Park in Progress, Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, Friday July 1st, 2011

It feels naughty, creepy and, frankly, slightly scary to be in a park after nightfall. It feels even more so when that that park is as imposing as the the Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, a short Metro ride from Paris, on a hill in the south-west and far enough away for you to feel like you’ve left the metropolis. It’s a long way from home, dark and not a little unsettling. The striking views it offers over the Paris as twilight descends and shadows lengthen only reinforce the feeling that you’ve left the city behind. It’s beautiful, certainly, but also eerie and you get the feeling you shouldn’t really be there.

Park In Progress from Pépinièreseuropéennes on Vimeo.

In the sunshine, the Parc de Saint-Cloud is a glorious place to escape, unwind and enjoy the patterns created by the rays of light falling through the trees. Last Friday night, however, was an opportunity to see the park from a different perspective. As darkness fell over Saint-Cloud, Park in Progress 4 lurched into life.

Park in Progress is an annual initiative organised by Les Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes, an organisation which, since 1992, has aimed to promote young creatives and their work on a European and international level. The event allowed around 40 young artists to showcase their work, but it is much more than an art fair. I was expecting a marquee filled with watercolours, plastic cups filled with warm wine and half-hearted, cringe-worthy performance pieces. What I got was a engaging experience that made creative use of one of the world’s most beautiful parks as well as clearly inspiring the artists whose works formed the collection to come up with something site-specific and special. Hell, we even got welcomed to the show by a man with a megaphone and no trousers.

Whilst there were some installations and video-art, Park in Progress was, due to the unique nature of the setting, really about live performance. A dance piece by Alban Richard saw the crowd of thirthy-something wannabe art bohemians clutching picnics, bottles of red and cans of lager smuggled in from the local superette draw together. The piece was performed against the backdrop of both an operatic aria and the crepuscular Paris skyline in the park’s Nymphée d’apollon. At this point, people-watching the crowd was at least as interesting as the performance. This morphed into a second piece by Carmen Cruz and François Martig which lured the two-hundred attendees towards the more upper levels of the park and deeper into the darkness towards the Jardin de Trocadéro. It’s been a long while since I’ve  followed a woman dressed like the ghost of PJ Harvey into the depths of a remote French forest on a Friday evening.

The Jardin de Trocadéro is a ‘jardin à l’anglaise’, taking its inspiration from nineteenth-century English parks and is a delicately-constructed space, its topiaried trees bordering a small lake housing a family of confused ducks. Heading into the rapidly-descending darkness, attendees were confronted by a noise installation, which included a cooped chicken, from the Belgian collective Livescope, at odds with the elegance of the surroundings. The standout performances included Julia Hadi‘s solo dance piece, performed on the shore of the lake, illuminated against the pitch-darkness by a video projection, giving her work a VHS, Videodrome aesthetic. This was followed by the night’s most memorable piece, dancer and choreographer Armelle Devignon held the attendees spellbound whilst she, lit by floating candles, mirrored by the surface of the lake and accompanied only by a black silence, descended into the water, before disappearing into the darkness and confusing the ducks some more.

Whilst many of the works were interesting, and I have a few names I’ll be looking out for in the future, tonight was about the collection as a whole; the individual works working together in the park. At times it felt almost like immersive theatre, something Punchdrunk would create. I’d encourage you to go next year, but I want to keep it to myself.

Tags: Paris, Pépinières Européennes, performance art, saint-cloud

Keith Reader, The Place de la Bastille, The Story of a Quartier, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

 

When you’re writing about a place where people live, work and play, the biggest challenge is to stop the everyday from coming across as, well, everyday. To put it another way, it is no mean feat to convincingly make the familiar strange, to force your reader to look at the things that surround them in a new, engaged way of seeing. Wherever you live, when you bustle through it bleary-eyed, on your way to work or way back home, then it becomes background, mundane.

