I Prefer Paris

Paris Artseen: Fahd El Jaoudi

ArtSeen: Fahd El Jaoudi by Jennifer K. Dick

Split between cultures, places. It’s the tale of the modern age. To write here in Paris, in English, of art coming from elsewhere. Intersections. Or, as Fahd El Jaoudi puts it in his new show’s title: “Collision”. One of ten young artists (all between 23 and 34 years old) being represented by the relatively new, dynamic Galerie e.l Bannwarth run by Emilie Bannwarth, El Jaoudi is himself a collision. Of Moroccan ancestry though born in Mulhouse, France, El Jaoudi studied in the East of France at the École Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg before moving to Paris in 2006. From heritage to nationality, Alsace to Ile de France, design and decorative art to photography and engaged installation works, El Jaoudi is exploring the many ways location and dislocation meet when his works confront his roots and the place he now lives. This is immediately visible when we enter the show and find ourselves standing at face level with a French flag deftly embroidered by Moroccan seamstresses. It hangs like a banner before us, at about our height—not above. Jutting out into the first main room of the show, this flag is French yet carries on it visual signs of Moroccan culture. Blemishes or beauty marks? “It is my flag”, says El Jaoudi. It is also what the viewer must walk around to get at the next part of the exhibition, hiding just behind it.

 

Since urban environments, violence, and cultural, racial, and religious schisms are some of the themes at play in “Collision”, it comes as perhaps no surprise that when El Jaoudi entered into the world of artmaking—as a painter before moving onto photography and other mediums—he was influenced by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The element that still links these two artists is their engagement with the “cultural question”, as El Jaoudi says, “I’ve lost this affiliation with one single culture, one single identity. Instead, I explore, (as did Basquiat,) how one loses and re-finds or relocates oneself.” For El Jaoudi, however, this has meant a shift away from painting, which he finds has a strong psychological dimension, above all on the painter as he works, but which did not allow him to capture the moments of tension he sought.

That tension is most visible in the engaged yet posed political photographs, such as “France 05” where a boy’s arm is on fire. In this photo, it is the title that immediately creates the tension, locating the precise, mesmerizing and surprisingly beautiful image within the messy, undetermined historical moment of the riots and uprisings that took place in and around Paris in 2005. “These were about problems of assimilation,” explains El Jaoudi, “and when I came across the photo while preparing the show I saw that it was still topical today.”  In this work, the pain is not visible in the photo—the skin is not burnt, not disfigured. The body appears unable to be harmed. Flame licks over its surface, dances into the shadowy air around. Yet the viewer knows that fire destroys, pains, kills. In this way the piece explores various kinds of erasure. It asks what can we not tolerate? What do we burn away so as to not see it? What must we do for the pleasure of another? For violence is being done to the body, a body that the viewer takes pleasure in seeing: arm outstretched, finely formed, aesthetically pleasing. The arm also seems like the skeletal structure of a wing. The potential allegorical allusions begin to multiply. Or at least this is what comes to mind for this viewer, and is peculiarly echoed by what El Jaoudi said when contrasting his impressions of New York and Paris—where in New York “one takes people as they are”, he said, for example allowing a waiter to wear a turban, or where different languages are able to be spoken by people in, for example, their workplace, speaking many languages openly with customers. In contrast, El Jaoudi notes, “integration here (in France) means erasing the attributes of another culture.” Otherness burns (or is burnt) away.

 

El Jaoudi takes his highly stylized technique, his attention to precise beauty as contrasted with violence from an artist he admires—Matthew Barney, mixing this with elements taken from David La Chapelle and various subversive performance artists. In the untitled 2009 photo in the main room, one notes the echoes of Barney’s work in El Jaoudi’s careful positioning of an overpretty, pale, perfect-skinned model. The body is photographed from the thighs up, though the lower part is not visible since it is placed, almost like a still-life object, or a hung painting, behind the odd elements of allegory, death, and the grotesque which stand before him: four white doves taking flight and a pile of skulls under them. The body/man is a looming phantom, at once desirable and terrifyingly inhuman; at once perhaps coming out at us, or ignoring us completely, engrossed with some work we do not really want to be witness to. The photo is silent, but I feel it incanting.

Similarly, the exhibition’s key publicity picture shows a young man photographed from the torso up (top photo), naked but for the drape he holds carefully over his head, hands in perfect parallel just below his chin, pulling the fabric which covers him tightly into place. It is as if he’s just putting it on, or defying some onlooker to steal it away. The drape alludes to a darker, shadowed side of the body, a force in what cannot be seen. It at once evokes and mixes images of various religious covers: scarves women wear for Muslim prayer, and Christian icons of Mary or Jesus. Like the other photos in this show, the body is diaphanous and yet seems solid as marble. In the middle of the figure’s chest there is what looks like an injury bleeding, however the liquid is black instead of red—it’s oil, we learn. At the gallery, when we move up closer to this piece, entitled “Le diable n’apparait qu’à celui qui le craint” (the devil only appears to he who fears him”, we realize the photo is not alone. It is paired with a dark other half, a black extension to the frame in which the almost unnoticed insignia for American Airlines is hiding.

