Lab, sweet lab. Nikola Tesla, genius par excellence.
Paris when it sizzles, Paris when it snaps, crackles and pops. You feel electricity in the air at le Palais de Tokyo. The show Gakona is the artistic harvest of a big, rectangular flowerbed of perplexing, symmetrical antennas, pointing at the sky in a remote Alaskan (what isn’t remote in Alaska?) place of that name. The key letters here are HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Sounds like pure sci-fi, doesn’t it? Imagination. Paranoia. Conspiracy theories. A hidden world of mad scientists and glorious inventors in the service of mankind, eh? Well, ceci n’est pas une harpe.
This strange and petrified forest of Gakona is a US Military hush-hush project, where they are making “things” with the Earth’s plasma shield. Only a light bulb’s worth of energy is required to detect matters underground (such as oil) by the use of radio waves. Then what happens when radio waves boosted by zillions of watts are directed towards the sky? Some say that this microwaving of the biosphere’s “soap bubble” is screwing up our climate, our global networking, yes even our brains. Others – HAARP’s own researchers – say that they are experimenting with modifying the damages caused by the Sun’s violent eruptions, that they are only humble followers of a futuristic blueprint by the supreme inventor genius Nikola Tesla (1856–1943). Anyway, the rest is classified.
Sci-fi is quite a bit more than half-bad writers posing as novelists. Sci-fi is a walkabout in terrains bigger than our brains can grasp. Sci-fi is the proving ground for new ideas – for new art? “For me, science frequently offers more possibilities for stories than fiction itself,” says Laurent Grasso in a conversation with Marc-Olivier Wahler, the editor of Palais de Tokyo’s own magazine Palais. Grasso is one of the four artists on the Gakona show, together with Micol Assaël, Ceal Floyer and Roman Signer. Their works relate to HAARP in one way or another, to modern mythology based on fears as old as the human brain itself. It’s like that billowing cloud of possible doom in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Fascinated, they do whatever they can to follow it, and to escape from it at the same time.
A magazine instead of the ordinary art catalogue filled with the ordinary sexless harangues of directionless academia is a splendid idea. One would expect to have a proper look at the phantoms of Gakona from the art world’s standpoint in Palais, but the magazine kind of shuts its door in your face. Nikola Tesla’s spirit is all over the place, but all he gets in the magazine is an extract of a short story by some cyberpunk guy who cannot even get the name right of his “all-time hero”. Assaël has an unclear feature about the Soviet scientist Alexander Chizhevsky, whose studies on the solar emissions and their hypothetical role in human social-historical disturbances appear to be very interesting. Signer’s Reisephotos are okay. Floyer’s ink dots do not work particularly well in print.
Palais also has a series of pictures of Peter Terren, an Australian who is playing havoc with high voltage as others may risk their lives with poisonous snakes. Employing Tesla’s revolutionary concepts, Terren makes electricity look like glowing jellyfish. So what’s the frequency? All in all, Palais leaves you pretty frustrated, even faultfinding, as with anything that lacks both invaluable information and a fresh set of questions. A fine-looking magazine that deals with worlds of mystery and art – you so much want it to sparkle, to thicken the plot, anything.
At the Palais de Tokyo, on the other hand, you sure are amongst fantômes et spectres d’une realité elastique. And you are not lost, you are still somewhere in Alaska.
Gakona at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until May 3. Special events take place each Thursday.