 

 

 

 

 

The Bastille district of Paris, as Keith Reader points out on the first page of his new book is an perfect example of the everyday. It might be filled with bars, cafés, noise, traffic, people of a wide variety of backgrounds, it might steeped in history – the 1789 French revolution started here, fuelled by the disenfranchised artisans of the Faubourg Saint Antoine – but it isn’t immediately interesting to look at. It is a functional place, first and foremost. It isn’t on too many tourists’ must-see list. Equally, there are far more immediately obvious parts of Paris to write about; Montparnasse, Montmartre, the Marais (and lots of other places that don’t begin with the letter ‘m’). For those with a passing knowledge of Paris, the Bastille is a square where there used to be a prison, where there is an ugly opera house and not much else.

 

Reader’s two main achievements in The Place de la Bastille are both making the those who know the place well (I’ve lived in the area for the last two years) stop, take stock and renew their interest in it and effectively arguing why it is worthy of investigation by non-residents . For Reader the Bastille is an important site in the collective Parisian memory, but not just for the role it played in stoking revolutionary furore. Reader goes beyond the much-told nineteenth-century history and, in an approach he describes as ‘flânerie at a computer’, inspired by Walter Benjamin‘s wanderings, explores the history of the less-known corners of the locale. We learn, then, about the pimps and prostitutes of the once seedy, now just disheveled rue de la Roquette, about the gay cruising of the perennially debauched rue de Lappe, and the marginally less exciting fashion wholesalers of the rue Sedain.

 

Refreshingly, Reader’s desktop flânerie takes in an impressively broad range of sources topping his hat to the well-known Paris history books, such as Éric Hazan’s L’Invention de Paris (2002) and Andrew Hussey’s Paris, The Secret History (2006) but also an unconventional mix of pulp detective fiction and films as well as his own anecdotes, himself a former resident of the area. Reader has also impressively demonstrated how the Bastille continues to be relevant to the contemporary collective memory, citing the 1981 celebrations by the left to mark it’s return to power in the guise of François Mitterand’s presidency, mirrored recently to mark the 30 year anniversary, and the much-reported debates around the designed for the world’s biggest and most expensive opera house.

 

The book’s final chapter comprises a walking tour, a nice touch for those whose appetites to discover more about the area have been whetted by the previous pages. Whilst a well-argued, thoroughly-researched and scholarly work, it is vibrant and readable enough to interest a readership from outside the academic community from which Reader comes (he holds a professorship at the University of Glasgow). Only the works essential, yet densely theoretical, introduction risks deterring the broader readership this book deserves.

Tags: bastille, keith reader, opera, Paris

‘This Is How You Will Disappear’, Gisèle Vienne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, April 21, 2011

French channel Arte has just started rebroadcasting Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s 1990s murder mystery TV series. At the very heart of Lynch’s landmark show is the ongoing battle between everyday small town North American life and the darker forces of death and the irrational that menace, yet concurrently complete it. Even after over twenty years it still has the capacity to disturb and entertain in equal measure.

The shadowy, dark forces explored by the show eminate from the Black Lodge, steeped in local legend as the place from where the ‘evil’ in the local woods emerges. Deep in those woods lies the portal to this place shrouded in death and mystery that appears to lie outside our ability to understand the world. It is this space outside time that ‘This Is How You Will Disappear‘, Gisèle Vienne‘s perfomance piece, part short play, part contemporary dance, part art ‘happening’ immediately evokes and appears to reside within.

The similarities with Lynch’s TV, show, however, stop there. Whilst Twin Peaks explored the tension between the logic and understanding of everyday experience and the the darker forces of incomprehension, ‘This is How You Will Disappear’, which premiered at the 2010 Avignon Festival and is currently touring the contemporary art festival circuit, plunges straight into the latter.

The performance takes place in a painstakingly recreated forest clearing, shrouded in fog, completely withdrawn from the security of the familiar and everyday. Indeed a recognisable world outside the forest is only hinted at. The performance’s text, provided by US writer Denis Cooper centres around three characters, a gymnast, her coach and a lost rock star, all of them who appear to have conventional existences outside the forest, but are all trapped by or hiding in the forest’s darkness. Their fortunes will tragically collide.

