Le Dossier de Paris - Juin 2007
Dear Friends,
Sorry I have been so quiet lately. As usual, work has overwhelmed my ability to find time to write even sparse words and sentences to keep up with this blog.
I'm just finishing up a week in Paris - which has been relatively quiet for me, and yes, partly because I have had to work a good deal this week while being here.
But, here's the scoop:
After a very quiet weekend, trying to catch up from a whirlwind previous week going from SF to Las Vegas, back to SF, to Seattle for the day, to Paris (Disneyland, for work), back to New York for a day and finally back to Paris - I simply needed some downtime, thus did very little - some walking and shopping and not much else.
Monday - Anselm Kiefer at Grand Palais:
Finally decided I better start seeing a few things, and the week started brilliantly with the Anselm Kiefer installation at Monumenta 2007 http://monumenta.com/2007/ at the Great Hall of the Grand Palais. This was what a site specific art installation should be. Kiefer made great use of the vast space of the Grand Palais with an installation of pieces that celebrated the poetry of two of his favorite poets - Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
The show is titled Sternenfall (Falling Stars). I had just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The Road, the night before, and the first thing you are confronted with on entering the site is a vast ruin of concrete and metal and a number of very large (monstrously large) boxes, which house the painting part of the art and are covered in galvanized steel siding. The immediate impression is one of a post-apocalyptic world, which fit the theme of McCarthy's book, and my thought was - oh, this is what the week is going to be about - gloom and darkness and despair.
Celan and Bachmann both lived through the second world war and both were politically committed and committed to remembrance. Both also died somewhat tragically. I'd write more about them, but best you do some work and discover them on your own.
But despite the initial impression, this show was really about hope and ended up being the best thing I saw all week and the show of the year for me. I ended up going back a second time on Thursday evening, just to see it in a different kind of light and to take some photographs (which I will try and post when I get home).
This was a unique experience in a unique space to see art. The vastness of the structures drew down the vastness of the space and created a firmament and an architecture that was quite nicely integrated. Kiefer conjures many things, intellectually and emotionally, combining many medium from paint to dirt to glass to concrete and steel, and makes it all work to draw you into a story, a journey of discovery of fundamental human experience, from our darkest transgressions to our most spiritual dreams.
If you are at all in Paris before August 7th, you must see this show above all others.
Tuesday:
Steven Parrino at the Palais de Tokyo. Senseware - Tokyo Fiber 2007 at the Palais de Tokyo.
The Palais de Tokyo always has interesting contemporary art. Parrino, who I did not know before seeing this show - La Marque Noire - is someone you probably need to know the context for his art to both understand and even attempt to like. Without some context, it would be easy to look at his art of the variety where one might say, geez, I could do that and do it better. Many pieces of black paintings cut in half or destroyed in some way and just (seemingly) thrown against the wall; other monochromatic pieces seemingly painted with no real purpose, or with the purpose intentionally to be destructive; videos of nothing; drawings of very dark subject matter.
But, here's some context from the blurb at the show:
"Steven Parrino (1958-2005 - yes, another young death) is considered by many as a model of a radical and uncompromising artistic activity. A witness to the death of painting, he unremittingly brought it back to life by replacing each and every piece of its corpse. Necrophilia rescuing High Art: an ambitious project to which Parrino devoted himself for more than twenty years, ignoring hierarchies, good taste and categories."
That pretty much says it all - bad taste was rampant. The show was paired or actually conceived as a tritptych with two other areas of influence on Parrino - Before (Plus ou Moins), which had some pieces from artists like Warhol, Judd, Smithson and Stella among others, and another room titled Bastard Creature, which included artists that Parrino supported and curated shows for and who mostly exhibited the same tendencies towards darkness and bad taste, and mostly unviewable "art".
Upstairs was a far more accessible and viewable show from Japan called Senseware - Tokyo Fiber 2007, which was primarly focused on new textiles and fabric materials and how they could and are being used in commercial applications - everything from clothing to fabric wraps for small, hand held televisions made by Sony to fabric wraps for Honda cars to projection surfaces to underwear for chairs that precisely fit your buttocks to temperature sensitive furniture to water repellent rainwear (to play in the rain with) to carpeting designed to be shaped like a pet that you can carry around or take to bed or just snuggle up with to get warm.
