Air. Dense. Cloud.
The air feels thick and dense in Paris today. The clouds hang heavy with water and gray. I anticipated rain and took my umbrella. It did not rain.
My bones feel dense today. My brain is dense with thoughts and ideas. My feet are dense with tired from walking the dense streets.
The neighborhoods feel denser than usual. Sitting atop the Centre Georges Pompidou, looking out the window, I'm struck with the density of the streets, the people, the buildings all infringing on each other. It feels like there is no empty space.
Today was art.
Ra'anan Levy at the Musee Maillol
Great draughtsman, well drawn and well painted, I was struck with the emptiness and loneliness in the drawings and paintings. Israeli born, now living and working in Paris, Levy started out as more of a portrait painter of nudes primarily, but has moved to different subject matter in recent years - the most recent being paintings of empty rooms with doors in various opened and closed positions evoking both an isolation and a sense of seeking the history of place. The thing I really noticed about the work is how alone it felt. The current work, whether it is of interior spaces or exterior street scenes are completely devoid of human beings.
There are paintings of single gutters in Jerusalem, which though decorative in nature have a sense of foreboding to them, of the pull of the void into which the water from the street flows and one could be pulled into at any time. In some there are stairs. Are we descending them into the sewer, or are they a lifeline, a place to flee to, into a different kind of future?
Despite the abilities exhibited in the paintings, I didn't care that much for the show. It kind of started me down the road of denseness for the day.
Yves Klein - Body, Color, Immaterial; Centre Georges Pompidou
Going into this show, I knew little of Klein, was not expecting to like the show, and initially (from the first few pieces) thought I would be bored and would leave quickly.
This show ended up surprising me and became a real source of thinking about a lot of things today relative to art, its role in the world, how it is political in nature, especially contemporary art, and how even what appears to have no surface, has hidden beauty and meaning.
Klein, who died in 1962, when he was only 34, was a monochromist primarily. He invented the IKB (International Klein Blue) and blue was the only color he used for a long time. He eventually added in gold and pink to his palette. A lot of his work prefigured conceptual and performance art, as well as the use of one color in a work, and apparently had some influence on a number of artists that were contemporary or came after him (Warhol, Louise Bouergoise are a couple that I noticed).
He also had some interesting, and what at the time were revolutionary techniques - using a dry gas flame to do "fire" paintings for one and having live, naked models (women, of course - he was a bit of a raconteur and self-promoter) cover themselves in (blue) paint and either roll around or interact with a canvas at Klein's direction, using them as his "brush".
He dabbled in music, film, sculpture, architecture as well as painting and performance and as a note of oddity had a fixation with and practiced judo and wrote a treatise on it. In fact he considered all of these as his elements of inspiration:
Composition
Painting
Sculpture
Architecture
Music
Judo
Politics
There was one point in the exhibit where a piece of text related to one of the painting talked about a sense of being born again into a new kind of philosopher's stone, and it got me thinking about the need for a new and different kind of "born-again" movement for humanity - an anti-religious born againism based on rationality, nature, art and science as a foundation of belief and hope for the future. I need to think on this one more and hope to write about it again soon.
As you can probably tell, I ended up really liking this show, and this list of words that accompanied one of the rooms (called Impregnate) says a lot about both Klein's art and art as a way of life, not separated from life:
Essential
Potential
Spatial
Incommensurable
Fast
Static
Dynamic
Absolute
Pneumatic
Pure
Prestigious
Marvelous
Exasperating
Unstable
Expect
Sensitive
Impregnated (Permeated)
Impregnate (Permeate)
Immaterial
Robert Rauschenberg - Combines; Centre Georges Pompidou
"If you do not change your mind about something when you confront a picture you have not seen before, then you are a stubborn fool or the painting is no good"
Rauschenberg - The Art of Assemblage"
I did not change my mind about something when confronting the pieces in this show. I'll leave it to others to decide if I am a stubborn fool or the painting was no good.
The Magellanic Cloud - Various Artists; Centre Georges Pompidou
The exhibition took its title from a 1955 novel by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lern, whose work was marked by an incredible ability to predict technologies and inventions that came into being only many years later (perhaps an earlier version of William Gibson, who tends towards the same proclivities?).
Unfortunately, Lern considered this particular work one of his least successful and this show was equally unsuccessful. Though aspiring to looking at contemporary works and the idea of fallen utopias to the possibilities of the future, the work itself was banal and uninspiring - a real disappointment given the interesting premise.
None of the artists displayed were known to me, are unlikely to be known to you and will likely remain that way.
So, the score for the day:
Density - Full
Klein - Inspiring
Art - Always interesting, but sometimes failing to deliver
Air - Fresh
Clouds - Still gray
Paris by night awaits.
