Zoe Williams at Ciaccia Levi, Paris
If Paris' contemporary art scene can be summarised in a single word, it might be: understated. This remains the case despite my visit during Paris Art Week, during which the global art crew descends upon the French capital for arts and culture, on the occasion of the Instagram content haul-cum-contemporary art sales convention, Art Basel Paris.
What this means for the city's galleries is that for this week in October, they have a particularly warm, attentive audience (some telling graffiti in the 11th arrondissement read: "Refugees Welcome. Go Home Fashion Tourists". I'm not enough of an egomaniac to exclude myself from the latter group). Most galleries have extended opening hours during this time (with most closing at 7pm as standard, living up to the general Parisian lifestyle choice of not closing every non-essential business at 5 or 6pm. London and the rest of the UK, take note). The whole rigmarole can become quite exhausting and, dare I say, monotonous if one is taking in the art scene as a numbers game, which can be tempting to do.
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This is where Zoe Williams' solo show, Petrolia, at Ciaccia Levi steps in. The exhibition's curation is so understated that from the outside, it can feel necessary to double-check that you are stepping foot in the right place. The frontage even had (un-commissioned, non-consented) graffiti at the time of visiting; although I'm sure the gallerists were less than thrilled by the vandalism, it does bizarrely dissolve some of the social barrier of outsider anxiety which can sometimes come with entering private gallery spaces.
The core inspiration of Petrolia is a 1908 study by psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clairambault, who, and I quote Ciaccia Levi's press release, "discusses the clitoral attraction of certain women to fabrics, particularly silk, which is valued for its tactile and acoustic qualities". Now this body of work has no interest in kink-shaming, but instead looks at the different ways that power dynamics play out when a liaison takes place between woman and material. The artist's expression of sexual autonomy, fused creatively and purposefully with an undertone of violent aesthetics, feels somewhat outside the heteronormative gaze, which in contrast tends to produce aesthetics that are exhausting and generally profoundly unimaginative. Petrolia feels more like an exploration of these sensory gestures and acts, as opposed to diaristic visual storytelling from the artist, which feels even more inviting for the viewer.
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Heteronormative depictions of women's sexuality are so casually bound up by violence, that a contemporary audience can sometimes entirely fail to notice. It can be second nature for some of us to wince at the sounds women actors make when they are depicting victims of violence in film and television, not due to being uncomfortable at the violence being portrayed, but moreso the glint of recognition in aural similarity between pornography and being murdered. In her recent novella, Cecilia, K-Ming Chang's protagonist recalls watching pornography with her friend as a teenager: "I want to watch two men. It's easier for me to be aroused by our absence. To erase ourselves as subjects. The cries of the women ring false because it's not a fantasy to be in pain; it's too easily achievable". The way Williams plays with motifs of desire and danger demand closer interrogation and inquisition; bloodied red hand prints smearing the walls across the space brings the viewer back to reality, should they get lost and distracted by the beauty of the fabrics and bronze sculptures depicting intestinal-inspired footwear, or a rogue bronze breast sitting pretty on the wall.
Clairambault's case studies take pride of place in the exhibition, almost 115 years after the research took place, and Williams illuminates the way in which the sexual desire towards these materials are decidedly anti-capitalist. Merely writing that sentence during Paris Art Week (where the flow of capital really is king, regardless of your spending status as tourist or consumer) feels somewhat disingenuous, but the works at Ciaccia Levi evoke thoughts of what a desire outside of capitalism might look like. Realistically, it could be argued that none of us reading this today could possibly know. Clairambault's case study, Marie D., "is not interested in the circulation of flows, energy, its transformation, or possession. She simply enjoys consuming the material, which evidently possesses her." The fact that the women are spoken about as if they are an alien, incommunicable species is atavistic, but enables the artist to be inspired by their documented desires in ways that feel liberated, animalistic, experimental.
Mixed media works in the gallery are something of a libidinal moodboard. Are they pornographic? There are, quite simply, orifices everywhere, but their mere presence in a gallery puts the brakes on them being classified as pornographic. Thinking of Chang's novella again, and there are no choreographed screams here, more of an open curiosity and softness of thought and texture. Williams' fingerprints are everywhere across the pages of the mixed media works, which feels naughty and titillating. The touch that would usually be immaterial strikes not only the artworks, but the space, which in turn envelops us.
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The sense of disembodiment is powerful throughout the show; as we never witness a body in its entirety, we are forced to isolate feeling, sensation and pleasure in individual body parts. The case studies of the early twentieth century psychiatric units have their desires embraced and celebrated by Williams, who uses an almost bricolage effect between mixed media collage, sculpture, and immersive painting interventions to tell us that the body is simultaneously present and markedly absent, simultaneously. The ghosts of Clairambault's women want you to say their names.
Post-pornography politics comes to mind when considering Petrolia, and the sexual taboos of the early twentieth century have been visually reproduced to a degree that the power dynamics are subverted, and our women are freed into the streets of Paris. I think of Tim Stuttgen's Ten Fragments on a Cartography of Post-Pornography Politics, who argues that the post-pornography image "emancipates itself from the binary logic of hetero-power and makes available potentials for other forms of representational-critical affirmation, which make new subjectivities and power relations within the practice of sexuality conceivable and debatable". [1] Through Williams' work, the potentials are opened up anew; they are gaping and open to all comers.
[1] https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/64/tim-stuettgen-ten-fragments-on-a-cartography-of-post-pornograph/#id17
