Needless to say, I was excited.
Almost every single person I'd talked to recommended I visit the Palais de Tokyo. People from all walks of life, be it Ircam researcher or maître patissier (okay, to be honest, these are the only two kinds of people with whom I have any contact), were completely convinced that there was no better place to feel the full nuclear shockwave that is creativity in Paris. On paper it's hard to imagine otherwise. Not only is the Palais devoted with almost sexual enthusiasm to contemporary art (probably once an exhibit is open for more than a month it must be retired for not being cutting edge enough), it actually has the audacity to call itself "anti-musée par excellence", the embodiment of a museum that contradicts the very idea of a museum. Again, I was excited. So excited, in fact, that I decided to stop for lunch.
Then again, who could blame me?
At a farmer's market one thing becomes clear: Paris is a city that loves to food. I contrast this sharply with the United States, which is a country that loves to eat, to take that which is not inside ones stomach and to make it so. The citizens of Paris, on the other hand, consider the act of actually consuming the food to be but one movement of a gustatory ring cycle that probably begins as early as the seed. I don't have any trouble imagining a French farmer bending down over freshly planted soil, leaning low over a just-sprouted carrot, and with one hand on his belly and an erotic twinkle in his eye whispering the word "Soon." A farmer's market carries that same humidity, that same, warm haze of culinary foreplay. There's something reminiscent of a child piling up his several kilograms of Halloween candy just to enjoy the thought of what is to come but on a much grander scale. At the market people come together to celebrate both their love for food and their love for the people who make the food; we have an explosive combination of cuisine and nationalism.
And so, after eating a kilogram of cheese one free sample at a time, I made my way to the museum. My spirits could not have been higher. With museums as with meeting new people I am much, much more likely to come away with a good first impression if my insides are lined with Roquefort. That way if I get bored I can always sit back and think to myself, "Man, I can't believe how much my insides are lined with Roquefort." I'm aware that to other people this must sound like the nauseating internal dialog of a stuffed-crust pizza, but to me it's a feeling of calm and serenity bordering on the spiritual. In any case, I was ready to hit the museum. And it appears the museum was ready to hit me.
This monumental hunk of dilapidated shit (aka art) by Peter Buggenhout is the first thing to slap you in the eyeballs on your way into the Palais. In case you can't tell from the mediocre photography, you're looking at an elephant-sized amalgam of sinuous waste suspended high in the air, equal parts chandelier and scrap heap. In it I found my love of the post-apocalyptic perfectly wed to my love of the biological, to say nothing for my love of having the things I love wed together. In fact based on this single first impression my Palais-amour could not have been higher. As you can see up to this point the Palais fulfills all its pretension of being the anti-museum, eschewing as it does the bland, white-walled trappings of the contemporary gallery but without adopting the whimsy of the Pompidou center. The Palais de Tokyo is a ruined prostitute or a dead bird or a fallen tree that looks up at me and says, "Yes, I am beautiful, but only because I am so ugly." I like it.
That last one is particularly noteworthy because it sums up exactly both the best and worst of the Palais de Tokyo. Maybe it's hard to tell from my picture but you're not looking at a portrait of fresh fruit. That's a still life of garbage (maybe living up much better to the French translation: nature morte). More importantly it's not hanging in a well-lit gallery flanked by a placard that celebrates the personality of the brushstrokes and the haloing use of color, but rather in a staircase and without any documentation. It says, "Oh hey, we found this here. We think it's an art, but we'd appreciate a second opinion." Which I certainly like.
This video is all for you, Stephan. Awesome, Right?
Unfortunately at this point my love affair with the Palais de Tokyo comes to an end. I know it seems like everything has been strawberries and frosted butter but I've really made the effort to show you the best of what the museum has to offer. All the literature and advertisement promises a soul-contorting experience, a sort of trial-by-art running of the gauntlet that grabs you by the ears and vomits aesthetic into your face until you emerge a broken, humbled, transcendent being. Maybe it goes without saying but the Palais de Tokyo is not quite this. It contains some very interesting art, to be sure, and it's all housed in probably the most incredible museum space I've ever seen, but at the end of the day the Palais plays it quite safe and, worst of all, the established relationship between museum and museum-goer remains well intact.
