The Beaubourg Effect
Implosion and Deterrence
John W P Phillips
Beaubourg, or:
Musée national d'Art moderne - Centre Georges
Pompidou
Fig. 1 Beaubourg Icon
Fig. 2: Beaubourg
History
The Centre National
d’Art et de Culture Georges
Pompidou is a giant, futuristic arts center located in the Beaubourg district
of Paris. President Pompidou conceived (1969) the idea for Beaubourg, as the
center is also known, to bring art and culture to the “man in the street”. 
It was
completed in 1978 by the architects Renzo Piano of
Considerable
controversy arose over the assertive industrial style of the
The
Fig. 3.
Beaubourg Links
The Artwork: An Example
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain
[Figure 4]
Submitted by Duchamp under the pseudonym
Richard Mutt (of Philadelphia) for the first exhibition of independents in
1917—for which he was a hanging committee member—the original was somehow
forgotten, misplaced and then apparently lost for good. Duchamp shortly
afterwards resigned from the committee (the reason is not recorded). The
Society of Independent Artists, it is worth recalling, was resolutely democratic:
“Any artist, whether a citizen of the united States or of any foreign country,
may become a member of the society upon filing an application therefore, paying
the initiation fee (US$1.00) and the annual dues (US$5.00) of a member, and
exhibiting at the exhibition in the year that he joins.” The society’s
only rule was the no rule principle: “No jury, no prizes.” All artists
were to be able to participate independently of any jury decisions.
Accordingly, 2,125 works by 1,235 artists were shown. As far as I am
aware none of these exhibits are currently available for viewing. The
only submission on record that failed to be exhibited was R. Mutt’s Fountain,
and images and reproductions of this work are ubiquitous. Removed from
its own contemporary, it seems, Fountain was nonetheless to go on to
become one of the most celebrated and influential artworks of the last century,
and its stature is growing with time. Its anti-retinal principle, that of
the readymade, adds a further resource to the artist’s repertoire, that of choosing
instead of simply making. In this way the readymade looks not only
forward to when the assisted or unassisted readymade—the found object, altered
or even reproduced in facsimile—would become a staple of art training but it
also looks back in recognition and belated acknowledgement that art was always
about choice of readymade, given that the paint used on painting was itself a
form of readymade. The inclusion of a title as no less a part of the
work—a technique that Duchamp had pioneered in 1911—allows it to speak as if it
was an actor, playing another role: the urinal is acting being a fountain, the
exhibition its stage, the artist a kind of dramatist or choreographer.
It’s possible to argue that Duchamp’s way with the artwork is actually very
old—he was rebelling against romanticism in art that was current amongst
artists for, in my calculations, only about 30 years, from 1814 to
1844—replacing that with the idea that art should be an apparatus of thought,
rather than vision or beauty.
If Mutt’s (or Duchamp’s) work is marked
first of all by its vanishing from its
present—majestically avoiding its own contemporary—then secondly it is marked
by the variety of versions of it that increased exponentially in number after
the 1950s. In order to be regarded as a version of Fountain an
artwork would not necessarily need to resemble it. Although R Doxford/N Fout’s Soft Fountain
(1973) does in its own Squashy way resemble the absent original, it repeats
more exactly the wit of its model, extending its idea through a
replication that must be distinguished from more common notions of repetition
thanks to the addition of its material difference [Figure 5].
The same—although, again and crucially, in a quite different sense—can be said
of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup [Figure 6].
Carl Andre’s brilliant Equivalent VIII (known thanks to its delayed
notoriety as “The Tate Bricks”) performs a similar kind of work [Figure 7].
In each case the artwork avoids any kind of representation yet its material
form always revises or replicates an original by maintaining a visibly absolute
distance from it (in Warhol’s case by departing from it in no way at all and
thus perfectly exemplifying the minimalist ideal). The public response to
these works (which is always somehow belated) confirms their contemporariness
(allowing a general ridiculing of “contemporary art”) while distancing them
from their own contemporary. Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre was
bought by Tate in 1972 and featured in special displays in 1974 and 1975
without attracting much publicity. But on 15 February 1976 an article appeared
in The Sunday Times about recent additions to the Tate's Collection,
illustrated with a picture of Equivalent VIII. The sculpture,
120 firebricks arranged in a rectangular formation provoked gleeful uproar
[e.g., Figure 8].
The failure of a national media to comprehend a contemporary exhibition would
be exactly the necessary sign that contemporary art has arrived.
