ECHO DELAY REVERB
By Laura McLean-Ferris
French theory’s influences ripple through the development of American art in a show at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought, curated by Naomi Beckwith with James Horton, Amandine Nana, and François Piron, assisted by Vincent Neveux, Romane Tassel, and Morgane Padellec, Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, France, through February 15, 2026.
“French Theory” is an American term from the 1970s, an amalgam binding together literary critics, philosophers, and psychoanalysts such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. With the tang of a fashion or food trend, it suggests a shared style or methodology among its chief actors that did not really exist. However, it is now fair to say that during the “Years of Theory” (as Fredric Jameson called them), charged, analytical texts originally written in French rippled through the arts and humanities, as well as through studios, magazines, even clubs and parties. Tracing the effects of these ideas in the US, ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought opened this fall at Palais de Tokyo as part of a “Carte Blanche” invitation to Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and artistic director of documenta 16.
Beckwith’s broad thesis—and broad it is—is that “French Theory” influenced, or was responsible for, the development of several strains of American art. Cast in this exhibition’s light, the origin of a movement such as institutional critique can be found in the work of
post-structuralists like Michel Foucault, who traced the way power has been accumulated, maintained, and transformed as it passes through institutions. If institutional power can be constructed, it can also potentially be deconstructed, or at least there can be a “displacement of givens,” as artist Michael Asher so finely put it.
You won’t find much in the way of “theory” in this show beyond the kind of brief summation I just gave of Foucault’s thinking or a smattering of famous phrases such as “The Death of the Author.” Most ideas are précised in a single sentence or a quote on the wall in the introductory zones that introduce five distinct sections—“The Critique of Institutions,” “Geometries of the Non-Human,” “Abjection in America,” “Desiring Machines,” and “Dispersion, Dissemination”—which are lined with red wallpaper and illustrated with photos of French philosophers looking extremely cool (Foucault positively slays in huge white shades in a picture taken in Death Valley). Art marshals information very differently than writing, and no one wants to see an exhibition in which art “illustrates” theory, but this treatment of the source materials is a little cursory for my taste. Still, in this regard, the title was well chosen, if we take it to mean that complex ideas reverberate like fragmentary echoes among artists, who might absorb some of a theory’s tenets without reading any particular critical text. This is how culture moves, digesting and mutating like an organism. ( … )