A couple of posts to cap off my time in Paris. Both had been on the back burner for a little while and leaving the city has provided me with the time/space to finalise them…

One of the simple pleasures of wandering around the 11th arrondissement where I have stayed in Paris is the totally unexpected discovery of a number of intriguingly detailed school buildings in the area. From the art deco influenced modernism of the ecole des filles et garcons on Rue des Tallianders to the iconography of the iron-work gates of the ecole on Rue de Marsaille these building possess an aesthetic charm and wit rarely, if ever, present in everyday institutional architecture. So it was with a genuine sense of wonder that I came across the ecole on Rue des Trois Bornes. Tucked away on a tiny side street the school resembled nothing so much as an ocean liner with its porthole windows and curved façade. The nautical theme was a popular variation on the art deco style at the time of its construction in 1932. A theme that is further reinforced by a relief sculpture featuring a stylised representation of a classical sailing vessel that puts one in mind of voyages of Homeric proportions. As fitting a metaphor as any for the education process and indeed life itself. However, it was a sense wonder that quickly dissolved. A small plaque dating from 1991 on the front of the building told of the 1100 children from the 11th arrondissement of Paris that were sent to Nazi death camps in the years between 1942 & 1944. The promise and optimism that I had previously read in the building now replaced by an almost unfathomable sadness.

On Friday September 14th I had the good fortune to attend a collaborative performance by musician Christian Fennesz and video artist Charles Atlas. Perched at either side of the large stage of the Pompidou Centre’s main performance hall the pair presented an hour of improvised sound and visuals that were projected on a cinematic scale. This collaborative work eschewed narrative convention for a series of peaks and valleys that played the looping visuals of Atlas against the guitar generated laptop manipulations of Fennesz. This proved to be a pleasingly intense experience. Perhaps, a little too intense for those who were seen to flee the hall mid performance. Fennesz’s music ranged from the oceanic to the threatening with large slabs of digital skree melting into the mix. For the most part he avoided the sense of calmness and dare I say prettiness that has infused his recent recorded works. This was music that relied heavily on the visceral power of volume. Like Fennesz’s music the video of Charles Atlas also employed a strategy of echo and dis-integration. Short loops of archival moving image were juxtaposed and overlayed in a procession of imagery that recalled nothing so much as the endless return of a fevered dream. A smash and grab raid on the archive of the unconscious that drew momentum and intensity from the sound of his collaborator. Loops would disappear to return once more, persistent and fragmented. However, it was the mesh of the two distinct elements that gave the works its power. To claim that the pairing was seamless would be to erase the very real tension that grew from the improvised nature of the performance. A tension that gave birth to a thoroughly entrancing night out.

Those that yearn for the pleasures of pre-cinematic spectacular entertainment in Paris could do a lot worse than take in a show at the marionette theatre in the Luxembourg Gardens. The marionettes are housed in a purpose built theaterette that has been run by the Desarthis family since 1932 . Staring the ever resilient 19th C. character of Guignol the show demands a high level of audience participation to cast its narrative spell. The audience, which consist mostly of overexcited enfants and their minders, writhes and howls as the action unfolds amidst the painted props and rudimentary lighting and sound effects. Within such an atmosphere it easy, momentarily at least, to cast oneself back to a time when the screen was yet to come alive.

“Then came the period of long walks around Paris. He let himself wander, going wherever the whim took him, plunging into the five-o’clock bustle of office workers. He trailed along shopfronts, went into all the art galleries, walked slowly through the arcades of the IXth arrondissement, stopping at every store. He stared with equal attention at rustic washstands in furniture stores, bedheads and springs in mattress-makers’ windows, artificial wreaths in in undertakers’ shopfronts, curtain rails in haberdasheries, “erotic” playing cards with macromammaried pin-ups in novelty stores (Mann sprich deutsch, English speaken), the yellowing photographs advertising Arts Studios: a moon faced urchin in a vulgarly-cut sailor suit, an ugly boy in a cricket cap, a pug-nosed youth, a rather repellent bulldog type of man by a brand-new car; in a pork-butcher’s Chartres cathedral in lard…”

Gerges Perec, Life A User’s Manual , Collins Harvill, London, 1988, p. 237.

(original title and pub. date: La Vie mode d’emploi, 1970)

Deep inside the Musée de Arts et Metiérs, nestled amongst the displays dedicated to the development of technology and media is a small collection of the most curious objects. These complex and fantastically shaped creations were produced by a painstaking and largely unknown process on a mechanical lathe in the late 18thC by Françoise Barreau. Barreau a somewhat mysterious figure, considered his work as art, turning the most intricate constructions from a single piece of ivory. How he exactly made these objects is to this day unknown. He was highly secretive and legend has it would only hire deaf mutes as assistants, so as his methods could not be divulged.