My bones feel dense today. My brain is dense with thoughts and ideas. My feet are dense with tired from walking the dense streets.
The neighborhoods feel denser than usual. Sitting atop the Centre Georges Pompidou, looking out the window, I'm struck with the density of the streets, the people, the buildings all infringing on each other. It feels like there is no empty space.
Today was art.
Ra'anan Levy at the Musee Maillol
Great draughtsman, well drawn and well painted, I was struck with the emptiness and loneliness in the drawings and paintings. Israeli born, now living and working in Paris, Levy started out as more of a portrait painter of nudes primarily, but has moved to different subject matter in recent years - the most recent being paintings of empty rooms with doors in various opened and closed positions evoking both an isolation and a sense of seeking the history of place. The thing I really noticed about the work is how alone it felt. The current work, whether it is of interior spaces or exterior street scenes are completely devoid of human beings.
There are paintings of single gutters in Jerusalem, which though decorative in nature have a sense of foreboding to them, of the pull of the void into which the water from the street flows and one could be pulled into at any time. In some there are stairs. Are we descending them into the sewer, or are they a lifeline, a place to flee to, into a different kind of future?
Despite the abilities exhibited in the paintings, I didn't care that much for the show. It kind of started me down the road of denseness for the day.
Yves Klein - Body, Color, Immaterial; Centre Georges Pompidou
Going into this show, I knew little of Klein, was not expecting to like the show, and initially (from the first few pieces) thought I would be bored and would leave quickly.
This show ended up surprising me and became a real source of thinking about a lot of things today relative to art, its role in the world, how it is political in nature, especially contemporary art, and how even what appears to have no surface, has hidden beauty and meaning.
Klein, who died in 1962, when he was only 34, was a monochromist primarily. He invented the IKB (International Klein Blue) and blue was the only color he used for a long time. He eventually added in gold and pink to his palette. A lot of his work prefigured conceptual and performance art, as well as the use of one color in a work, and apparently had some influence on a number of artists that were contemporary or came after him (Warhol, Louise Bouergoise are a couple that I noticed).
He also had some interesting, and what at the time were revolutionary techniques - using a dry gas flame to do "fire" paintings for one and having live, naked models (women, of course - he was a bit of a raconteur and self-promoter) cover themselves in (blue) paint and either roll around or interact with a canvas at Klein's direction, using them as his "brush".
He dabbled in music, film, sculpture, architecture as well as painting and performance and as a note of oddity had a fixation with and practiced judo and wrote a treatise on it. In fact he considered all of these as his elements of inspiration:
Composition
Painting
Sculpture
Architecture
Music
Judo
Politics
There was one point in the exhibit where a piece of text related to one of the painting talked about a sense of being born again into a new kind of philosopher's stone, and it got me thinking about the need for a new and different kind of "born-again" movement for humanity - an anti-religious born againism based on rationality, nature, art and science as a foundation of belief and hope for the future. I need to think on this one more and hope to write about it again soon.
As you can probably tell, I ended up really liking this show, and this list of words that accompanied one of the rooms (called Impregnate) says a lot about both Klein's art and art as a way of life, not separated from life:
Essential
Potential
Spatial
Incommensurable
Fast
Static
Dynamic
Absolute
Pneumatic
Pure
Prestigious
Marvelous
Exasperating
Unstable
Expect
Sensitive
Impregnated (Permeated)
Impregnate (Permeate)
Immaterial
Robert Rauschenberg - Combines; Centre Georges Pompidou
"If you do not change your mind about something when you confront a picture you have not seen before, then you are a stubborn fool or the painting is no good"
Rauschenberg - The Art of Assemblage"
I did not change my mind about something when confronting the pieces in this show. I'll leave it to others to decide if I am a stubborn fool or the painting was no good.
The Magellanic Cloud - Various Artists; Centre Georges Pompidou
The exhibition took its title from a 1955 novel by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lern, whose work was marked by an incredible ability to predict technologies and inventions that came into being only many years later (perhaps an earlier version of William Gibson, who tends towards the same proclivities?).
Unfortunately, Lern considered this particular work one of his least successful and this show was equally unsuccessful. Though aspiring to looking at contemporary works and the idea of fallen utopias to the possibilities of the future, the work itself was banal and uninspiring - a real disappointment given the interesting premise.
None of the artists displayed were known to me, are unlikely to be known to you and will likely remain that way.
So, the score for the day:
Density - Full
Klein - Inspiring
Art - Always interesting, but sometimes failing to deliver
Air - Fresh
Clouds - Still gray
Paris by night awaits.
posted by Paul Salinger at 8:37 AM
1 Comments:
Well said.
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