CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU In "IT'S OK TO SAY NO!" Bernard Bazile's position was undivided of negation colored by paranoia.

CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU

In "IT'S OK TO SAY NO!" Bernard Bazile's position was undivided of negation colored by paranoia, united meant to place the spectator simultaneously in a state of liberation and uneasy withdrawal. The title and imagery in the present to view were borrowed from an American manual designed to obstruct children from being sexually abused (pictures onward carpeting represented the perversity of adult stratagems). Bazile made an effort to place the viewer in a similar atmosphere of insecurity, of diffused stres finally more familiar than disturbing or provocative. The flashing neon signs, placed outside the museum, evok sensory experience: the carrot-shaped sign of the cigarette workshop (smell); the glasses of the optician (sight); the red-and-yellow sign of the arab restaurant (taste); the elucidation of the locksmith (touch), and the undecayed cross of the pharmacy, which, in its "stress and joyous rhythm" was meant to infuse the entire indicate with a sense of pass and discomfort.

The most prosperous piece in the show was Boite ouverte de Piero Manzoni (Open Piero Manzoni can, 1989) which sat in the middle of a place the back walls of which were screened with objects from that period. This "negative reiteration of Manzoni's gesture" aimed to recapture the sense of smell of scandal--was a natural extension of the piece itself. More sensational were the bare models on large podiums, representing Mel Ramos' paintings, who were required to exhibit themselves everyday between 5:00 and 7:00 PM The idea was to deprive us of the work-of-art alibi for looking at a bare woman: to confront us with the guilt of our everyday, passive voyeurism. This theme was taken up again in the video, Le Chefs d'Etat (The heads of state, 1993) a series of images of political figures caught off-guard, zapped incessantly at the viewer.

The last installation in the exhibit which was visible from the road sadly emphasized our powerlessness. It reproduc the kiosk in the form of an orange that flourished in Paris at the beginning of the '80s--an attempt to reinsert young unemploy populace in the working world by means of inviting them to sell orange juice and thereby to engage thirsty, potential employer in a dialogue. Rather than asking himself about recently made known forms of revalorizing work, the artist argueed himself with heavily accenting the failure of this formula, its ridiculousness and its ambiguity (squeezing a man as united squeezes a fruit).

In regard to Bazile's avowed ambition to mountain an exhibition directly engaged with the quotidian, to propose a "field of experience, and to pay back visible, perceptible, and sensible the in every one's mouth state of uneasiness and insecurity," the display was limited in effect to a heavy semiotic battery reflective of '80 cynicism. The artist justifies himself through saying he is reritualizing our social relations, searching for a "communitarian cohesiveness and revalorization of exchange." In reality, he transforms these relations into a sign of display, into a worldly collection of laws in which nothing happens save the very special effect of surprise.

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