7 September 2008
the ninety-nines
For a foreign place, Paris sure feels like home. It’s one of the reasons I came here, and it’s not due to anything particularly profound. It’s in the small daily ways of living, and believe it or not I am trying to live small here. In many ways, Paris is much like New York (though that only proves to me how European New York can seem…) I buy my bread at the bakery, my meat at the butcher, my vegetables at the farmer’s market. I can walk everywhere, or take the Metro if I’m going far (though not all night long, unfortunately.) Parisians even jaywalk as much as New Yorkers – no, more.
So last night I did what I would often try to do in the Fall: go to gallery openings. It’s not the enormity of the usual (and usually fun) Chelsea Open Season that I always seem to hit, but I still managed to go to eight or nine openings. I can’t say I was impressed by much, except how the art here looks just like the art at home. I did get to enjoy an older piece by Sophie Calle that I’d never seen in person (Gotham Handbook, 1994/2000), at Emmanuel Perrotin. There were Jesper Just videos in the main gallery space, but I hate watching Slow TV with a bunch of sweaty rubber-neckers… I will go back and check them out on my own time, when it’s quiet.
The only other artist I liked was Susan Collis, in a group show called Lure at Galerie Frank Elbaz. I suppose her transformation of everyday objects is a bit of an obvious gambit in the high-low game, but I almost always appreciate really good craft, and I like a sneaky surprise, if it’s rewarding…
Of course, like at all gallery openings, the people-watching was the most fun. I can’t say exactly why yet (I need more data!) but the High Style of the Parisians is definitely different than that of New Yorkers. The Fuck You artist look here seems more about Wacky Color and Kooky Prints, where it’s still more that roughed-up, post-punk “oh this old thing?!?” in New York. But so many more people were just seriously dressed up, and I mean really nicely. Well-tailored jackets on the men, gorgeous cocktail dresses on the women. People also looked a lot older to me – busted wrinkled faces and bagged eyes, but man, they looked good. I’m sure it’s the Smoking Culture here (still in full swing) that gets you looking that way, but it’s clearly the je m’en fous that keeps you looking that hot.
Speaking of, I already ran into someone I know: the designer Zaldy and his boyfriend, both of whom were dressed to the ninety-nines. Clearly, they’ve been to openings in Paris before…
6 September 2008
get lost
It turns out it’s not that easy to get lost in the middle of Paris. I left for a purposely vague walk in the direction of the Pompidou yesterday, but found I almost always ended up on some large thoroughfare with signs and directions to the landmarks. I suppose at some point one would always run into the Seine anyway… I kept having to take wide wrong turns to discover another small street on the way to the museum, but I made it there pretty quickly despite myself.
I was pretty disappointed in the Pompidou’s collection, as displayed throughout the 4th floor. So much of it seemed like second-tier work, unless I just really don’t get the French sensibility. I mean, where else outside of Austria would you see so much of the Viennese Actionists? (And, really, aren’t 10 Schwarzkoglers way more than enough…?) What I hated most was the layout of work – like gathered with like, to the point where everything became equal and invisible in a sea of similar form. Here were all the drippy paintings, here the inflatables, here some big faces, here all the hanging things…
There was a beautiful Joseph Beuys I’d never seen before – an elephantine felt-wrapped piano and, nearby, its skin – but only poor examples of artists I usually expect to see and enjoy, like Twombly, Basquiat or Anselm Keifer. (In a typical juxtaposition, the poor Kiefer was hung directly across from a really awful Gerard Garouste that just made me want to move on quickly…) There was a nice Antoni Tàpies, one of those artists I loved as a teenager but rarely see these days. The context should have had me look for other Europeans I miss, like Jannis Kounellis, but I was really just here to see Miroslav Tichy.
The Tichy show was not what I feared – some small rescue-mission of the few pieces I’d already seen online – but a rather exhaustive survey of almost 100 photographs, with a few artifacts (including cameras) and a half-hour documentary, too. The pieces were gorgeous to see in person, but more for their physical aura than for any reason photographic in nature. And here’s the problem – and the joy – with Tichy’s work: it’s really just about the objects, and the whiff of Outsider Authenticity that makes art-lovers (and collectors) drool.
