{"id":147438,"date":"2025-11-22T02:30:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T02:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/147438\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T02:30:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T02:30:19","slug":"poststructuralism-and-self-censorship-at-palais-de-tokyo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/147438\/","title":{"rendered":"Poststructuralism and Self-Censorship at Palais de Tokyo"},"content":{"rendered":"

What does this bookwormish exhibition have to say about the histories and afterlives of critical discourses? <\/p>\n

Just one day after the Palais de Tokyo opened its ambitious exhibition Echo. Delay. Reverb. American Art, Francophone Thoughts, curated by Guggenheim chief curator (and artistic director for the next Documenta) Naomi Beckwith<\/a>, the institution was hit by controversy: Cameron Rowland\u2019s Replacement (2025), for which the artist swapped the French flag outside the building for the Martinican one, was removed from its mast<\/a>. The green, red and black flag \u2013 created in the 1960s by anticolonial activists and officially adopted by the island (and French overseas d\u00e9partement) only in 2023 \u2013 carries a complex history Rowland hoped to make visible to a metropolitan French audience. All that now remains of the work is a label in the corner of an exhibition room explaining that the work \u2018could be considered illegal\u2019 \u2013 beneath which an angry visitor has scrawled the word \u2018honte\u2019 (\u2018shame\u2019 in French).<\/p>\n

Why the self-censorship? The institution\u2019s director told Le Quotidien de l\u2019Art that the removal was to avoid any breach of the principle of neutrality \u2013 a rule repeatedly invoked by France\u2019s recently departed home secretary, Bruno Retailleau, in a series of circulars to public institutions issued after France\u2019s recognition of Palestine \u2013 which \u2018prohibits the display on public buildings of symbols expressing political, religious or philosophical claims\u2019. A principle that seems to concern some flags far more than others. Meanwhile, according to Le Quotidien, Rowland was advised by several lawyers that the Martinican flag, as an emblem adopted by a French territorial authority, did not violate the neutrality principle, and that the work was further protected under copyright law.<\/p>\n

\"\"Echo. Delay. Reverb, 2025 (installation view). \u00a9 the author. All rights reserved. <\/p>\n

If it was a staged performance, it couldn\u2019t have be more effective: a meta-institutional critique exposing how art institutions crave the aura of critical discourse without accepting the risks of real political stakes, and how the principle of \u2018neutrality\u2019 can be used selectively to police symbols under an increasingly right-wing government. But in reality, the staging was of a different kind: the institution accepted the work only to censor it a day later, in a manoeuvre that reads like a performance of criticality \u2013 a way to include the gesture without enduring its political effect. The result feels not just ironic, but downright cynical \u2013 not to mention a distraction from the brilliant show that awaits visitors inside.<\/p>\n

Unfolding across the whole of the Palais de Tokyo, Echo. Reverb. Delay. is underpinned by a premise that feels both so evident and yet has rarely been articulated in an exhibition until now: that American artists (and the academia before them) have long absorbed, transformed and re-exported the ideas of French and francophone thinkers from the 1960s onwards, not only echoing but reshaping these ideas in the process. (Although one could argue Beckwith is here picking up where the 1977 Pompidou show Paris-New York, which traced similar transatlantic connections from early-twentieth century to the 1960s, left off.) Simply put, it\u2019s a show about how the circulation of ideas can spark radical transformation.<\/p>\n

\"\"Echo. Delay. Reverb., 2025 (installation view). Photo: Aur\u00e9lien Mole. Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris<\/p>\n

At the heart of Beckwith\u2019s reckoning is a deliberately expanded constellation of what makes up the so-called French theory: there\u2019s the usual poststructuralist suspects \u2013 Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Deleuze & Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig, etc \u2013 but also the decolonial thinkers whose work emerged from France\u2019s former Caribbean and North African colonies \u2013 Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Frantz Fanon, \u00c9douard Glissant. The show studies how their ideas first moved through American university campuses and academia before being transformed by artists, and maps these rhizomatic connections between thinkers and artists, and across territories and sociopolitical contexts.<\/p>\n

Each of the show\u2019s thematic sections \u2013 \u2018Dispersion, Dissemination\u2019, \u2018Institutional Critique\u2019, \u2018Geometries of the Non-human\u2019, \u2018Desiring Machines\u2019 and \u2018Abjection in America\u2019 \u2013 opens with massive wall text filled with quotes, black-and-white portraits of authors and a vitrine display of (the first English translation of) the key texts it references. If the latter feels like a somewhat aggrandising way to the role of the academic and publishing world in circulating those ideas, it does provide a useful timeline for the viewer to measure the speed \u2013 or delay \u2013 of that circulation. There\u2019s also an additional documentary section introducing the pivotal role of Sylv\u00e8re Lotringer\u2019s publishing project Semiotext(e), responsible for transporting so many of these ideas.<\/p>\n

