Running on empty: Daniel Birnbaum on the art of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

"How to enchant with practically nothing, a few popular songs, a series of anti-landscapes, some micro-events, lots of emptiness ...

This low-intensity cinema penetrates our perceptions right to the core of our sensibility," declares writer Nicole Brenez in a brief letter to the editors of Cahiers du Cinema about Ile de Beaute (1996), a film codirected by French artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster (with video artist Ange Leccia). This, it seems to me, also nicely sums up what Gonzalez-Foerster achieves in her solo filmic experiments, which are some times displayed in dark theaters on a screen but just as often branch out to envelop architecture, public space, and even whole cities--be they the artist's native Paris or distant metropolises in Asia or Latin America. Indeed, in Gonzalez-Foerster's work, genre no longer seems relevant. Her recent productions include the 'cosmic" adventure Exotourisme (2002), a video projection and sound "environment" that takes the viewer through an abstract landscape of computer-generated forms; the design of a Balenciaga store in New York; and ambitious lighting and video shows that accompany rock concerts, Asked to describe her open-air project for last year's Documenta II, Gonzalez-Foerster lists some of the heterogeneous elements that were displayed amid the shadows cast by the large trees south of Kassel's orangery and where, on hot days, one could see exhausted viewers dozing away on the lawn: "It's a park; it's a plan for escape; it's an extra-large piece of lava rock that's come from Mexico and landed on the green grass; it's a blue phone booth from Rio de Janeiro; it's a butterfly pavilion screening a film inspired by The Invention of Morel, the fantastic novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares; it's a rose tree from Chandigarh." On hearing this catalogue of seemingly unrelated parts--removed from their original contexts but ranged together in subtle tension--one senses that the work is less a particular, circumscribed space or medium than an atmosphere that draws out the melancholy inherent in objects in the world.

Still, I ask myself: What exactly is Park--A Plan for Escape? A curious sculpture garden, an installation, or an outdoor cinema equipped with exotic props? Probably it's all of these things, but it's also one more example of what French theorists would recognize as a form of ecriture. Regardless of technique, Gonzalez-Foerster's work is always close to that active production of emptiness that Roland Barthes-in his book about a fantasized Japan, Empire of Signs--counted as writing and which he associated with Zen: "And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence." In this sense, Gonzalez-Foerster writes gardens, flower arrangements, and, yes, entire cities, often using cinema to alter an urban landscape, whether it is a lush German park or the subterranean maze of a Parisian subway station. In Park--A Plan for Escape, a butterfly-shaped pavilion is a kind of cinematic machine, a freestanding projection booth presenting imagery of parks from films like Antonioni's La notte, Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive l'amour, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. Bodies and faces appear like ghosts behind the pavilion's glass, hardly discernible during daytime but suddenly entirely visible when night falls. "I like the idea that you can enter the park by chance and encounter these elements in a rather mysterious way without immediately thinking about art," says the artist. "It's all not so clearly coded or framed. You can come across these things anytime during night or day and have a very different experience. It's not even clear where it all starts or stops. Beyond this tree, after this cloud ...?"

Given its lack of beginning or end, perhaps it's understandable that a project like this originated some-what amorphously. One point of departure was a scene from Tsai's film that made such a lasting impression on Gonzalez-Foerster that she eventually journeyed to the distant location where it was shot to try to understand it better. A hopeless endeavor, no doubt, but in this case, nevertheless, a productive one. Says the artist, "In Vive l'amour a woman is walking through a park under construction in Taipei. Five years after seeing the film, I went to Taipei myself to see that park and to walk that lane. It started to rain. And the rain became so strong that I had to stay one hour under a kind of shelter. A prisoner in the park, I final]y could connect the film and the space in an intense way." Out of this charged atmospheric moment came her art; in work after work, Gonzalez-Foerster targets those exquisite sensations that are so evasive they lack names but are distinct enough to be remembered for a lifetime.

Bonne Nouvelle, Station Cinema, 2001, installed at the Bonne Nouvelle metro station in Paris, was the artist's first major public work and was another attempt to bring filmic associations into an unlikely space. Through a number of delicate interventions--a few monitors here and there, various forms of theatrical lighting--she transformed the station's utilitarian underground architecture (staircases, passageways, platforms) into a cinematic fantasy. Fragments from films shot in the metro appeared on the monitors. More conspicuous were the rows of lurid spherical lamps hovering over weary passengers waiting for the train to finally arrive. These colorful globes were pure joy: For a moment the travelers were transported from the gray and noisy environment of urban transportation to some fanciful theater lobby or perhaps a small-town amusement park.

