Creative Beginnings. Professional End.

Kerry Downey & Joanna Seitz, Lou Masduraud,
Lorenza Longhi and Maria Toumazou.

Exhibition from 01.17 to 04.18.2020
Curated by Julia Gardener

Flyer of the exhibition Creative Beginnings. Professional End.

Villa Vassilieff hosts a group exhi­bi­tion cen­tred around the Tour Maine-Montparnasse as an emblem of ‘site’. Tour Maine-Montparnasse is located just 750 meters away from Villa Vassilieff. The 1970s skyscraper – the first and, for a long-time after, the only one in Paris – remains uni­ver­sally and pas­sion­ately detested in the city. The joke goes that the tow­ering office block has the best views because you can’t see the tower itself. Positioned in the neigh­bour­hood the building’s tow­ering pres­ence stands for the effects of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, mod­ern­iza­tion, and glob­al­iza­tion on space. This exhi­bi­tion inves­ti­gates the threat­ened speci­ficity of local sites as opposed to uni­ver­sal­izing struc­tures, bringing together art prac­tices that center prac­tical, mass pro­duced, and patented objects within inter­ro­gated com­mer­cial spaces.

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Creative Beginnings. Professional End. - by Julia Gardener

There is an irony to working on an exhi­bi­tion that cen­tres on one skyscraper in Paris when I am curating most of it from New York– a soaring urban centre and home to over 7,000 high-rise build­ings. “Le petit Manhattan de Montparnasse”, as seen from Manhattan proper.

A skyscraper is gen­er­ally under­stood as a very tall building. Architecturally, it is clas­si­fied as a building of specific height and sup­port. It is also the building that King Kong climbs in every
There is an irony to working on an exhi­bi­tion that cen­tres on one skyscraper in Paris when I am curating most of it from New York – a soaring urban centre and home to over 7,000 high-rise build­ings. “Le petit Manhattan de Montparnasse”, as seen from Manhattan proper.
A skyscraper is gen­er­ally under­stood as a very tall building. Architecturally, it is clas­si­fied as a building of specific height and sup­port. It is also the building that King Kong climbs in every iter­a­tion of the epony­mous movie. In 1964, it’s the sole sub­ject of Andy Warhol’s eight hour film, Empire. And in 2002, it serves as the set­ting for Matthew Barney’s sem­inal film, Cremaster 3. Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column – both as two-metre oak sculp­ture in 1918 and a public steel work in 1937 in Târgu Jiu (Romania) – mimics the building’s shape and promise of infinite height. And as early as 1908, Antoni Gaudí pro­posed a 360 meter high hotel called Hotel Attraction – meant for the same site that later saw the erec­tion of the Twin Towers, arguably the most con­se­quen­tial skyscrapers of our time.

A skyscraper holds immense sym­bolic value. As a poten­tially end­less struc­ture, the skyscraper’s soaring height very lit­er­ally brings us closer to the sky – which, to some, is also closer to heaven. Often likened to tem­ples and palaces of the past, the skyscraper sym­bol­izes eco­nomic wealth, pro­gress, and power. Yet, the Italian archi­tect and the­o­rist Manfredo Tafuri accu­rately noted that the skyscraper is both the instru­ment and expres­sion of cap­i­talism. And cap­i­talism’s force on space is always shad­owed by gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, mod­ern­iza­tion, and glob­al­iza­tion.
A skyscraper in Montparnasse was a uniquely unsuc­cessful pro­ject, spurring a ban on sim­ilar struc­tures in the city for decades in Paris. Tour Montparnasse quickly attracted severe back­lash on aes­thetic, prac­tical, and local grounds. The city’s grand plan of cre­ating a money­making apex turned the neigh­bour­hood into an orga­ni­za­tional night­mare – lacking in log­ical spa­tial orga­ni­za­tion and green space, and unable to inscribe itself into the wider urban con­text. In a 2008 poll of edi­tors on Virtualtourist, the tower’s simple archi­tec­ture, large pro­por­tions, and mono­lithic appear­ance won the Tour Montparnasse second place in the awards for the ugliest building in the world. Boston City Hall won first place.

