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.