El Jaoudi’s show title, “Collision”, could be pluralized, for he is never confronting the spectator head-on with a single, or simple, collision. Take for example the video piece, in which again the pale torso of a young man is visible standing bare, exposed at the left side of the screen. A bullet is shot in slow motion onto screen from an unseen gun at the right. The bullet spins in super-slo-mo towards the chest, recalling pop culture films like the Matrix, or comic books. When the bullet strikes the chest, it merely falls down, more quickly now, falling away from the impenetrable body. Are we disappointed? The shot happens again. Do we watch over and over hoping for a different result? A destruction? A piercing? “Is this an animated photo or a video?” asks El Jaoudi, adding that, “it is an extension of my photography work. A way to explore it a little differently.” The movement is so subtle as to hardly be video, and yet he has also added a sound element. The chest goes on and on unpierced while music plays, a woman’s voice sings in Arabic. “This is symbolic in a way of my work,” explains El Jaoudi, “It’s a Lebanese nun who is singing Christian songs in Arabic. There is a sort of ambiguity in this. Arabic being of one ethnicity, evoking one ethnicity, and the religion another.” It is true that one might easily believe she is singing part of the Koran, or a traditional song that has nothing at all to do with Christianity and everything to do with some place she comes from. What we see, hear, know and do not know is also part of the collision in place, in play here. We, the spectator, stumble against our own ignorance. As such, the show is evocative as well as provocative.

*All photos by Fahd El Jaoudi

Show by Fahd El Jaoudi entitled “Collision” until 18 October 2009.
 Galerie e.l Bannwarth / 68 rue Julien Lacroix, 20th arr.
Metro: Belleville or Couronnes
(Ring the bell to be let in through the red gate).
Open Tues-Saturday, 14h-19h or by appointment
Tel: +33 (0)1 40 33 60 17
http://www.galeriebannwarth.com/

Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte’s professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 185 euros per person (about $240)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 3 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com

Paris Artseen: Matthew Rose

Art Seen IX: Matthew Rose inside/outside of A Book About Death by Jennifer K. Dick

Things unroll. Things roll over. They layer. The self becomes an old wall, pocked, pin-holed with old bits of tape, notes, afterwards, images crossing its memory surface, some personal, some external. Matthew Rose’s vast array of collages, but also his rich life as visual artist, author (both as journalist and novelist), and traveler/curator attest to such layering of a single being. His visual projects range from painting, drawing, collage work with a wide variety of materials, videos, even boxes such as “Maybe” (pictured here) which is part of a triptych hanging on his house and studio wall. The pure white of “Maybe”, about as pared down colorwise as Rose’s projects get, exemplifies the fundamental roles for Rose of language entering his artwork and humor touching on seriousness. Maybe to hatch? Maybe to be born? Maybe to be an egg? To break an egg, maybe, to split open? To begin? Maybe might separate to May Be: as in may it be, exist, may being be. Maybe is even permission, or a response to the request, May I be? The word at the back, white on white, announces this is a Pandora’s box, this tension between object and language, thought and gaze. It is also a contemporary response to Hamlet’s conundrum, To be or not to be? Maybe.

However uncertain or indecisive the word and world of “Maybe” is, in reality Rose’s only vacillation appears to be what medium to be at work in. Most any day of the week, Rose can be found elbow-deep in a project, tucked away in his studio near Montparnasse, often manipulating paper, wood, canvas. Cutting and pasting. Though he has also made videos, Rose prefers paper—“its texture, how it absorbs or not paint, how it rots.” Many of the materials Rose uses come from his walks of the Paris streets. “There is a sensibility here [in Paris,…] an openness. It’s easy for me to work here. The street gives me a lot of stuff. I find things all the time—pieces of string, paper, forms. You don’t fall into a coma here—like in America—there is a clash of history. Things can be hard or soft here, but the street and the architecture tell you things. To be honest, I spend a lot of time here [in my studio].” This said, Rose is also to be found trekking the world. Recent projects have taken him to Israel and Sri Lanka, and this year alone he has had shows in France, the USA, and Mexico. “Travel is a different surface and a different language,” he explains, it is also a way to force himself out of himself, since he admits, “It takes a lot to knock me out of my own head.”

Rose’s current project is in fact focused on the world. He is curator for the global collaborative community project “A Book About Death”, show opening on Sept 10th 2009 at the Emily Harvey Gallery in New York City. It is an homage to Ray Johnson, Emily Harvey, Marcel Duchamp and others. From Ray Johnson, called “the father of mail art” the show takes on its postal aspect, inviting artists of any stature from around the world to contribute 500 postcards involving the words “A Book About Death” on them (call for work at the right column of the show’s blog, at http://abookaboutdeath.blogspot.com/). “The idea is that everybody is an artist,” Rose explains. For Rose, who met Johnson three times, “part of my mission is for people to think about Ray’s work […which] was idiosyncratic and mysterious, […] For Ray, a piece of paper could be a book” and his “letters were like events.” In fact, Rose explains, in one project Johnson mailed photocopied papers with one-line stories with a drawing on them. Such work is not unlike what one will find in the event Rose is organizing this fall.

