Thursday, 27 September 2012

Marais, Montparnasse, and the Biennale de Belleville



Gallerie Dix9 - Studio21bis







Galerie Chantal Crousel - Gabriel Orozco









Consulting the map to find our way around…

Galerie Michel Rein - Elisa Pône





Musée du Montparnasse - Portrait de Famille










With Works by:
Eso Peluzzi (1894-1985)
Claudio Bonichi (1943-)
Benedetta Bonichi (1968-)










This is the tiny map. It doesn't get any bigger.



















So that was my weekend.

Thursday, 20 September 2012

Stone Tourism and Geological Accidents

People who have been following this blog or my work for some time might know that I have been getting interested in collecting rocks. Rocks! Stones! Geology! Archaeology! Subjects that are not discussed quite enough in Singapore! But ah, now we are in Paris, where everything is built with stone and rocks! So have you ever wondered, where exactly do the stones in all of Paris' iconic buildings come from? No? Well, I'm going to tell you more about rocks anyway.

I thought we'd start, for example, with the most famous of famous churches, which would be Saint-Denis, where all of the monarchs of France and their families have been buried from the 10th century until 1789 (with the exception of 3 kings). It stands to reason that such a significant building would have the oldest, the most EPIC and monumental stones. And what else has the ability to say "EPIC" besides a stone that's more than a thousand years old?

This led to me a book entitled "Working with Limestone: The Science, Technology and Art of Medieval Limestone Monuments" by Vibeke Olson, one of the few English language books on large-scale medieval artistic production and stone studies.


Page 76:
"The French plain, which extends to the north of Paris, is made up of marl, clay and sand, on which the basilica of Saint-Denis and the medieval city that surrounds it were constructed. The Seine flows into an alluvial plain 1,200 m to the west of the basilica. To the north, the Pinson and Montmorency hills edge the horizon. Like the Montmatre and Belleville hills to the south of Saint-Denis, they are formed of gypsum, marls, clays, and Fontainebleau sand/sandstone layers, with the Montmorency cavernous siliceous limestone outcrops at the summits. Upstream, in the valley of Croult, from Garges-les-Gonesse 5km to the northeast of the basilica, the Saint-Ouen lacustrine limestone and the Beauchamp sand/sandstone can be found close to the surface.

Consequently, the material abundance near the city was an important source of local quarry stone and allowed the production of mortar, tiles and plaster. Only the building stones were not available locally and had to be imported. Fortunately the Paris basin is composed regionally of an excellent building stone known as Lutetian limestone (called Calcaire grossier)..."
It is this Calcaire grossier or soft limestone which many parts of the city of Paris was built with. The rest of chapter 5 elaborates more about the quarries and the Lutetian limestone known as the "Paris stone" (pierre de paris) that is found in all the medieval monuments.

Screen Shot 2012-09-24 at 5.04.41 PM.png

Image Source: "Working with Limestone: The Science, Technology and Art of Medieval Limestone Monuments" by Vibeke Olson

Lutetian limestone was extracted from a few parts of the banks of the Seine during the medieval period, and also in large quarry centers along the Oise river. The stone that was mined there was also called "Oise Stone (pierre de l'Oise) which was used in the nineteenth century and is still actively mining and exporting this stone to other countries and for the restoration of historical monuments. Limestone from these areas can sometimes be very hard or quite soft. Interestingly, in buildings like the basilica of Saint-Denis, they arranged it so that the hard stones faced outwards and the softer stones faced the interior. [One more stone of note is a kind of white hard chalk known as Vernon Stone (pierre de Vernon), mined from a spot approximately 110km from Saint-Denis, which was actually used for the foundations of the building. This Vernon Stone is also used in Normandy building sites. I add this additional fact in just for completeness.]