Lots of interesting materials, designs and ideas - very Japanese in sensibility and nature. Fun to walk around and touch the materials and see whimsical design ideas after the Parrino darkness.
You're probably getting the idea that one museum per day was all I could handle on this trip.
Wednesday:
Airs de Paris; Annette Messager; Philippe Mayaux - Centre Pompidou.
Airs de Paris was a huge, rambling show that I could not get through, even in over three hours of walking through relatively quickly. It's a big, multidisciplinary show of 59 artists, 16 landscape designers, interior designers and architects, all looking at modern urban space and commenting on it. The show is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the museum and explores the themes of cities and urban life, with Paris as the primary focus and starting point of energy that extends beyond the boundaries of the city.
The show takes its inspiration from Marcel Duchamp's Air de Paris, a ready-made piece from 1919, which was part of the opening display that the museum put on in 1977, with Duchamp as their first artist retrospective, and there are comments on that piece from other artists as a complement to start the show.
Some of the art was intriguing. Lots was forgettable. The thing I actually liked the most was the layout and naming of the different areas. There were three primary areas (Art, Geographical Airs and Areas: Landscaping, Architecture, Design, and Art (again) and then subthemes within each of these areas (Another Urban Space, Remix and Fictions; New Perceptions of Space and Time; The Media and NICT at the Heart of Urban Life - "Unpredictable Future?"; New Public Languages and Popular Urban Cultures; Conflicts, Risks and Accidents; Ascensional Horizons; Corporal Spheres; Vertical Landscapes; Territorial Strata; Urban Ecology and Biotechnologies, from Nature to Artifice; Identities and Communities; Individuals and Globalised Networks; and, Intimacy and Urban Life.
Annette Messager won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, but I was not familiar with her or her work. Some interesting ideas and some not so interesting. Good use of pullies and winches in some of her (not so interesting) work, where she pulls and drags stuffed body parts and stuffed animals around. The mechanics were more interesting than the art for me.
The piece that actually seemed the most interesting to me was the one that was least accessible - a room that you could not enter, only view through slits in the walls and comprising a "secret room", where the artist has personal mementoes and objects, but you really can't make out what most of them are.
The other piece that I liked was one from the Biennale, a piece that used a big red sail that was made to wave by automated fans and displayed, as it moved, various objects that lit up underneath it, like looking through a big red ocean at a fantastical undersea world of odd objects. The movement of the sail was quite beautiful. Movement seems somewhat central to Messager's work. In this piece, it worked quite well. In others, it seemed far too random and pointless to me.
Philippe Mayaux was the Prix Marcel Duchamp winner for 2006. Utterly forgettable and boring. Duchamp is probably rolling in his grave. His work draws on loud colors juxtaposed against all white pieces and has a fairly obvious sexual reference to it all (really - vulvas as cuckoo clocks with angel wings). Supposedly his work is a reference to Picabia and Duchamp, but if their work was intentionally banal and making a statement about art and life, this work is mostly just banal and obvious and a cliche. I guess I didn't like it.
Thursday:
From Cezanne to Picasso - Masterpieces from the Vollard Gallery. Musee D'Orsay.
I normally would have passed on this show. How many Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, etc does one need to see in a lifetime anyway?
But, I went to see this show because the angle of Ambroise Vollard, who was dealer to many of the artists (for better or worse in some cases) was intriguing and seeing the paintings in the historical context of Vollard and his influence and affinities with the artists made the show very worthwhile.
The highlight was actually at the end of the exhibition, the last room, where there were pieces of other media that Vollard encouraged the artists to take up - gravures, painted ceramics and sculptures as well as many drawings and lithographs on paper.
Turns out that there were actually a number of paintings I had not seen before as well, always a treat, including some very early Cezanne's and a number of Nabis and Fauve pieces from Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Rouault, and Odeon.
Worth seeing.
That was it for art on this trip. A good mix and some good contemporary art, which I generally prefer these days as it spurs more ideas and my imagination better.
More on the rest of the trip in another blog later.