French cultural output has never shied away from embracing the dark side of human thought and experience; the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille are a clear testament to that. Indeed Blanchot and Bataille have been explicitly cited by Vienne and Cooper as direct influences on their work. The interesting aspect of ‘This is How You Will Disappear’ is how it takes the experience of incomprehension and attempts to bring it to life in front of an audience, an experience that directly implicates the viewer as participant. In the performance, what we don’t think, the thoughts we don’t dare to have are given centre stage.

Perhaps most immediately striking aspect of the performance is the work of Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya who has created intensely dramatic living fog sculptures for the show. These combine with the lighting and video projections to overwhelm the forest on occasion, spilling over the stage, filling the auditorium and blurring the distinction between spectacle and audience. The viewers are thus directly transported into the forest beyond thought in an experience that is concurrently both exhilarating and claustrophobic.

This effect is reinforced by the show’s music, provided by the black pope of heavy drone Stephen O’Malley, perhaps best known for his Sunn O))) work, here collaborating with Peter Rehberg. Fog, light, video and music/low frequency noise all combine to strikingly physical affect In this way, the title ‘This Is How You Will Disappear’ frames the show both as a consideration of the characters and their metaphysical states and a declaration of visceral intent from Vienne/Copper/O’Malley to their audience.

Whilst undoubtedly a hugely affecting work, the shows sheer audacity and excess resonate strangely with the audience in the days and weeks following the experience. In a post credit-crunch age of supposed belt-tightening and financial austerity, how can artists justify the sheer ridiculousness of such a scale? Bringing together big names from around the world to collaborate with video, live sound, live action (even live falconry – seriously), doesn’t come cheap. Maybe the answer is to be found in Georges Bataille’s La Part maudite– his general economic treaty celebrating pure, excess as an end in itself. Maybe we shouldn’t try and justify it.

Tags: 'this is how you will disappear', denis cooper, drone, gisèle vienne, performance art, stephen o'malley, sunn O)))

Breaking News: Andres Serrano’s controversial ‘Piss Christ’ photograph destroyed

”Piss Christ’, a controversial photograph by American artist Andres Serrano has reportedly been destroyed by hammer and pickaxe-wielding Catholic extremists at an exhibition in the south of France. The work, which was one of two images attacked, depicts a crucifix suspended in the artist’s urine and has been on display at Avignon’s Collection Lambert art gallery since December 2010. It has recently been the focus of repeated protests by militant Catholic groups, including a protest of between 800-1500 yesterday. The other damaged work is reportedly from the artist’s Churches series and is composed of a photograph taken in a Parisian church.

Serrano’s work has consistently been the focus of controversy; in 1997 the same picture was vandalised during an Australian show at the National Gallery of Victoria.

France Culture journalist Frédéric Martelbroke the story via Twitter. Eric Mezil, director of the Yvon Lambert collection, revealed on Martel’s France Culture radio show Masse Critique that four youths, reportedly sporting tattoos and wearing sunglasses, launched the attack earlier today (Sunday) being fleeing the gallery unapprehended. The works are, accordng to Mezil, damaged beyond repair, with Piss Christ sustaining a hole of four to five centimetres in diameter.

Protests against the picture have taken place in Avignon over the past two weekends with Catholic group Civitas, which aims to ‘rechristianise’ secular France taking a leading role in mobilising support. The group was also recently responsible for presenting a petition demanding the artwork’s withdrawl from the show, entitled, ‘Je crois aux miracles’ (I believe in miracles). The gallery’s partners include luxury goods brand LMVH.

Tags: piss christ, vandalised, vandalized

Tous Cannibales, Maison Rouge, Paris, February 12 – May 15, 2011

Cannibalism has never been so fashionable. Or so banal. At the start if the year an enterprising Covent Garden ice-cream parlour went all-out for column inches with a crude, cynical, but ultimately impressively effective PR stunt. In case you missed, Icecreamist’s Baby Gaga was launched as the world’s first mass-market ice-cream to contain real breast milk, farmed from a pregnant human female. For just £14, Londoners were invited to, effectively, lick their way to cannibalism.

