Adrian Searle encounters ? chaos in Paris

Healers and tricksters, shape-shifters and spirit guides, transgressors and transvestites ? two exhibitions in Paris send the Guardian art critic into a spiral of panicIn every encounter, you confront yourself first of all, your openness and your resistance. There's always a little voice in your head providing a running commentary. Some critics, recording this invisible guide's comments as they go, scribble their way through exhibitions. It is a surprise they see anything at all. I try to ignore my invisible little friend, the smart-assed creep on my shoulder. But if that doesn't work, there's always exorcism.We were standing at a voodoo altar, curator Jean de Loisy, anthropologist Bertrand Hell and me. There were just a couple of pots on the floor, each containing a huge, multicoloured, waxy, fat-congealed mound of stuff. There might have been some chicken in there, and what looked like jawbones, of what I couldn't tell. It had been sitting under the gallery lights for a couple of weeks. Yum."What this thing needs to activate it is strong alcohol!" De Loisy exclaimed, and picked up a bottle of gin from beside the pots, giving the mounds a liberal sprinkling then taking a swig himself. These are the sorts of spirits I like, but he didn't pass the bottle. For a moment, nothing discernible happened. No voodoo, no who-do. The sorcerer from Togo who concocted the altar goes by the name of Az� Kokovivina, Sorcerer of the Giggles. Maybe that's where the gin comes in.Suddenly I wasn't laughing, but plunged into a world of spirits, demons and creatures from the netherworld. Annette Messager's clothes flew about the room, powered by electric fans. A tiny carved Peruvian shaman, part baby, part boxer, and no bigger than my hand, took up a fighting stance. A medieval St Michael slew a demon, Joseph Beuys gave a lecture to a dead hare and Picasso transformed himself into a faun. A figure with a head like a dunce's cap gave me the eye, and what looked like a sock turned into a cuttlefish. Ancient beings of remarkable ferocity stalked my way and Sri Lankan masks gurned and yowled.In the Garden of Addiction, Christophe Berdaguer and Marie P�jus's tangle of glass tubes, like so many evil flowers, proffered the scents of opium, cocaine, skunk and booze. Various modern-day witches and healers discussed their craft on a tower of TV screens. It was like watching a dozen cookery channels at once.Cultures, eons, continents flew by. We were among the forces of chaos and disorder: healers and tricksters, shape-shifters and spirit guides, transgressors and transvestites. Housed in a mock-up cave of aluminium struts, wallboard and plaster-soaked scrim, the exhibition Les Ma�tres du D�sordre (Masters of Chaos) is an exercise in wild curating at the Mus�e du Quai Branly in Paris.De Loisy has always been a bit of a maverick curator. Here, he has brought together a bewildering selection of artefacts, sculptures, costumes, masks and objects from past and present, and from every continent. Beautiful, tender objects collide with the monstrous and the devilish. Much of it has extraordinary power and vitality. Among it all are a number of more modern, western artworks ? from Picasso to Paul McCarthy ? as if to show the persistence of the transgressive and the search for hidden meaning in the world. Beuys, a latter-day shaman, thought he could heal the postwar world with his art. Randy old goat Picasso was a shape-shifter and trickster.Other recent artists ? Jonathan Meese, the Chapman Brothers, Russia's Oleg Kulik being led around on a chain and behaving like a mad dog ? are just tricky. But if you want to be an artist, you've got to believe in something. The trouble with most contemporary art in this context is that little of it, if any, is the product of a shared belief system that glues the world, and the self, together. If there are no rules, there's nothing to transgress.The exhibition's title is taken from Bertrand Hell's book Possession and Shamanism, yet to be translated into English. Masters of Chaos is also the culmination of De Loisy's own 20-year obsession with the subject. His previous curatorial projects have included exhibitions on beauty, on the face, and, in 2008, Traces of the Sacred, a tour of the persistence of the sacred in 20th- and 21st-century art. He also collaborated with Anish Kapoor and James Turrell and, after working at the Centre Pompidou, went sailing around the world for a number of years. He is a man in search of something. He has also recently been appointed director of the newly renovated Palais de Tokyo, just across the Seine, where the Paris Triennale is currently on view ? the launch show in the expanded, renovated building.The two exhibitions share an interest in the ethnographic, in cultural difference and transcultural proximity, but could not be more different in approach. De Loisy is passionate about objects. The Triennale, which goes by the title Intense Proximity, is much more cautious about the readings we might make of the vast corpus of paintings and sculpture, films and video installations, photographs and drawings brought together by guest curator Okwui Enwezor. De Loisy's show is a thematic romp. Enwezor's triennale admits to the difficulties of finding order and meaning in the world. The triennale is a trial for any spectator. I wandered like a lost tourist. One minute, you're in the Venezuelan jungle, the next at a mixed-race wedding in the new South Africa. One minute, I'm staring at the most intimate body parts of an Amsterdam sex-worker, the next watching a TV documentary about a talent contest for migrant Filipinos in Tel Aviv.I twirl along to north African beats and stare at a group of closed and silent grand pianos. Here are Claude Levi-Strauss's notebook drawings and a great new painting by Chris Ofili; over there are some gorgeous black-and-white photographs of Bahia's Afro-Brazilian dock life in the 1940s. On a screen, blacked-up (now that really does seem transgressive), the young French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar dances among a group of her own sculptures, in homage to Josephine Baker.The day before my shimmy with the shamans, I'd spent almost five hours here and was still reeling. Enwezor, who directed Documenta 11 in 2002 and is now running the Haus der Kunst in Munich, has a very different take on art and ethnography to De Loisy. He sees a link between the ethnographer and the artist, ethnography and curating.Intense Proximity focuses on this: the link between the close and the distant, the near and the far. It confronts us with the world's disjunctions. With so many cultural differences and competing interests in an ever-shrinking world, how do we even begin to make sense of it all? Is art a kind of news from elsewhere (whether a geographical place or a somewhere in the artist's mind), or a report from the close-to-home? Both exhibition catalogues quote the ironic opening phrase of Levi-Strauss's marvellous 1955 book Tristes Tropiques: "I hate travelling and explorers". The idea of exploration has changed immeasurably since the days of 19th-century colonial empire, and as much again since Levi-Strauss's first trip to Brazil in 1935. Bertrand Hell told me how little travelling French ethnographers and anthropologists undertake nowadays.On the other hand, today's curators, and even critics, are always on the move. Enwezor admits to a kind of intellectual vertigo and spatial disorientation. Descending into the bowels of the Palais de Tokyo, I knew what he meant. It has hidden depths, basements leading to sub-basements, subterranean mezzanines and floors, traversed by ramps and open, curving staircases. Films are screened in rediscovered auditoria that had been walled up for decades, and in side rooms branching from dizzying Piranesian shafts. The place seems to go on for ever, and so does the triennale. When I described my journey through the triennale to De Loisy, he said he likes the idea of people getting lost in these basements. I like being lost, too. But this journey is accompanied by growing panic.I'm bought up short by a sign that reads: "I am not exotic I am exhausted." How can anyone deal with all this stuff? The urge to see everything leads to the frustration of not seeing anything, of always being driven on to the next thing without absorbing the last. It is a flight that becomes ever more urgent, ever more futile. If it is an encounter with anything, it is with competing urges: the voice on the shoulder jockeying me on, and a desire for it all to stop. It is an encounter with the chaos of the world.? Masters of Chaos is at the Mus�e du Quai Branly, Paris, until 29 July? Intense Proximity: La Triennale 2012 is at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until 26 AugustArtInstallationExhibitionsParisPaintingSculptureVideo artPhotographyAdrian Searleguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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