Excess, paradox and instability at the Bourse de Commerce

A love letter to contemporary art, ‘Le monde comme il va’ (‘The world as it goes’) opened at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris at the end of March. Spread across the entirety of the museum and featuring a selection of 60 works from the Pinault Collection dating from the 1980s to the present day, the exhibition reveals artists’ “heightened awareness of the present” according to its curator, Jean-Marie Gallais. Plaster picked Gallais’ curatorial brains about the major landmarks in the show and how he feels they respond to the current state of the world.

‘The world as it goes’, how does a curator begin to tackle such a vast topic? “I wanted to show artworks from the ‘80s and ‘90s that still hold relevance today. I was regularly discussing this with François Pinault,” Gallais tells us. “We discussed the topic of instability and how art reflects and reacts to the present. From this, we chose to exhibit major pieces from recent art history that are in the collection, as well as new acquisitions of lesser-known artists. I then designed each room to create dialogues between the artworks.”

Gallais explains that the exhibition borrows its title from a short philosophical tale by the French philosopher Voltaire. “It tells the story of an envoy sent to investigate human vices and virtues, as the gods do not understand humanity anymore. This envoy comes back to the gods with the conclusion that an antagonist system based on the opposition of good and evil doesn’t work; the world and its inhabitants are much more complex and require nuance. Humans are made of excesses and paradoxes. Their world – our world – is in a state of precarious balance, but this is how it is: ‘the world as it goes’. I decided on this title as I see artists as this envoy, investigating humanity and testifying from this moment of instability we live in.”

The exhibition’s expansive subject matter is reflected in the selection of artists: from bigshots Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, via art world titans Cindy Sherman and Wolfgang Tillmans, to a younger generation of artists including Pol Taburet and Mohammed Sami. “I think it’s important for my generation and the younger ones to see these works now, as they’re the product of recent evolution. The ‘80s and ‘90s were decades where the lines between art, media, marketing, communication and fashion were blurred. This was pre-internet. These works have something very ‘analogue’ to say about the world that I think is interesting to see in comparison to artists that grew up with globalization and the internet at their fingertips,” Gallais continues. “With a few artists, I chose some works from their early career in the ‘80s as well as more recent work from the 2000s onwards. Mixing these generations also reflects the cyclical nature of the world.”

‘Le monde comme il va’ alludes to the uncertainty of current events, but the show claims to be more than just a musing on the state of the world ‘as it is’ and encourages its audience to engage with the present in a more meaningful way through the complexity of the works. “All the works across the museum provoke reactions from the viewer. This could be a relation of seduction with Jeff Koons, a sense of the uncanny with Robert Gober, feelings of empathy with Rosemarie Trockel or irony with Maurizio Cattelan and Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. They could sometimes be quite violent, with Anne Imhof’s explosive paintings or with Christopher Wool’s word drawings. All these works are like a punch in the face, even today. They’re the opposite of artworks conceived solely for contemplation and beauty.”

Connected to the exhibition is Korean artist Kimsooja’s ‘carte blanche’, a programme in which the Bourse de Commerce gives an artist free reign over an installation. Kimsooja’s piece is composed of a giant mirror used to reinterpret the architecture of the gallery’s rotunda. “We wanted to show how artists are finding antidotes to the current state of the world. Kimsooja is one of them. She offers an experience of recentering yourself to find resonance with the world. With her installation in the rotunda, she amplifies the circularity of the architecture as an allegory of an embrace. She sees the architect’s concrete curved walls as two arms reaching around to hug you. The mirror inverts the usual way we see the world and shows that we are a central piece in it.”