Echo. Delay. Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought

Echo. Delay. Reverb partial installation view, photo by Aurélien Mole

Palais de Tokyo 13, Avenue du Président Wilson 75116 Paris 10/22/2025 to 02/15/2026

By JOSEPH NECHVATAL February 16th, 2026

Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, after reexamining the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and taking distance from Structuralism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis, spawned what is collectively termed French post-structuralist theory. Palais de Tokyo’s wide-ranging exhibition Echo. Delay. Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thoughts, curated by Naomi Beckwith – Guggenheim’s head curator and artistic director for the next Documenta – embellish and extend the work of this group of intellectual male French white literary critics, political activists, and teachers of patriarchal structures (seen with a poetic aspect) by highlighting other thinkers, like Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant (from France’s former Caribbean and North African colonies).

Beckwith (and her curatorial team of James Horton, Amandine Nana and François Piron) maintain that all of these thinkers are decisive influences on the fields of contemporary art that has been touched by postcolonial, feminist, and gender studies in America. This is true but nothing all that new. Probably starting at least with Monet, Cezanne, Picasso and especially Duchamp, American artists have long absorbed, transformed and re-exported styles and ideas of the French.

So Echo. Delay. Reverb is a political transmission event where the flow of transatlantic thought and art is confirmed and debated in the wake of an aged cool post-modern nihilism. The title of the show implies as much, while it reminds me that the invention of the electric guitar is considered by some to be the greatest American invention of all.

For those who were around in the 1980s, the initial look of Echo. Delay. Reverb is reminiscent of a Group Material show. Each of the show’s thematic sections – ‘Dispersion, Dissemination’, ‘Institutional Critique’, ‘Geometries of the Non-human’, ‘Desiring Machines’ and ‘Abjection in America’ – opens with massive walls painted red that contain texts, quotes, black-and-white portraits of authors and a vitrine display of books it references. This initial 80s impression slots in well with the importance of the role of academic publishing, foremost being the pivotal role of Sylvère Lotringer’s (a Virginia Woolf scholar) publishing project Semiotext(e) that distributed French theory cheaply in America out of Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall. I think it may not be a mere coincidence that the The Thinker (1903) sculpture (originally entitled The Poet) by Frenchman Auguste Rodin sits deep in thought in front of the Hall.

 Pope.L, Eating the Wall Street Journal (Street Version), 1991.  Photo credit: James Pruznick.  Courtesy The Estate of Pope.L et Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York © The Estate of Pope.L

 Glenn Ligon in Echo. Delay. Reverb partial installation view, photo by Aurélien Mole

 Kiki Smith, Puppet, 1993-1994.  Collection Frac Normandie Courtesy Galerie Lelong (Paris) © Kiki Smith Studio

Hans Haacke Condensation Cube (1963-1967), photo by Aurélien Mole

 Tiona Nekkia McClodden installation view, photo by Aurélien Mole

 Cindy Sherman, Untitled (n°142), 1982.  Courtesy Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Limoges

Wangechi Mutu, Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery (Bruxelles, New York, Séoul) © Wangechi Mutu

So, to pigeonhole: the show is a woke wonderland where politically quietist conservatism goes to die. Stylistically, most of the other works are lean and familiar looking, having been drawn from the legacy of conceptual art. Often it is not clear just how apt is the art as a response to the rhizomatic thoughts (a rhizome is a concept in post-structuralism describing an assemblage that allows connections between any of its constituent elements, regardless of any predefined ordering, structure, or entry point. It is a central concept in the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-1967) and reactivated 1972 visitor poll, for example, influenced by the cybernetic-related ideas of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, an Austrian biologist and philosopher, could be (and has been) in many a theme show. This is true too with the work of Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Dan Grahm, Andrea Fraser, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Renée Green, Hal Fischer, Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and Kiki Smith found here. The Smith, Puppet (1993-1994), was for me the finest work of art in the show, however, as it touches my real world sympathies while Kristeva’s theorizing of ‘the abject’ and George Bataille’s ‘informe’ appear relevant.

Likewise, Ellen Gallagher, whose work I have admired, also seems randomly slotted into the theme with her painting Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2023), especially when considering that the glaring omission here is the absence of internet-inspired digital artist from the 90s and after who cleave more closely to French theory’s general rhizomatic episteme. They, along with many musicians, took early and direct influence from Deleuze and Guattari.

