A HOUSE OF STONE
IN A METROPOLIS
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHT
INHABITED BY THOSE WHO INVITE OTHERS
Joshua Schwebel, Le heurtoir, 2017
La Galerie, CAC, Noisy-le-Sec
Joshua Schwebel, The Interloper, 2017
La Galerie, CAC, Noisy-le-Sec
In contrast with the head-on critical approach to the arbitrary, hierarchical powers of our institutions, Joshua Schwebel’s work aims at deconstructing the authority that legitimizes those powers. Effected in the context of cultural institutions whose stated values are founded on the principles of ethical responsibility, honesty and emancipation, his work homes in on the disjunctions between these ideals and the institutional and human reality of the structures and the works on display inside them. For the exhibition at La Galerie, Schwebel explored the multiple manifestations and consequences inherent in the fact of being invited by an institution engaged in project on hospitality. The upshot was a double-barreled questioning of the ethics of hospitality. Firstly he invited three artists to create works to be performed in the homes of the exhibition’s three curators in their absence. Thus the exhibition extended into the domestic spaces of those issuing the invitation. The hosts had no idea of what the work would consist of: they simply trusted Joshua Schwebel and gave him freedom of access to their private space for an agreed period. Secondly, working at the other end of the delegation chain, he asked La Galerie director Émilie Renard to contact the human resources councilor—and former mayor—of the municipality of which she was, in a way, the guest. The original aim of Schwebel’s project was to facilitate dialogue between the director of the art centre and a key political figure. In both these instances the artist tested the limits of unconditional hospitality via the ethical experience of trust.