Escapism? Yes, but not of the sort that seeks a more authentic life, some less artificial or even pre-modern form of dwelling in the world. On the contrary, Gonzalez-Foerster's fantasies often conjure up a kind of tropical modernity connecting abstraction in the arts, visionary architecture, and the suggestion of equatorial fecundity. One recent example is the fifteen-minute film Plages (2001), shot from a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro that overlooks the Copacabana and accompanied by a patchwork sound track of voices, music, and exploding fireworks. In describing this work, one finds oneself falling into Gonzalez-Foerster's own elliptical manner of recitation, such is the power of its mood. We see the beach at night, with people dressed in white on the sand. The camera moves away from the water, and we see the street, lined with palm trees and full of cars. On the sidewalk there is a black-and-white wave pattern, A voice belonging to Diogenes Paixao, a Brazilian art collector, explains" "It's the biggest drawing in the world. The landscaped

gardens of Copacabana. He was very proud of it, you "know. Always saying:

'It's the biggest drawing!'" Paixao is talking about Brazilian artist and garden architect Roberto Burle Marx, and soon the camera zooms in on the abstract wave design. The people moving back and forth along the strand seem to follow the pattern. What we experience is the crowd--always the group rather than the individual person. This is a film about a collective state of mind called the Copacabana. The sun has set and it's getting dark, but the beach is lit by spotlights and small fires in the sand. A collage of voices, talking and singing, delivers a dense and poetic account of life at the waterfront: "Copacabana has no center. No ties to the golden youth ... a sort of oasis." Explosions from the fireworks get more and more volcanic, turning the screen into Turner-like cascades of color--fire and smoke produce imagery verging on abstraction. Then it starts to rain, and the crowd hides under umbrellas. "If there is one place where mankind's utopia exists ... Copacabana must be that place," says one voice. The crowd continues to move along the wave pattern, and we hear a last statement, delivered by a local fisherman: "Copacabana is wonderful. It's a wonderful city. Copacabana doesn't exist."

Plages is the last film in a kind of trilogy that also includes Riyo (1999), shot in Kyoto, and Central (2001), shot at the Star Ferry Terminal in Hong Kong. (In addition to her own films Gonzalez-Foerster has collaborated on others: Recently, she codirected two films, the aforementioned Ile de Beaute and Gold [2001] with Leccia; in 2000 she added an episode to the story of Annlee, a series of artworks about a Japanese manga character initiated by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno; and the following year she teamed up with Swedish musician Jay Jay Johanson to produce Cosmodrome, an experiment with sound and light using precinema technologies and reminiscent of the ninteenth-century panorama.) All three films--Plages, Riyo, and Central--focus on moments of urban experience and in particular on an intensified sense of the flow of time. In Riyo the flow is both literal and impressionistic: The camera travels smoothly along a riverbank in Kyoto where young couples meet in the twilight of the early evening. Neon lights, luminous facades, and an occasional exploding firework illuminate the scene. A cell phone rings, and we hear a young woman's voice: "Hello!" A man's voice replies: "Hello ..." She continues: "Don't you remember? We met in Shirahama ... My name is Riyo ..." A telephone discussion (in Japanese with English subtitles) about recent memories, amorous hopes, and geographical distance ensues, accompanied only by the image of shining neon lights and the streaming water in the river. Flirtation in Japanese--it's different-sounding yet familiar. Nothing much happens, time is passing. Somehow the lack of imagery, the monotony of the water, and the slow movement of the camera produce a space in which time itself seems to imbue the urban landscape.

In Central, this sense of time flowing (but getting us nowhere) is even more intense. It's early morning at the ferry terminal. A woman dressed entirely in black, appearing as a silhouette, is looking out across the water, waiting for her brother to arrive. "This girl is black," says a voice off camera. "She looks like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey." Then a long monologue follows about the expected encounter, and about time. People show up in the bright morning light. They look out across the water, perform their morning rituals--a few stretches, some moments of silent meditation. Each and everyone for himself: "Now is a moment without limits. Everything begins anew. Everyone carries his own space around. Does his own little dance. It's the present." There is the attraction of the foreign city, but there is nothing especially exciting or exotic about the scene. In short, there is nothing surprising. French critic Jean-Charles Massera has written about this tone of precise indifference in Gonzalez-Foerster's films: "Since surprise is no longer a challenge, and difference and events now belong to the market, to the spectacular, we may as well rest our eyes and deactivate our curiosity. You didn't see anything in Kyoto.... So what? Nightfall instead of exoticism, light conversation instead of sham depth."

In many of the artist's installations, this blankness is expressed quite physically, as she leaves large spaces empty. Such was the case a few years ago in Brasilia Hall, 2000, in which a green carpet covered the floor of a vast area at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, but which otherwise displayed nothing more than an orange neon sign spelling out the title and a small monitor built into the wall showing imagery from Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia--certainly a prime example of that "tropical modernity" Gonzalez-Foerster tends to return to. But the spatial void at the center of these works seems to me only one more way of indicating what most of them express on a level of signification or, more precisely, through their strategic lack of signification. "Writing is after all, in its way, a satori," claims Barthes, "a more or less powerful seism which causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate: it creates an emptiness in language." This enchanting emptiness is the productive force in Gonzalez-Foerster's works. She has captured and recorded lacunae of meaning in places as distant as Brazil, China, and Japan, but these are also to be found at the very core of our everyday experience. Now that she's shown me, I find the liberating emptiness everywhere.

Daniel Birnbaum, a contributing editor of Artforum, is director of the Stadelschule art academy in Frankfurt and heads the institution's portikus gallery.