"French Touch: buzz AND reality."

These last few months there has been talk here and there of a "French Touch" in contemporary art. The expression is really a bit of joke. Makes you think of advertising, a media or marketing strategy. Just a buzz.
And so one reflects bitterly that the French art scene is being treated as a thing of fashion that will have run out of steam before the next season. Then one imagines a holdall expression that panders to youth rather than expresses dynamism, a label desperately claimed by artists frightened of being excluded from artistic "society."
The "French Touch" idea emerged a couple of years ago in musical circles, and for a good reason. It referred to a French electronic music scene whose creativity and talent was at last earning this country some international musical credibility. As represented by musicians such as Daft Punk, Air and Laurent Garnier, this particular "French Touch" remains just as vigorous today, and it seems to have unburdened the art scene of its complexes. In fact, the musical phenomenon was the harbinger of a general cultural effervescence waiting to overflow.
But while some may experience this self-affirmation and creativity as something fresh, there is fortunately nothing new about the commitment of artists and art mediators.

THE '90s: THE MUTATION. REAL TIME AND CONVIVIALITY

The process began with the '90s, making this decade the decade of transition. Reacting to the problems that stemmed from the economic crisis, commitment grew all the more as public interest waned. Critical reviews such as Purple Prose, BlocNotes and Documents, critics whose arguments were not at first taken seriously, independent curators and public exhibitions attacked for being lightweight or frivolous - all were sewing the seeds of a future mutation.
While Nicolas Bourriaud spoke of the "Relational Aesthetic" in Documents, artists were producing not works to hang up but experiences to be lived.
"Ozone"
In 1989, with "Ozone" (APAC, Nevers), curated by Eric Troncy, a group of artists from Grenoble (Bernard Joisten, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Joseph) laid down the foundations of a more convivial kind of art based on interactivity, and aware of new technological developments.
"No Man's Time"
"No Man's Time" (Villa Arson, Nice, 1991), another exhibition organised by Eric Troncy, took the form of a labyrinth. Artists seemed to be playing the leading roles in what looked like a theatrical presentation. Here was the foundation of an art that referred to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Pierre Joseph presented two of his first "Characters to Reactivate": a leper woman and a medieval warrior wandered around the exhibition rooms during the private view. The next day, and for the rest of the show's duration, they were gone, leaving only their image behind them. "No More Reality" proclaimed the banderoles. Philippe Parreno set up an event involving children.
The viewer's relation to the work was brutally called into question. Action replaced simple contemplation. Now taking an active role, the viewer entered a scenario with unfamiliar rules, becoming indeed one of the key elements of the work, since their presence and action constituted its actual fulfilment.
"L'Hiver de l'Amour"
In 1994, "L'Hiver de l'Amour" at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was the last straw on the back of critics unprepared for such transformations. The exhibition organized by Purple Prose mixed different disciplines and offered a walk-through experience. Video clips, a video programme, a relaxation area, fashion photographs, designers, architects and dancers transformed the museum into a glamor parlor, yet one shot through with the sociological menace of the '90s. Under stroboscopic light, himself in a hypnotic or psychotropic state, Bernard Joisten initiated the public into automatic writing from within some interstellar vessel. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster opened her mind doctor's surgery to those suffering biography deficiency. Jean-Luc Vilmouth laid on masks representing various animals: "Choose your animality" was the watchword here for a public that was no longer to be offered the armchair of blissful contemplation but invited to try out all kinds of different experiences. Art was to happen in real time. At least, this was the phenomenon that had begun. It was turned towards life, glamor, theatricality, festivity.
Also present were the questions raised by the new technologies. The notion of programming was emergent.

