At the Maison Rouge hidden in a tan stone building

by Terry Talty

The Art Tourist finally finds a show of a contemporary American in Paris.

Paris – I’ve seen racks of clothes at every town market in France, and they often look like they’ve seen better outlets, better days, but at the Maison Rouge – a gallery of contemporary art in the Bastille area of Paris – I saw clothes nicely grouped into matched outfits hanging from the ceiling of a gallery. Each outfit had a little Kleenex-like covering over the top as they hung in rows almost as dense as the market vendors clothes racks. This installed work by Ann Hamilton, the artist representing America at the Venice Biennale in 1999, looked like it would have been really fun to make. But how much fun is it to see the show?

For starters, the Maison Rouge is not in a red house. It is a beige contemporary building on Boulevard de la Bastille and none of the street magazine vendors or local authorities seem to know where it is. Directions: from place de la Bastille (a hub with what seems like a hundred spoke roads) walk toward the Gare de Lyon on Bastille until you reach No. 10, which will be on the left side of the street. Yes, this is easy when you have the address and directions, but not all the little announcements for the shows at the Maison Rouge have the street address. It happened to be raining as we, the tenacious art tourists, attempted to find the place, and didn’t. We came back the next day when it was sunny.

The room full of outfits was just one part of the exhibition of Hamilton’s work and did bring up memories for me of being a Catholic schoolgirl who had forgotten her “chapel veil” and had to bobby pin a Kleenex on her head.

Unfortunately, from the next room unintelligible words we’ve oscillating in volume and calling a person to that space which was more brightly lit, In this room several shiny metallic tuba-like speakers were repeating some words that I could go to the catalogue of the show and read these, as I did and found that knowing these words didn’t really affect the impact of this part of the piece (which of course annoys the art tourist). The spinning, repeating speakers were dangling at various heights under a large tent. To give no more information, but to make the piece seem more meaningful the floor of the tent was in another space below this one. Sorry, I may be making this sound more interesting than it was.  The little room with the tent’s floor was dark and until I read the brochure/catalogue, I thought it was a storage space for the museum that wasn’t being put to very good use. It was dark and really not much to see. Again, sorry. I really do want to like contemporary art, but someone has to be able to say when stuff just doesn’t work. And today we are so busy promoting --- promoting the same celebrities – that we rarely hear the objective, the guy-on-the-street, or the educated art tourist opinion of what we really are seeing. Reading about Hamilton’s previous work, I would guess that she’s done some good pieces. This isn’t one of them.

In the first encountered rooms of this exhibit, a video device rotated about 6 inches from the ceiling, and projected a line that traveled around the room and lit up a square on the wall and was accompanied in this performance by a sharp sound. Standing in the room, the light and line hit you, traveled away and came around toward you. It was fun and activated the entire space. The sound was annoying. If the intent of the piece was to be annoying, it worked. If not, the sound was an unnecessary addition to an otherwise very engaging piece.

Here is a picture of some art tourists who snapped pictures of themselves in the reflection of the clear windows that looking into the modern-décor coffee shop inside the Maison Rouge while the light line was traveling around the room beside them, and leaking out into this hallway where Hamilton’s photos (taken up the noses of her subjects) were hanging.

Terry Talty is the self-described art tourist, who writes contemporary art criticism anytime she can.