Flaneuring within the footsteps of the situationists earlier than him, Julien Berthier is preoccupied by these camouflaged apparatuses which information and delimit the stream of individuals by way of city house: the widespread potelet – higher recognized in English as a bollard or steel site visitors put up. With ‘Ardour Potelet’, an exhibition of the French artist’s musical sculptures and détourned readymades at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, Berthier makes a triumphant muse out of that almost all lowly and ubiquitous instrument of city site visitors management.
Occupying the centre of the principle gallery house is Harmonie européenne (European Concord, 2025), a large, flattened grand piano constructed of plywood. Erupting like multicoloured organ pipes from the lid of the enormous instrument are 77 distinctive bollards collected from 20 totally different European nations. Whereas every could have as soon as been rigorously designed underneath the auspices of some city-planning fee to mix seamlessly with its supposed surroundings, right here, posed collectively in a confused huddle, their variations in color, dimension and form render them cartoonishly conspicuous. They’re additionally meant to characterize the musical notes of the keyboard: Berthier struck every bollard with a mallet, recorded the sound, and electronically mapped the person recordings to every of the piano’s keys. Gallerygoers are inspired to play the instrument, which sounds a bit just like the clanging, cacophonous stay accompaniment to a slapstick silent film.
At occasions, Berthier’s whimsy will get the most effective of him. Public Ideas (2019) transforms the sawed-off scalp and hair of a bronze statue right into a hole bell suspended from the ceiling, which may be performed with a specifically designed mallet the artist long-established from yet one more bollard. The impact is charmingly foolish, if barely one-note. Berthier’s work is at its most compelling when the extent of his interventions, and the logic guiding them, is much less obvious. In Public Sculpture (a clock) (2013), what seems to be an enormous stone base for an out of doors monument that has been turned on its aspect and mounted to the wall is, in truth, a intelligent simulacrum carved from resin and disregarded within the artist’s backyard to calcify and collect moss. The work can also be, as its title suggests, a clock: it marks every hour with an ominous chime performed from a speaker put in inside.
To assemble Tape Recordings: Doing One thing Silly Whereas Listening to One thing Fascinating (2021), Berthier spent numerous hours winding roles of packing tape (253, in line with the press launch) round a single aluminium block. As these layers amassed, the work’s form morphed regularly from sq. to circle, in the end forming an enormous disc which Berthier shows on a plinth, just like the cross-section of an historical tree trunk, its concentric rings indexing time lengthy squandered. We’re left questioning what the ‘one thing attention-grabbing’ was that Berthier listened to as he undertook this non-public ritual, and whether or not these audio information should still be trapped someplace contained in the busted MacBook wedged behind the enormous disc of tape to prop it up.
Although a number of of the present’s artworks additionally operate as playable devices, Berthier, curiously, doesn’t compose scores for them. He prefers to depart the music to us, a gallerist defined whereas demoing Black Steel (2023), a form of electrical guitar long-established from a bollard and performed by operating an empty Heineken bottle up and down its single string. The instrument launched a whining screech, like a sitar fed by way of a number of distortion pedals. In the meantime, my daughter banged out an unholy rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’ on Harmonie européenne. One customer left, whereas one other began headbanging to the noise. The tranquillity and dignified air of your typical business artwork gallery had been out of the blue upended. It’s simple to think about Berthier having fun with that.
Julien Berthier’s ‘Ardour potelet’ is on view at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, till 26 April 2025
Important picture: Julien Berthier, Harmonie européenne (European Concord) (element), 2025, set up view. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris; {photograph}: Aurélien Mole