A slight digression of note at this point would have to do with another area also full of limestone - Cornwall and Lyme Regis. I have a certain interest in the coastline of Lyme Regis due to it being the setting of one of my favorite novels - John Fowles' "The French Lieutenant's Woman". Now, although later searching reveals that the origins of the name "Lyme Regis" comes from its proximity to a River Lym as first named by the Romans, I must admit that for some time I had thought the "Lyme" in "Lyme Regis" was related to the abundance of limestone (lime being calcium oxide) and all of its ancient fossils in the region. Many famous dinosaur fossils were found on the coasts of Lyme Regis (some by the famous palaeontologist Mary Anning), and limestone itself is a kind of rock that is likely to have been made from the skeletal remains of all the little marine organisms that teem in the seas. It is famously noted that Jane Austen had visited it three times and wrote it into her final novel, Persuasion. I am not so much an Austen fan to have noted this, but I learnt of the fictional fall of her character of Louisa Musgrove from Fowles' book, where the fictional victorian character of Ernestina notes, while fictionally walking down a flight of stairs that exists in reality, that "these are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persuasion'. Oh! What a dramatic accident! Apparently even Lord Tennyson was said to have commented (when he arrived in Lyme Regis):
Speaking of accidents, if one goes about searching for tours to either the quarries or the coast, one will see information stating that some areas and sites are considered unsafe for long visits because of the possibility of "geological accidents". This is a little vague sometimes. This particular phasing of words attracted me, because on one hand I knew it was used to describe true accidents in the sense of the word, like if parts of the rocks dislodged themselves and hit someone, that would be a geological accident. Or, if someone fell off whilst in the midst of a geological study, perhaps it would be called a geological accident. But then again, in its most obvious form, the term could also refer to geological anomalies such as fissures or faults. Last of all, geological accidents could also refer to the accidents by little animals and creatures that were compressed into the rocks to form fossils. So it is a pretty flexible term. Perhaps all of the above scenarios illustrate the dangers of being near rocks:

Geological Accidents:
(1) being hit by falling rocks
(2) falling off rocks
(3) earthquakes and other actual geological events
(4) becoming compacted and eventually fossilised, by accident

These are just meandering collections of facts at this point, so let's go back to the city of Paris. I found in another article (in french) that notes that since a lot of Paris was built from materials from Paris itself, the mining of gypsum and limestone in the city also gave rise to huge underground caverns and "catacombs". "Les Catacombes de Paris"! The article also seems to be describing how the catacombs are built in the process of mining for limestone. I wonder if I can visit them?

I've also found another link to a "Stone heritage centre in Saint Maximin, which is said to have been the source for stones that were "used to build Les Invalides, the Palais Bourbon and the Place de la Concorde"! Their simple website also writes: "The Maison de la Pierre ("stone-heritage centre") of southern Oise seeks to develop "stone tourism": cultural and industrial tourism centred around the department's important stone heritage..."

French people! I've never heard of "STONE TOURISM" before - is this phrase the result of some wonky french-to-english translations? Or are they attempting to come up with a new, cutting-edge tagline here? Either way, I don't mind going out to visit Oise as a Stone Tourist, as long as I get to witness some geological accidents along the way. Yeah baby.

See also:
Where Exactly did Louisa Musgrove Fall?
Les Anciennes Carrieres Du Calcaire Grossier a Paris
Comité Français d'Histoire de la Géologie

Object love: "Married to the Eiffel Tower"

From the opening to Married to the Eiffel Tower:
"I am a woman, and this is a bridge. And despite our vast differences, we are very much in love. And our love is no different from any other love that exists between two beings. One of the most difficult parts of being in love with a public object, is that he and i can never be truly intimate. Whereas objects i've loved in the past, that has never been an issue..."
I found an interesting documentary about people who have relationships with objects, who connected online together in a group known as Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale. Their website states that they denounced the above documentary for its "sensationalist" take on things, but seeing as to how there are few other documents of this, this is probably one of the few avenues to get an insight into this.

I suppose what's really curious is how they speak at length of their love in incredibly poetic terms, and that it was started by a model-builder who was able to build models of her love. There is a scene in which they take a miniature replica of the structure along with them when they go to visit the actual structure itself.

What exactly are they in love with then? I am not so clear on this. Are they attracted to the physical geometry (a lot of them express a love for fences and other similar structures), or the concept (politically significant objects like the Berlin Wall, and beautiful public attractions that give joy to other people such as the Eiffel Tower), or the "authentic" physical structure itself as an entire functional object? And crucially, I wonder, what role does the smaller replica play in all this? This is all so mysterious!