Yet, despite its wide array of crit­i­cism, the tower has actu­ally been host to a range of moti­va­tions, mis­sions, and man­dates. At var­ious times, it has housed the Qatari news channel Al Jazeera, the coop­er­a­tive finan­cial insti­tu­tion Crédit Agricole, the Dutch multi­na­tional elec­tronics con­glom­erate Philips, the French National Architects Council, and the paradigm of gig economy– co-working space. The national lot­tery was shot there in the 80s and 90s, and two pres­i­dents – François Mitterrand and Emmanuel Macron – head­quar­tered their cam­paigns in the building’s offices.
There is an irony to con­sid­ering a skyscraper from an insti­tu­tion whose mis­sion is to uphold an area’s rich, artist driven past. Just 750 meters away from the tower, Villa Vassilieff’s quar­ters have a long­standing his­tory of artistic activity. Starting as an ate­lier in the early 1900s, the building has acted as a can­teen for artists, a gallery and a museum [2] before it becomes a space for res­i­den­cies, research, and exhi­bi­tions. From this set­ting, the ten­sion between Tour Montparnasse’s fraught his­tory and its impending future – the recently announced 300 mil­lion-euro refur­bish­ment sched­uled in time for the 2024 Olympic Games — pro­vides par­tic­u­larly fer­tile ground for artistic work.

This exhi­bi­tion takes is name – Creative begin­nings. Professional End. – from an Airbnb guide about the neigh­bour­hood. It brings together a video by Kerry Downey and Joanna Seitz, adapted work by Maria Toumazou, and new com­mis­sions by Lorenza Longhi and Lou Masduraud. The Tour Montparnasse oper­ates as an emblem of ‘site’– but one that is per­ceived from a dis­tance and only as one ver­sion of a broader typology. Through their own lens and loca­tions, every artist con­tem­plates threat­ened speci­ficity and iden­tity in a fric­tion against uni­ver­sal­izing struc­tures.
Downey and Seitz’s video explores the office as a site that has a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship with the body. Jen Rosenblit’s filmed per­for­mance inter­acts with the archi­tec­ture and the objects within it to reveal a rowdy, riotous, and res­o­lute resis­tance against the sti­fling forces of pro­fes­sion­al­ized space. Next to this, Toumazou’s sculp­tures take the phys­ical residue of cor­po­rate cul­ture to mate­ri­ally blend cap­i­talist, con­sumerist aes­thetics with local, lyrical forms. Through labo­rious and arti­sanal pro­cesses, her work inves­ti­gates how homoge­nous struc­tures push up against dis­tinct locality.Inhabiting zones of pas­sage across both floors, Longhi’s inter­ven­tions com­pli­cate the expe­ri­ence of moving through space. Her screen-prints and neons rely on repro­duc­tion to refer to specific ele­ments of the space of dis­play at Villa Vassilieff or the space of ref­er­ence at Tour Montparnasse. Moving along the walls, Masduraud’s rhi­zomatic design snakes its way from the recep­tion, where work is per­pet­u­ally vis­ible, to the insti­tu­tion’s office, where work is habit­u­ally invis­ible, to bind together the all-con­suming modes of con­tem­po­rary labour. The in-situ instal­la­tion employs dis­carded drawers and a long wax skeleton, gut­ting out an anatom­ical and con­struc­tural sup­port system before putting both on shared dis­play.

Together, the artists in Creative begin­nings. Professional End. explore their specific invest­ments into gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, mod­ern­iza­tion, and glob­al­iza­tion through a dis­tinct, but uni­versal, symbol.If you look out the window here in Paris, you can see the Tour Montparnasse – but if you are in New York, or in Nicosia, or in Milan, or in Geneva, you are likely to see another soaring skyscraper not unlike this one. Maybe across the sky – across all the lan­guages and the cli­mates and the time zones – all the skyscrapers share some hor­i­zontal plane above the clouds, seeing eye to eye above us all. But then let us stay here, low on the ground – bound to the lan­guages and the cli­mates and the time zones – to col­lec­tively con­tem­plate their promise, their illu­sion, and their might.

Julia Gardener is from Warsaw, Poland and grew up between her home­town, and London, UK. Currently, she is a grad­uate stu­dent at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, where she is working towards her thesis. Her research focuses on site-ori­ented prac­tices with spe­cial atten­tion to the influ­ences of late cap­i­talism on space and place, as well as its impact on their speci­ficity. Prior to CCS, Gardener studied English Literature at the University of Bristol, going on to work in cul­tural jour­nalism and in com­mer­cial and non-profit gallery spaces. From 2016 to 2017, she was the gallery and com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ager at the nomadic exhi­bi­tion pro­gramme Emalin, and aided in opening a per­ma­nent gallery space alongside the direc­tors in London, UK. In this posi­tion, she worked pri­marily with emerging artists towards exhi­bi­tions and inter­na­tional art fairs. In 2017, Gardener co-founded Hot Wheels Projects – now Hot Wheels Athens – with Hugo Wheeler in Athens, Greece. The cura­to­ri­ally driven space pro­duces exhi­bi­tions, events, and pub­li­ca­tions with both local and inter­na­tional artists. In 2019, she was a cura­to­rial fellow at Bétonsalon in Paris, France.