Whilst hardcore cannibalism, the act of eating the human flesh of another, is one of humanities most fundamental taboos, so forbidden, in fact that according to Freud, it doesn’t appear in dreams, it is also a key aspect of collective human experience. It has been observed by the earliest anthropologists as playing a key ceremonial role in so-called ‘primitive’ societies. The human infant is nourished by the mother in a cannibalistic relationship with its mother, through the act of breast feeding. The ceremonies of the Christian church revolve around the key issue of transubstantiation, the (literal or metaphorical) body of Christ keeping you (or otherwise) in eternal life. It is everywhere.

Cannibalism is also pure box-office. It gets people through doors and puts bums on seats, talking as it does to the profoundly dark side of the human animal. It forms a key part of the collective imagination and has fuelled works of popular culture as diverse as films from Cannibal Holocaust to Alive. This crowd-pleasing factor is something la Maison Rouge is clearly banking on for its first major show of 2011. As a fairly small independent gallery, staging provocatitive, challenging shows is something it does well, recent shows have included a retrospective of the controversial creator of ‘le happening’ Jean-Jacques Lebel. In such a way, la Maison Rouge is a refreshing a antidote to the Palais de Tokyo, increasingly swamped by corporate sponsorship deals.

Despite sounding media-friendly, the overall premise of Tous Cannibals is actually disappointingly vague, its unifying theme is ostensibly that it illumates a quote from legendary anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss that, “We are all cannibals. After all, the simplest way to identify oneself with the Other is still to eat him.” The show, curated by German art historian Jeanette Zwingenberger seems unable to decide if it is tacking cannibalism (following Lévi-Strauss) from an anthropological or aesthetic perspective, leaving the overall show a little jumbled; it aspires to be both an examination of the role cannibalism has played in our society and how it has been artistically reflected, it ends up being a somewhat gaudy, bloody blur.

Whilst the collection as a whole, then, is underwhelming, there are a number of interesting works that warrant a visit. Notably, Ralf Ziervogel‘s DD, a huge panoramic drawing on paper that shows a huge network of humans fused cannibalistically, sexually and revelling in unrelenting cruelty. Ziervogel’s drawing posts a funny but simultaneously bleak, almost overwhelmingly so, picture of contemporary society that evokes Sade’s 120 Journées de Sodom or Jake & Dinos Chapman’s Hell series.

Alongside the inevitable Jake & Dinos, and the even more so Goya, the childlike quality of much of the art depicting cannibalistic acts is consistently troubling. The contrast between a supposed, primitive innocence and unthinkable (yet ever present) horror being particularly horrifying. As well as Ziervogel, Japanese artist Aida Makoto‘s watercolours Edible Artificial Girls, Jérome Zonder‘s nightmare fusion of childhood and the ‘adult’ perversions of hardcore pornography and torture as well as the suitably-named Sandra Vasquez de la Horra‘s monstrous pencil drawings will lve long in the memory and haunt your 4.30am dreams.

Tous Cannibals isn’t subtle, it is bloody, brash, even crude. To which end it seems appropriate that a focal point of the show is Jana Sterback’s Robe de chair pour albinos anorexique, last seen in the Pompidou Centre in 2009, but most recently evoked in the popular imagination on the haunches of the contemporary queen of the bloody, brash and crude, Lady Gaga as a ‘meat dress’. Has la Maison Rouge provided an insight into the banal contemporary omnipresence of cannibalism or is it propgating that banality? Does the meat dress belong to Sterback or Gaga? One thing is for sure; they missed a trick by not selling the breast-milk ice-cream…

Tags: Aida Makoto, Cannibal Holocaust, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Goya, Jake Dinos Chapman, la maison rouge, Lady Gaga, Ralf Ziervogel, Tous Cannibales

Film: Black Swan, (dir: Darren Aronofsky, 2011)

Ballet has always been a hard cultural sell. Like opera, the way it has been packaged by the cultural hierarchy mean it has been exclusive, expensive and elitist; out of reach of the majority. What makes the reception of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan so interesting is that everyone’s been talking about it, even people who are unlikely to ever see a ballet have been getting caught up in the pre-Oscars hype (and there has been a lot) getting excited about a movie, and actually going to the cinema. Whether this results in an upturn in those same movie-goers upgrading their bucket of popcorn £10 cinema ticket for a cocktail dress and £150 ticket remains to be seen.

