Nuit Blanche 2011

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No matter how one tries to plan a Nuit Blanche, there is no way to ever stick to the plan. Nevertheless, I had a vague strategy based on the location of the participating areas.

Everything was on the Right Bank this year, which is a plus as far as I'm concerned (people on the Left Bank might disagree). The historic core of the event is always around city hall, so I dutifully trekked down to the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville where I got my guidebook for the evening.

There were pallets and pallets of the guidebooks at all of the major locations. You can see a pallet behind the woman holding the camera, to replenish the big piles on the tables as needed.

Maps at the central point of each zone showed where the "attractions" could be found.

I went first to the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville (20 minute wait in back of the building). The installation was an abstract British art film about the Italian island of Lampedusa. It is clearly a lovely place, but in recent years it is much more famous for the cadavers washing up on its beaches and the thousands of refugees arriving from Africa in sinking boats.

Lampedusa is in spitting distance of Tunisia and not near the rest of Italy at all, not even Sicily, which explains why anybody hits the European jackpot by touching the soil there.

The images of the film were quite interesting, but I found myself gazing up at the fancy reception rooms of city hall.

This year was the 10th Nuit Blanche. During the very first Nuit Blanche in 2002, it was possible to visit the splendours of the Hôtel de Ville, and it was there at 2:30 a.m. that a deranged homophobic man stuck a knife into the abdomen of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor. The mayor recovered after a couple of months and was re-elected in a landslide a few years ago. He remains one of the most popular politicians in France.

Where to go from there? The night was very young -- it was only about 20:30.

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There was one thing that I absolutely wanted to see, but I took a stupid wrong turn. The streets of the Marais have quirky names, but frankly, how could I have confused the rue des Blancs-Manteaux with the rue des Francs-Bourgeois?

This caused me to arrive at one of the "minor" associated installations as opposed to the ones sponsored by the city (clearly municipal funding is involved in the 'sponsored' things).

And so at the Blancs-Manteaux cultural center, I found myself visiting "le Yeti." One entered from the backside of the installation and saw this.

Once you walked around to the front, you finally saw the electric yeti.

That was good for a few minutes. Frankly, in a calm environment I could sit down and admire this sort of thing for a lengthy amount of time, but in the heat and the crowds of the night, it was preferable to keep moving.

Did I mention that the number of visitors this year was estimated to be 2.5 million people? (The actual population of the city of Paris is 2.2 million with about 11 million for the metropolitan area.)

Next I let myself be sucked into a "follow the crowd" situation. People were flowing into the Eglise Notre Dame des Blancs-Manteaux, so I followed them.

However, I quickly determined that the event was "Voices in the Night" and it wasn't starting for another 20 minutes. The guidebook describes it as a musical marathon with more than 150 chorists, lyric artists from the conservatory and disabled and mentally handicapped singers. I did not feel musically inclined to wait for this, so I exited before it began.

Finally, I arrived on the rue des Francs Bourgeois to see one of the big events of the evening.

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Although the Marais is chock full of old manors and other public buildings that are perfect for these kinds of artistic displays, the streets are absolutely not suitable for this sort of event on a hot night. (But one can imagine that they expected October weather when all of this was planned!)

Well, I waited for a full hour to get into "Purple Rain" in the courtyard of the Hôtel d'Albret. Naturally, umbrellas were provided at the entrance.

The guidebook promised a gentle rain, and I was expecting a misting drizzle, but it was pouring in that courtyard! Due to the extreme heat of the evening, nobody minded and some people even got drenched on purpose. The umbrellas really were not sufficient when one was trying to use a camera at the same time, so I got pretty wet as well along with everybody else.

                           

Anyway, it was just as purple and just as rainy (even rainier) as promised and everybody seemed delighted by the experience, especially the numerous Japanese.

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As great as all of the new cameras are these day, they can totally screw up a simple photo of a shop window, in this case the bookstore of the Swiss cultural center.

Luckily, the video setting is much more understanding.

Anyway, in spite of 20 or more major things still left to see in the area, I decided it was time to head north. One thing that convinced me was when I tried to take a better picture of what was happening in the courtyard of the museum of Judaism and one of the security gorillas told me "no photos!"

There were glittering strands of something-or-other scintillating in the dark. I will never know what.

I took the metro to the 17th arrondissement. There were projections on some of the blank walls facing the Gare Saint Lazare train tracks. Unfortunately there is no way to get a good photo of this sort of thing since the whole video cycle lasts at least 30 minutes...

Then it was time to enter the Lycée Chaptal to see some more video madness.

Fidel was with us!

A second video in another courtyard celebrated the recession. Created by a Spanish artist based in Mexico, it was a film of a pyrotechnical installation for the 'Art Basel Miami Beach' show in Switzerland. It was financed by a loan by a Spanish bank and is considered to be an ironic homage to the world economy.

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Damn, the next thing I was was totally unphotographable. It was in the Sainte Marie-des-Batignolles church and was proposed by a Lithuanian artist who lives in New York.

It was about as convincing as telling someone that you had seen a ghost and then showing blurry photos of... nothing. Even when we entered the church, it was not immediately obvious what we were supposed to be seeing. It is called "Big O" and is a continuous loop of magnetic tape, such as you might pull out of an old VHS cassette.

There were six big fans blowing at each other in the semi darkness.

