|
Post by Deleted on May 13, 2014 11:02:44 GMT
One of the things I like about the Monumenta event is that it is challenging. The huge artwork has been created specially for the event, usually by an artist who is very obscure to visitors, and you just have to figure it out for yourself. Oh, there are some brochures, in both French and English, to give you some clues as to the significance of what you are seeing, but most of the work has to be done with your own eyes and mind. Last year Monumenta was cancelled due to budgetary restrictions, but we fans were happy to see it return this year. I have not gone to it every year, but I did make reports in 2010 and 2012 so you can see how wildly variable the art can be. This year's artwork is called " The Strange City" and was created by Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Both of them were born in Dnipropetrovsk, formerly in the USSR but now in the troubled southeast quadrant of Ukraine. It's is Ukraine's 4th largest city. For a long time it was one of the "closed cities" of the Soviet Union, because Stalin had filled it with all sorts of strange military factories including the first missile systems and Sputnik satellites. When I went to Monumenta yesterday, I knew none of this, but it all explains perfectly the architectural obsessions of the Kabakovs and their desire to create visions of a technological utopia. The first thing to which you are directed when you enter the Grand Palais (and you have no choice since there are big white walls restricting the direction you can go) is the Cupola. It shifts colour discreetly if you keep watching it. It faces the Strange City and is clearly some sort of satellite dish to rectify the brain waves of the inhabitants. The first building that most people enter is The Empty Museum. It is disconcerting at first, but more and more people sit on the seats staring at the blank walls, mesmerized.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 13, 2014 11:14:18 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 13, 2014 11:27:50 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 13, 2014 14:46:29 GMT
One of the themes, just as complicated as touching an angel, was the idea of entering in contact with the noosphere. The concept of the noosphere was very popular in the early 20th century, being a complement of the geosphere (the planet itself) and the biosphere (the totality of living things). The noosphere is sort of a giant invisible glob of all human knowledge, emotion, energy particles -- basically the sum of human cognition. Religious people would call it our souls, because it is comprised of all of the non physical things that are left when we die. These elements are immortal and never really disappear. There were all sorts of proof of the noosphere leaking back through to people from time to time in the 1920's when a Russian peasant woman would suddenly start speaking perfect French or a person in a psychiatric institution would write long texts in a made-up alphabet, except that it wasn't made up at all and was actually a lost language from the 11th century and the words were poems. Such poetic science seems to have drained out of our lives in the 21th century (sucked up by the noosphere?) and now if you mention such a concept to a modern teenager, he will probably say, "the place where all of the ideas are collected? That's just Wikipedia."
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 13, 2014 19:36:04 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 13, 2014 19:49:30 GMT
Frankly, I hope to return on European Museum Night in about 10 days, because it was quite obvious that it would be a totally different experience after dark.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on May 14, 2014 20:49:10 GMT
|
|
|
Post by mossie on May 16, 2014 16:33:39 GMT
Sorry, this is not for me. I class this as "pretentious rubbish" and consider that better artists work can be seen on rues Desnoyez or Ordener.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 16, 2014 17:00:23 GMT
"Pretention" is a must for certain art forms, just as it is for certain types of literature or performance art. Even though it often annoys me, I support it anyway because it is what pushes the envelope and makes art forms advance. Picasso, Dali, Monet, Van Gogh, Warhol, etc. were all considered totally pretentious when they began their careers (Actually that isn't true -- most of them started totally classical careers and only began to try new way of artistic expression later.), and the world caught up with them later.
So whenever I see something that is "challenging," I prefer to give it the benefit of the doubt for awhile because it often takes a month or two to settle in my brain. If it still comes to mind two months later, it means that there was really something in the work that affected me. I already know that this exhibition affected me because I am absolutely fascinated by the discovery of the concept of the noosphere, even if this artist did not invent it. But he caught the ball and ran with it.
|
|
|
Post by fumobici on May 18, 2014 16:03:13 GMT
Hmmm. Went to see this show last night without really intending to. Brief thoughts: I went into the show knowing exactly nothing about its conceptual foundations or the artists--as I generally prefer.
Firstly, incredible effort put in to create all this, paintings in oil, sculpture, architectural renderings in both drawings and models, the maze-like division of the space into rooms and passages--all done on a grand scale. Paintings were quite workmanlike if not brilliant, many showing almost Escheresque plays on perspective and space (admittedly lacking his mathematical wizardry) with dark interior fields in browns and blacks populated by figures--scrapbook faces from the deep 20th century really were what you noticed--almost always turned on edge or at some unnatural angle, looking disjointed from the context and sometimes cadaverous. Glimpses of dreamscapes and 50s-60s sci-fi bookcover scenes hid in the spatial interstices.
The architectural renderings depict some sort of huge mystical machine meant to focus and make visible some ethereal invisible reality. The drawings and models have an almost maniacal depth of detail. I had no sense of whether the artists meant this to be taken literally, whether it was all some allegorical commentary or if indeed it was simply whimsical.
I think night time was probably ideal for viewing the show, the tipped over cupola which loosely mimicked the main cupola of the building wasn't having to compete with ambient light from the translucent roof so the color changing was surely more dramatic, and one room Kerouac shows above with a plane with protrusions in its center was intermittently lit and darkened every five or ten minutes and at night the darkness inside that central room was nearly total. People gasped and laughed when the lights suddenly came on. The only way I could see anything at all when it was unlit was people using the flashlight functions on their phones as little random spotlights.
Overall very impressive without ever really being in any way brilliant or deep. Well worth a visit in other words.
I'd actually never been inside the building before and any excuse to go inside is worth doing as it is rally a marvel of ironmongery, engineering informed by physics on display in the beautifully tapered iron skeleton beams making visible the stresses of the buildings huge mass far overhead and endless decorative detail, mostly cleverly incorporated into the functional structure. Very little of the considerable decorative detail isn't doing double duty as load bearing. There are a few superfluous curly cues, but the aesthetic almost never is at cross purposes with the engineering purity of the design. Oh and balcony and staircases feeding it on either side is really an astonishing art nouveau ironwork, all organic flowing forms rendered in thick, thick sections of cast iron. A masterpiece. There are some enormous dark granite columns supporting the main balcony but the rest is all in iron.
I guess that wasn't really all that brief was it? Go if you have the chance.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 18, 2014 18:54:00 GMT
One thing that was bad last night was the sweltering heat in the smaller rooms -- at least the whole building did not heat up, though. Obviously, I have a few photos to add to this report in a day or two, unless fumobici beats me to it.
|
|
|
Post by fumobici on May 18, 2014 20:41:41 GMT
It was very warm in some of the rooms, the programs were being used as fans more than being read. I haven't felt that warm since last August, it felt almost perfect to me.
I didn't take any photos at all, I was just there to look and absorb without the distraction. You pretty well captured it, I would likely have been taking photos of the iron balcony rather than the exhibit in any case.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 19, 2014 10:04:42 GMT
You mean this sort of thing, fumo?
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on May 19, 2014 10:09:53 GMT
|
|
|
Post by fumobici on May 19, 2014 17:22:12 GMT
You mean this sort of thing, fumo? Yes, quite.
|
|