Photo by Jack Pierson at Philippe Rizzo David Salle at Thaddeus Ropac David Salle Thomas Locher at Anne DeVillepoix Imi Knoebel at Gilbert Brownstone & Cie. Wolfgang Laib at Gilbert Brownstone & Cie. Serge Comte at Jousse-Seguin Xavier Veilhan at Jennifer Flay

letter from paris by Jeff Rian The Paris art season opened with its standard mix of around 40 percent locals and the rest imports. September's American entries included Jeanne Dunning's photographs of a female body covered in foodstuffs and her video of whipped-cream hair dressing at Samia Saouma, and Jack Pierson's picture poems of faded beach vistas and fey boys and still lifes of kitchen cleansers or flowers (one of this month's stand-outs) at Galerie Philippe Rizzo. They had the charm and simplicity of a William Carlos Williams short poem and the melancholy softness of Carson McCullers's sad society. David Salle, at Thaddeus Ropac, showed a room of jokey, photo- inset, deft and seamless David Salles, adding a touch of France to the insets, such as the Tour Eiffel, and continuing the style that defined him. Anselm Kiefer at Templon was no less predictable or Teutonic than he was a dozen years ago. He showed about a dozen table- size books and a handful of large hay- strewn, earth-colored paintings about the death of empires and the depleted soil they return to. Thomas Locher at Anne DeVillepoix showed a line-up of message- laden chairs ("I'm not saying that what I think is right, but what I'm saying, I think, cannot be wrong."), annotated wall texts on the preamble to the French Constitution and, in the back, geometric Plexi-surfaced "paintings" with numbers referencing patterns based on an aleatory selection of colors and numbers. At Gilbert Brownstone & Cie., Imi Knoebel showed smallish, stacked, sculptural paintings on wood that recall Mondrian's primary colors, Minimalism's formal simplicity, PoMo's formulaic compression: memories of times past, redone, reformatted, high-teched. Wolfgang Laib built a 10 x 10 x 10-foot woodwork temple with a wax staircase and tub-sized boats atop ready to float netherward. The Americans are preoccupied with media and sexual politics, the Germans with death, formal rigor and the brooding soul. Both are in distinct sensory contrast to French exhibitions, the highlight of which was, in my opinion, Pierre Huyghe's video projection called Dubbing (unpicturable here), which showed a group of 15 professional dubbers doing voice-overs for a two-hour film we don't see but they watch. In one part, after some minutes of silence, a woman starts moaning in pain then begins to shriek "I hate you," then another woman screams as if tortured, then a man. The other vocalists ignore the seemingly tortured, as is often the case (survival often preempts personal involvement), while waiting their turn to orchestrate the movie. Dubbing made an impression and held my attention by active voice alone. At Jousse-Seguin, Serge Comte took the Post-it to its dweebiest limit, making books, using a hundred or so to compose a large portrait, contriving small Post-it collages of himself and a female counterpart. In a work called Le Tour (The Tour), at Jennifer Flay, Xavier Veilhan automated a potter's wheel with a scooter, which turns the wheel to make wonky dun pots. Le Hublot (The Porthole) is a port hole cut in the office wall, and Le Luminaire (The Lamp) is a strobe light installed in what looks like an extraterrestrial's round, banded Orgone Accumulator. Yves Amu Klein, son of the famed cobalt-bluemeister, must have been a boy-genius with an erector set, by the evidence of his animated, pet-sized metal octupi, called Octofungi, which tip and reach like an electronic baby at the passersby. But is it art? September in Paris was not exactly lackluster, just lacking in freshness. The city hasn't been a contemporary art Mecca since the war, the First one, that is, and French art never really recovered from either of the two. What France preserved, however, is perhaps its highest art form: its lifestyle: its café society, morning baguette, two-hour lunch, social capitalism, a constant run of film festivals, Spring and Fall fashion reviews, five weeks of vacation per annum, 400-plus varieties of cheese, and cultural centralization: Paris to and fro. Its lifestyle is often the subject if not impetus of the kind of art they make, and import. Most Paris galleries are accessed by pushing polished-steel nipple above a key pad that unlocks a three-inch-thick 400- year-old door-within-a-door that tests anyone's strength and every American's patience, often terminating their visit when pushing doesn't budge it and the polished nipple's purpose is not apparent. If you manage to find your way inside, there might be a courtyard and what were once sky-lit workers-ateliers now transformed into sleekish gallery spaces that wax and ape an `80s polish, or a winding staircase or a two-and-a-half person fin-de-siècle elevator whose inner doors open inward making you heft that paunch. Galleries are redolent of time and touch and the kind of priority that inheres to a sense of place and life that eschews business and the bottom lines of the artists on parade. This is perhaps the way things ought to be: Business supporting life rather than ruling it, and art prevailing as the last, only and highest subset of life with a vestigial hint of metaphysical beyondness. What's interesting about French art is that the life-art quotient is a real tug of war, where life is artistic and art is a stylistic improvisation