Do you see anything? I didn't think so. The big circle of table hangs in suspension, spinning around and never touching the ground. There is nothing spectacular to see at all, but once you see what is happening, it just seems impossible. How can a loop of tape stay in the air and not just fall to the ground, fans be damned?

     

You can see a tiny glimpse of the blurred tape, but you will never really believe it until you see it for yourself.

And then it was time to enter the garden of the superheroes at the Square des Batignolles. Children really loved this one.

All through the garden, there were encounters with superheros, but not just the normal ones -- there was also Hello Kitty, Tintin, Astérix, Super Mario, an astronaut, and plenty of WTF characters.

     

There were tons of Americans there and their absolute favorite was Bibendum, the Michelin tire man, for some reason. In Europe, we have seen Bibendum for at least 80 years, but they all shrieked "the Michelin tire man!" the moment they saw him as though a physical manifestation of him were the most incredible thing in the world.

I'll admit that it was a bit odd to see all of these characters.

[bixaorellana]

Oh, this is great! How did you keep the camera dry in the purple rain? That's an amazing installation. I love the last photo of it, from the outside looking in. The pics looking up at the "privileged" windows of city hall made me want to storm something or maybe eat the rich. Was the yeti moving?

I'm glad that you were forced to video that bookstore window -- quirky & charming! Too bad about the pointlessly officious security guy at the museum, though.

Hm. Peter Pan is a bit long in the tooth, and the Michelin Man looks skinny. But I LOVE TinTin!

Kerouac, do you "train" for this event -- resting earlier so you can stay up all night?

[lola]

Wonderful, Kerouac. We do appreciate your doing this for us!

How hot was it?

Choral marathon sounds pretty resistable to me. Was that church decommissioned? It's beautiful.

For me it's a tie between the big O and Purple Rain. I guess they had barricades to prevent people from approaching the O; otherwise it would be too tempting to go tug on it or something.

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It was getting close to 1 a.m. so I hopped on the metro for my next destination. Had to skip another 20 or so sites along the way. I came out of the metro at Anvers and went to the Lycée Jacques Decour in the 9th arrondissement.

The Mexican artist Carlos Amorales had an installation called "Black Cloud" in the covered arcade of the inner courtyard. We had to climb a set of stairs to get up to the courtyard.

And the black cloud was upon us.



               

30,000 individual black butterflies!









The guidebook says "marvelous and menacing" .....





.... "reminding us of classical mythology and horror movies."

Elsewhere in the high school was a theatre showing simultaneously two British experimental works, Black Rain and Heliocentric. The first shows life on earth, nature, urban chaos and everything in between. The other is raw astral footage from satellites, showing the cosmos above us.

               

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Coming out of the lycée at 1:30, I found myself facing the recently renovated Trianon. It was a glorious movie palace that had become a karate grindhouse by the 1970's. Since then it has become mostly a pop music venue, but it has also staged plays and even operas. It is a delight to see it restored to its former glory, but I didn't go to see what was happening there tonight.

Just two blocks away, the city of Paris is renovating the even more spectacular Louxor cinema to create yet another municipal cultural center -- but it won't be ready for another two years.

There was a minor installation next to the Anvers metro station, called "La Concentration des Services." An artist merged every piece of "urban furniture" into one unified block -- bus stop, parking machine, bike stand, clock, trash bin, traffic signal, directional sign, etc. Since people were occupying all of seats, it seemed to have already been adopted.

I trekked up rue de Steinkerque in the direction of Sacré Coeur. There were as many people at 2 a.m. as at 2 p.m. -- maybe more.

The funicular was mobbed, and I didn't feel like taking it. It had become an installation as well, because the two cabins had been covered with red light strips, and they flashed like beating hearts going up and down the hill.

Therefore I did not see the 1000 flames in the gardens or any of the other things up there. Instead, I ducked into the school next to the funicular and saw something by an Icelandic artist, "The End - Rocky Mountains." There was a rectangle of hanging screens on which there were spectacular images of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and also some improbably placed musicians.

This would have been excellent if it had been a cold night!

Coming out the back of the school, I saw a big green monolith that had been scratched by a monster. The artist, Virginie Yassef, recreated the authentic life-size claw mark that a creature left in the primeval slime of the Massif Central 140 million years ago.

I used my final energy to limp in direction of metro Abbesses. Since St. Jean de Montmartre church is right there on the square, I went to see my last item for the night, "Barbed Salt Lamps" by an Israeli artist. To me, it looked like they were flocked like cheap Christmas trees at Wal-Mart, but what do I know?

Even though some of the metro would be running all night, my own station would be closing at around 2:10, so I hurried to get one of the final trains to my station. However, I did pause to admire one of the final pieces of art of the evening, a collective work that I had seen all along the Nuit Blanche trail. I can't even imagine what it looked like at dawn.

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Just one last remark -- as usual, I saw only about 5% of the things that the Nuit Blanche had on display. So frustrating!

[nycgirl]

Well, I really like the ones you did see.

Those black butterflies certainly are menacing, and I've never said that about butterflies before! They're almost skin-crawling. The sight of them is very arresting, though.

I really like the Purple Rain exhibition, looks like a good time. It's funny, the third one of those photos looks like it could be at a college's wet T shirt contest.

Thanks for sharing these terrific photos. I love these reports, each year seems better than the last.