But the A Book About Death project is equally attached to the founder of the show’s venue, Emily Harvey. Harvey, according to Rose, was “a person with no respect for Hierarchy. The story was always that she could be with a collector and then a UPS guy would show up with a splinter and she’d stop everything to help him.” Rose hopes this exhibition, not focused on his own work but focusing on bringing people together in one space will thus echo Harvey’s ability to bring people of all walks of life, and artists of all levels, together into a center of the world revolving around a space of Harvey’s (often called “the den mother”). To this end, Rose has been focusing heavily on web technologies, trying to drum up connections, reach out through the ethereal lines of zeros and ones, to lure artists from all reaches of the world.

The show will also disappear, as those who attend it will be invited to take a packet of 100 cards of their choosing away—“the Duchamp idea of putting a show in a box, put a rubber band round them,” Rose states, “I want the cards to disappear. The exhibition disappears.” The symbolism of the show’s title, and the date, one day before Sept 11th, is not lost on anyone.

However, Rose is not only organizing group projects for others, he is also hard at work on many of his own personal projects. When it comes to his own collaging, modern technology gets left behind. Instead of the popular photoshopping, Rose gets out the scissors and glue, the paint and pencils. “Cutting and pasting is physical, an intellectual-manual labor. You discover the thing as you physically produce it. I’m an object-maker. I make things,” he explains, adding, “You have to cut in order to see.” And in the details here, from some very elaborate collage works, one can see not only the attention to seeing, but the difficulty that Rose’s work presents at times to the viewer. For forthcoming shows, keep an eye on his website. Collectors and others passing through or in Paris are also invited to contact the artist for a private showing via matthew.rose.paris@gmail.com 

A Book about Death Blog

Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte’s professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 185 euros per person (about $240)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 3 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com

Artseen: Maryanne Pollock Chez Grace

Artseen: Maryanne Pollock Chez Grace Text & photos by Jennifer K. Dick

A humid Saturday early evening, I climb the turreted staircase in Abbesses metro station to emerge onto a colourful children’s fair with trampolines, cotton candy, a merry-go-round. I wander a short block along the bustling rue des Abesses, once the haunt of Picasso, Picabia, Dali, Van Gogh, Monet, then knock on the door of Grace Teshima’s third floor apartment. The walls are stark white, the lighting over a series of tile-sized paintings by American artist Maryanne Pollock is gallery-professional, and yet there are two fabulously inviting crimson couches by big windows overlooking the bustling shop-filled street below. Teshima offers me a drink. I could be the first one at a party, but the room has been emptied of all other furniture and the walls have been carefully hung with three series of paintings and mixed medium works, another series and further works are displayed in an adjoining space. This is my first time at chez Grace, a monthly art salon curated by Teshima and which began four years ago “almost by accident” as she explains.

Though Paris has a longstanding tradition of the “salon”, bringing to mind the ambiance of Gertrude Stein’s place in the 1900’s, I have not attended one. Neither gallery nor squat, this traditional, homelike venue provides artists with what host of “chez Grace”, calls “an extended living room”. It is a place for one artist to share new or a selection of work. Chez Grace has become a popular community spot for art enthusiasts, friends, or travelers who want to take the time to really look at one artist’s work, to talk to the artist, reflect and discuss thoughts on the work, even ask questions about technique, personal history, home or the artist’s work environment. In short, it is a convivial space where collectors, casual spectators, fellow artists, even families, can purchase or really spend time with the art Teshima has selected for her once-a-month shows, or for visits any day of the week by appointment. Here, her guests mingle comfortably, lounge on giant couches in a space which is not as self-promoting, showy or theatrical as many of Paris’ vernissages. As cameraman and filmmaker Nicholas Kent notes, Teshima shows “a large variety of work” which he films for her posterity (some is online) and her blog. However, as Teshima admits, this “variety” also means there is “not one consistent eye—sometimes the work is professional and other times it can be amateurish. I select art by persistent artists, friends, those who I like.”

In the case of Maryanne Pollock, graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1982), and who has shown work in Egypt, Switzerland, Paris and throughout the USA, she certainly could have sought out a gallery for this show. However, as she says, she is “an educator”, “moving more towards collaboration”, widely involved in art projects throughout the world which foster greater community, dialogue, meeting—often working, as she currently does in the USA with at-risk kids—so this intimate venue fits her. Here, everyone takes time to discuss and inquire about the pieces, to interact with them.

The work itself is fabulously inviting, and perfectly suited both socially but also aesthetically to this context. Pollock’s show entitled “Human Grid” is made up of many small works, easily hung in a place this size, and which allows enough time and space for onlookers to take them in. Completed primarily in recent years though a few date as far back as 1992, these abstract and figurative pieces display great variety and dialogue between painting and drawing techniques (ink, water, acrylic, pastel)—such as in her “Cosmic Garden Series” which dominates the main room. “Cosmic Garden Series” is made up of dozens of tile-sized acrylic canvases plus a few paper watercolors which depict flowers, small male figures, or landscapes. Some are coated with ornate tile-like designs recalling mosques or iron gratings, as well as fabric designs: tartan or plaids. All of these hang alongside a single, startling miniature self-portrait out of which the artist, in hat, scarf and winter clothing views the viewer, confronts them. She is there, painted in unhappy red-nosed hues, a winter among all this vibrant summer. For Pollock, this series is a “post-9/11 kind of prayer”, touching on political themes, natural exploration, economics, and even her personal origins subtly through the references to her Scottish and Catholic Irish heritage as seen in the tartan paintings.