Wangechi Mutu’s collages of biopolitical post-colonial merit in the Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006) perhaps inadvertently make the point that Dada-Surrealist techniques of uncertainty, irony, mockery and humor, all of which downplay grandiloquent reason – and particularly Max Ernst’s Dada concept of systematic displacement – a technique which is concerned with the liberation of individual signs from their utilitarian purpose – must be counted as prototypes here. Still, the volume of art works and critical approaches presented here is already almost overwhelming, which is appropriate, I guess, to its overly broad conceptual scope.

Much of Echo. Delay. Reverb is visually uninteresting from a stylistic sensual point of view. That recalled for me that in his infamous 1996 essay “The Conspiracy of Art”  Jean Baudrillard maintains, “that there is no longer any possible critical judgment” pertaining to art, only a “genial sharing of nullity”,[i] even while admitting that art is not central to his concerns. That indeed he doesn’t “really identify with it” (while mourning its “loss of transcendence”).[ii]

There is a colorless photo of Baudrillard at Whiskey Pete’s in Las Vegas in a gold lamé suit, but as a thinker Baudrillard receives short shift here, which is so strange as he was everywhere in the art world in the 80s (even while stating that art is not his problem). Yet he went ahead and invented a concept to address this supposed state of non-judgmental affairs in art: transaesthetics.[iii]

The Baudrillardian position is that we live inside an increasingly global simulation where the dominance of media-forms engender, homogenize, hallucinate and drive communications via a rigidly methodical interactive network: what Baudrillard calls the hyper-reality of simulation. Observations concerning the sense of dissolving borders that once helped to separate the “true” from the “false” and the “real” from the “imaginary” were established in The Ecstasy of Communication[iv] and made a political weapon by Donald Trump. In The Ecstasy of Communication and other books, Baudrillard theorized the media’s effect on society and argued that we are in an era where the production of images and information, and not the production of material goods, determines who holds power. Today, according to Baudrillard, the private sphere of human intimacy is exteriorized and made categorical and thus diaphanous. In The Ecstasy of Communication Baudrillard described this diaphanous media effect as an instrument of obscenity, transparency and ecstasy.[v] 

Artists and art critics influenced by Baudrillard, and I include myself among them to some extent, have tended to elucidate a concern with images in the circulation system, occupied with their recoding and perverse reuse, now recycled into AI slop art. Baudrillard anticipated this position toward art as it described post-modern society of the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the presupposition that social immersion in media simulation adds up to a new zone of experience.

Baudrillard submits, among other things, that the intrinsic objective of simulacra is to bring forward a malleable (but controllable) universal modus operandi bent on world domination through electronic media totalization (the feedback-looped totality of computer terminals and screens). For Baudrillard the computer is a superficial abyss and a hypnotic transparency which simulates and denies space at the same time: an “aesthetics of the hyper-real, a thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of alienation and magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency...”.[vi] Baudrillard therefore puts forth a paradigmatic model of the media as an all-over, engulfing, omni-present, totalizing agent. He theorizes that such a process leads to both a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and reality. In a society presumably saturated with media messages; information and meaning implode into pure effect without content or meaning.[vii]

This, if true, would set the conditions of Echo. Delay. Reverb exclusively, in his terms, as null (worthless) art. Happily this is only partly true here, as sweeping generalizations of what contemporary artist do and mean do not hold. The artists here vary greatly into a gradational scale.

At the root of Baudrillard’s generalizations about art lay his highly respectful estimation of the work of Andy Warhol, who he claims “freed us from aesthetics and art…”.[viii]

To a certain extent Baudrillard is correct in his belief that some contemporary art has become null. Yet Echo. Delay. Reverb makes it clear that there is still a worthwhile – even critical – possibility for art that implodes appearance of that seen in an indistinct totalized pattern from which there is no critical distance from which to oppose it.

I found it interesting that this overly large and ambitious transaesthetic show re-steps into the deep metanarrative puddle that post-structuralism once worked so hard to dry up. Its battle cry: no more of those grand narratives of an overarching storyline that give context, meaning, and purpose to art and philosophy. It is the specifics that matter more.

So gladly, Avenue President Wilson, on which Palais de Tokyo sits, does not run one-way. And neither does Echo. Delay. Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought. It’s the constant specific movements over the big puddle between nationalized art and thought that makes both worth doing and redoing.