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Sirens and Surveillance, Performance and Power - Grasso's Silent Movie


Laurent Grasso - Silent Movie

Every year since I can recall, they've played the public warning system air raid sirens on the 15th of September (Civil Defence Day). They also play it on 15 February as that is Total Defence Day and also when the Japanese invaded Singapore during World War II. I'm not sure why 15th September was picked to be "Civil Defence Day" but it has always seemed suitable as a sort of birthday bell of sorts. I always thought it was quite special to have some island-wide sounds to look forward to on my birthday.

This year I am in Paris on my birthday, but I still got to hear the siren as I asked my friends back in SIngapore to record it for me and a number of them kindly obliged. It was awesome, because the places where different people had recorded it all sounded so different: some sounded like they were living in the middle of nature with insects all around, whereas others sounded like they were next to traffic. And in the midst of all the different landscape sounds, there was the same steady cry of the air raid warning siren. It can be easy to forget that the chiming sirens' real purpose is to be a test of the air raid sirens and public warning system in Singapore; a monthly chime that resembles a charming little church bell plays on the first day of each month and I am sure that many think it is a church bell - but it is actually the testing of the public warning systems.

I will confess that there is very little need to "sell" the idea of civil defence to me; my father had been a naval officer and he had always talked about the importance of various strategic outposts as surveillance or radar stations that would be Singapore's eyes out at sea, and which would allow one to "safeguard" one's shoreline by watching it closely. So if you asked me, I would be inclined to agree that everything within one's own capacity ought to be done to ensure the safety and security of one's own home, even if this translated into keeping a close eye on all of the movements in international waters around Singapore. After all, if you did not preemptively collect and monitor this data or information, then how would one truly understand what was really going on?

When me and another friend did a surveillance camera performance some years back with a public webcam that pointed at a walkway along Wisma Atria (a public walkway that no longer exists today), I was excited by the fact that someone I wouldn't know could also be watching this. I google every single thing. I expect to be able to search and scour every piece of information and for the same to be said of the information I am putting out (although, in reality, i do realize not everyone is so inclined to do so, so its safe to say that probably no one is obsessively googling me now - but they could be! and I could be obsessively googling for something else too… and you would not know).

For this reason, I was quite attracted to Laurent Grasso's work. Especially Silent Movie, which shows the different surveillance points and deserted military installations on the coast of Spain. At first, one is more impressed by the spectacular view of the coastline, craggy rocks and scenic outcroppings from which one can see the sun glittering in the sea. The shots themselves are intentionally long and ponderous, and with nothing else to look at besides the scenery, one eventually stares at it until a hint of the installation reveals itself. Like a submarine sailing past. Or that the camera is on top of a big gun. Or that the curious building in the distance is not just any building but a military outpost.

The military fortifications embedded into the coast were made to be visible to those approaching the coast, and in a way, their visibility could be more important than their functionality, for we are shown how their strategic viewpoints provide an overview of the coastline. Although the military installations are now seemingly disused and empty, the physical presence of the military architectures still suggests to the observer that he is being watched; like Bentham's Panopticon.

It is a bit like the big (and slightly ostentatious) mobile column of brand new armoured vehicles, battle tanks, and military equipment that occurs every five years at the National Day Parade in Singapore and then makes an epic tour around the different neighborhoods of Singapore. Are ordinary Singaporeans really interested in looking at our military's numerous tanks and armoured vehicles? Maybe they are interested in it, but certainly these shows of power aren't just for Singaporeans but it is also a public performance and display of heavy military equipment that is meant for our foreign neighbors to see.