As the title does here, much of her work indicates a spiritual/cosmic component. “(I am) investigating the deeper realms of the conscious, subconscious and super-conscious minds” she writes in her artist statement. As such, the work is both evocative of earth and sky, of nature and man, of untarnished landscape and construction (grates, buildings and windows, as seen in a colourful pair of paintings which recall peculiarly appealing and lively housing projects). It also evokes unseen, minute or microscopic elements, beyond-language sensations which dominate recent abstract works, such as the show’s poster-publicity piece, “Phthalo Maze I”. Pollock states that her work links her to the original Sanskrit word for art, whose meaning is “to connect”, thus she sees these as “tracings” of “journeys, soul”, a space where “I abstract the visual narrative of everyday urban life.” They are also, she mentions, “daily windowscapes” looking outward even as, she states, “creating something is a kind of self-reflection”.

It is growing late, and I have stayed for hours when three of us pause looking together at one of her pieces. Pollock says, almost speaking to herself, seeing her work anew, “there is a static, geometric, architechtonic framework, and then those kinetic lines that fan out.” This summarizes the collection, a point stretching into line, an artist reaching towards self, towards other. Echoes of Kandinsky and Miro are evident to me, though she also adds that her work/practice references Motherwell—doing black and white rice paper studies before moving into color, “so that color doesn’t confuse me”—as well as women such as Judy Pfaff or Beatriz Milhazes (currently showing at the Fondation Cartier thru 21 June 2009) who are “unafraid to be joyful or women”. As we grab a last drink and mill about, Pollock states, “I pay attention to that interconnectedness. I pay attention to coincidence.” And I think, chez Grace, it is a nice coincidence to come inside a home, off the exciting bustling Saturday streets to find oneself in contact with such vibrant work echoing that life just outside.

Grace Teshima/ Chez Grace,
rue des Abbesses, Paris 18e, 
tel : +331.42.62.45.98 or +336.98.42.69.69
http://graceteshima.blogspot.com
If you are passing through Paris, do not hesitate to check in with Grace Teshima, to attend one of her shows or to have a private visit of works.

Contact for Maryanne Pollock: via her Artfile listing (scroll down alphabetically): http://artfile.wpadc.org/alpha.php?a=15

Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte’s professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 185 euros per person (about $240)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 3 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com

Artseen: Boris Achour

Artseen:Boris Achour by Jennifer K. Dick
Entering Boris Achour’s show “Conatus: celui dans la grotte” at the gallery Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois (http://www.galerie-vallois.com/fr/artiste.html), one is struck by a series of contrasts—carnivalesque rainbow paper lines the walls, coats a series of spiked stalactites descending from the ceiling. Along the wood floor, which creates a path (almost a “natural habitat”) through which the spectator walks, there are on occasion pyramidal pyres of fluorescent tubes which recall campfires (are we tempted to huddle there, tell stories?). Then, lining the walls, paintings are spaced out from one another as if windows looking out of this interior, though not opening the gaze to an exterior but rather enclosing it in a confrontation with this series of back and white, Jean Dubuffet-style paintings of masked women peeing. Spaced along these red, yellow, blue, green walls, it is as if the color has been drained from them, and yet they are almost creepy in their unexpected affront of us, their overt use of figuration, of the face hidden (masked) but the body exposed to us in this private act. Are we in an artificial universe, exploring elements of earth, fire, water? Are we being mocked? Are we turned upside down as in a funny house at a summer fair? Are we to recall embarrassing moments of needing to duck into the woods to relieve ourselves as children at camp? The show evokes narratives, invites the spectator to invent connections.

 In fact, as Achour explains, this expo is one in a “series”, and thus can be seen as a moment or “episode” in a potential movement of “autonomous exhibitions” which all, like the elements presented within this one scene, interrelate, dialogue, evoke narratives and reactions. The elements within each are, he says “articulations”, connected and disconnected, but which are held in the same space, that of the gallery. Over the past 7-8 years he has come to think of his exhibitions as “landscapes in which the spectator meanders”; within which “each work is autonomous” so that it is “a landscape of an assemblage of elements which combine,” so as to allow one “to wander” seeing (or not) “a discrete line [or lines] between them”. The exhibitions fill the space, take it over, but within them “the works are like the characters in a series, an accessory to the landscape”. The exhibition becomes the form of the show, its filmic aspect, what contains it.

This uncommon method of imagining the work he is doing as an artist takes its cue in part from film and TV. Cinema, he explains, is an art which has managed to cross borders, touch everyday, popular culture as well as specialized art viewers. It has come into contact with the real world. In fact, he feels that cinema “is touched and nourished by things which are exterior to the field of contemporary art. Cinema has succeeded in creating a very strange synthesis of the avant-garde and the common [or everyday, it is] a medium which permits gaps” in ways that he, too, seeks. He makes casual note of David Lynch or Lars Von Trier, of the American series “Friends” whose episode title style his own show’s title takes its form.  Yet he also maintains a relationship with artists like DuBuffet whoses famous black and white grotto sitting just over the river in the Centre Pompidou one cannot forget as one looks at these paintings, stands in this brightly-colored “grotto”. For Achour, leaving the floor exposed also maintains the rapport one has with painting, it’s the idea of something missed, flawed, distanced. Returning to the figuration, the women peeing are making a painting-stain. Something about this is, explains Achour, both artistically charged and an erotic game.

