“ECHO DELAY REVERB”

Like any exhibition intended to trace direct or oblique affinities between artists and writers, “ECHO DELAY REVERB: American art, Francophone thought” bristles with quotations—in this case from half a century and more of a body of thought, received in the US academy as “French Theory,” that informed or inspired many American artists. (The exhibition includes work from the early 1970s to the present day.) Lines of influence—vexed term, hence the modulations imagined in the title—are posited between, for instance, Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection and the art of Mike Kelley and Cindy Sherman. Between the critique of institutions and power in Pierre Bourdieu to works by Walid Raad, Hans Haacke, and Mark Dion. On the gallery walls, textual aperçus from the writers stand in for big ideas. But I was put in mind of two apt and unmentioned assertions. In 1909, sailing to New York on his only visit to the US, Sigmund Freud is reputed to have said to Carl Jung (or Sándor Ferenczi, or both) some variation of: “They do not know that we are bringing the plague with us.” And in Wim Wenders’s 1976 film Kings of the Road, one German character says to another: “The Americans have colonized our subconscious.” I suppose I was trying to remind myself first that “influence” is never only positive, second that it rarely travels in one direction. At its best, “ECHO DELAY REVERB” is keenly aware of the ways critical theory and artistic practice may tarry with each other—and of the stakes involved in (broadly) the decades after World War Two.

In terms both of intellectual ground covered and sheer weight of works, this is a large and ambitious show: the writers Francophone rather than merely metropolitan French, and “American” interpreted more or less broadly. There’s a pressing and perilous distinction throughout, however, between its related planes of artworks and concepts: no matter how vibrant or instructive the art, no matter how apt or unlikely it seems as a response to certain Francophone thinkers of its time, it will always dominate or obscure any attendant texts. Alongside quotations, the latter are represented mostly by physical books. If you’re of an age and disposition the heart may still quicken at the sight, for example, of an early US edition of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, with its shadowy industrial lettering like a heavy metal album cover of 1974. Or a run of Semiotext(e)’s “Foreign Agents” series: dinky black paperbacks of Paul Virilio or Deleuze and Guattari; easily slipped, in the mid-1980s, into your biker jacket or academic-entryist chinos. What is more expressive of thought as such, these glass-cased volumes or amusing photographs of their authors? Foucault in Death Valley, wearing a white polo-neck and mirror shades. Baudrillard on stage at Whiskey Pete’s, Las Vegas, in a gold lamé suit? How else to demonstrate the ideas or impact of such radical writers?

The answer is apparently in the art itself and not in very much tracing here of cross-Atlantic pedagogic currents, though such institutional history surely matters: there are references to the Whitney’s Independent Study Program (founded in 1968), and the show includes several alumni such as Glenn Ligon, Félix González-Torres, and Mark Dion. For the most part, the role for Theory posited in this show is to supply themes and arguments about the world, rather than any subtle or violent redefinition of the work of art itself. Hence an idea of dispersion and dissemination—types of movement to be discerned in the texts of Barthes, Derrida, and Deleuze, among others—relates to seemingly uncentered work by Julie Mehretu, Renée Green and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose video installations Untitled (Paper) (1975) and Translations from a Willow Tree (1976) answer some thematic desire for an art of words, gestures and folds. But, like much of the art in “ECHO DELAY REVERB,” Cha’s works live at some distance from ideas about such things. The show’s catalog insists, rightly, on a poetic aspect to the writings of many of the theorists in question—including, presumably, an anti-poetic urge in, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari—but the meeting points of image, object, word, and idea often feel accidental in an exhibition so wide-ranging in the sympathies it posits.

Of course there are also theorists and artists missing from the picture. Sartre is here as an example of existentialism and not as representative of a phenomenology relevant both for the abstract expressionists and for minimalist sculpture. Perhaps that lineage seems of antiquarian interest now, in a show with its eye on present relevance. But in that case the more baffling (relative) absence is that of Jean Baudrillard and consequently much of the perplex of ideas and attitudes that went by the name of postmodernism. It’s a moment or movement routinely dismissed today as politically quietist or outright conservative. But the caustic ironies of Baudrillard’s critique of images, technology, consumerism, and self-improvement, never mind his influence on critical debates about image and truth—these are surely quite pertinent today. Of course there is little in Baudrillard that can be squared immediately with a vision or project of liberation; we live, despite everything, in an intellectual moment that does not easily accept irony or the kind of cool nihilism once associated with postmodernism.

Sometimes, however, a dark and implacable irony seems the only proper response, or to have been invoked already by events. A certain notoriety already attended “ECHO DELAY REVERB” in its opening week. The exhibition originally included Cameron Rowland’s Replacement (2025), a work that involved the artist substituting the flag of Martinique for the French one flying outside the Palais de Tokyo. After one day, and shortly after wide-ranging instruction from the Minister of the Interior regarding “symbols representing the advocacy of political, religious, or philosophical opinions,” the institution removed the work. The ministerial edict was clearly meant to apply to public support for Palestine, but was here displaced onto France’s relations with its own colony or département in the Caribbean. A wall text now points to the absent work, which “could be considered illegal”—a phrase whose ambiguity alone deserves the attention of a heated symposium of French theorists.