Ser Serpas at Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection and Mark Rothko at Foundation Louis Vuitton
A German friend offered a take, lukewarm at best: the Parisians are obsessed with American mythologies. It is hardly revelatory to read the PR of three new exhibitions in Paris as subtext. The Mike Kelley and Ser Serpas shows at the Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection and Mark Rothko at Foundation Louis Vuitton profess themselves to be about just that: personal mythologies, and American one’s specifically. The French and the Americans share a love of mythologizing, in state and person. More interesting here is the success or failure of the narratives of ghosts and ghosting (haunting?) specifically alluded to in the Mike Kelley and Ser Serpas exhibitions at the Bourse, but certainly always hanging over Rothko’s evacuated oeuvre. In a toast at the pre-opening of the Mike Kelley exhibition one of the functionaries invoked Kelley’s spirit and his oft quoted wish to become a ghost; hoping that he was here with us. I don't imagine Kelley as a very friendly ghost, overseeing these ministrations of oysters with mayonnaise and bite sized entrecote, happily. When he said he wished to become our ghost I believe it to be in a more tragic sense. Wanting to stay and having to go, a way of insisting. A striking difference between Rothko and Kelley is that so many of Kelleys works are one-offs, unique pieces within a dramatic system. There is no scarcity here, or fear of losing one part of the expression in the field of the idea and feeling. Rothko on the other hand is something of an emotional capitalist (or pugilist, one wall text proudly quotes: “I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every square inch of their surface”), replicating states over and over, endless spectral horizons. There is not nothing there though. Rothko is still transcendent, if transcendence is what you're after.
I have my own Rothko-ish ghost story. Growing up in Houston Texas I loved to visit the Rothko Chapel on the Menil properties. It is a very postmodern brick octagon housing an austere and vast set of dark, dark, canvases by Rothko. At the Louis Vuitton foundation in a video accompanying a scale model of the chapel, Dominique de Menil explains how the project was a reaction to the loss of a friend “better to do something crazy than something rational.” The works do not portend well for their creator, Rothko died by suicide before the completion of the chapel. There is a sense of the deep irresolvability of things. I am personally presided over by the ghost of my uncle. A successful gay interior designer who died young from AIDS related illnesses. He cut the figure of a more devilish Richard Gere; I always imagine him dressed in Armani, the Geere from American Gigolo, perpetually draped in brown wool. It was years later that I learned his memorial service had been held at the Rothko chapel. I had been making visits to him without knowing it. Was he there in the cool cave, hidden from the summer heat in all the deep mauve and blue absence? Outside the chapel there is a reflecting pool and Barent Newman’s “Broken Obelisk”, a perplexing and wonderful anti-monument. Later, in New York, I was walking at Storm King Art Center in a light and humid summer rain. I thought to stop and ask my uncle Mel explicitly for his blessing. I spoke to him and felt a presence, a hand on my shoulder; it was compelling to say the least. I took the moment in–grateful to be responded to and grateful for him–then I got up and kept walking. Almost immediately, coming over a hill in the woods, I was surprised by another copy of Newman’s upturned obelisk.
I digress dramatically, but by example, there(!) an American mythology at work. Did you enjoy it? Mythologies are working lessons for structuring meaning and value. They draw long on what is past to give worth to what is present. Worth is, can be, suspect. Everything that passes through the doors of the Bourse is of worth. The building has gone from one institution of value distribution (historically the Paris stock exchange) to another. The Louis Vuitton foundation with all its crumpled ambition is another type of value producing structure. The shows serve to uphold the esteem of a luxury brand, what is offered in trade for our reinforcement of that value is treasures–so many Rothkos, so many Mitchells.
Ser Serpas’ show is sly in its radicality. This may be the first time I have seen her work in person, or not, but I have been aware of it for a while. I first saw the draped canvases over a rack in a booth from Essex Street gallery at some art fair. A cynical gesture, the paintings were like drop cloths stained, smudged and dragged. Like: see here, they arent even stretched, we dont give a fuck, you can have all this attitude for $$$.99. But when I saw the row of canvases hung in the Bourse I thought, here it rests rightly, and whatever you need to do to smuggle gestures like this in, is the right choice. Maybe an art fair is the right place to declare your intention to play along, but that you are not playing. The title of the Bourse show is fabulous in French and english. “I fear”. “J'ai peur”. An admission and an haughty, outdated idiom. “I fear your position may not be as tenable or radical as it seems.” “I fear your dress is démodé”. But more than that: I fear. I do. I fear so many things. I am afraid to carry forth and to carry on. I am afraid of the violence in me and the violence that addresses me.
Speaking of the violence in me, let's talk about Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Serpas’ exhibition has a wonderful soundtrack, a haunting and jovial composition of waltzes and static, by a producer addressed only as “The Caretaker”. Another good name. Rightly or wrongly–but in reviews, as in viewing, we take all observations as correct–the peculiar name led me to thinking of the character that Nicholson is and isn't in the film. The caretaker is the ghost that Nicholson is. He is split, two parts of himself. The one who arrives somewhat broken to the hotel and the older, truer?, self that is called up, has “always been here” in the Overlook Hotel. The name of the hotel is another clue, what has been overlooked? Histories are constantly alluded to in the film: cannibal tragedies of western settler expansion, the hotel built upon Indigenous American burial grounds. The violent past that always was Nicholson’s true character eventually erupts as he attempts to reenact a murderous rampage on his family, repeating history.
I keep going astray into anecdotes and stories but: mythology. To be a consistent body is a type of myth; to inhabit a single sense of self soundly, another. Serpas’ canvases do not suggest or insist on some precarity in painting. I think Serpas is probably unconcerned with such academic undermining of the Medium (capital M). But she does bend its sovereignty to her advantage to make these folds of canvas–still determinedly paintings–describe bodies less fixed and states more tertiary or intermediate. Grated ochres”could describe the bodies-cum-surfaces in Serpas’ exhibition as well as Rothko’s figures on the underground in his early works. With Serpas there is so much fluid touch and it's all transferred or delivered as frottage–scraping and rubbing. On most of the paintings, patterns emerge in the “skin” of the floorboards and tiles the work is made on. Around the central element of the draped canvases is some great sculpture. I haven't always loved or been convinced by Serpas’ signature style of sculptural assemblage (is it even possible for this type of flaneur bric-à-brac composition to be signature?). But in the Bourse they are artfully covered in white linen, bed sheets or tablecloths, pantomiming superficially as ghosts. The covering–the act of it–adds much to the arrangements, so that they become more soft and private, more lived. And they are dynamic in their material juxtapositions (for example: big teal Lego Brick in bathtub with sketchbook), totally valid and interesting combinations that fully resonate period and dont need explication here.
How to sum it up? You cant, it’s ongoing. Serpas holds faith with participation and rebellion, makes an exhibition that holds its space as it carries you. And for Mike Kelly and Mark Rothko others can say much more (not to mention Lee Lozano who is fierce full stop). If there are ghosts let them be not necessarily benevolent and if there are mythologies let them be trashed or turned over as necessity determines. Who determines? Artists hopefully.