 However, despite the lines one might draw to film, this work is neither a police tale, nor something to be decoded. Achour believes he is tapping into “a ritualistic aspect at work here which is not explicit”, perhaps it’s a modern-mythic, both masked for ceremonial reasons and for some theatrical-imaginary one. Interiors and exteriors come into play. As in much of his earlier work, potential links to the way literature or writing functions exist. The tale is there and yet remains to be told. It remains masked even in its affront of us, as it surrounds us. Regardless of how one feels, we step into his wonderland, it swirls round us. Yet Achour’s work, for me, retains a peculiar mystery, exploring at once the still objects, works, and the space he has created to hold it (and me). This is even more accentuated in works where he makes and uses videos, such as his video and object piece currently showing in the Grand Palais “La Force de l’art” show. Stop by before 1 June (Le Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill 75008 Paris. Closed Tues. (http://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/Accueil/p-93-Accueil.htm). Also check out his new website: Boris Achour: http://www.borisachour.net/  which contains “actions peu” written about last month, as well as some videos and many recent works.

Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com

Paris Art Seen: The Object Objectified

Note: This month’s ArtSeen is a sort of in-between space, to announce what is happening, how things are looking, to signal the forthcoming further focus on Boris Achour (May ArtSeen, with 2 shows opening in April 2009 with his works: not to be missed if you are here!!!)

Last week I attended a lecture on rhetoric at la Sorbonne where the invited guest said “beauty plus history equals art”. This passé notion made me flinch. I wondered what he would do with all of the self-flagellating artists of the 1970s who self-mutilated on film or in live performance pieces. More importantly, when I reflect on the current art focus of Paris, how would he see the use of objects as art? Not pretty, ornamental things from some other era, but gigantic colorful cows, a rumpled, worn-out dress tossed on a museum floor, or Paris artists Olivier Babin, with his bronze, painted watermelon(photo above) entitled “Art for the very last people”, 2005, and Boris Achour, with his “Actions Few” (1993-97) a kind of “soft guerilla warfare”. Achour, unlike Babin, does not make an object, but used objects found on the spot in unusual “public interventions” which he then photographed and filmed—as in his hanging baguette (see photo, from his site: http://www.borisachour.net/).

Boris Achour- Baguette on Pipe

Propaganda, art, fame, object, design, life, utility, beauty, consumer(ism)—the world of art has battled with these themes, terms, and their ramifications for ages, but ever since the 1917 urinal entitled “Fountain” by Duchamp and his many other Ready-Mades, the artworld, and its audience (museum-going tourists to critics and collectors) have both expressed moments of dubiousness, and others of sheer pleasure when looking at (or touching) something we might see in other contexts as “everyday item”. This month’s Artseen therefore reflects on a few Parisian artists, galleries and museums who focus on the object: not those who make installations of objects from their own lives or around rooms they have lived in (such as the many museums focused on famous author’s lives and how/where they lived—like Victor Hugo’s house) but those who take the object away from its natural setting and, à la Marcel Duchamp, make us see it again, anew, differently—in as simple ways as seen in works by Paris artist Sophie Calle, for example her bed, which she mailed to a lovesick Josh Greene and around which emerged an expo of bed, letters, emails (see photo).

What is certain is that artist’s—especially those here—have been trying to modify our interaction with art for over a century, and one of their ways of doing this has been through an exploration of the object, both objectified from the tradition of the still life through the very amusing play on simulacrum. Duchamp wanted to move the object away from a purely “retinal art” position. Boris Achour’s does this in an entirely new way, playing on the context not of the object in museum, but of art in the world, and also of it. For example, for “A Sculpture”, Achour deposited 20 books with glued pages in 20 public libraries around Paris. These were cataloged and shelved as fiction books, because they look like books, yet they are not readable (http://borisachour.free.fr/english-oeuvres/asculpture.html ). The “spectator” for this artwork will not be seeking out art, but reading material, when he/she stumbles upon the art object. Purpose, aesthetic, and interaction with “art” are all put into question, in very fun ways by such a project: a tricking of context takes place when the everyday object, or perceived thing, is out of place in comic or perplexing ways.

Often, however, the contemporary treatment of things reverses this effect to make us see the object again, focus on our visual relationship with it—just as with the soccer ball pictured here, (also from “Actions Few”), where Achour has transformed one of the iron spheres forming a border between pedestrian and driving space into a soccer ball. The likely viewer will be a pedestrian, perhaps out running errands, who might not even notice the work, or see it as “art”. They might even try and give it a kick (with painful consequences). The initial viewer’s interaction with the creation will not be the same as our interaction with Achour’s photo or film of it in a gallery, or here. The artist therefore is finding (and seeking) ways to move through various spaces, taking himself and work into and out of the expected role of art(ist) and object(ifier/-maker). Once in the gallery, however, and hung on the wall, there is a return to the object objectified, such as in the popular consumer items portrayed like icons by Andy Warhol.