Singapore's defense expenditure will constitute almost 25 percent of government spending in 2012, with Singapore Budget 2012 reporting that expected total expenditure by Ministry of Defence "is projected to be $12.28 billion. This makes Singapore's defense budget the largest in the Southeast asian region. There is also a well-known and established military manufacturing sector in Singapore and Singapore-made rifles, anti-tank weaponry, warships, etc,. are also exported to other armies. For example, rather than purchasing off-the-shelf guns that would not be as suitable for smaller asian people and would have high maintenance costs, they instead developed and produced the SAR 21 (Singapore Assault Rifle 21) to fit asian physiques and over time also produced new models which improved on various design weaknesses that were commonly found in other assault rifles. Nearly ever able-bodied male in Singapore will at one time or another be conscripted into the military. Singapore also makes it into the GMI (Global Militarisation Index) at 2nd place; in an index calculated by "the comparison of a country’s military expenditure with its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its health expenditure".

On the significance of the Militarisation index:
Power is a performance which must have an audience. A performance could consist of just people watching each other to see what each other would do. I don't quite buy it when people say they perform for no one, or make works without regard to who will see it. But I suppose that is why interaction is important for me in my own work.

Abrupt end to post: Today the sun is great and I am going out for a walk.

Monday, 17 September 2012

Jeu de Paume - Rosa Barba / Eva Besnyö / Laurent Grasso


Galerie Nationale du Jeu de paume [Source]

The Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume is an national gallery of contemporary art with a focus on images and moving images. The building was originally built for real tennis courts (jeu de paume) but it was later renovated to become a museum. It has actually had a checquered past with it having been used to store Jewish cultural property that had been looted by the Nazis during the years 1940-1944. Later, after World War II, it was used to display the biggest collection of Impressionist works which later moved to the Musee d'Orsay in 1986. Currently it seems to focus a lot on moving images and contemporary media arts/installations, so it was well worth the trip down to see.

Currently one can see exhibitions and works from 3 artists at the Jeu de Paume:

- Rosa Barba, "Vu de la porte du fond"
- Eva Besnyö, "The Sensuous Image"
- Laurent Grasso, "Uraniborg"

All three shows run from 22 may to 23 september.

Rosa Barba - "Vu de la porte du fond"

Rosa Barba - Vue de l'exposition au Jeu de Paume

Rosa Barba - The Hidden Conference: A Fractured Play (Image source: Jeu de Paume)

Rosa Barba's work is sited in an interstitial space of the gallery that was not originally meant for exhibition use, and the work appears as a series of works that the visitor stumbles across as they walk around, without prior explanation. Playing with the idea of the film as a physical material and fractures in narratives; some of the works feel more like conceptual exercises involving film, such as "Coupez ici", which is a "moving sculpture" with celluloid strips spinning and rolling within a lightbox. These "exercises" feel a little abstracted and a bit distant for me. But the most immersive work was the one where the entire cinema had been converted into a strange theatre of film. "The Hidden Conference: A Fractured Play" is one of those things you walk into and then have no idea what is going on. I sat there for three rounds of it before I determined that this was probably the way the artist wanted it to be: to make almost no sense to a casual viewer. I walked in a darkened cinema with three spots of light: a spotlight on a large, oversized loud hailer squashed ignominiously into a small cinema seat, another spotlight on a slightly abused 16mm projector hanging from the ceiling from the very celluloid rolls that was going through it in some sort of tortuous looking pulley system, and the last spotlight being the film itself that was projected on the cinema screen. The audience walked in to watch a jerky and somewhat random super8 clip that seemed to be all about broken sculptures. Sculptures with fractured heads, arms, legs, and other parts. There was no commentary, just background sounds and clipped words in the audio of the film. Suddenly, it would end and be replaced by the suspended projector turning on back into the audience. During the first viewing, the suspended projector shone a square of light over an area where a woman from the audience was sitting. I looked over. She looked at me. We looked at the screen. We looked all around. Nothing happened. Eventually, the film started up again! And this repeated. Alright... (This is like that parody of a french film where a beautiful girl skates backwards in a room full of strange people and then they stop the take and discover that a bunch of chickens in the backroom are the ones writing the script)

Eva Besnyö - "The Sensuous Image"


Eva Besnyö, “Self Portrait” (1931) (Image source: Jeu de Paume)

Eva Besnyö's show is a retrospective of her long career as a architectural photographer, also as the new breed of female photographers in that period who were able to make a living from it and also shoot many images on the street. Most works are sans titres and they provide some glimpses of what Europe was like through the years. For me, it was basically the images of a woman who lived in Europe during those years. It was interesting enough but to be honest it did not move me very much beyond seeing a picture of Europe in those years.