I can’t say I’m all that different; it’s not really about the images for me either. (Heck even Roberta Smith would rather look at the cameras.) Tichy’s process certainly is fascinating, as he used a variety of cameras made from scraps and paper and cardboard, with plexiglass lenses that he cut with a knife and polished with toothpaste and cigarette ash… His darkroom work seems to be much the same, and his prints were left strewn about to be stained and creased over time. Many have handmade cardboard mats or frames, with penned-in outlines. Some prints are scratched or drawn-on to enhance the image. If you have any love for the found-object (as I sure as hell do), you would find these objects gorgeous, too.
The problem, of course, is the pictures. There just really aren’t many that are all that interesting in the usual formal way, and one is quickly overwhelmed by the force of Tichy’s, well, creepiness... Photo after photo is of a woman (or women or, in fact, girls) taken from behind. He seems to be trying to catch them unawares and as undressed as possible. He is stalking them. Many are taken at the local pool in Kyjov, where one man who grew up there recalls Tichy hanging about and scaring the kids. As this guy (now a curator) says in the documentary, many kids thought the picture-taking was fake, a ruse. There are few direct portraits, and even those seem taken under duress. There are even some nudes, but at least one is off a television screen. And the Still Life pictures are mostly bras…
The show does seem a rescue mission after all, for the beatification of an almost “lost” artist. The story is half the art here, and it’s a funny game being played. He is extolled as much for being the “primitive” as he is for being a deliberate genius, producing work "not for others, but solely for himself without any regard for exhibiting or selling the work to others" (that, according to one of his galleries…) At the same time, his art and technique are called out as a specific attempt to be original. He has been quoted as saying, “If you want to be famous, you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world.” He can’t be too savvy or he wouldn’t be authentic, but he can’t be too naive to be a genius. In the documentary, the curators are even asking themselves, “Where is the chance, and where is the artistic intent?”
Still, it’s hard not to come away seeing Tichy as just a dirty old man. (In a very literal sense: Roman Buxbaum, the documentarian who grew up in Kyjov, mentions in the catalogue how children were told to wash their hands or they’d end up like Miroslav Tichy…) However, I can’t help but see in his work one more very important distillation of Photography: Voyeurism, and Tichy’s is the ultimate case*. If I am to look for the beginnings or foundations of Photography, even beyond the Salt Prints and handmade cameras, I have to look at Looking. It can be argued that that’s what makes Photography different from the other Arts. In every other case, the image is indirect, transferred via the Artist’s mind and hand. Despite what we know (more than ever) about the lies and limits of the camera image, Something is captured “automatically” by Light, no matter how much manipulation goes on before or after the Photographic Act. To some degree, it was there. Without that small degree of physical action on a light sensitive material, we just have… Drawing.
There is just so much to think about here (even that old chestnut, “What is Art?” ...more on that later.) With a head full of ideas, I left the Pompidou towards home, and even, this time, managed to get a little lost.
5 September 2008
little joys
I’ve been eating well in Paris, of course: potato-leek soup with fresh thyme; salted roast chicken with mustard and an apple-fennel-celeriac salad; baguette with creamy brie and deep red tomatoes; organic muesli with fat raspberries, yogurt, honey and mint… and I haven’t even been to a restaurant yet. I’m surprised to find that a lot of food is cheaper here than in New York, even with the weak dollar. There’s a huge bi-weekly market just outside my door, almost like my beloved Union Square, but oh so much closer… For €13 there (about 19 bucks today) I bought 2 fancy pieces of cheese, 2 melons, 6 apples, mint, lettuce, a large cod filet, a big bag of lentils and a bunch of fresh tomatoes. The cheese alone would have cost me that in New York, and wouldn’t have been nearly as good.
What is not so good is my French. It’s sad, as I’ve always had a tongue for languages – I can order coffee and offend your sister in German, I can bargain and tease in Spanish, and I can say (badly) “I don’t know Cantonese” in Cantonese. I can do all these things and more* in French (I studied it in high school – oh hell that’s 20 years ago!) but I feel suddenly slow and stupid here. I just haven’t had a real chance to work on it. My longest conversation so far was with the taxi-driver from the airport, during which we discussed the weather, the arondissements of Paris, when best to visit New York, and how neither of us really cares for Picasso. I couldn’t remember the word for fireplace (it’s cheminée) and found myself saying, “You know, when it’s cold outside and you want a fire in your house…” I’ll get there, I just need to practice.