Paris ArtSeen: Zoé Chantre and Alexandra Pianelli

Paris ArtSeen: Zoé Chantre and Alexandra Pianelli by Jennifer K. Dick

For artists Zoé Chantre (originally from the Massif Central region) and Alexandra Pianelli (from Paris), only two years after graduating from the École Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, the question of who art is destined for is at the heart of their collaborative and individual film, book and mixed-medium explorations. They have extended their dialogue with themselves to include each other, and then enlarged this further to consider on a global scale the question of, as Chantre asks, “Who are our families in the world, in art, etc.?” Who is this art destined for?  The rural farmer, a fellow artist, a doctor?

It is precisely for this reason that neither Chantre nor Pianelli want to be part of an institution. Rather than seek out gallery shows, curator representation or grants, they prefer to project their films in spaces such as festivals, during private showings, even at stands or booths where they throw a sheet up against a wall and the projection becomes part of something akin to a performance-projection-conference. This avoidance of the gallery is in part due to the fact that, as Pianelli declares, “I don’t recognize myself in the white cube”, though she admits she likes the idea of getting to a point where she could appropriate an entire space, a place she would be able to convert into a universe that was entirely hers, absolutely her. This literal anti-establishment position also comes from their interest in going out into the world, encountering others, experiencing life in unfamiliar milieus. “Not living off of the artmaking allows us to be in the real, connected to something concrete. It allows for inspiration.” Says Pianelli. Both enjoy taking on various positions, putting the art, the artmaking, the artist, and the spectator into a series of roles that are sometimes real life (ie: a job as concierge or newspaper kiosk worker, or a casual encounter).

Paris Artseen:Georgio Fidone

Paris Artseen:Georgio Fidone
by Jennifer K. Dick

No matter where or how far you go, childhood is never far behind. Such is the case for Georgio Fidone who, when he moved to Paris from the island of Sicily, first in the 1970s as a tourist, then later as an immigrant, carried with him a rich layering of recollections that continue to filter into the works he produces in Clichy, where he has his atelier. This ragged suburb with its rushing highway, blocked building towers and concrete blocks is a stark contrast to the central Paris Fidone hangs out in most of the time, but even more it is far from his green islander childhood. Images from Italian churches, chapels, village traditions and religious ceremonies, the colors of the sea still provide a background for recent sculptures. Moreover, the time he spent going to Greek temples where he could actually touch the writing on the walls, the palpability of words, marked him and led him to make a vast number of paintings in the 1980s.

For Fidone, the large-scale paintings (see photos) he first worked on in Paris, his “city of painters”, are “erased writings; unwritten writing where, at the start, something is marked” then, through a process of overlapping color, is buried in palimpsests of phrasings.  Fidone explains “I began writing without ever writing.” At times political, angry, a space for venting, the colors and shapes of the lines take over the underlying message (and emotion), absorbing it into a new dynamic space .Reminiscent of Cy Twombly, Miro, Pollock, Basquiat (who he proudly recalls having had the pleasure of meeting), Jean Clareboudt or Ouatta (a friend of years ago), these works also recall Jasper Johns’ series of 5s, for here, too, are numbers encased or coded into the lost messages. Fidone does not believe in influences, however, and scoffs at the question, stating “when you sit down to write a poem, do you remember the poems you have read?  When I start painting or sculpting, influence is not part of the process.” And yet, as he talks of his works, he constantly recounts anecdotes of his youth, the Italy where he began painting and sculpted tuiles romaines to make money. In Fidone’s case, place is the greatest mentor.

In fact, he is currently preparing a large exhibition of 200+ clay sculptures which will be shown in a condemned chapel surrounded by music. Originating in the year 2000, some of the sculptures are made to sit on stakes in water, as if walking over the surface. For Fidone, this work is “both baroque and contemporary” linking the images of virgins being paraded through the Italian streets of his youth and the condemned architecture of a dying chapel to Fidone’s newly-made figures.

At the same time as he’s working in three-dimensional space, he continues his dialogue with writing by contributing original acrylic paintings to many artist books.  To date, Aeneis Editions, France, has completed 3 such collector volumes, from the book in an edition of 8 handwritten volumes by Alan Chatam de Bolivar in 1996 (see photos), to 2 volumes of printed text with his close friend Jacques de Longeville (one with additional images by Esther Hess, entitled “le sillage prolonge l’empreinte”). Currently, Fidone is preparing paintings for “Ondulations”, an edition of 50 which will appear in late spring 2009 with 3 paintings in each by Fidone (as well as a fourth image on the cover) alongside 3 poems by 3 poets in 3 languages (French, English, and Argentinian Spanish). 

These works embody Fidone’s international life, and are a continuation of his encounters in Paris cafés—one of the main reasons he says he loves living and working in this city. “In Italy”, he felt, “artists get too caught up in” where they are going and how to get there. Here he is able to work well without “all of that messiness”.  He can go to museums and exhibits all he wants, of course, and does, but most importantly he spends time in cafés. 
Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com

Paris Artseen: Julie LeGrand

Photo by Antonio Meza

The questions regarding our environment dominate magazine covers, fill pages of newspapers, inspire political and personal debates, even find their way into literature and art.  Yet the work of young French plasticienne Julie LeGrand goes far beyond a treatment of environmental issues, challenging notions of nature vs. manmade (or artificial) production, asking “which is menaced, which menacing?”. 