Laurent Grasso - "Uraniborg"


Laurent Grasso - Uraniborg

Laurent Grasso's work is in my opinion, the star exhibit at the Jeu de Paume. An excellently curated exhibition of his film works which are presented in a manner that I have never seen before.

The spaces that have been built to show his works are utterly impressive. You approach a dark gallery, and there is an image in the wall, but this is not just a lightbox or a projection. It is built in a way that it feels like an impossible window into another dimension. This is achieved by cutting a hole into the wall and having the projection some distance away so that one feels like one is looking into a window into another space when looking straight at the projection. Due to the ingenious method of construction, it induces a sense of "vertigo" from the "forced perspective" effect, as one can walk around it and find that the image "floats". This has to be seen to be believed.

Of note:
Les Oiseaux (2008)
This to me seems to be a poetic observation that the flocks of starlings over the Vatican appear like a mysterious moving smear in the sky due to their great numbers, and to this he notes that "some civilisations interpret flights of starlings as presages". Certainly from this we can already see his interest in looking to the skies for the signs.

On Air (2009)This is another short involving a camera strapped to a falcon that is sent into flight in areas around the United Arab Emirates. We see images of the bird's flight, and a handler holding up a giant radar to track the bird, combining the old image of the falcon used as a surveillance tool and the modern surveillance tool of a digital camera and transmitter.

Silent Movie (2010)
For me, I sometimes feel that some film works stand almost like sculptures, and this would be one of those types of works for me. It is a film that will make no sense without description and closer examination, as it consists of many slow takes and long shots of what appears to be, on first glance, nothing other than a beautiful natural coastline. The work slowly reveals the beautiful environment of Cartegena and slowly, also the military installations hidden in the natural environment. The camera's viewpoints apparently show the different perspectives of attacker and besieged, allowing one to see the site of Cartegena from the perspective of its role as a strategic spot for surveillance.

Bomarzo (2011)
The film of Bomarzo recalls the story of Park of Monsters (Parco die Mostri), a curious theme park of statues that had been constructed by the slightly eccentric Count Vicino Orsini in around 1550. Consisting of various mythologically inspired sculptures of monstrous characters which are scattered across the grounds in no apparent order or manner of logic, this particular film is shot on a shaky handheld which is much unlike all of other immpeccably made, high production value film works. You will wish it was clearer because one feels like peering and craning one's neck to get a better look, but it is all fuzzy and mysterious like the origins of these massive, monstrous sculptures which were also made famous by other artists coming to take photos with it while on holiday in the region.

Uraniborg (2012)
Another work that looks to the skies, with its key image being the statue of the astronomer Tycho Brahe who spent 20 years of his life on Ven (an island between Denmark and Sweden) observing the stars and recording their position and movements from a castle-observatory that was named after Urania, the Muse of Astronomy - hence the name, Uraniborg. It was built in around 1576 and it is considered to have been remarkably accurate and his work is still useful till today. The stars themselves are something which are simultaneously visible all the time and also invisible to us without the required equipment. Nothing is said to remain of the actual castle that he resided in, destroyed soon by citizens after Tycho Brahe left the island. However, Tycho Brahe's ponderous statue still stands there and still gazing up at the sky are crucial to this piece.

For more information and images on Laurent Grasso's work and Uraniborg, please see the Jeu de Paume website here.

