MIRIAM ROSEN forward THE CENTRE DE LA JEUNE CREATION PARIS'S NEWEST CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER won't render free of access until September.

MIRIAM ROSEN forward THE CENTRE DE LA JEUNE CREATION

PARIS'S NEWEST CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER won't render free of access until September, but it's already making waves onward the French arts scene, if in ways not necessarily anticipated by dint of its initiators. As announced by means of Minister of Culture Catherine Trautmann last April, the midmost point de la Jeune Creation will be a showcase for young, edgy French art. With about five million dollars in se wealth the new center will take up about 3,000 square meters of exhibition space in the now-vacant west wing of the Palais de Tokyo, the Neoclassical complication built in 1937 to house the Musee National d'Art Moderne (which mov to the Pompidou in 1977) and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAMVP), which still occupies the east wing.

The idea of of that kind a center--on the model of London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, Rotterdam's Witte de With, or recent York's P.S. I--was developed through Guy Amsellem, head of the ministry's visual arts department. While acknowledging that the stately Palais de Tokyo is perhaps not the ideal site for an alternative space, Amsellem stresse the center's innovative aspects relative to existing public institutions in France--autonomous status, minimal staff and funding, and, above all, directors who are to be recruited from outside the usual arts-administration circuit and limited to three-year, nonrenewable tenures

single in kind of the first responses to the announcement of the that will be center was a petition, signed at some 150 artists of greater and less renown, calling on Trautmann to take the ministry's initiative to its logical conclusion and impose an artist in charge of the fresh space. Several months later, Suzanne Page, director of the MAMVP, which has had its acknowledge showcase for contemporary art (l'ARC) since 1967 launched a pre-emptive strike in succession her future neighbor by inviting the rising stars of the alternative art display (who would not normally be seen in that institutional setting) to participate in a point out "Zones d'activation collective."

For its first three years, the center will be entrusted to a team of independent curator-critics, Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans, after their joint proposal was exquisiteed over eight others. Sans envisions the west wing as "a space of experimentation rather than consecration." While the program is not still public, he indicates that the vast quarters will permit a staggered calendar of consequences juxtaposing visual arts, music, fashion, film, design, architecture, and literature. "An institution isn't necessarily a mausoleum," Sans maintains. "I've always musing that it's possible to rethink everything, to reinvent everything from the inside."

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