Sorry I have been so quiet lately. As usual, work has overwhelmed my ability to find time to write even sparse words and sentences to keep up with this blog.
I'm just finishing up a week in Paris - which has been relatively quiet for me, and yes, partly because I have had to work a good deal this week while being here.
But, here's the scoop:
After a very quiet weekend, trying to catch up from a whirlwind previous week going from SF to Las Vegas, back to SF, to Seattle for the day, to Paris (Disneyland, for work), back to New York for a day and finally back to Paris - I simply needed some downtime, thus did very little - some walking and shopping and not much else.
Monday - Anselm Kiefer at Grand Palais:
Finally decided I better start seeing a few things, and the week started brilliantly with the Anselm Kiefer installation at Monumenta 2007 http://monumenta.com/2007/ at the Great Hall of the Grand Palais. This was what a site specific art installation should be. Kiefer made great use of the vast space of the Grand Palais with an installation of pieces that celebrated the poetry of two of his favorite poets - Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
The show is titled Sternenfall (Falling Stars). I had just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The Road, the night before, and the first thing you are confronted with on entering the site is a vast ruin of concrete and metal and a number of very large (monstrously large) boxes, which house the painting part of the art and are covered in galvanized steel siding. The immediate impression is one of a post-apocalyptic world, which fit the theme of McCarthy's book, and my thought was - oh, this is what the week is going to be about - gloom and darkness and despair.
Celan and Bachmann both lived through the second world war and both were politically committed and committed to remembrance. Both also died somewhat tragically. I'd write more about them, but best you do some work and discover them on your own.
But despite the initial impression, this show was really about hope and ended up being the best thing I saw all week and the show of the year for me. I ended up going back a second time on Thursday evening, just to see it in a different kind of light and to take some photographs (which I will try and post when I get home).
This was a unique experience in a unique space to see art. The vastness of the structures drew down the vastness of the space and created a firmament and an architecture that was quite nicely integrated. Kiefer conjures many things, intellectually and emotionally, combining many medium from paint to dirt to glass to concrete and steel, and makes it all work to draw you into a story, a journey of discovery of fundamental human experience, from our darkest transgressions to our most spiritual dreams.
If you are at all in Paris before August 7th, you must see this show above all others.
Tuesday:
Steven Parrino at the Palais de Tokyo. Senseware - Tokyo Fiber 2007 at the Palais de Tokyo.
The Palais de Tokyo always has interesting contemporary art. Parrino, who I did not know before seeing this show - La Marque Noire - is someone you probably need to know the context for his art to both understand and even attempt to like. Without some context, it would be easy to look at his art of the variety where one might say, geez, I could do that and do it better. Many pieces of black paintings cut in half or destroyed in some way and just (seemingly) thrown against the wall; other monochromatic pieces seemingly painted with no real purpose, or with the purpose intentionally to be destructive; videos of nothing; drawings of very dark subject matter.
But, here's some context from the blurb at the show:
"Steven Parrino (1958-2005 - yes, another young death) is considered by many as a model of a radical and uncompromising artistic activity. A witness to the death of painting, he unremittingly brought it back to life by replacing each and every piece of its corpse. Necrophilia rescuing High Art: an ambitious project to which Parrino devoted himself for more than twenty years, ignoring hierarchies, good taste and categories."
That pretty much says it all - bad taste was rampant. The show was paired or actually conceived as a tritptych with two other areas of influence on Parrino - Before (Plus ou Moins), which had some pieces from artists like Warhol, Judd, Smithson and Stella among others, and another room titled Bastard Creature, which included artists that Parrino supported and curated shows for and who mostly exhibited the same tendencies towards darkness and bad taste, and mostly unviewable "art".
Upstairs was a far more accessible and viewable show from Japan called Senseware - Tokyo Fiber 2007, which was primarly focused on new textiles and fabric materials and how they could and are being used in commercial applications - everything from clothing to fabric wraps for small, hand held televisions made by Sony to fabric wraps for Honda cars to projection surfaces to underwear for chairs that precisely fit your buttocks to temperature sensitive furniture to water repellent rainwear (to play in the rain with) to carpeting designed to be shaped like a pet that you can carry around or take to bed or just snuggle up with to get warm.
