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Art Tourist
in
Paris
Beyond modern the future is plastic
by Terry Talty
PARIS
- Remember the old joke about Starbucks? If you miss one, keep driving
there’ll be another in ten minutes. In Paris, if you're not down with
the art museum you’re in front of, walk ten minutes and you'll find a
different one. You know this, because, as an Art Tourist, you’ve
already seen the Louvre - old photo-realism can be a snoozer - the
Musee d’Orsay with its rooms full of Renoirs, Degas, Monets, Manets,
the rooms go on and on. You’ve seen the moderns, DuChamp and the lot at
the Beaubourg, but, now, you want something really new, beyond modern.
So we go
to the Palais de Tokyo. The gutted Palais is Paris for warehouse and
sits next door to the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris -- even
shares a coffee shop/restaurant -- which can have fantastic shows of
new, old stuff - like the Mark Rothko retrospective.
Inside the Palais, it's Bauhausly stark. There is almost a smell
associated with contemporary exhibition spaces, a smell from the
street: concrete and dust, and a faint raunchiness - not the
urine smell of a Paris alley in summer -- more like smelly feet. As
contemporary art viewers, we're always asked to take off our shoes and
experience something. Over everything, however, is the modern smell of
a space inhabited with a lot of plastic, photographic paper and video
monitors. The sound is like a sports bar without the jocular people
sounds - a whole bunch of TVs tuned to different channels.
The walls
move around in these contemporary space and behind-the-scenes museum
people can arrange exhibition spaces to suit what’s showing. They had
fun in one room, turning it into a maze of walls. As you walked through
(you were allowed your shoes), the walls were covered with photographs,
big and small, as if someone had thrown opened that box with all the
snapshots from vacations, parties, memorable events and birthdays.
Pictures that expected never to be looked at again until the Pandora’s
box was opened some nostalgic day with the grandkids. We arrived at the
Palais de Tokoyo on this day, and this artist’s snapshots are all over
the walls.
“Was this
supposed to be thrilling because of all his gay lovers, pictures of
them at bar-b-ques or posing. I would have rather see my
grandfathers’ scrapbooks,” my companion says. "Right," I say, "Trips of
pensioners visiting towns bombed in WWII." “Yeah," he says, "those
scrapbooks are more interesting.”
The next
room - where we take our shoes off - is dark with the infrared lights
and double doors to keep out the light. It's a smell-less darkroom, and
when I get used tot he light, clothes make of photographic paper or
cloth are hanging casually about - each object appears white and the
arrangement reminds me of a country museum -- you know those
"historical" museums in small towns -- one in particular in Cozad,
Nebraska - the house where Robert Henri, the painter, was born. In the
house was one reproduction of Henri’s work, an early 20th century
portrait, but everything else was “period” - hairbrushes, sewing
mannequins - arranged as they would have been 100 years ago.
Apparently, I wasn’t privy to the importance of the clothes in this
room, just as I had no idea what people did with mannequins in 1908,
but “artists” had made the clothes and then set them up in here
mysteriously. Somehow the clothes were going to be exposed - the photo
paper they were made of - but when we, Artist Tourists, were going to
be allowed to see or do that, I didn’t know. Meanwhile, we were to look
at them while in the infra-red “darkroom” state. Yeah, the museum
in Cozad was cool, too - something about that eerie Midwestern gray
light and dust.
My
companion had secretly stowed his extra travel money in his shoes, so
he choose not to participate in this “no-shoes” room. Nor was he able
to see the next room. The viewer, me alone, was asked to walk inside,
adjust to no light and discover an open book of matches on a pedestal.
“Was it
worth it?” my companion asked. I told him what it was, and he was
relieve that it was so easy to describe in words. Great more time for
coffee.
The
most famous artist showing in the Palais that day was a young Japanese
woman who lives in New York, who had built a runway with a gazebo at
the end on which she had paraded and lounged making a video of herself
being sexually suggestive with an assortment of gaudy, baroque
materials and Japanese comic book images. She didn't plan to be
there in person, again.
And as far as the video goes, my companion said, "Why doesn’t she just
take off her clothes - that’s what we want to see. We never get to see
enough people naked. If this is art, it’s timid.”
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