Danh Vo: Go Mo Ni Ma Da

With a 1:1 copper scale replica of the Statue of Liberty spread around the spaces of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Vietnamese artist exemplifies his wise reactivation and reinstallation of all kinds of materials.

"10,100,1000 Vietnam" was one of the most powerful slogans in the 1970s protest movement. It embodied the idea of resisting all imperialism and prophesied the viral escalation of the war in Indochina that spread social conflict to every corner of the globe. It comes to mind when browsing the incredible Angeline Scherf–curated exhibition at Paris’ Musée d’art Moderne, dedicated to Danh Vo (1974), a Vietnamese artist naturalized in Denmark.

"Danh Vo, Go Mo Ni Ma Da", installation view at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Photo by Pierre Antoine. Courtesy of the artist / Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

The artist seems to have possessed the large space with the slogan’s same desire for multiplication, unfolding his personal strategy of visual and literary micro-conflict. Not only. That energy seems to have been transformed into a highly personal technique, reinventing the grammar of poverista guerrilla warfare: a difficult endeavour that is rarely successful, only in the case of grand civic poetry.

Like Indochina, Dahn Vo charges his works with rewrites that metabolise the negativity of human tragedy

The artist’s personal history is marked by his region’s terrible fate and, like Indochina, Dahn Vo charges his works with rewrites that metabolise the negativity of human tragedy. These dramatic stories continually reappear in exhibition spaces; and while no longer topical, they are still important for decoding his creative work.

Dahn Vo left Vietnam with his father on a boat that was rescued by a Danish trawler. This event exonerated them from the horrors of the 1970s real-politik which is why all of his works, expertly installed with rare semantic relevance, seem imbued with burning topicality even today.

One of the pieces in the exhibition seems to speak of the breakdown of the welfare system in the Nordic countries. Dating from 2005, If you where to climb the Himalayas tomorrow is embedded in today's reality like a splinter. And it is this atemporality that dissolves and unfolds from room to room, from relic to relic. It is a strange and uneasy “chamber composition” of objects charged with fetishistic power that is being disarmed. Whether it is the reliquary containing the branded personal effects that the artist's father, Phung Vo, bought upon his arrival to the West or the artefacts from the auction of relics and furniture belonging to Robert McNaara, Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy presidency, the result does not change. The artist deconstructs and transfigures a Rolex watch, a Dupont lighter, a US military service ring, or even two Chippendale armchairs that Jacqueline Kennedy gave to the American politician. These personal relics become somewhat anonymous: outdated, with no sense of belonging.

It is a strange exhibition, inhabited by a positive mantra that remixes a large quantity of material in a very precise way. There are works from recent exhibitions at Marian Goodman in New York or at Douane — Galerie Chantal Crousel and there are even pieces that were shown at the Tuileries garden during the last edition of the FIAC.

But the secret to Danh Vo’s art lies precisely in his wise reactivation and reinstallion of all kinds of materials. The artist’s Fleurs d'interieur from his residence at Paris’ Kadist Foundation come to mind with their seminal premises for this show. Vo is a master of selective accumulation and redefinition, committed to elegantly conceiving the visual ideology of the perception of the symbolic object. Aside from the title, the splendid and banal cardboard boxes containing all sorts of drinks raised in gold leaf indicate the weight of the material in grams. They allude to the value of the “interiorisation” of an object; they break the tautological law of retracing and mimic the perfection of the symbolic process. The mechanics of value in art is superimposed on the movements of the unconscious. Nothing is more precious than pure personal signification. The Danh Vo who personally attempted to re-examine the idea of freedom through an obsessive series of marriages and subsequent divorces is not gone. He investigated the multiplication of identity in its codification on paper or in the multiplication of documents: driver's licenses, passports, credit cards. Now he attacks a symbolic level strictly regulated by institutions that could be equivalent to the decomposition of the Statue of Liberty.

Fragments of the Statue of Liberty — identical to the original — from Vo’s 1:1 copper scale replica are redistributed in very different places; just as the bizarre and ideological idea of freedom born from the French Revolution, declarations of independence and dominant liberalism were made iconic and forged by Bartholdi. Danh Vo reinvestigates the form of the colossal, like that paradoxical liberty at the entry from the east to the US immigration hall that regulated the flow of immigrants for over a century. The sculpture arrived in New York in pieces and, with the same prefabrication process, returns as detritus of modern and “povera” sculptures that inhabit museum rooms. It becomes, however, a memorable Grand Canyon crossed by a trickle of crumpled cartons of Evian water, composed in beautiful display cases and raised in gold. It is a sort of underground river, like the inner journey that Danh Vo invites us to undertake and that territorial contingency compelled him to entitle Go Mo Ni Ma Da, a mispronunciation of Good Morning Madame.

So it is not only a different Parisian version of his formalist work which he more properly names We the people (detail). The decomposition of Bartholdi’s sculpture is accompanied by materials from his well-conceived raids and auction purchases. How could the three large chandeliers that once illuminated the rooms of the Hôtel Majestic in avenue Kleber, where, in January of '73, the peace treaties ending the Vietnam war were signed, be missing from the ville lumiére? The artist bought them in 2009, making them silent witnesses to a war that ended in 1975, but which now bear — more poetically — the signs of his weighty deconstruction and only an anonymous title with the dates and time of their disassembly. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 18 August 2013
Danh Vo: Go Mo Ni Ma Da
Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris
11 Avenue du Président Wilson, Paris

Danh Vo: Go Mo Ni Ma Da

With a 1:1 copper scale replica of the Statue of Liberty spread around the spaces of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Vietnamese artist exemplifies his wise reactivation and reinstallation of all kinds of materials.

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