5 October 2008
white night
Last night was La Nuit Blanche here in Paris and despite some rather disappointing Art Events I had quite a good time. According to the official map, there were over 75 different projects and other assorted events throughout the city. It’d be tough to see them all, but since things ran roughly from 7 p.m. until 6 in the morning or so, you could have a pretty good shot at it. Unfortunately, the only thing I was truly excited to see – Patti Smith playing two shows in a church – was impossible to get into, the 600 free tickets for each show vaporizing before I got a chance to get one…
The other disappointment was that almost everything turned out to be some sort of Video Projection. Is that what public art has come to, the Great Intervention of only mildly interesting moving images shone on some facade? Most of the public spaces allotted for the art were either churches or grand courtyards, and with only one exception the architecture just blew away the art. The worst example of this was for poor Jeremy Blake, whose multi-channel video piece was relegated to a few medium-sized flat-screen TVs arranged in front of the much-better-lit altar at the Église Saint-Paul. I don’t love Blake’s work, but at the very least it can be immersive and somewhat hypnotic – just not here. The church was much more beautiful. I would have rather seen what Robert Stadler did there last year, but, alas Video rules in ’08.
There were, of course, other things going on – open galleries at the Pompidou, lectures and things (unfortunately too full), even open swimming pools… I did enjoy a global web-cam reading of Proust, a project by Véronique Aubouy, although, of course, what you saw when you went to the space was… video projections. I really should have made it up to see Shaad Ali and his Bollywood spectacle – I bet that was the best thing all night! – but I spent the evening going from spot to spot in and around the Marais and hoping for the best.
The only exceptional piece I saw was Christian Boltanski’s environment in a courtyard in the Marais. Working with the composer Franck Krawaczyk and lighting designer Jean Kalman, Boltanski transformed this hidden space into another world. Barely lit by his trademark lightbulbs, the courtyard was subdued by fog and a paper snowfall. The only lit windows were papered-over, behind which silhouetted figures could be seen: a man playing the violin, another on piano, and in a lower window, a child practicing at the barre. The music was faint but beautiful, then suddenly the lights flashed and glowed and an old man in an overcoat walked a circle around the yard, ringing a bell. I’m sure one could tease out some narrative meaning if one wanted to, but why bother? Boltanski has always been a master of mood, and his elegiac (and, yeah, death-obsessed) work has always done it for me, so easy and manipulative as it is. (Another artist I first saw as a teenager – and the teenager in me hasn’t let go…) Here he just transformed us to some snowy Eastern European night, and left us there to dream what we would.
I thought a lot about the superficial charms of Festival Art as I walked around last night. Not long ago I would have ragged on the cheap tricks of the genre – a thousand flags! a million band-aids! a courtyard filled with salt! But who knew things could get worse? I’ve already written how I feel about Video, but what a Lazy Spectacle it all becomes here, like a series of Walk-In Movies projected large enough to hide the lack of Depth. Really, the best part of the night was the somnambulist city, and my friend Cydney and I wandering freely, gently guided by the Promise of Art. That promise was enough, I guess… We re-crossed our own path and covered miles, it seems, drinking from a bottle of cognac and practicing our weak French. None of it was very deep, I’m sure, but none of that mattered in the end.