I suppose I have two complaints. In fairness the first probably has more to do with the word art itself than it does the Palais de Tokyo, but at the same time I do feel that in calling itself a contemporary art museum the Palais does give off a whiff of false advertisement. Yes, it would be fair to say that the Palais de Tokyo contains contemporary art, but it's not the same species of contemporary art that one finds at the Pompidou center. By my own reckoning contemporary art must achieve victory in two spaces, the space of the concept and the space of the medium. It must bring us face to face with a typically marginal issue and it must do so in a way that evokes the awe of technical mastery. The Buggenhout work hums with power, succeeding both as a beautiful sculptural gesture and an indictment of waste in society, but the overwhelming majority of the exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo fail to rise to that high water mark. For example, a collage of photographs of women with all body parts blurred except for the secondary sex organs certainly highlights the insult of the male gaze but the presentation hits with the blunt weight of a lead pillow. A documentary of poverty in modern France fills me with disgust and compassion but not by the aesthetic of its sloppy, thoughtless montage. I know all this sounds desperately pretentious but I hope it isn't. I hope that I'm saying what I feel, which is that I love art that is challenging, frustrating, insulting, terrifying and brutal, but not when it comes at the expense of beauty. Maybe art has become too broad an umbrella and we should invent a new label, something like interpretive journalism, to describe the kind of work on display at the Palais de Toyko. Personally I feel this is unnecessary, we simply need to challenge our contemporary artists to try a little harder.
My second complaint, though, is that filling the Palais de Toyko with a museum is the stupidest decision since the French hot dog. The interior of the Palais is spacious, well-lit and unlike anything I've seen before. The ground floor folds over itself like a plate of pancakes. The basement dives and slopes between pockets of level ground, punctuated by spiral staircases that shoot up to disconnected plateaus on the floor above. The upper levels form a scattered canopy of chaotic space, blown apart by the vaulting atria below. It's a mad, twisted space, and putting a museum inside it certainly makes for an interesting museum. But it would have been so, so, much more interesting as not a museum. Why not a bar? A roller-derby? A paintball arena? A grownup playground? An artists collective? A public events space? Anything, anything but yet another stand around, stroke my chin, gee my legs are sore let's find a cafe museum. Man, just look at this place and tell me it doesn't get your creative juices flowing.
Finally, here's yet another addition to my list of Shitty Streets named for Awesome People. It's a little hard to tell from the photo but here I am standing at the actual corner of Fresnel and Foucault. Given the names, you might expect to see the rainbow of humanity itself, the raw light of our essence sprayed by an array of prisms into fractured beams of vibrating time and space. Instead you get this.
#lolparis
Almost every single person I'd talked to recommended I visit the Palais de Tokyo. People from all walks of life, be it Ircam researcher or maître patissier (okay, to be honest, these are the only two kinds of people with whom I have any contact), were completely convinced that there was no better place to feel the full nuclear shockwave that is creativity in Paris. On paper it's hard to imagine otherwise. Not only is the Palais devoted with almost sexual enthusiasm to contemporary art (probably once an exhibit is open for more than a month it must be retired for not being cutting edge enough), it actually has the audacity to call itself "anti-musée par excellence", the embodiment of a museum that contradicts the very idea of a museum. Again, I was excited. So excited, in fact, that I decided to stop for lunch.
Then again, who could blame me?
At a farmer's market one thing becomes clear: Paris is a city that loves to food. I contrast this sharply with the United States, which is a country that loves to eat, to take that which is not inside ones stomach and to make it so. The citizens of Paris, on the other hand, consider the act of actually consuming the food to be but one movement of a gustatory ring cycle that probably begins as early as the seed. I don't have any trouble imagining a French farmer bending down over freshly planted soil, leaning low over a just-sprouted carrot, and with one hand on his belly and an erotic twinkle in his eye whispering the word "Soon." A farmer's market carries that same humidity, that same, warm haze of culinary foreplay. There's something reminiscent of a child piling up his several kilograms of Halloween candy just to enjoy the thought of what is to come but on a much grander scale. At the market people come together to celebrate both their love for food and their love for the people who make the food; we have an explosive combination of cuisine and nationalism.
