106-109 FEATURE-Dominique Gonzal2 2 12/10/09 3:40:55 PM
Dominique
Gonzalez-
Foerster
Written by Heather Corcoran | Photographed by Rishad Mistri
It’s a rainy November morning when I show up at the Museum of Modern Art.
I find myself nervous to meet Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Just 12 hours ago,
I attended her insanity-inducing “K.62” performance piece, a collaboration with
experimental conductor/composer Ari Benjamin Meyers and part of the Performa
performance art biennial. This is how it happens:
You get a call telling you to show up at a bookstore at 8 p.m. No
earlier, no later. There you meet your company while a violinist plays something
vaguely familiar. You’re handed an envelope that says “K12” and told to get in a cab
that drops you off outside a nightclub. You walk through the door and into one of
the most common nightmares in the collective unconsciousness: you’re onstage fac-
ing a packed house and you have no idea what the hell is going on.
That’s one way of experiencing it.
And then there’s another, and that’s how it happened to me. I show up
at the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with my sister. We’re
each given a ticket—mine blue, hers red—and sent to separate theaters. Every once in
a while some riffs on an oboe come from the back of the room. After 30 minutes,
a headset-wearing, clipboard-carrying assistant type apologizes—we’re in the wrong
room. We’re taken to reunite in a larger theater where the waiting really begins.
I resist all urges to claw out my eyeballs as I patiently wait for some-
thing to happen onstage. After an hour, wide-eyed bodies start to emerge from
the door at the back of the stage. Gonzalez-Foerster shows up and mimes her way
through a Spanish guitar solo before giving a soliloquy on Martin Scorsese’s After
Hours, one of two Kafkaesque films that inspired the evening (the other was Orson
Welles’s interpretation of The Trial). The film “irritated” her, she explains, but 20
years later, she can’t get it out of her head. An orchestra shows up from the audience.
They play. Meyers does a magic trick and talks about The Trial, and the frightening
feeling of insanity that comes with having no idea what is happening around you.
Some people get up and leave.
The show ends and we we’re all invited to a club called After. After
getting past the velvet rope, we find ourselves standing on the very stage we’d just
spent the last two hours staring at. A very friendly guy with a video camera tells me
there’s someone he wants me to talk to and from what I can piece together from the
conversation, 20 people have been stripped of their names and given “K-numbers”
(a nod to The Trial’s Josef K.) and sent to locations from After Hours, where a member
from the orchestra waited. Scattered throughout Manhattan, the 20 musicians simul-
taneously (but separately) played music from the film’s soundtrack, which was piped
into the theater through the occasional phone call.
In Gonzalez-Foerster’s hyperliterate work—whether installation or
film, or a mixture of the two—time and space are the media. She doesn’t set out to
prove something; she’s more like a scientist building an experiment. The hypothesis
behind “K.62”: “What if the time you spent going to the theater was, in fact, more
important than the performance itself?’”
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The piece, with its if-a-tree-falls-and-no-one-hears-it ambiguity (it seems
Gonzalez-Foerster’s answer is yes) and cross-cultural references, is emblematic of a lot
of her work. The artist builds environments layered with personal memories and cul-
tural citations. Her short films have turned the spotlight on cities through a series of
seemingly mundane experiences. She turned the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern into
a dystopian vision of London’s future where you could pick up a copy of H.G. Wells’s The
War of the Worlds and read it under supersized versions of a public sculpture by Alexander
Calder and Louise Bourgeois. At the Dia Foundation’s Hispanic Society, she built diora-
mas, with the help of the Natural History Museum, filled with books instead of fauna.
In situations like this, ideas of beginning and end are meaningless. Her
work relies, instead, on an audience to activate it. She presents the situation, and then it’s
open to the audience to play the role of detective.
But what about those people who left the performance? If they didn’t make
it all the way to the big reveal, did they fully experience the piece? “It’s one of the possi-
bilities,” says Gonzalez-Foerster. “It’s also one possibility that’s given to any audience at any
show—to leave; why not? Maybe the person who left, she got out and then she did something
else that she wouldn’t have done… it’s still connected. I would say this is the beauty of that
structure. At one point, the way it’s set, it can include almost any accident or event.”
If you follow that logic, then the community created with “K.62”
includes the audience in the theater, all the Ks, and every one of the people they pass on
their journeys. You could probably say that about everything—the idea of the unfortunate
butterfly who flaps his wings in China causing a rainstorm in Central Park—but how
often do you think about it? That’s the space where Gonzalez-Foerster works.
To get to those questions, those elemental experiences, you have to
shake things up, change some parameters, and maybe even get a little uncomfortable,
she explains. It’s an artistic sentiment that spills into her real life, half of which is
spent in her native France, the rest in Rio. “This is why I like to live in Brazil and, in
a way, I would say ‘less-controlled’ environment—because the fact that certain things
are less predictable makes me feel that I have to be more awake. It’s almost like some-
thing uncomfortable wakes you up, but then it means you’re also more conscious of
nice things, you know?”
That doesn’t mean she enjoys playing some sadistic game of puppet-
master. It’s more of an Andy Kaufman-like attempt to wake people up. “At one point,
yeah, you feel a bit evil, but then you also know it’s for the beauty of something.”
This attempt to shake the status quo is why her work frequently references
others, whether through appropriation or collaboration, with an audience, or with other art-
ists. (With Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière, she deconstructed and rebuilt the concept
of a retail store; she frequently works with the likes of Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija).
“I don’t believe in style and identity,” she says, suggesting that what she
finds interesting instead is revealing those things that she is made of—the books and films and
people and places that she’s encountered all her life. “For me, the whole thing is an endless
chain. At one moment, as a person, you are one possible editing of all this material.” x
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 Clockwise from top: Chronotopes & Dioramas, 2009. Installation view, Dia at the
Hispanic Society, New York, September 23, 2009-April 18, 2010. Courtesy of the Dia Art
Foundation, New York.

TH.2058, (The Unilever Series), 2008. Six reproduced sculptures, LED Screen, 229
shakedown beds, approx. 10,000 science fiction books, and sound. Installation view,
Tate Modern, London, October 14, 2008-April 13, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Esther
Schipper, Berlin.

Chronotopes & Dioramas, 2009. Installation view, Dia at the Hispanic Society, New
York, September 23, 2009-April 18, 2010. Courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation, New York.

Opposite page, from top: “Bahia Desorientada,” 2005. Video on plasma screen with
wooden platform, 118.1” x 118.1” x 47.2”, Duration: 7 minutes. Courtesy of the artist
and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

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