A Surprisingly Enjoyable Show About Critical Theory

PARIS — Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought at Palais de Tokyo is billed as an exploration of the influence of French critical theory — including and perhaps especially thinkers in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire — on American art. For those who have encountered critical theory and indulge in the occasional Marx meme, the show may sound like catnip, but such conceits often slip into theory- and text-heavy curation that is opaque to many viewers. So it was refreshing to find the exhibition’s theoretical points concisely made, historically situated, and woven through excellent wall labels that contextualize a wealth of strong artworks. 

The show, which is staged across nearly all the museum’s available space, truly begins with pioneering abstract sculptor Melvin Edwards, whose work has its own space that viewers have to walk through to enter the main galleries. The pieces on view range from his small Lynch Fragments series to larger installations composed of barbed wire or sizable industrial objects — some freighted with meaning, such as a short length of chain or shackle, others more ambiguous, like a finial or a single metal cube — that play up the works’ formal qualities: the heavy made to look impossibly light, the razor sharp to appear delicate. Edwards’s sculptures lay bare the ways in which the material realities of labor, incarceration, and death still evoke violent associations even when the machines that enable those processes are broken out into component parts. 

Edwards has long been in conversation with transatlantic networks of poets and theorists, including Léon Gontran Damas, whom he met through the Black Arts Movement, and Jayne Cortez, whom he married in 1975, and his art reflects much of the critical theory that undergirds the show. “Maquette for a sculpture in homage to Édouard Glissant” (2021) speaks to the belated recognition of diasporic Francophone thought on contemporary discourse: Born in 1928 in Martinique, Glissant moved to Paris for his doctoral work, then returned to Martinique to found the Institut Martiniquais D’études; there, he began to produce a body of work on coloniality, social movements, and the afterlives of the Atlantic slave trade, all of which are unavoidable in contemporary scholarly discourse. 

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