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So one reason why fiction nowadays comes so easily into the art context, I think, is because it has a healthier relationship to the economy of the text as it’s exploited by the art community.– Mark von Schlegell

Massive earthquakes cause tsunamis and nuclear contamination; cucumbers and soy beans kill human beings; dictators are kicked out by their own people; the most powerful state in the world scavenges itself publicly by killing its number one enemy and throwing his body into the sea; and the director of the IMF just thinks about getting his cock sucked: wow, 4000 years of science fiction have come to a head. We are facing a true dystopia, which is the opposite of utopia according to some, but which others recognize as its negative version: its devilish side, in a way. A utopia gone bad.

Quite a relevant frame for the exhibition Dystopia. Alexis Vaillant, curator of the CAPC museum in Bordeaux, commissioned sci-fi writer Mark von Schlegell to write a book. They then exchanged ideas and artists’ names, co-curating the exhibition, as it were. The catalogue for the show is the novel upon which it is based. Paradoxically, almost no one was able to read the book and then see the show, as it started before the book was published.

The exhibition is a temporal ellipse, mirroring the plot of the book, in which an art critic comes back from the future to try to change art history. Von Schlegell, who also writes art criticism, seems to feel at home in the museum of Bordeaux, hosted in the former colonial town hall, symbol of the crumbling civilisation and world order we are living in.

The dystopia shown at the CAPC acknowledges our wish of entertainment while taking advantage of every sci-fi cliché: gigantic urban landscapes, out-of-control technology, communicative diseases, genetically-modified bodies and minds, popular riots, post-hippy communities, ruins of modernity, crepuscular feelings of apocalypse, and so on. Curatorially speaking, this vision emerges from a selection of large artworks, the majority of them sculptures and paintings. Indeed, the practice of artists (46 in all) who capitalize on the modernist formal legacy, twisting it and questioning its relevancy both as former utopia and beyond that, its actual future potential, gains a whole new perspective within the context of the show.

The artworks of Sterling Ruby, Keith Farquhar, Manfred Pernice, Julia Scher and Isa Genzken offer a great panorama of quirky structures, where classicism is challenged by a deviant feeling of something gone mad. Other artworks pull the show in a trickier, uncanny direction, with a rare series of On Kawara’s portraits of irradiated Japanese people, and artworks by Des Hughes, Frances Scholz, Cyprien Gaillard and Hans-Peter Feldmann, whose deconstructed bodies haunt the show.

An esoteric, almost new-age touch brings the slice of bad taste that you can expect of good shows, like the crystalline installations of Sebastian Hammwöhner, or the paintings of moons by Roe Ethridge. Also noteworthy is the great mix between the younger American artists, who seem to have totally integrated the feeling of ‘fin de règne’ now emanating from their continent, and an older, northern European scene, which, still turning around the abstract, shamanistic quest of the material invoked by Beuys as an answer to barbarism, finds a new contextualisation, more baroque and sensual. The confrontation gives them a little break from the white cube’s orthodoxy, which in my opinion sometimes straightens intentions that in their deepest essence, and according to the artists themselves, are not so unequivocal.

The success of the show comes from its felicitous deconstruction of the notion of authorship – a consequence of Vaillant’s far-reaching scenography. Moreover, the idea of a contemporary art show based on a science-fiction script detaches the artworks from heavy art-history-related backgrounds and enhances their visual, phenomenological strength. It definitely unleashes a raw force, aimed at the spectacular, in the sense of shock. The deliberately pregnant red light in which the whole show is bathed, as a permanent sunset à la Fahrenheit 451, adds to this.

That light is also illustrative of the authority that the curator has claimed for the sake of the show. And if a fussy viewer cannot get past that point, it might reveal the reactionary tendencies of an art context which has become more focussed on pointless corporate rules than on the bottom line: the fact that art expresses an urge for thinking in the present, on its own terms. After all, that’s what science fiction is all about.

Dorothée Dupuis is director of Triangle France, Marseille, and editor of the magazine Petunia