Beaubourg: The Pompidou Center, Paris

Beaubourg: The Pompidou Center, Paris is a television program written and presented by Michael Baldwin of Art & Language and directed by Nick Levinson. It was created for the Open University's "A315: Modern Art and Modernism; Manet to Pollock" course which was taught from 1983 to 1992.

Synopsis

Can one control art which criticizes 'the system' by absorbing it into the system, and elevating it to the status of the official avant-garde? And is that what the authorities were trying to do in Paris when they built the Centre Georges Pompidou after the upheavals of 1968? The students on the streets of Paris were demanding a social and cultural revolution; their ideas were apparently expressed in the founding of 'Beaubourg,' but at the same time its collections and exhibitions showcase French culture and France's importance as the perennial home of modern, and post-modern, art. So is Beaubourg an expression of cultural and political freedom, or is it really a symbol of central control?

Release

A VHS edition was released by the Roland Collection in the mid-1990s(?). $49 for individuals, $99 for institutions. Out of print by 2000.

Reviews

A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965

1987

Charles Harrison

[...] In the later 1950s and 1950s, Modernism was reexported from New York to Europe "like a slow-release Marshall Plan,"[27] transformed, metropolitanized, and - at least as regards the functions of criticism - substantially professionalized. [...]

[27] The phrase is Michael Baldwin's from his script for "Beaubourg" a television program for the Open University "A315: Modern Art and Modernism; Manet to Pollock," TV 32. (The Open University, Milton Keynes, 1983.)

The Situationist City

1998

Simon Sadler

[...] See also the BBC Television program "The Pompidou Centre," made for the Open University course A315, Modern Art and Modernism, 1982, in which Michael Baldwin (from the conceptual art group Art & Language) launched an attack on the Centre of such ferocity that the BBC prefixed screenings with a disclaimer.

Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection

2014

Carles Guerra

Michael Baldwin, a member of Art & Language, did the voice-over for a documentary about the Georges Pompidou Centre in 1982. In little more than twenty minutes, the artist provided a rigorous description of the institution. The editing combined footage of inside the Pompidou Centre, invaded by thousands of visitors, with other shots filmed outside in the streets. Outside the museum, various crowds demonstrated and were confronted by riot police. The programme, produced by The Open University in collaboration with the BBC, was originally supposed to be educational. To judge from the tone, however, it could be deemed an exercise in institutional critique, the same kind of artistic practice associated with Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher or Andrea Fraser. The political, economic and social questioning of the museum carried out by these artists constitute what we nowadays call, broadly speaking, artistic research. Baldwin’s commentary threw out a 'critical and provocative' observation about the modern art museum housed in the Pompidou Centre. To his mind, that was 'a strategic and administrative response to the 1968 events'. He went on to say that 'its raw materials are people', and after commenting on its genuine construction lattice, considering it a place for 'the spectacle following the death of culture', he concludes with a remark about the impression the massive building left. ‘Inside’, the voice-over said, ‘practice is made a mythology’. Meanwhile, the screen continued to show artworks hanging on the museum’s walls. This television programme does not, officially, form part of Art & Language’s work. Instead, it comes across more as a journalistic variant of Art & Language’s discourse, something not to be taken as an institutional criticism. It consists simply of an analysis of cultural policy which avoids the theatrical components which institutional critique has made us so used to. This programme’s insertion into the realms of education associates it with one of the most downgraded genres in the chain of artistic production. 'The paradigmatic site of modern art in the mind of its producers is the museum.' Education sits apart from art production. It is segregated from the sphere of reproduction. 'The sites of modern art … [for example], the classroom, art school, studio, the art magazine and the gallery’ – to quote the very same ones Baldwin mentioned – make up an alternative distribution network. These other spaces, often misvalued, have brought about specific production conditions throughout Art & Language’s history: from the days when Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson were teaching at Coventry College of Art, then through the magazine Art-Language, the group’s principal interface with the public, and to the studio practice which the same Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden maintain today. [...]