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Art

Maxwell Alexandre’s Debut at Palais de Tokyo Considers Power Dynamics in Art Spaces

Wilson Tarbox
Dec 27, 2021 1:00PM

Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Maxwell Alexandre’s exhibition “New Power,” currently on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris through March 20th, was inspired in part by the 2018 music video for “Apeshit” by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The hip-hop couple’s triumphant traipsing through Europe’s most famous museum, the Louvre, reignited conversations about the sociology of museum visitors; the value and accessibility of culture; and above all, the tension between the museum’s pretentions of being a democratizing, educational space despite the troubled histories of colonialism and plunder that had built up its collections. The global resurgence of racism and xenophobia, exemplifed by the presidencies of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, seemed to lend these concerns additional urgency.

It is in the crucible of this new global culture war that “New Power” was born. Consisting of large, loose sheets of paper, taped together and strung up throughout the high-ceilinged gallery in the north wing of the Palais de Tokyo’s lower level, the works transform a large open space into a sort of labyrinth. Overlapping and intersecting, the monumental surfaces form thin walls, at once delicate and impenetrable. The installation creates a compelling artistic metaphor for the barriers of structural discriminations (be they gendered, based on religion, or skin color). What the visitor seeks is often just out of reach or, at the very least, difficult to attain.

Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

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In addition to the disorientating spatial partitions, the suspended paintings commingle real visitors with painterly representations of various types of museumgoers, from school groups and couples to individuals and security guards. These personalities look at and interact with painted pastiches or silhouettes of famous works of art, many of which are recognizable contemporary art icons like Damien Hirst’s cruel A Thousand Years (1990), Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into Limbo (1992), or one of Lucio Fontana’s slashed Concetto spaziale works. Most, however, appear as anonymous rectangles of beige paper set into painted representations of ornate baroque frames. The particular type of paper used is called papel pardo and conveys an important double entendre: In Portuguese, pardo means “brown” and is a term still used today by the Brazilian census to designate Brazilians of “mixed race,” a vestige of the country’s complex colonial caste system.

Alexandre’s work is informed by his upbringing in ​​Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil, located in a southern Rio de Janeiro suburb. In these most recent works, he uses the multiple meanings of papel pardo to address contemporary debates about identity and representation, lending his work a specifically activist, political orientation. Indeed, although the works in “New Power” may make heavy-handed allusions to art history, they really are about who is looking at art. The painted representations of visitors are all faceless, Black, and blonde-haired. As such, they seem to represent a fully mixed world, although hierarchies and power dynamics still appear to remain. Indeed, the security guards in Alexandre’s musée imaginaire are dressed like Brazil’s militarized state police force, collapsing the small margin of authority held by museum guards over visitors into the more repressive and expansive authority of the state.

Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Alexandre shared his intentions for the installation in a statement: “Pretos no topo (Blacks on top) has become a slogan of local rap,” he wrote. “I wanted to show its implication in contemporary art and highlight that that’s where the winners are because that’s where the intellectual capital is concentrated. It’s not just about money, but about controlling the narrative and the image. Occupying and controlling these spaces is the consequence of a powerful alliance. We (black people) must be attentive to these places designed so that we cannot see them. We must be physically present, attend openings, go to galleries and museums, learn about art, consume culture in all of its forms.”

The representation of people of color in art spaces has come a long way in the decades since Rasheed Araeen published “Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto” in the pages of Studio International in 1978. That said, Alexandre’s political conclusions, however well-intentioned, are less impressive than his aesthetic ones.

Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

For a certain category of contemporary art of the variety that Alexandre alludes to in “New Power,” it’s not the mystique of a dense theoretical underpinning, but rather the impressive spectacle of obscene wealth that bestows these works with their aura. Art by the likes of Hirst and Jeff Koons have become highly legible to a mass audience and, as a result, lucratively marketable.

In an interview with Lux Magazine, Alexandre demonstrates his intimate understanding of these art market dynamics, even citing them as important formal influences on the “Pardo è Papel” series, of which “New Power” is only the most recent manifestation: “People want a souvenir, they do not want art. The collector should be educated in this sense. The acquisition of an art object is not only the expansion of his or her asset portfolio, but involves the responsibility to shelter that which has now become an asset of humankind. My large pieces of brown craft paper will get ripped and they will deteriorate in time.…Hopefully, the museologists and conservators will accept the challenge of preserving these works and gallerists will support less-formatted works, and collectors will start dealing with the need to collect things that are not permanent. There is nothing more contemporary than this.”

Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

The artist’s desire to create work that challenges some of the market’s worst habits is remarkable, but it makes his insistence that Black people ought to occupy those same market-driven spaces all the more perplexing. Indeed, his statement for “New Power” suggests a confusion between intellectual capital and financial capital and an erroneous conception of social hierarchies as dichotomies between losers and winners, rather than between exploiters and exploited. Furthermore, the identity politics framework presents representation as an end rather than as a means and “Black people” as homogenous rather than a grouping with divergent and contradictory class interests. When Beyoncé and Jay-Z walk through the Louvre or pose in a Tiffany & Co. ad with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Equals Pi (1982), perhaps they are not claiming these spaces as the domain of all Black people, but rather as symbolic extensions of their own personal wealth and success.

In a video interview with PalaisPopulaire (the institutional home of the Deutsche Bank collection), Alexandre discusses his appearance on the cover of the Brazilian Forbes “30 Under 30” issue, and then asks and answers the following question: “How can an artist change the world? By changing himself, the change is inside, without the pretension of this external change. It must occur through the contact of seeking the origin, everything is kept in me. I am the measure of all things, always looking inwards.” It’s hard not to hear this statement as echoing a familiar refrain. It is one that assimilates the success of a narrow Black elite to the general advancement of Black people. Without specifying which Black people ought to occupy what art spaces and what they should do once they are there, what we are left with is not a “New Power,” but an old power with a new face.

Wilson Tarbox