Lots of interesting materials, designs and ideas - very Japanese in sensibility and nature. Fun to walk around and touch the materials and see whimsical design ideas after the Parrino darkness.
You're probably getting the idea that one museum per day was all I could handle on this trip.
Wednesday:
Airs de Paris; Annette Messager; Philippe Mayaux - Centre Pompidou.
Airs de Paris was a huge, rambling show that I could not get through, even in over three hours of walking through relatively quickly. It's a big, multidisciplinary show of 59 artists, 16 landscape designers, interior designers and architects, all looking at modern urban space and commenting on it. The show is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the museum and explores the themes of cities and urban life, with Paris as the primary focus and starting point of energy that extends beyond the boundaries of the city.
The show takes its inspiration from Marcel Duchamp's Air de Paris, a ready-made piece from 1919, which was part of the opening display that the museum put on in 1977, with Duchamp as their first artist retrospective, and there are comments on that piece from other artists as a complement to start the show.
Some of the art was intriguing. Lots was forgettable. The thing I actually liked the most was the layout and naming of the different areas. There were three primary areas (Art, Geographical Airs and Areas: Landscaping, Architecture, Design, and Art (again) and then subthemes within each of these areas (Another Urban Space, Remix and Fictions; New Perceptions of Space and Time; The Media and NICT at the Heart of Urban Life - "Unpredictable Future?"; New Public Languages and Popular Urban Cultures; Conflicts, Risks and Accidents; Ascensional Horizons; Corporal Spheres; Vertical Landscapes; Territorial Strata; Urban Ecology and Biotechnologies, from Nature to Artifice; Identities and Communities; Individuals and Globalised Networks; and, Intimacy and Urban Life.
Annette Messager won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, but I was not familiar with her or her work. Some interesting ideas and some not so interesting. Good use of pullies and winches in some of her (not so interesting) work, where she pulls and drags stuffed body parts and stuffed animals around. The mechanics were more interesting than the art for me.
The piece that actually seemed the most interesting to me was the one that was least accessible - a room that you could not enter, only view through slits in the walls and comprising a "secret room", where the artist has personal mementoes and objects, but you really can't make out what most of them are.
The other piece that I liked was one from the Biennale, a piece that used a big red sail that was made to wave by automated fans and displayed, as it moved, various objects that lit up underneath it, like looking through a big red ocean at a fantastical undersea world of odd objects. The movement of the sail was quite beautiful. Movement seems somewhat central to Messager's work. In this piece, it worked quite well. In others, it seemed far too random and pointless to me.
Philippe Mayaux was the Prix Marcel Duchamp winner for 2006. Utterly forgettable and boring. Duchamp is probably rolling in his grave. His work draws on loud colors juxtaposed against all white pieces and has a fairly obvious sexual reference to it all (really - vulvas as cuckoo clocks with angel wings). Supposedly his work is a reference to Picabia and Duchamp, but if their work was intentionally banal and making a statement about art and life, this work is mostly just banal and obvious and a cliche. I guess I didn't like it.
Thursday:
From Cezanne to Picasso - Masterpieces from the Vollard Gallery. Musee D'Orsay.
I normally would have passed on this show. How many Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, etc does one need to see in a lifetime anyway?
But, I went to see this show because the angle of Ambroise Vollard, who was dealer to many of the artists (for better or worse in some cases) was intriguing and seeing the paintings in the historical context of Vollard and his influence and affinities with the artists made the show very worthwhile.
The highlight was actually at the end of the exhibition, the last room, where there were pieces of other media that Vollard encouraged the artists to take up - gravures, painted ceramics and sculptures as well as many drawings and lithographs on paper.
Turns out that there were actually a number of paintings I had not seen before as well, always a treat, including some very early Cezanne's and a number of Nabis and Fauve pieces from Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Rouault, and Odeon.
Worth seeing.
That was it for art on this trip. A good mix and some good contemporary art, which I generally prefer these days as it spurs more ideas and my imagination better.
More on the rest of the trip in another blog later.
posted by Paul Salinger at 7:13 AM
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