The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture (review)

This book of twelve essays studies how literature and art of recent years are organized by experiments and sets of procedures whose results bear less consequence than their process or play of mean and variation. A formerly mimetic design of literature gives way to one of formatting sets of actions and of determining their results over discrete periods of time. The novel, painting or poem becomes a diagram or a design. The editors' introduction engages the 'systems or methods of understanding' that change our view of inherited genres and leads to the creation of new and unforeseen works that take place in urban spaces, sites of transit, or peripheral zones. 'On the Subject of the Project' shows how the creator is 'envisaged more modestly as a researcher, recorder, archivist or curator'. He or she often wanders about non-places in order to be subsumed in activities in which chance and repetition yield creative mappings of experience. Sheringham's 'The Project and the Everyday' studies François Bon's Paysage fer, an experiment Bon made when he took the Paris–Nancy train (prior to the installation of the TGV) on Thursday mornings in the winter months of 1998–99. Bon elucidates the conditions of observing industrial landscapes, terrains vagues, canals, warehouses and factories in passing. Structures of visibility are discerned when certain objects are glimpsed and are no sooner eclipsed by others. An 'oblique vision' allows the traveller to look both inwardly, through the interference of memory-images, and outwardly, toward things seen along the edges of the railway. Other essays develop these points through applied analysis: on Man Ray's photography that mixes chance encounter and ethnology; on travel writing that new uses the art of navigation to replace the aims of destination or arrival; on reality television, in which spectators learn how the body is 'disconnected from our conscious control' (p. 78); on the death-drive and the calculation of things incalculable in the work of Perec, Roman Opelko, and Jean-Benoît Puech; on Agnès Varda's take on the fragility of life and human ecology in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000); on narcissism and performativity in Sophie Calle's experiments with her own subjectivity; on the institutionalization of André Malraux's initially experimental project of the 'museum without walls' in high culture during the era of Charles de Gaulle (that leads to productive counterparts in the cinemas of Godard and Marker); on contemporary French photography that records past forms to unsettle the character of contemporary life; on projects and projections that mark the consciousness of recent French writing in France of the twenty-first century; on Michel Foucault's latent agenda in which historical research figures in a life-process felt to be a work of art. This volume is a rich inventory and review of critical and creative process in contemporary French culture. It attests to the fact that, although the glorious years of structural and post-structural theory are past, artists of keen and cutting vision are reshaping the legacies of poetry, the novel, cinema and the plastic and performative arts. The reader discovers a gamut of creators and creations that turn not on great or monumental themes but on engagement in ephemeral and vital areas of everyday life.