 |
| Want |
 |
| Want*x |
 |
| Want^x |
This monumental hunk of dilapidated shit (aka art) by Peter Buggenhout is the first thing to slap you in the eyeballs on your way into the Palais. In case you can't tell from the mediocre photography, you're looking at an elephant-sized amalgam of sinuous waste suspended high in the air, equal parts chandelier and scrap heap. In it I found my love of the post-apocalyptic perfectly wed to my love of the biological, to say nothing for my love of having the things I love wed together. In fact based on this single first impression my Palais-amour could not have been higher. As you can see up to this point the Palais fulfills all its pretension of being the anti-museum, eschewing as it does the bland, white-walled trappings of the contemporary gallery but without adopting the whimsy of the Pompidou center. The Palais de Tokyo is a ruined prostitute or a dead bird or a fallen tree that looks up at me and says, "Yes, I am beautiful, but only because I am so ugly." I like it.
 |
| I'll bet you do. |
That last one is particularly noteworthy because it sums up exactly both the best and worst of the Palais de Tokyo. Maybe it's hard to tell from my picture but you're not looking at a portrait of fresh fruit. That's a still life of garbage (maybe living up much better to the French translation: nature morte). More importantly it's not hanging in a well-lit gallery flanked by a placard that celebrates the personality of the brushstrokes and the haloing use of color, but rather in a staircase and without any documentation. It says, "Oh hey, we found this here. We think it's an art, but we'd appreciate a second opinion." Which I certainly like.
This video is all for you, Stephan. Awesome, Right?
Unfortunately at this point my love affair with the Palais de Tokyo comes to an end. I know it seems like everything has been strawberries and frosted butter but I've really made the effort to show you the best of what the museum has to offer. All the literature and advertisement promises a soul-contorting experience, a sort of trial-by-art running of the gauntlet that grabs you by the ears and vomits aesthetic into your face until you emerge a broken, humbled, transcendent being. Maybe it goes without saying but the Palais de Tokyo is not quite this. It contains some very interesting art, to be sure, and it's all housed in probably the most incredible museum space I've ever seen, but at the end of the day the Palais plays it quite safe and, worst of all, the established relationship between museum and museum-goer remains well intact.
I suppose I have two complaints. In fairness the first probably has more to do with the word art itself than it does the Palais de Tokyo, but at the same time I do feel that in calling itself a contemporary art museum the Palais does give off a whiff of false advertisement. Yes, it would be fair to say that the Palais de Tokyo contains contemporary art, but it's not the same species of contemporary art that one finds at the Pompidou center. By my own reckoning contemporary art must achieve victory in two spaces, the space of the concept and the space of the medium. It must bring us face to face with a typically marginal issue and it must do so in a way that evokes the awe of technical mastery. The Buggenhout work hums with power, succeeding both as a beautiful sculptural gesture and an indictment of waste in society, but the overwhelming majority of the exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo fail to rise to that high water mark. For example, a collage of photographs of women with all body parts blurred except for the secondary sex organs certainly highlights the insult of the male gaze but the presentation hits with the blunt weight of a lead pillow. A documentary of poverty in modern France fills me with disgust and compassion but not by the aesthetic of its sloppy, thoughtless montage. I know all this sounds desperately pretentious but I hope it isn't. I hope that I'm saying what I feel, which is that I love art that is challenging, frustrating, insulting, terrifying and brutal, but not when it comes at the expense of beauty. Maybe art has become too broad an umbrella and we should invent a new label, something like interpretive journalism, to describe the kind of work on display at the Palais de Toyko. Personally I feel this is unnecessary, we simply need to challenge our contemporary artists to try a little harder.
My second complaint, though, is that filling the Palais de Toyko with a museum is the stupidest decision since the French hot dog. The interior of the Palais is spacious, well-lit and unlike anything I've seen before. The ground floor folds over itself like a plate of pancakes. The basement dives and slopes between pockets of level ground, punctuated by spiral staircases that shoot up to disconnected plateaus on the floor above. The upper levels form a scattered canopy of chaotic space, blown apart by the vaulting atria below. It's a mad, twisted space, and putting a museum inside it certainly makes for an interesting museum. But it would have been so, so, much more interesting as not a museum. Why not a bar? A roller-derby? A paintball arena? A grownup playground? An artists collective? A public events space? Anything, anything but yet another stand around, stroke my chin, gee my legs are sore let's find a cafe museum. Man, just look at this place and tell me it doesn't get your creative juices flowing.
#lolparis
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