All photos: Arnaud Lapierre

French artist Arnaud Lapierre has installed a cylindrical assemblage of reflective cubes in the center of the Place Vendôme in Paris. Mirrors? Reflections? French art? Visual reminders of 19th century power and social structures? I’ll spare you the Foucault interlude. More images after the jump!

Lapierre’s stacked construction, called “Ring,” alludes to the square’s looming war monument, a column of layered bronze plates made using the spent cannon of the Continental armies conquered by Napoleon I, who erected it to commemorate his victory over a combined Russo-Austrian force at Austerlitz. The Paris Commune of 1871, in the midst of defeat at the hands of the invading Prussians, razed the obelisk as a symbolic gesture of intolerance of the outmoded aesthetic and political rule the monument represented.

“Ring” similarly throws the Place Vendôme into tumult, disrupting the stillness of the quintessential Parisian square, as it has been displayed and marketed to tourists. The piece is a “visual intrusion” into the space, absorbing and digesting all its constituencies: the historical fabric of the surrounding Baroque structures is warped and liquefied, while the sky has been rendered solid, perforated by geometric massings. By distorting the square’s spatial data, Lapierre’s installation functions as a machine for “spatial recovery,” whereby the collective perception of place is ruptured. Says the artist, this resultant vision is “more intimate.”

[via MocoLoco]

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged Art, history, installation, napoleon, paris, place vendome

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