The recent exhibition Zones de Productivités Concertées at the MAC/VAL in Paris featured a compelling ensemble of works by British born artist Simon Starling. The exhibition, subtitled Enterprises Singuliéres was the third and final installment in a series of group shows that collectively featured 20 “monographic exhibitions” that in some way engage notions of “the economy -its questions, its concepts, its thinking…”

Central to the collection of works exhibited by Starling in the exhibition was a recent film (2006) titled Autoxylopyrocycloboros. A somewhat unwieldy name for such an elegant and conceptually resolved work. The film meticulously shot on super 16mm, which seems to be the contemporary art moving image medium of choice at the moment, features two men in a boat navigating a picturesque mist-shrouded Scottish Loch. I assume that one of the men is the artist. The boat is an old wooden one powered by a fuel burning stove, the two men are hard at work sawing pieces of the boat away which in turn are used to fuel the engine that propels its passage. And so it goes until the boat finally starts taking on water and rather undramatically sinks.

To date Simon Starling’s practice has been pretty much defined by examining or making visible the processes behind the transformation of materials and objects from one state to another. The two other works included in the MAC/VAL show consisted of a series of deadpan photographs of a car that had been geographically relocated and mechanically modified and a collection of coins titled Home-Made 20 pence piece (anon) found in Glasgow on the 8th of January 1996 and reproduced in addition of 27 using the silver from on ladle produced by George Smith and William Fearn, circa 1830.

Within his work things move from one state to another. A boat becomes a boat in motion until the motion itself consumes the very integrity of the craft, the ability of the boat to stay afloat. It is not hard to read the work as a metaphor for the current economic/environmental predicament. One is left wondering at what point the world’s economy is at in its doomed cruise, seems that we are taking on a bit of water at the moment.

Rewatching Michelangelo Antonioni’s Deserto Rosso a few days later in a small cinema on the left bank (there has been a proliferation of tribute screenings in the wake of the director’s death) I was jolted into recognising the very same metaphor at work within the film, albeit alluding to a very different economy.

In Antonioni’s film a group of three couples gather in a secluded wharf side shack for a casual get-together that ambiguously veers towards an orgy. Exactly what transpires is never really divulged by the film’s elliptical narrative space. However, at some point in the proceedings the participants begin to pull planks from the walls of the shack and burn them in the small stove that heats the somewhat dank space. Despite the half-hearted protestations of the shack’s owner the group becomes ever more animated, smashing furniture and dismantling a brightly painted wall to use as fuel for the wood stove.

How then do we read these actions? It is tempting to view this spontaneous ritual of destruction in terms of the societal changes that were in 1964 about to sweep through the western world. But if we look closer to the narrative confines of the film itself we can see a much more interesting and complex web of meanings alluded to. A web in which the hinted transgressions and indiscretions of the proceeding scene resurface. A libidinal economy emerges that produces desire through the dismantling of its very supporting structures. An architecture of desire that is only made inhabitable by its own combustion.

Black and white 8 x 10″ photograph found in 2nd-hand bookstore, Marseilles 15/8/07.

Last week (14/8-15/8/07) I traveled to Marseilles for the express purpose of visiting Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation. Completed in 1952 after a protracted process of construction in the years directly following world war II, the building is one of the architect’s most instantly recognisable works. It is also perhaps one of his most misrepresented, at least in terms of current design culture. The building engages an overt formalism that has in many ways come to define popular conceptions of high-modernist aesthetics. Indeed, many of the shapes and forms present in the structure, particularly on the roof area, can be seen to echo through much ‘kitsch’ industrial design of the 1950s to 70s. It is, as theorist/artist Mark Lewis recently observed of modernist buildings, “almost already an image in both complicated and simple ways.” However, to engage with the building (and indeed the architect’s oeuvre) in purely aesthetic terms, as much contemporary design culture seems to do, is to create such a simple image. It is to ignore ideas that that are absolutely integral to the building’s creation. For Le Corbusier the building was to be the first in a community of structures that were to present a new ideal for living. An ideal, that in the architect’s words, sought to to balance “individual freedom and collective organisation”. The voice of history calls: form is never just form. So what of the building today? It is a slightly run-down, fully functioning apartment block in a unremarkable part of town that also caters for a modest flow of architourists. If it is not the most luxurious hotel in the world it sure can’t be beat as place to contemplate the complexities that accompany its image.

