Moved by mirrors, magnets and motion
The Globe and Mail, April 9, 2008

by Andrea Carson

In the 1960s, when the conceptual art movement was in full swing, one of its leading practitioners, artist Sol LeWitt, wrote: ”The idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.” Today conceptual art is commonplace, though it still requires that the viewer understand the idea from which the work arose. The most successful works unite concept with form while managing to say something –beyond the work itself- abut human nature.
Several pieces achieve this in Paulette Phillips’s new exhibition called History appears twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, on view at Diaz Contemporary. The idea here involves architecture, specifically the famous modernist villa E 1027, built on the Cote d’Azur by the Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray in collaboration with her lover Jean Badovici in 1929. For this show, Phillips has created a number of thoughtful sculptural works, some photographs and a video. Each piece takes an element from the house and reworks it to convey the tensions of the relationships that mark this iconic building. In doing so, she has managed to fill the space with imagination and elegance, not to mention some highly covetable works.
Gray named E 1027 in code, as a reference to her and Badovici’s relationship. Following the E, the numbers correspond to the alphabetical order of the letters J, B and G. In 1932, Gray moved out, leaving Badovici the house. The villa’s clean lines and spare, modular interior have made it an icon of the International Style, though various circumstances had led to its unfortunate neglect until 1999, when it was declared a national monument by the French government. The architect Le Corbusier admired the house so much that he acquired nearby land on which he would later build a small cabin for himself, Le Cabanon. In 1937, after Gray had left the house to Badovici, Le Corbusier too the liberty of painting two large murals on the interior and exterior walls – an act that Gray loathed and considered a “defacing”. Years later, he is said to have died while gazing at E 1027 from the ocean.
Three of the five works in the show are outstanding. The first work on view in the exhibition, titled The Egoist/Lover, is a brilliant reworking of Gray’s Satellite mirror. A large chrome mirror sprouts a smaller one on an arm in front. Phillips has embedded a motor and motion sensor in the piece so that the small mirror deflects uncooperatively from the viewer’s gaze – it’s a funny, frustrating, passive-aggressive piece, familiar to anyone who has ever experienced a lover’s silent treatment. The surprise is in how Phillips has invested an inanimate object with human qualities – albeit negative ones. The fact that is a mirror adds potency to the work: it’s your own face avoiding you.
Phillips chose the mirror to work with not only because Gray had made it for her then-lover, but also because it is one of Gray’s signature pieces and perhaps one of the most important designs. “ Mirrors are an integral part of my work, too,” Paulette says. “The idea of reflecting back is a really potent idea that I wanted to work with.”
An equally powerful work titled Touché again unites emotion and representation in a near-perfect union. Two books, a monograph on Gray and Le Corbusier’s The Poetics of Machine and Metaphor have been embedded with magnets whose negative charge keep them inches from one another. Both books are trapped within a polished chrome cage like two highly charged egos, each unable to resist the other.
Shell is a 32-minute video that slowly, deliberately explores the house prior to its restoration. As the camera traces once-clean lines, now rusted, muddied stairs and a vandalized interior, it captures the emotional topography of the house, all the more evident once you are aware of the building history. The quiet film creates space in the exhibition for the viewer to reflect on the building’s design, its neglect and on Modernism’s ultimate demise.
Phillips, whose work often engages with opposites through mirrors, magnetism and electricity, contrasts the frailty of human emotion with architectural strength. “I’m interested in how we create structures of stability … and how we operate in structures of instability,” she says.
The opposing forces of male and female also pervade the show - in the relationship between Badovici and Gray, in the domestic object made in a masculine style and in the careers of Le Corbusier, who achieved great fame, and of Gray, who languished in obscurity until late in life.
According to Phillips, it was Le Corbusier who destroyed the house with his ego. Perhaps he was unable to accept his admiration for architecture designed by a woman. “I sympathize with her," Phillips says.