Aronofsky is best-known for rejuvenating Mickey Rourke’s flaccid career with 2008′s The Wrestler and 2000′s brutal Requiem for a Dream, the unforgettable adaptation of Hubert Selby Junior’s book of the same name. Whilst the director himself has claimed Black Swan, is a companion piece toThe Wrestler, the bleak mood, pessimism and claustrophobic feeling seems to make the earlier film an equally fitting bedfellow.

Nina, played with enough impressive histrionics by Natalie Portman to make her a shoe-in for an Oscar, is a technically gifted, yet emotionally vulnerable ballet dancer, over-protected by her domineering mother, herself a failed dancer. Nina gets the career break she has, literally, been dreaming of, the lead role in Swan Lake, cast by Vincent Cassel’s enigmatic producer Thomas. Nina’s role demands she plays the role of both the virginal White Swan, and the Black Swan, her sensuous negative. Whilst Thomas has no doubts about Nina’s suitability for the former part, he takes some convincing for the second, cajoling her to feel it, live it at every opportunity. Nina’s casting inevitably ruffles as few feathers (sorry), with the company’s previous prima ballerina, played by an almost unrecognisable Winona Ryder, making a suicide attempt and the remainder of the female company treating her with the distance and contempt that pack animals can. The new production also coincides with the arrival of Lily, herself a negative of Nina, sensuous, yet technically limited. But as Thomas says, she isn’t “faking it”.

Black Swan is quite explicitly a film about mental illness, bringing the ambition, neuroses, and jealousy of the classical dance world to the big screen. Whilst Nina prepares for her debut in the leading role, her rehearsals are marked by not just her own nerves, but by a rapid decline into mental collapse. The clues are there at the start of the film, she appears to be self harming, she is seems to be suffering from an eating disorder. Things get worse as curtain up draws closer, Thomas’ concerns about her suitability for the role result in her reality starting to decompose, there are hallucinations, and constant confusions between herself and Lily. There is an unsatisfying ambiguity here, the audience is frequently left to speculate if there is a supernatural element to the story, or if we are witnessing a young woman’s mental collapse, rather unsympathetically within the framework of particularly un-subtle horror flick.

Whilst the ‘is it really happening, or is she losing her mind’ question is clearly set to be the film’s big talking point, the way in which Aronofsky treats the original Swan Lake text is also interesting. Any ballet buffs looking for a re-interpretation of the classic tale will be disappointed, Black Swan owes about as much to Swan Lake as Fatal Attraction does to Madame Butterfly in terms of faithfulness to the source material.

That said, the points of divergence between the film, and the ballet, however, are revealing and offers an alternative way of looking at the film. The classicSwan Lake cast includes Odette, the White Swan, Odile, the Black Swan, the shadowy van Rothbart and the ballet’s hero, Siegfried. Whilst the swan roles are clearly reflected in Black Swan, via Nina and Lily respectively and van Rothbart, the evil wizard who has a predilection for turning young women into half-swan hybrids is clearly Cassel’s Thomas, the absence of an obvious replacement for the hero is troubling. In the ballet, Sigfried falls in love with Nina and, depending on which version you see he is ultimately able, or not, to break the curse that keeps her trapped inside the body of a swan. This absence of any such redeeming figure from the film is symptomatic of its overall bleakness.

It doesn’t stop there. The father is remarkably absent from her family home, even when her birth is alluded to, he is not even referred to. This is telling. In the place of a father, Nina has an over-bearing, herself apparently psychotic (à la Kathy Bates in Misery), both hyper-supportive and intensely resentful of her daughters’ success. Freud would have had a field day if Nina had turned up on his couch, her stunted emotional development and strangely sexually-charged relationship with her mother casts her as suffering from a warped, unresolved Electra complex and the repressed emotional baggage that goes with it. Most worryingly for Nina, and this is arguably a hugely important factor in her eventual psychological breakdown, the complete absence of a father figure means this is ultimately something she cannot resolve. The only slight hope would seem to be the Lothario Thomas, who is ultimately, and rightly only concerned with the success of the show, the shareholders, the investors rather than her development or even artistic success. Indeed this complete lack of redemptive potential could be precisely what this film is really about, putting Nina on exactly the same level as the junky victims ofRequiem for a Dream.

