Esprits de Paris at The Centre Pompidou - Musée National d'Art Moderne

December 03, 2024

December 3, 2024
Musée national d'art moderne, room 22, Level 4

The Centre Pompidou - Musée National d'Art Moderne is pleased to present Esprits de Paris by Mike Kelley and Scanner. It was produced in 2002 by the Centre Pompidou for the "Sonic Process: A New Geography of Sounds” exhibition held in the Galerie Sud (now Galerie 3) from 16 October 2002 to 6 January 2003, and donated by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and Scanner in 2018. As part of its role in curation and dissemination, Centre Pompidou is working to ensure the long-term preservation of works that make experimental use of technology. They can be found in multiple parts of the collection, particularly the New Media section. The aim is to consider the survival and updating of “intangible” works, such as audiovisual and digital works. After Zapping Zone by Chris Marker (exhibited in 2021-2022), it is now time for Esprits de Paris to be presented to the public once again, following ambitious restoration work carried out by the museum in collaboration with Scanner and the Mike Kelley Foundation.

Irreverent and yet very well informed, a visionary yet very much in the present, American artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954, Detroit, d. 2012, Los Angeles) worked in a wide range of forms, including performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, photography, sound, text and sculpture.

Scanner (artist name of Robin Rimbaud, 1964, London, United Kingdom) is a composer whose work traverses an experimental terrain between sound, space and image, creating immersive, multi-layered sound pieces that put technology to unconventional uses, linking together a diverse range of genres.

It was research into sound that brought them together on this ambitious project. Esprits de Paris is a musical tribute to the pioneering researchers of "electronic voice phenomena" (EVP): Friedrich Jürgenson, Konstantin Raudive and Attila von Szalay. The term refers to the "voices” discovered in ambient audio recordings and thought to belong to the deceased. These three men, who worked in Sweden, Germany and the United States respectively, were the most famous of the psychic researchers who tried to communicate with the dead by electronic means, rather than via a traditional human medium. These attempts began in the 1920s, but EVP research reached a wider audience with the publication of the book Breakthrough de Raudive in 1971. They were intimately linked to the history of field recording, the audio practice of capturing the acoustic portrait of a given place. For their work, Mike Kelley and Scanner drew a map of Paris that lends itself to elective affinities; focusing on sites linked to scientific inventors and major figures in avant-garde sound and music.

Imitating the techniques of EVP researchers, the artists isolated, slowed down and looped abnormal sounds found in ambient recordings. “However," write the artists, "instead of looking for voices of the dead, we looked for the ghost in the machine itself, working with anomalies found on blank digital minidiscs."

The result is an immersive sound and video environment, set in an architectural structure specially designed by the artists. This fascinating work combines video surveillance, urban wandering, images captured with a thermal camera in nightclubs and a mysterious electronic composition run through with peaks, backwashes and stasis, in which the “ghosts” that haunt technology itself are expressed. Here, Kelley and Scanner echo a “spectral” approach to media that interested scholarly and popular cultures, the avant-garde and philosophy of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Esprits de Paris is composed of sounds taken from the following sites in Paris:

• 7 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, where writer Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870), died. He is often regarded as one of the first practitioners of literary processes of appropriation.
• The Moulin Rouge, Boulevard de Clichy, where flatulist Joseph Pujol (1857-1945) performed.
• Inside the Grotte des Cascades in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a Parisian site with a history of horror.
• 5 Rue Montmartre, former studio of spirit photographer Jean Buguet.
• 39 Rue Condorcet, where ghost-hunting medium Eva Carrière worked at the turn of the 19th - 20^th centuries.
• 17 Rue Beautreillis, where American poet and singer Jim Morrison (1943-1971) died. 
• Père Lachaise Cemetery, at the grave of Allan Kardec (1804-1869), one of the greatest champions of spiritualism in his time.
• 15 Avenue Junot, home of Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), alleged inventor of cut-up poetry in the 1910s.
• Division 29 of Montparnasse Cemetery, at the grave of French scientist and poet Charles Cros (1842-1888).
• Eglise de la Sainte Trinité, at the tomb of composer and organist Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992).
• 5 Rue de Verneuil, home of singer-songwriter and painter Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) (image opposite).

Esprits de Paris is curated by Marcella Lista, head curator, New Media department, Musée national d’art moderne; and assisted by Sylvie Douala-Bell, curatorial attaché.