Chasing Napoleon
Palais de Tokyo, Paris, October 15, 2009 – January 17, 2010

[En anglais]

While driving a pristine New Jersey turnpike in absolute darkness, Tony Smith had an aesthetic epiphany. Unfinished and without streetlights, railings or markers, the dark pavement flowed freely through the abyss. In Chasing Napoleon, Smith’s sculpture For V.T. (1969), a solid black low-lying rhombohedron, functions as a metaphor for the irrational — a bounded unknown. Whatever art historical lineage Smith’s work answers to is beside the point; this is an exhibition about the sublime potential of individual experience, touching on the aesthetics of terror. A quote from Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II appears at the entrance: “You’re not the hermit, the woodsman-writer, you’re not the crank with native vision, you’re the hunted man.” Directed at the novel’s protagonist, hermetic writer Bill Gray, it sums up the paradox at the heart of this exhibition: isolation is in equal parts freedom and oppression. 

Chasing Napoleon brings together eighteen artists whose works, according to Marc-Olivier Wahler’s curatorial statement, “also read as instruction manuals on how to withdraw into seclusion and take refuge in the limits of the visible.” Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, casts a long shadow here, featured in works by five of the artists. Replication predominates: Robert Kusmirowski’s Unacabine (2008) is a life-sized copy of Kaczynski’s remote Montana dwelling; Dora Winter amassed titles from his personal library to create The Unabomber’s Collection of Books (2008-09); and Ola Pehrson remade 187 newspaper articles and photographs by hand to reconstruct the documentary film The Hunt of The Unabomber (1998). The visuality of terrorism has prompted an active dialogue on the relationship between contemporary art and violence, described by theorist Boris Groys as “more than ambivalent.”¹ 1 - Art Power [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008], 123. In Chasing Napoleon this ambivalence comes across through notes of tenderness towards Kaczynski: the remake as homage. These romantic undertones make for a resolutely aesthetic exhibition, and given its subject matter, one markedly apolitical.