REAL TIME AND PROGRAMMING: THE OPERATORS

In the 1970s, the works of American conceptual artists like Hanne Darboven and Robert Barry, and the "Everyday Mythologies" of Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager and Sophie Calle, were made up of collections, classifications and series. In the '90s, artists became real programmers, or even operators.
Indeed, no one was surprised when, at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Fabrice Hybert converted the French Pavilion into a television studio which was occupied by a horde of characters from differing backgrounds invited by the artist. As for Paul Devautour, the operator's operator, he proclaimed himself the owner of a very heterogeneous collection of artworks. The Collection Devautour can be be read as an attempt to recyle all existing artistic styles (painting, installation, photography). The period is all about the ecology of forms and of images. Thus Pierre Huyghe uses the movies as the raw material of his work. He carries out casting sessions, sets up dialogues, dubbing sessions and makes different versions of the same film. His "Remake" (1995) sees Hitchcock's "Rear Window" being played out anew, sequence by sequence, by Huyghe's chosen actors in a modern remake.

OPENING OUT

Anne and Patrick Poirier have worked since the 1970s as "architects and archeologists," making models and photographs and assembling herbariums in the search for the language of universal memory. The younger generation has extended the range of possible roles, multiplying the possibilities. Practices have grown more diverse, embracing every kind of support, medium and discipline. Alain Bublex, who was once an automobile designer, develops fictions within which he generates plans and models just like an engineer. His "Aérofiat" is the prototype of a car that bestrides two distinct periods. "Glooscap" is an imaginary territory presented in the form of a real reconstitution, which can be visited in the form of photographs and plans. Like a mad scientist, Gilles Barbier works on the idea of cloning. His wax figures are a mixture of the monstrous and the burlesque. He speaks of a scientific reality in forms that are only just fictionalized. As for one of the representatives of Body Art, Orlan, she no longer needs to visit the surgeon's table in order to metamorphose in accordance with the canons of universal beauty: software offers a much more effective way of dealing with the issues of the body and identity.
Artists are creating new modes of relation to space, place and time. The plastic computer screen is giving way to new kinds of works. In "NoMemory" Valéry Grancher offers a direct image of the ocean and the cyber-navigator relates their impressions. The architect François Roche proposes living spaces that are like excrescenes of nature.
Some artists confront the empire of technology with deliberately low-tech devices. Using recycled objects, Malachi Farrell makes complex machines that denote dangers linked to the environment, politics or social crises.

NETWORKS AND ENGAGEMENT: THE BIG MIX

Today, their fingers caught in the millennial hinge, artists are emphatically multi-function personas. Their field of activity went beyond the austere white cube years ago. Now they act directly, in the space of life itself, within society. New networks are developing. Independent structures involving artists and various art mediators are growing up: witness GlassBox in Paris and La Station in Nice. These seek to bring art out of the museum while the museum just goes on wooing them regardless. Sound, images, objects, experiences-the whole lot is mixed and remixed in unexpected settings. In a climate of hypercommunication, each medium and form of expression may be used to convey an idea, a message. Video artists like Joël Bartoloméo and Rebecca Bournigault produce auto-fiction. Each in their own way, they put their entourage in the middle of the picture. Whether in the domestic rows filmed by Bartoloméo or the intimate questions that Bournigault puts to those around her, each time we are aware of social bonds, identity and the universality of the themes.
Mixing the society of consumption and the "society of the spectacle," Matthieu Laurette uses systems against themselves, makes them his servants. While taking advantage of "Satisfaction or money back" guarantees to live on a shoestring, he manages to spread his image and name into every nook and cranny of the media network.
It is here invariably that the engagement is felt, in a fading logic of crisis, but always in a mood of economic realism. Getting by in a global world.
While the practices are unlimited, these recurrent notions of identity, intimacy, the everyday, the social and power are configured in art according to a constant pattern. They arise in a personal mode, reveal their intensity in generosity and aim for the universal. The Temporal Autonomy Zone (TAZ) theorized by the cyber activist Hakim Bey is perfectly illustrated in art: "An insurrection without direct engagement against the State, a guerrilla operation that liberates a zone then dissolves itself before the State can crush it and takes form elsewhere." A space of freedom, of personal investment and activity which one might have thought was limited to free parties, but is now applicable to the French art scene. "French Touch" or no "French Touch", here as elsewhere, globalization is plowing its starry furrow.

Anaïd Demir