about the stuff that makes up life and style. Here, the "idea" of art is revered, and it's a cathedral of an idea, although art and artists are treated like merde. (Imagine how different the world would be if we'd treated God as poorly as He or She's treated us?) In Paris, collectors are few or old-world minded, and galleries look to art fairs and non-French collectors to keep them afloat. It has been said that a French baby's head is chopped off at birth, the brain is sent off to school to learn Frenchness by rote and rule, while the young body is doted upon with four o'clock pain aux raisins, chocolat chaud and that inbred sense of style, for theirs is among the most fastidious of lifestyles, the apex of which is a luxuriant, pampered, fondled and complicatedly contrived fetishdom of haute cuisine and couture and heady abstractions that are as dandily texted as a Gault et Millaut rating or Jean-Paul Gaultier outfit. Without thinking, the body is programmed: it knows to sniff cheese, to read the color of wine and the tints and tinges of baguettes and succulent meringues and to don the toniest of combinations, even if the same outfit is donned day-in and day-out. But the French language treats the senses as a subset of mind, and defers to the body's most hawklike sensory organ: the eye. The verb sentir, for example, means to taste, to smell, to feel. "Let's taste a different track on this CD," a friend said to me not long after we'd "smelled" different parfums (flavors) of deliriously rich Bertillon ice cream. The senses are programmed by habit, and philosophers need little in the way of sensory detail when they strive to encompass the galaxy of mind itself. Aristotle told us that sight is the highest sense, that the eye is the window to the soul. But to maintain that lofty air all the way through the entrée, fish, and meat course to sniff that sneaker-smelling cheese requires concentration. Plus a flotilla of that Bordeaux. Body communicates to Mind without words. Both are programmed by habit. Separating mind and body leads you toward a kind of sensory refinement where the eye is, indeed, the highest sense. Yet the body can revel in sensory pleasures while the brain remains detached in loftier contemplation. The French have mastered this art. Here, too, psychology is more rational than therapeutic; it's something to ponder but not necessarily to sign-up for the way American's do. There's a certain delicacy about French culture. Spicy means to add salt and herbs, not chili pepper. This delicate palette, the leggy wine, the meat gussied up with sauces Marie de Medicis first brought here five centuries ago (disgusted by the festering gobbets aroast) are savoured by a language that descended from mumbly Latin argot to rise to aristocratic prominence during the age of Diderot and the Académie Française, which still convenes to preserve its linguistic inheritance, creating words like le ordinateur, to mean computer (neither being particularly appropriate). How they know it's masculine, I'm told, is not because of the thing itself, but because of an inherent linguistic logic. Art tells us something about our creature habits and, of course, their art and the art they like tells us about theirs. After all, they loved Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke, not Buddy Hackett or Seinfeld. Art and artists here traffic in thought and glossy sensation; in style. As the advance forces of sensory experience, artists here prioritize the eye and aim to pique thoughts. The eminent epicurean Marcel Duchamp, of course, continues to be the legendary maestro of art and the lifestyle all artists chase. Matisse was a southerner. Picasso an import. Pierre Huyghe's dubbers remind us of our detachment from life's dire situations: we all want to come out alive. Xavier Vielhan's pot-making engine, Serge Comte's elaborate Post-its, and Yves Klein the Younger's toylike octupi may only elicit an outsider's thinky chortle or polite bemusement, but here at home they nudge and nuance the rules and rotes of cultural conditioning. Their works are not about big media or the permanent dark, and there is something disquietingly oxymoronic about this art's quiet intensity, ambient thoughtfulness and deep superficiality: something about the body seemingly separated from mind and all that "seemingliness" strategized at length into an art of appearance and profound gloss. This is a not a mere trick of modern esthetics; it's idea art that prods the delicate seams of life. Artists know how our hands feed our thoughts, how, like babies, we taste life by putting as much as manageable in our mouths. A lot of art is simply about nonverbal relationships between knowing and knower. Estheticizing the world at large, i.e., making it visual, puts distance between knowing by taste and touch and makes dimensions strange and surface reality interesting for its quiddity; ergo, laterally deep and delicately provocative. P.S. The FIAC (International Contemporary Art Fair) opened yesterday with an art fair's standard five-years-worth of contemporary art. But there was a section of 15 Korean galleries stuck together in the back, hanging, surprisingly, a preponderance of gray matte-knifed monochrome paintings of varying textures. Their gallerists beamed with possibility. But their outsiderness was sad, as most art fairs are sad, particularly for anyone not in the swim. You might imagine one yourself, everything except that earthy rich Korean gray. JEFF RIAN is a writer living in Paris.