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

The Vernissages of "La Rentree"

Vernissages were aplenty last weekend as autumn marks the start of the cultural season in Paris. I was shocked to see so many openings on the list for the 8th of September (of all dates! the first weekend in Paris) but this was also the very weekend (la rentree) that marked the change of the season. We were blessed with unusually good weather, and armed with a copy of the Galeries Mode D'emploi, we headed out to see as much as we could (hot on the heels of a four-day extreme museum marathon!!!); we encountered about a dozen shows on this desultory meander, and it was very impressive in general, with at least four being noteworthy:

Highlights for me:
1. Sophie Calle (Galerie Perrotin)
2. Claire Morgan (Galerie Karsten Greve)
3. Greg Semu (Galerie Metropolis)
4. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (Gallery Xippas)

What we saw on a walk through the art district:
1. Greg Semu's fantastic pacific islander reintepretations/restylings of famous christian paintings
2. Aurelie Haberey's photos of a curtain (the only really boring work in the whole walk, actually)
3. Some iconic/famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe (you will have seen this before)
4. Pierre Petit's "Si de si" (a perplexing coil of led lights around some metal weighing scales)
5. Anne-Lise Broyer's cut-up mountain pictures and sketches
6. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's sound works (bees!)
7. Sturtevant's new video works which might or might not be related to Deleuze
8. Jean-Luc Parant's taxidermied creatures cast into resin
9. Claire Morgan's amazingly detailed sculpture-installations of dead flies
10. Sophie Calle's brilliant exhibition in which she asks blind people in Istanbul to describe the last thing they saw before losing their sight forever…

Here follows a more detailed chronological account:

Greg Semu, "The Last Cannibal Supper" / La Galerie Metropolis (16 rue de Montmorency)



The first gallery that we chanced upon was La Galerie Metropolis where we saw the works of Samoan artist Greg Semu. His work was a series of detailed photographic portraits which recalled the iconography of religious paintings from the Christian world - except that the figures have been played by Kanak tribespeople, dressed in traditional costumes which are worn during rituals and ceremonies. Apparently Semu grew up in Auckland but has resided abroad for many years. His work raises the question of how in New Zealand the occidental culture has systematically erased and eroded tradition and people's cultural roots; in his portrait of "The Last Cannibal Supper", the "cannibal" native has one last supper before rescinding his cultural identity - only to partake of the blood and the body in the eucharist?

Hommage a Marilyn Monroe, André de Dienes, The first portrait / Galerie David Guiraud (5 rue de Perche)



Some famous images of Marilyn Monroe. You will probably have seen these images before. I guess there are some very famous works making the circuit in Paris. I guess they all had to be shown somewhere before they gained such world-wide recognition; and some of these work are still being shown over and over again elsewhere. Galerie David Guiraud apparently focuses on showing a lot of "classic" modern photography like this.

Anne-Lise Broyer, "Leçons de Saint-Victoire & Vermillon" / La Galerie Particuliere (16 rue de Perche)



La Galerie Particuliere is an interesting space split across two streets. There was a show inside both of the spaces which was by Anne-Lise Broyer whose written text perhaps exceeds the work itself. She quotes Robert Bresson in his Notes sue le cinematophe: "An image should transform itself through contact with other images, like a color in contact with other colors". Her images are supposed to be "in-between images" from which the viewer can make what he/she will of the works. While the sentiment is good and the works are generally aesthetically pleasing in their "delicacy" (this seems to be a word that the French seem to very fond of!), I find the "in-between" works (as described by the artist of her own work) to be unsatisfying because it is not demanding enough. If art or literature is not like a knife that's stabbing you, then I would find it boring. You might as well take a picture of some normal curtain and then call it art. And if I ever see another artist take a picture of a curtain and then attempt to pass it off as art, then I will probably have to stab that so-called "artist". That would certainly be cause for an artistic intervention…

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot / Gallery Xippas (108 rue Vielle-du-temple)




Gallery Xippas is located next to Galerie Yvon Lambert (where Paolo Giulini's exposition is also on at right now). Getting there, you might notice the curious queue to get up on a busy day, because the entrance to the gallery has been blocked by many rocks. Boursier-Mougenot's rationale for doing this is so that people slow their pace before going upstairs since you have to concentrate pretty hard on getting up the stairs in one piece (without rolling down on the bed of large pebbles). Upstairs he has a number of sound works and installations, the most notable of which is a beehive with a microphone inside it, amplifying the sound of bees coming in and out of the hive which bees can still access through the window. I would be very excited about this…. except that I had just seen a beehive with a pipe to a window at the Ottoneum (a venue for documenta at Kassel), so the bringing of beehives to urban places where they are isolated yet so close and visible to us is not a new image to me anymore. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, the sound works had significant presence in the room. The hum of bees which is perceived as a threatening "white noise" to us humans is actually important bee communication that apparently helps the bees bond together. As for the black bakelite phone, I understood that it was supposed to ring every time somebody googled the word "phantom". The effort and queuing was worth it, but I still think perhaps it could have gone further with the idea, rather than simply presenting a straight-up visual "conceit".

