Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Last Manoeuvres in the Dark, 2008, installation view at Superdome 2. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Didier Barroso.

Why is it that the Palais de Tokyo just seems cursed? What is it about the place that just makes you want to expect the worst? To walk in the door with hackles raised, eyes squinched, ready to pounce? Maybe it’s the sauntering scensterism, how egregiously hip the whole thing is. Or maybe it’s how the institution seeks to proffer an entire, readymade lifestyle, replete with a wardrobe, related reading material, a cutting-edge menu, and a compulsory moue of blasé disdain? ‘Whatever.’ All art, and the context within which it is displayed, is ideological. The problem at the Palais is how secondary, nay even tertiary the art actually seems to the lifestyle it peddles. In such a freighted context, it’s hard not to feel harassed, and that to like the art (incidentally) on display is tantamount to embracing the lifestyle lording over it all.

Since taking over the direction of the Palais, Marc-Olivier Wahler has certainly made due with all this ideological baggage, and yet, given his status as a consummate, curatorial stylist, it’s probably no accident that he was selected to run the Palais. Still, differences between the old and new, stylistic or not, can be noted. To wit, to the more direct ‘politically engaged’ approach of his predecessors, he has proposed a programme that is much more oblique, more of the order of myth making, as with his inaugural exhibition 5 Billion Years (art as a schizophrenic, elastic object/activity), and his more recent solo exhibition of Loris Gréaud (artist as impresario). With Superdome, Wahler seems to be after more myth making, which is probably the best any curator or artist can hope to do. Whether he succeeds at it, no matter laudable his effort may be, is another story altogether.

Assembled together under the thematic umbrella of ‘superdome’ — the massive New Orleans football stadium built in 1975 that has served numerous purposes ranging from a Rolling Stones concert in 1981 with more than 87,500 people, a visiting Pope John Paul II in 1987, the Republican convention in 1988, and more recently, as a shelter for refugees from hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans in 2005 — five individual exhibitions are intended to articulate a ‘geometry of chaos’. Exhibiting artists include Christoph Büchel, Daniel Firman, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Jonathan Monk, and Arcangelo Sassolino.

It is hard not to see Superdome as analogous to say, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, 1563, and as such, a living allegory, so to speak, of human hubris. Given this interpretive framework, Jonathan Monk’s clever two-part exhibition Time Between Spaces makes sense in theory, but not in sensibility. Monk cooked up a show that takes place in the Palais and the neighbouring Musée de l’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, in which mostly two-part works are divided and shown in each respective venue. Most of the works are pretty much variations on Ceal Floyer’s 1999 Half Empty Half Full (two identical photos of a glass of water). Example: Zoumana Thinking about Yesterday, 2008, and Olivia Thinking about Tomorrow, 2008, two different performers sitting in chairs and staring at a wall, or Before a Bigger a Splash, 2006, and After a Bigger Splash, 2006, two identical David Hockney knock offs of a still pool and diving board. Departing from his usual mode of over-production, Monk might have done better to limit his contribution to Time Broken Down, Moved and Repaired, 2008, an ongoing performance of a clock maker taking apart a kind of cuckoo clock, which is transferred to the other space where another clock maker reassembles it, and so and cyclically so forth. In this context this would have been not only much more powerful than a thematic survey, but it also would have a better chance of contending, if ironically with the apocalyptically monumental spirit of the rest of the show.

Fabien Giraud’s & Raphaël Siboni’s Last Manoeuvres in the Dark, 2008, is an installation of 300 Darth Vader helmets installed at head height in a diamond formation all connected to a computer that composes and broadcasts purportedly the most evil music of all time. Never mind the evil music claim here, probably the most chortlesomely embarrassing aspect of this installation is how, with a sophomoric élan, it uncritically takes Darth Vader’s iconic and mythological status as a given: as if evil was the offspring of George Lucas, and was blessedly unencumbered by any ideology but that of pure evil itself.

This show really begins to gain apocalyptical momentum with the works of Firman, Sassolino, and the arch-maniacal installation of Christoph Büchel. Firman’s Würsa (at 18,000 km from earth), 2008, consists of a taxidermied elephant vertically standing on its own trunk. Apparently, it is at 18,000 km from the Earth’s surface that an elephant would begin to float. Dark and desperate speculation is inevitable: if there’s an elephant all the way up ‘here’, what’s going on ‘down there’? Meanwhile, Arcangelo Sassolino’s Afasia, fires, at aleatoric intervals, beer bottles at a wall at the speed of 650 km an hour. This supremely unnerving contraption, its simplicity notwithstanding, cannot escape allegory; here it speaks to the fatal absurdity of human ingenuity. Finally Christoph Büchel’s Dump, 2008, challenges the imagination. If the theme of ‘superdome’ sought to prognosticate on some fundamental level, this installation single-handedly fulfilled Superdome’s purpose. A labyrinthine network of some odd 15 rooms is buried under an enormous mound of trash. This network of rooms, which is reached by crawling along a 10-meter-long drainage pipe, tells the story of what it would be an understatement to call ‘a marginal community.’ Each room serves a specific purpose, such as for recycling, sewing etc. while other rooms serve more obscure purposes, such as an office or a kind of library where paperbacks are taken apart and recomposed, while unmade beds are lodged in nooks everywhere. Absolutely every detail is accounted for, investing the whole installation with a staggering verisimilitude. Here, clearly, is a world complete unto itself. It is not clear where this world is in time and space, but its mere existence all but tends toward engendering the kind of ontological crises that are produced by being forced to accommodate hitherto unsuspected realities.

Disturbing and evocative as Christophe Büchel’s Dump was, it was not enough to sustain the myth-making umbrella of Superdome — as none of the other exhibitions had the same epic narrative power. In fact exactly what, in the end, Superdome had to do with the rest of the shows, or vice-versa, remained unclear (with Dump, one could at least imagine a post-Katrina, ad-hoc community taking place in the stadium). I state that reluctantly, as Superdome, in spite of its portentously prodigious proportions, seemed like a promising theme, but unfortunately, never made it beyond the stage of promise.