les presses du réel

The Synagogue de Delme

excerpt
Corinne Charpentier – Director of the Art Centre (2002-2007)
(p. 23-29)


Etiquette can have some unexpected consequences: the story goes that the old synagogue at Delme owes it to a "courtesy call" to have had its destiny taking a very different direction from the one that presided over its construction. Such at least are the terms recorded in the minutes of the founding of the arts centre, the words of Alain Rérat, then visual arts adviser at the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC), responding to the mayor of Delme Roland Geis(1), who had turned to him for advice on an altogether different matter. The scheme to turn the place into an arts centre was a fairly snap decision, backed by the Drac at a time when State policy was firmly behind contemporary creative art, and by a village with a population of 750 that had already shown a keen taste for culture. After a while the Departmental council bought the idea and so the art centre was able to develop.
This development remained low-key, even though the arts centre achieved nationwide and international recognition of its activity, and has since been able to set up an artists' residence a few kilometres from the main venue. For all that, it is a remarkable place: exemplary for its initiators' ambition and tenacity, for the commitment of the many volunteers and teams that have followed one another, singular because of the many ways in which it continues to resonate with history, original because of its architecture. But maybe most of all, it is the harmony of its volumes, the simplicity of its lines rebuilt in the post-war years, the outstanding quality of the light streaming in through so many windows, that rightly guided our visual arts adviser's intuition.
It is a much-awaited moment in an arts centre's history when it brings out a publication documenting its past activity. At the same time, apart from its most obvious purpose, the promotion of the institution orchestrated by the institution itself, one may doubt the usefulness of such an initiative. For fifteen years, the synagogue de Delme preferred to ask artists to come up with a project specially designed for this particular venue. This was back in the early nineties, apparently a particularly favourable period for site-specific work; however, fifteen years on, it seems that placing the emphasis so heavily on the context is no longer the done thing, which probably has something to do with the logic of the marketplace, one bent on supporting the circulation of works through commercial networks. Most of the works – especially in the early years – were destroyed, being so closely tied in with the host site. They had to be interpreted through the venue or existed only in that place. Therein lies one of the most obvious reason for producing this book, i.e. purely and simply to document these destroyed projects.
But rather than a chronology, rather than just documentation, the book has been designed as a handbook presenting a set of assumptions that have been tested in this unique place, an array of viewpoints to be remembered and also those to come. In addition to the works that have been produced, this book will also document the dialogues that have been entered into with the place, fusion and utter indifference being possible methods actually tried.
Thus the writings of the artists featured in this book set out stances that are singular, sometimes antagonistic, and they appear in different sections of the book. Part One attempts to restore and bring together in pictures offerings that echoed each other, without claiming to explain in so many words the mechanics and effects of this juxtaposition of images, punctuated and informed by artists' statements. This "picture book" is a substitute for the visual, sensory, physical experiences we get in exhibition mode. It is no more than an ersatz and an evocation. A set of inadequate clues.
The essays by Jeff Rian and Julien Fronsacq situate the venue and its activity with a history of recent works and exhibitions, placing the art centre on the professional scene, with its customs, its reflexes and its evolution. A historical section rounds off the book: the history of this synagogue, its architectural style and the community behind it all, written by Philippe Hoch, followed by a fairly exhaustive chronology (2) of exhibitions held over the last fifteen years.
(...)