Today is another gray and rainy day, but I have to walk again, perhaps to the Pompidou. Nothing calms me more than ambulatory and visual pleasures…
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4 September 2008
here it is
(click to enlarge)
I think I’m crashing today…
3 September 2008
the marble faun
I could not resist. Even tho it’s rainy and gray, and I feel hungover from traveling, I had to get out into the City today. What was to be a little exploration became a three-hour walk, with a stop at the Musée d’Orsay for a damn good reason: Calotypes.
One of the questions I’m asking myself on this, um, sabbatical is, “Why Photography?” My old line was that I worked backwards through Photo History in order to learn how to draw again. Photography was born from drawing, in part from one artist’s frustrations and a wish that Nature would draw itself. For years now I have been asking myself how to combine Drawing and Photography. Can I make Drawings about Photography? Why not just make drawings and escape the Camera completely?
And here, the City lets me know it’s listening… on one side of town, my deepest inspiration: early paper photography at the Musée d’Orsay ; on the other side: a full show at the Pompidou of my recent discovery, Miroslav Tichy. These could represent two sides of Photography (the process and the camera) at their most stripped-down state, exactly the way I love them. This, of course, is just what I’d be jettisoning simply to draw. A wonder indeed that both shows just happen to be up right now…
I actually walked by the Pompidou on my long promenade to the d’Orsay, stopping in the Tuileries for a while, and passing by the Louvre. I was rather tired by the time I made it to the Museum, but excited to see two exhibitions of Calotypes. Unfortunately, I had somehow googled my way to a lie, which promised me French Calotypes (including my dear Bayard!) alongside the British ones, but it just wasn’t true. The d’Orsay did, however, have a great show of French Daguerreotypes, making the disparities between Photography’s Twin Parents perfectly evident – The Grand Grainy Tour of the more transportable (and reproducible) Paper versus the more Perfect Shine of the Mirror. The one is full of ruins and vistas, the other of cities and faces. Country Mouse and City Mouse…
The Dags had some great little surprises, but it was more as objects than as images that I loved them. There were so many in the small red rooms, and I couldn’t really concentrate. (This may have been in part due to the Bulge of Teenagers bunching around the few nudes…) Either I was more jet-lagged than I realized, or I guess I had really just come for the paper.
(click to enlarge)
Now, I had seen the British Calotypes at the Met last year, but it sure seemed a different show here, with a few things I hadn’t seen before. It was interesting to note that my two favorites from the Met exhibition sat at either side of the entry text… The d’Orsay has good taste! At any rate, even here my tired brain could only fixate on small details – hidden figures, collection-stamps impressed into bare skies, the hand-written captions, the varying contrast and color of les epreuves salées… Afterwards, I sat for a good long time in the great hall, gazing absently over a Satyr’s Butt. There are little magicks in those early pictures I don’t feel ready to give up yet, but it’s hard to imagine how to move forward when I’m mostly looking back. I have no answers yet, and the Faun has turned to stone.
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2 September 2008
arrête
Well I made it to Paris. After a hectic year marked by dreams of escape I’ve finally come, jet-lagged and over-tired, to a full stop. Is there such a thing as Mental Momentum? If so, it would explain why it seems loose bits of my brain were thrown about the place when I crashed. I am puttering about and settling in, too fried to go explore the city yet too excited to sit still. I’m distracted and unsure of myself. My tongue stumbles in a mouth full of French marbles… I’m going to enjoy being l‘étranger.
This is the week I promised to do nothing. I’m here long enough to get away with it, but it may be a hard promise to keep. I’m reading Peter Schjeldahl’s Let’s See (hate that title) to stay connected to contemporary art, while I dream of the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. Later, I will wander through 19th-century streets looking for the ghost of Hippolyte Bayard.*
I’m suddenly wondering what I’m doing here, which, I’ve been reminded, is the whole point.