In her series of tactile pieces entitled “Rose” (I, II, III), one might merely see hills of bright fibers that make the viewer want to plunge their fingers in, dive into the pile as they might surround themselves in the cushy warmth of a scarf, or brush their cheek up against them as they might a fern in a botanical garden. For Legrand, however, this series is part of an homage to a lost ancestor. As such, she is less concerned by the material that is amassed than by how it comes together and connects, how it makes a solid shape and yet, as in the image of Rose III pictured left/right displayed in the Château de Saint Ouen’s expo “Tendre”(2007), where we see parts of it dangling over the top of the stairwell, it is at once coming together and thinning out, disappearing, falling away from the ensemble. The solidity of the mass, at first mountainous, dwindles, as in nature mortality covers over, erases and replaces. 

Conversely, an accumulation of threads becomes almost menacing in her humorous piece “Les liens coupés” displayed in winter 2007 at La Maison Rouge, Paris 12e http://www.lamaisonrouge.org/fr/index.php. Atop a bed, smashing it, a body of yarn-like material is a planet, green nature crushing the bed (a human structure) under its massive weight and size.  The title again evokes humanity, and separation between humans. It throws the piece’s interpretations in many directions, eliciting at once the idea of a collection of links cut from others, a couple’s splitting up, an individual separated from the world, the world or planet personified as off brooding in its room (perhaps because we have so mistreated it), the way separation grows making it difficult to reconnect later, or simply the massive collection of things in life, necessary or not, that overtake us at times in funny, ludicrous ways, as a ball of string does in this case.

Other works by LeGrand evoke more directly nature taking over the space of a gallery, such as “retour aux sources” and “sans titre” which seem to be sending silicone root systems out over the space of the expo, or nature vanishing, such as “Tralalarme” a transparent series of pyrex and crystal glass drops pasted one by one onto the wall at the Galerie Anton Weller, Paris 6e, in 2006 for her exhibition “Faire et Defaire”.  In “Tralalarme”, the droplets form a vine trickling up and down the wall, enclosing it as if in a natural substance but entirely manufactured (and unfortunately for viewers, as hard to photograph as it was stunning).  LeGrand, originally a country girl, says that she came to Paris and now she often confronts ideas of nature interacting with architectural space, “such as mold overtaking a ceiling, or vines covering over a building”.  This time, though, the transparent substance seemed more at risk of vanishing than invading; on the verge of evaporating unnoticed even as it overtakes the wall. 

In her sculptural projects, LeGrand desires, as she has said “to explore the manufactured” but also to locate it in a way that “is beautiful and fascinating, which shines and draws your attention to it”. Her influences are as varied as American minimalism, Jerôme Bosch and Cy Twombly. She enjoys working in Paris, a major urban space, and seems to see herself now as an urban artist, fascinated by the found, what one discovers in the city. As such, LeGrand’s work recognizes interconnection between self and other, discovered thus uncovered potential.  It is an extension of her main thematic explorations: nature and artificial, creation and exploration, color and the absence thereof, the fragility of both the natural and the created/fabricated object. Only now in her mid-thirties and with an increasingly inspiring body of work developing, she is a French artist to keep your eye on, and certainly to see when traveling here in France!

 

Julie Legrand’s work is currently being shown at Fondation Ecureuil, Toulouse. http://www.caisseepargne-art-contemporain.fr/
Galerie Anton Weller, Paris, represents LeGrand’s work:
http://www.antonweller.com/artistes/legrand/legrand_en.htm and where you may find a downloadable pdf of her “dossier artistique” which includes a collection of images of the works described above.

Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

Eye Prefer Paris Contest -Extended till next Thursday

One of my goals for 2009 is to at least double my subscriptions and I am enlisting you to help me achieve that. Many of you have turned your friends, families, and colleagues on to EPP but now I'm looking to up the ante. So I decided to have a contest to see who will register to most new subscribers. The prize? A copy of the wonderful book We've Always had Paris and Provence, the fascinating and highly entertaining story of Patricia & Walter Wells life here. It also includes some of Patricia's classic recipes.

The best way to go about subscribing people is to go to my homepage www.eyepreferparis.com and on the right hand sidebar you will see a box where it says enter email address. Enter each email separately. A confirmation message will appear that says "Please check your inbox for a verification message from FeedBurner’s “confirmations@emailenfuego.com,” the service address that delivers email subscriptions for I Prefer Paris. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription." Please cut and paste that and send it to the person you subscribed so they can confirm their subscription. Please email me at r.nahem@gmail.com to let me know how many people you have subscribed.

I will announce the winner next Thursday, so start subscribing now.

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com

Paris Artseen- Seulgi Lee

The lines between visual and performance arts has been growing blurrier these past years, especially when one examines cutting edge explorations such as those by Seulgi Lee, a South Korean artist living in Paris for the past 17 years.  After completing her degree at an arts high school in Seoul, Lee came to France to study at the Beaux Arts in Paris. An admirer of Rodin and Claudel, as well as work by Renoir, Lee began her studies at the Beaux Arts in a mosaic studio.  For Lee, deciding to participate in this workshop was part of a realization that one could use decorative arts techniques in fine arts work.  Thus began a series of transformations towards her own interdisciplinary artistic practice.  In her third year at the Beaux Arts, Lee met Jean-Luc Vilmouth who'd just begun teaching in the sculpture studio.  "I showed him pictures of garbage cans and other things, things I wasn't willing to show anyone else, and he made me realize art could be made out of nothing or anything."  Most of the students in Vilmouth's group—which Lee became a part of—were doing installation and mixed performance pieces at the time, a direction Lee's work would take.