In some of the work on show, the influences of French Theory are vividly palpable, as if to demonstrate the practical applications of its conceptual \u2018toolbox\u2019. Bourdieu\u2019s ideas on cultural capital \u00a0\u2013 the notion that taste, value, and institutional authority are socially constructed rather than neutral \u2013 haunt the institutional critique section, notably embodied in Hans Haacke\u2019s reactivated 1972 visitor poll, which profiles the sociocultural backgrounds of museumgoers, and Andrea Fraser\u2019s hilarious satirical performance impersonating an entitled posh gallerist drowning her bewildered visitors in artworld jargon (ORCHARD Document: May I Help You?, 1991\/2005\/2006). Hal Fischer\u2019s Gay Semiotics (1977) photo series, on the codes and rituals of gay desire, is indebted to Barthes\u2019s analyses of cultural signs and mythologies, and Foucault\u2019s insights into sexuality, power and identity as socially constructed. Meanwhile, Laurie Anderson\u2019s Fully Automated Nikon (Object\/Objection\/Objectivity) (1973) \u2013 in which the artist photographs men catcalling her on the street \u2013 reads as a feminist, Barthesian effort to expose patriarchal structures through mediated visibility.<\/p>\n

\"\"Pope.L, Eating the Wall Street Journal (Street Version), 1991. Photo: James Pruznick. Courtesy The Estate of Pope.L et Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. \u00a9 The Estate of Pope.L<\/p>\n

\"\"Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Untitled (Paper), 1975, video still. Courtesy University of California collection, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a more-or-less direct lineage, too, in artists responding to Kristeva\u2019s theorising of \u2018the abject\u2019 and George Bataille\u2019s \u2018informe\u2019: Cindy Sherman\u2019s macabre mise-en-sc\u00e8ne in her Fairy Tales series sits alongside Tala Madani\u2019s raw and scatological portrayals of motherhood (Shit Mom (Feedback), 2021), both confronting the bodily and the taboo. In the next room, Pope.L \u2013 the self-dubbed \u2018friendlier Black artist in America\u2019 \u2013 is seen channelling the absurd and grotesque in video recordings of his performances, unsettling social norms with a confrontational blend of humour and provocation. \u201cI don\u2019t want to powder the butt of white culture,\u201d he intones preacher-like at a pulpit, before the footage cut to him dragging and flinging a white baby doll attached to a string down the street; \u201cI want to spank it\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"Ellen Gallagher, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 2023. Photo: Tony Nathan. \u00a9 and courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, the heritage has been digested and transformed in more oblique, poetic ways. C\u00e9saire\u2019s view of Caribbean identity as forged through dispersion and displacement, and Glissant\u2019s later archipelagic thinking \u2013 where identity emerges through a constellation of relations rather than a single root \u2013 offer a lens through which to look at the underwater worlds of Ellen Gallagher, in which drowned slaves are reborn as hybrid, mythological creatures (Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 2023) or Firelei B\u00e1ez\u2019s time-warping compositions collapsing colonial past and speculative futures (Spiralism (or an understanding, sun minded), 2025). In the next room, Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha echoes these ideas about diasporic identity while borrowing from the grammar of poststructuralist French cinema: in her super 8 films and installations, language dissolves and reforms, its meaning slipping between tongues, and we get the sense that her identity moves somewhere in between, in the misunderstandings and interpretations.<\/p>\n

\"\"Firelei Baez, Spiralism (or an understanding, sun minded), 2025. Photo: Mats Nordman. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. \u00a9 Adagp, Paris, 2025<\/p>\n

\"\"Cindy Sherman, Untitled (n\u00b0142), 1982. Courtesy Frac-Artoth\u00e8que Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Limoges<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t even touched on the \u2018Geometries of the Non-Human\u2019, and the artists who channel Foucauldian biopolitics and Fanon\u2019s postcolonial studies to question who gets counted as \u2018human\u2019 \u2013 and which groups, such as Indigenous people, women or enslaved people, have historically been excluded from it. The sheer volume of works and critical approaches presented in one exhibition is overwhelming, and the scope is so conceptually broad that is sometimes wobbles under its own weight. But you keep going because, even when the curatorial frame verges on didactics, the artworks never disappoint: Echo. Reverb. Delay. is almost constantly shifting across concepts, media, generations and languages, and in times of intellectual policing both in the US and in France, such unruly movement of ideas and their kaleidoscopic expressions feels intoxicating. Outside the Palais, meanwhile, the absence of Rowland\u2019s flag tells a different, more sobering story. And the show\u2019s most striking resonance lies precisely in that tension \u2013 between the stories institutions can tell within their walls, and the ones that unfold, insistently, just outside.<\/p>\n

Echo. Delay. Reverb. American Art, Francophone Thoughts at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, through 15 February 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

Read next On Naomi Beckwith and the Future of Documenta<\/a><\/p>\n

Louise Darblay<\/a>Reviews<\/a>21 November 2025artreview.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does this bookwormish exhibition have to say about the histories and afterlives of critical discourses? Just one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-147438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}