In this way, Aronofsky’s Black Swan casts a bleak picture, not only of the world of ballet, but also of the women in the film, unable to function outside of a patriarchal environment who degenerate into mental illness, lesbianism and self-harm in the absence of a paternal force. It isn’t a subtle film, it is too garish, too bold, too full of the clichés of the Hollywood psychological thriller to be a masterpiece. As a brash, entertaining piece of cinema it works, but scratch too far beneath the service and you’ll how the overall message is potentially to be more disturbing that it initially appears.

 

Spectrum, November 10, 2010, Nouveau Casino, Paris

Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember is unfairly pigeonholed into being little more than a drug artist. He’s guilty of propagating this legend himself to a large extent thanks to his candour about his own experimentation, his impressive grasp of the history of pharmaceuticals and his early commitment to take drugs to make music to take drugs to. But there’s a danger that his music, as evocative as it is of altered states, loses credibility if it is dismissed as merely being music to get wasted to.

It is easy to overlook that his music, including that of his Spectrum outfit, is best understood within the broader artistic current of minimalism, something touched on, but never really examined in his work. Maybe because most of the critics who should be pointing this out are themselves too lysergically distracted to notice.

Artistic minimalism has been described as “[...] that without the diverting presence of ‘composition’, and by the use of plain, often industrial materials arranged in geometrical or highly simplified configurations we may experience all the more strongly the pure qualities of colour, form, space and materials.” (The Tate Gallery, An Illustrated Companion, 1979). Whilst this definition brings to mind contemporary visual art by the likes of Dan Flavin and Richard Serra, this is clearly the effect created with Boom’s one, two chord songs. His work is often brutally formalistic, and always has been marked by a quest for pure noise – sonic minimalism – rather than just being too wasted to play more complicated songs. This approach marked the early Spacemen 3 recordings, but since Jason Pierce and Spiritualized, through their choirs and orchestral arrangements has taken a tangent firmly towards the ‘composition’, Kember has remained true to this sense of sonic purity.

What we got tonight at the Nouveau Casino, a distinctly un-minimal venue with it’s chandeliers, hipsters and location on Rue Oberkampf one of Paris bohemian-chic addresses, was a masterclass of Sonic Minimalism. The spartan setlist, just eight songs, each one teased out to it’s full conclusion, was broadly similar to that played a couple of months previously during Kembers’ last visit. Perhaps inevitably, we got the hits from Spectrum and Spacemen 3, bombarded with a similar precision to that night at the Point Ephémère; Ché, How You Satisfy Me, Suicide and Revolution. The was lineup was reassuringly familiar the with Guto Price from the Super Furry Animals, alarmingly looking increasingly like Dr Jacobi from Twin Peaks, again anchoring bass duties.

For me, the most interesting tracks played were two that didn’t make the setlist last time around, both of which showcase the gentler, melodic side of the Spectrum oeuvre, rather than the bombast. The first, set-opener ‘The Lonsesome Death of Johnny Ace’, a standout track from the 2008 album Indian Giver album that saw Kember going head-to-head with the late legendary rock producer Jim Dickson. The second, the set’s first encore ‘Undo the Taboo’, which kicked off 1992′s Highs, Lows And Heavenly Blows. Both tracks show cast aside the pummelling drone Spectrum is perhaps is best known for, showcasing a subtler, altogether more delicate side to the Spectrum sound, a side where the intersecting lines of Kember’s theramin and Jason Holt’s guitar take centre stage.

With the immanent re-issue of the first three Kember solo albums, here’s hoping that 2011 will be the opportunity for a full consideration of Spectrum’s, err, range – the light, rather than just the shade of Kember’s commitment to ‘making the most out of very little’ to be celebrated.

Tags: minimalism, nouveau casino, Paris, Pete Kember, Sonic Boom, Spacemen 3, Spectrum, Spiritualized