Sturtevant, "L'Abécédaire De Deleuze" / Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (7 Rue Debelleyme)


Elaine Sturtevant is probably more famous for having an artistic career that is almost entirely based on copying other artists, which I think is only really interesting for the people who are writing about art. Her older work in general is not in any way inspirational for me as an artist because it is pure concept and lacking in form and content and imagination. This work was not in English and there was no accompanying English text - so my best guess would be that it was something about art world people talking about something, maybe Deleuze. I apologize I am not trying harder to figure out what it is, because I figure that either way it is probably going to be all the same; actually I'm not really sorry either… ("Next!")

Jean-Luc Parant "Mémoire du merveilleux" / Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier (8 rue Debelleyme)




The light was dim and it looked like a huge pile of rocks inside the gallery, which naturally attracted me. But these were not just rocks, these were man-made objects that looked like fossils and rocks. The setting for Parant's exhibition were suitably lush and were clearly intending to exude some sort of "natural", "classic" and/or "historical" feel, with plant anatomical drawings and whole mummified baby elephants and pufferfish and other exotic flora and fauna, frozen in time. His work was about creating marvelous artifacts - unbelievable fossils which have animals with a crazy mix of animal parts appearing from jet black rocks. There was a band playing on the second floor when we came in, and they played a long, mysterious and moody introduction to their set while we ascended the stairs, which was really impressive and it even helped intensify the mood of mystery - that is, until we got upstairs, and then the band suddenly segued in a very mundane and predictable rendition of Sinatra's "Fly me to the Moon". Yes, it was that kind of vernissage, and the crowd was significantly older, in posher clothes, probably more monied, and maybe slightly less critical at this show than others. On closer examination of the pieces, the resin casts are rougher than one would expect, and the studies and other paintings could really be more detailed. The taxidermied and preserved animals look a little shocked to have been permanently frozen into place in someone's artwork of all things. There was something in the presentation style that showed that it wanted to seem convincingly authentic but these "fake historical" items did not speak to me with their stories; instead, the natural portions of the work (i.e: the taxidermied animals) all seemed to be quite alarmed at these ministrations, especially with the application of permanent resin around these natural objects!

Claire Morgan "Quietus" / Galerie Karsten Greve (5 rue Debelleyme)






Claire Morgan's work is so detailed that it truly blows all the other works out of the water; most artists do not make works which have such excellent form, although it must be very very tedious to build a work such as that. Blowing at her delicate work, however, is something that is specifically forbidden (as says a small sign next to each work) - as each of her works consist of hundreds and thousands of tiny little dead flies or dandelion seeds strung up onto transparent threads and hung from the ceiling. They form columns and lines and blocks which are perfectly lined up. It is terrifyingly fragile, and that is the point of the work itself, because life is fragile. The studies and sketches are also equally detailed and amazing; but the precision of the installations is jaw-dropping which makes it truly worth a visit to see in person.

Sophie Calle - "Pour la dernière et pour la première fois" / Galerie Perrotin (76 rue de turent)





We chose to end this walk on a high note by going to Sophie Calle's show. Calle's work has a very strong, anthropological element to it - in that she goes out and speaks to many people and her pictures have a strong narrative thread that accompanies all of them. This was an excellent exhibition about her project asking blind people in Istanbul what was the last thing they remember seeing before losing their sight. All these were people were not blind from birth but had lost their sight for some reason. Some go into detail on how they lost their sight, while some remain slightly enigmatic. The stories are brilliant (the catalogue is quite desirable as it has all the images and texts, but it was too steep at a whopping 79 euros) but I guess that even if this had been the only show I had seen in the area, it would have been worth an entire trip on its own.