Given these foundations, one sees how the work Lee has been showing over the past decade here in Paris and in Seoul borrows from the decorative arts in its bright colourings and textures; it is playful, almost giddy at times. For example, a 2005 exhibition at Miss China Beauty Room in Paris showed a sock tree called "weeping willow" alongside a series of almost naïve drawings of single objects floating mid-page.  Her installation piece "c" from a show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2001 recalls something from fairy tales or a children's stage set: out of the edge of a giant grey lump stick live people's legs (see image).  In fact, Lee believes that "children are the most serious of people," and therefore she tries to get at the elements of childhood which unite all of us. "Everyone was a child once, its something we all share," she explains, and I want to "create relationships with [and between] people"— as well as between objects.  This is why she works with what she calls "standard forms" such as blocks and circles, or everyday objects, such as green tea, doors, doorknobs or take out cups.

One should not be fooled, however, by the surface lightness of this work.  It exposes its own interrogations of serious issues within playful, unthreatening (or less threatening) space.  Take for example the take-out cup and straw in her 2008 solo show "Automatic; homage to the thief" at Colletpark galérie, Paris. This cup's an object, Lee explains, we just toss away.  Yet in her work she connects the cup and a plastic fast food tray via a straw within which water is then circulated "permanently".  This, Lee adds, is opposed to the disposable logic of the object, giving it elements of sustainability, making the material take on a constancy unlike our daily uses for it.  Similarly, for the show "B side" from the Do Art Gallery in Seoul, Lee's "Green Tea" piece linked two solid green cubes with a bar of running green tea.  Instead of constructing a real bar between the cubes, she used the flow of liquid.  The tea is at the same time more constant and yet also not fabricated like an object, nor solid in the same manner as a bar would have been.  As here, Lee is "interested in creating objects where the relationship between them is indirect".  The stream of tea also adds mobility to the work, like a life force connecting the cubes.


When asked whether she thinks about impermanence, or what is left behind (speaking both of people and objects), in relationship to her own migration to Paris, or how people confront others' leaving, deal with absence, distance or loss, Lee looks stumped and admits that she had not conceived of her work this way.  However, she admits, she has moved a lot in her life, even in Paris, and her work does deal with that search for the familiar, or a desire to see the world from another perspective. For example, she sought out difficult to locate round doorknobs for her piece "Porte américaine" (see image) —whereas in France, the doorknobs are typically horizontal levers, the round knob, prevalent in the USA, is also the kind she recalls from her childhood in Korea. This piece is a door with 7 doorknobs, but, as she said, "only one will actually open the door, though many are offered.  It's the idea that we're given a lot of options but only one works, like in life."

Lee's work is also quite political—despite its bright and cheerful camouflage. In fact, the political aspects of her artwork have lead Lee to put herself in positions of risk, such as for her documented performance piece "Une afghane en Corse".  This piece emerged after Lee saw images of women in Burkas in a metro ad at a time when she was noticing an increasing number of covered women around Paris, and was interested in black hooded protesters in Corsica.  In the interest of bringing these intersecting ideas of people covering themselves up or being covered, Lee dressed in bright floral patterns—a small flower motif she later learned is called "liberty"— and hooded herself in a similarly floral scarf in which only two eye holes were cut.  Lee then wandered around the island of Corsica, an island covered with tiny, richly perfumed Mediterranean wildflowers. No one would mistake this getup for traditional covering, yet it angered some of the people she came across and even frightened a few. "For me, taking risks in the real world is very important", Lee explained, which is why she sought out actual protesters to display another political work, the giant yellow banner on which Lee embroidered the word "STRIKE" in French: "GRÈVE" in pink thread.  The process of meticulous, time-consuming embroidery was, for Lee, also a response to the idea of striking.  For some strikers protest to avoid unemployment, which puts one into a position of having too much time on one's hands, and in striking one is also not at work. This piece also touched on an element of the feminist idea of women's work not having value yet being time consuming.  Though Lee never managed to get this French banner used in a real demonstration in France, she did manage to have a Korean version in held high at a May 1st parade in Seoul.

Whether you enjoy Lee's work because it helps you, as she hopes to, "see the world with the eyes of objects" or "see objects are inhabitants of the earth just as human beings are" or you simply laugh at the vibrancy of some childhood echo, this work certainly does reawaken the hidden corner of ourselves where the curious child still resides, strangely evoking the future adult with all of its complicated politics. 

Currently, Seulgi Lee's work is represented by La Galerie Colletpark in Paris and she will be showing alongside Caroline Molusson at la Ferme du Buisson Centre d'Art in Noisiel near Marne-la-Vallée (out on RER A from Paris) from January 24 thru March 29th, 2009. 
http://www.lafermedubuisson.com/caroline-molusson-seulgi-lee.html
 
Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about including small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com