreadings and also the poetry of it all — with the hope that the audience might recognize something familiar, but also encounter something that feels quite unfamiliar as well.” This is a noble, increasingly rare aim, at a moment when many institutions seem drawn to didactic presentations, as if the magic of exhibition-going weren’t to make your own meaning.
This was, in reality, the goal of these French thinkers who are now often called “theorists,” but who may simply have considered themselves writers, even artists, committed to finding different ways of looking at the world so that other people could, too. “Echo Delay Reverb” as a title perhaps says it all: Loosen up and listen for yourself.
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