Finally, if this book were to be cut down to just two pages, the two standpoints of Daniel Buren and Roman Opalka would be reproduced on their own, as they illustrate so well two antagonistic approaches that have cropped up with varying intensity at the different exhibitions. And if we had to settle for just one picture – fortunately, with a book like this we can do better than that – we should probably have to choose a view of the upper floor of the Peter Downsbrough project: one word, written vertically on either side of the rostrum but upwards, and cut in two lengthwise: the word "and". Because we have simultaneously to make do with and allow ourselves to do without. To devise a programme bearing in mind the singular history, the collective history which might readily be capitalized, to be willing to move away from it or latch onto it depending on the circumstance, and surprise ourselves by coming back to it when we thought we had got away from it.
On the outside, the Moorish architectural style shows the influence of nearby Germany, which during the 19th century saw many synagogues built along the same lines, notably the great synagogue in Berlin. The architecture seems to be the sign of a distant origin, out of keeping with its surroundings; it should be recalled however that the feeling of strangeness we associate with this type of architecture was in its day shared by many Jews. Apart from the clue to the general 19th century taste for orientalism, there is in this architecture the sign of a claim to be different, and a striking fact is probably how ostentatiously this is advertised, leading us to think by the way about what is becoming of similar architectural projects in villages with the same qualities, in our own day – but this is probably off topic here. The synagogue de Delme is not on the edge of the village, on the contrary it is right in the middle, just next to the old law courts, now the Town Hall. The building pervades the village's identity without in any way characterizing its overall reality. It is a kind of assimilated alien, a emblematized, asserted, advertised difference.
It is a fate of history that this building with its eastern splendours, including an impressive cupola should have been destroyed, dynamited it seems towards the end of the Second World War. War damage funds were set aside for reconstruction but the old cupola proved too costly to rebuild. Owing to its slightly flattened round shape, the dome that now tops the building some call an "English helmet" (there are plenty of references to the war in this part of the world). The archives for the period before the destruction are few and far between. As for the architecture, all we know is that the interior was redrawn on more austere lines.
Once you get over the strange feeling from the outside view (3), you come to the odd scene of complete floor-to-ceiling whiteness. This looks like a heavy-handed attempt at emphasizing the place's new calling, with white de rigueur, pretending to a neutrality that no longer deceives anyone. The surfaces fit in with this colour scheme that is now rather old(4); what remains of the place of worship are the dome, the balcony formerly reserved for the womenfolk (who, in addition to this raised view, also had their own entrance), the rostrum, some huge pillars and thin ornamented columns, on either side of the main doors on the ground floor. At the back of the rostrum stands the stone arch surrounding the cabinet (at present concealed) designed to hold the Torah, this arch being surmounted by an oculus in the shape of a star of David that clearly proclaims the building's erstwhile function. Finally, numerous windows survive in a variety of geometrical patterns that served as a source for the graphic identity of the place(5). The daylight streams in, and combined with so much whiteness, tends to heighten the Moorish character of the place and mentally take us miles away from the Lorraine countryside.
The site is always inevitable, it is the framework of the work, its boundary. If this book only manages very imperfectly to restore the works that have occupied this old synagogue, it will perhaps better succeed in providing food for thought on experiencing this boundary, by attempting to explain the nature of the relationship that artists have entered into with this building.
Many guest artists' works have resonated with History. The first programming period (6) saw recurring motifs, one such being the multitude: whether it be Jean-Marc Bustamante's marble pebbles, a voice reciting a succession of numbers (Roman Opalka) or Tadashi Kawamata's chairs, these multiplied presences in such a context inevitably make one think of the dark hours of humanity. Other interventions have sought a more direct link to these evocations (Iris Sara Schiller, Muntadas) or proposed various thoughts on religion or belonging to various communities.
When I arrived to take over in charge of this art centre, an Ann Veronica Janssens exhibition was just ending. This was the "smoke sculpture", which filled the space with a fog that blocked the view, slowing down visual perceptions and bodily movements, as if the better to force them. The setting lent itself perfectly to the presentation of this work, but I was struck by one comment left by a visitor. I forget the exact words, but the meaning was clearly indignation at the presence of fog – or smoke – in this former synagogue, as if to emphasize the artist's tactlessness. A few months later, another visitor counted the colours in a work by Stéphane Dafflon and found they came to the same number as the tribes of Israel. So interpreting against the yardstick of history is not always the result of the artist's intentions, and the site seems to be regularly catching out visitors' perceptions in this trap.
This is probably what Daniel Buren is driving at when he describes himself as "mistrusting as far as possible the place's original calling"; Buren adds that this disused synagogue is "an empty place where everything is possible". To privilege the "here and now" seems to be a position that follows naturally from what an art centre is called upon to do and it seems all the more a necessity for a place like this. Such a position is a form of optimism, emphasizing the present without drawing a veil over the past for all that. The programme from 2002 to 2007 focused on issues relating to the state of awareness and forms of perception, as if to echo this mistrust, the better to foster a new awareness as to the nature of perception.
Thus the Surfaces de projections exhibition proposed to take a look at the active relationship between the work and the visitor (7), like this white painting by Rémy Zaugg containing just two words that could barely be made out: tableau aveugle (blind picture). The question of active participation has been addressed on a number of occasions; in the construction set by Paul Cox testing the laws of physics, visitors' intentions (or lack thereof), as in Dan Walsh's offering. This artist, who might be succinctly described as an abstract painter, put the site to remarkable use, which was easily guessed to have been dedicated to an orator and his oratory. Focusing on the rostrum as a speaker's corner, Dan Walsh proposed a rather serious approach to the ways in which painting and more generally information is perceived. The whole thing was combined with a playful intervention which likened the old synagogue to a sporting arena, where visitors/the former faithful were the players in a game with no set rules.
Dan Walsh's intervention stood apart from many earlier offerings by preferring the physical scale of the individual to that of the architecture, which comes as no surprise if we consider this artist's paintings. To that extent, this offering can be linked with that of Marc Camille Chaimowicz, who in a very different register, explored the question of subjectivity in the heart of a place so heavily burdened with its collective history. It was a subtle mix of biographical elements, closely linked to a personal history, and the presence of birds, which gently brought us back to our own presence in the here and now. The link with the venue, a community and its past was at once decontaminated and reactivated in a completely different way, not foreign to this past but offering a more subjective reading of it. Like some newfound freedom, an attempt to escape from the weight of history.


1. In 1991.
2. Three exhibitions which occasioned the production of no new works have been set aside: Chroniques ludiques, Frac Lorraine collection (L. Krims - S. Skoglund - S. Hughes - W. Wegman - C. Boltanski - X. Veilhan - Fischli & Weiss - from 28/06/1996 to 13/10/1996); "Pièces à conviction", Herve Bize private collection (S. Antoine, Arman, J-P. Bertrand, B. Burkhard, B. Borgeaud, B. Carbonnet, R. Combas, R. Dall'Aglio, M. Dector et M. Dupuy, D. Dezeuze, G. Gasiorowski, P. Gauthier, J-C. Loubières, F. Morellet, C. Nanney, P. Rösel, E. Saulnier, Ernest T., Taroop & Glabel,
B. Vautier, C. Viallat, A. Warhol - from 06/02/2000 to 12/03/2000; Surfaces de projections, works taken from various private and public collections (A.V. Janssens - P. Chang - F. Gonzalez Torres – D. Graham - W. Jacob - J. Kosuth - R. Zaugg - from 29/06/2002 to 29/09/2002).
3. On a visit for a project to lay out the approaches, Mathieu Mercier for a moment took it for an observatory, which is not far off the mark…
4. The reader is referred to Jeff Rian's essay on this subject, p. 99 to 109.
5. Created in 2003 by Rik Bas Backer and José Albergaria.
6. Who was led by a trio, Hélène Decelle, Olivier Kamoun, Nicolas Schneider – then Olivier Kamoun only, appointed director in 1998.
7. June to September 2002.


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