To read the Mark Lewis quote in context: Is Modernity Our Antiquity? in Documenta Magazine No 1, 2007, Taschen, Cologne, 2007 which is online here

This is the title of the current temporary exhibition (until sept. 16) at La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. The exhibition consists of 150 short films about architecture presented across a continuous sweep of 24 projections. These span the entire length of the north wing of the Palais de Chaillot, the monumental modernist/classical building that houses the museum and that sits on the Seine directly opposite the Eiffel Tower. Watching the films is in itself an exercise in perpetual montage as even the most attentive viewer is invariably drawn to another screen when their interest wanders from the program they are watching. Perhaps it should be subtitled, one never-ending film about architecture that you cut yourself. After spending a few hours in the exhibition I set about making a list of ways that the filmmakers had addressed the problem of representing architecture. What conventions and strategies (filmic, conceptual or otherwise) are employed to render and translate the lived 3D environment as film?

supplementary image sources:

• archival still images
• archival film footage
• conceptually related (perhaps) footage from narrative films
• media sourced footage (tv shows, documentaries etc)
• stock images and footage

camera techniques:

• tracking shots, dolly shots
• panning
• 1st person POV (steadycam etc)
• mobile camera (vehicle, helicopter etc.)
• time lapse
• variations in lighting (time of day etc)

post techniques:

• transitions (dissolves, wipes, fades)
• superimposition
• image masking (time based reveals etc)
• spatial montage (split screen, image in image)

use of the human figure:

• occupying/operating in space (working, relaxing etc)
• historical signifier (through costume and look)
• guide to scale

soundtrack:

• atmos
• dialogue
• voice over
• music, classical
• music, electronic
• sound assembalge

Found at Vanves flea market today:

I seek the gold of time. These words are inscribed on the tombstone of André Breton. Today I made a pilgrimage to his grave which is located in the Batignolles Cemetery on the edge of the 17th Arrondissement. The cemetery is also the resting place of Paul Verlaine and surrealist Benjamin Péret. During the hours I spent at the cemetery I saw 3 other people. This included a woman who was washing her car in a secluded corner of the graveyard right near Breton’s grave, as you do. I left a small tribute made of a simple portrait and a collection of flowers I gathered from the edge of the abandoned high school that skirts one edge of the cemetery.

Two posts in a row about someone named Pierre – I must be in Paris. One of the best contemporary artworks I have seen since arriving in this city of light is a film by Pierre Huyghe called “This is not a time for dreaming”. Shot on super 16mm and transferred to digital video it is displayed in The Centre Pompidou as part of the Musée National d’Art Moderne. Essentially a film of a marionette show, it tells the story of Le Corbusier’s protracted commission from Harvard University to build the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. It was a project that was begun by the architect in 1959 but not completed until 1963. By which time he was unable to attend its opening due to ill health. Huyghe relates this legendary tale of bureaucratic wrangling to his own experiences with Harvard who commissioned him to make a work to celebrate the 4oth anniversary of the Carpenter Center. Highly interpretive in nature with shifting frames of reference the film features an array characters that includes Le Corbusier, Huyghe himself and a Dean of Harvard that has to be seen to be believed. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. With the exception of a closing epilogue (presented by a real-life character) the tale is without dialogue using excerpts from the compostions of Varése and Xenakis (both of whom worked with Le Corbusier on the Philips pavillion for the 1958 world fair in Brussels) to underscore the action. Watching the marionettes, that posses a definite Thunderbirds-like edge, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the lofty ambitions of the character in Being John Malkovich who elevates the marionette to the status of high art. But unlike the puppeteering featured in that film Huyghe never foregrounds the expressive qualities of the pupeteer’s craft, his marionettes are personable yet disembodied. And here lies one of the major strengths of the work. In using puppets and adopting a lose and shifting narrative framework Huyghe has made a work that is far from didactic. What so easily could have been yet another example of institutional backbiting is instead presented as a magical tale that ultimately attests to the the transformative power of the creative act.

On Saturday August 4 I was fortunate enough to attend the performance of Objectif Terre by composer/sound artist Pierre Henry, Henry who is now in his 8oth year was a musique concréte pioneer working with Pierre Schaeffer from 1949-58 and has maintained an active practice since. The performance took place in front of the La Defense Arch at sunset and lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. Using enormous stacks of speakers that delivered a sound equal to the monumental scale of the site Henry presented an often terse but constantly evolving sound work that juxtaposed recognisable “found” sounds with those of an indeterminable source. The strategic placing of speakers around the esplanade provided the sound with a high degree of spatialisation and physicality. This sense of physicality allowed the sound to enter in a unique dialogue with the site, casting it in a otherworldly shade. What is an is in effect an everyday business district was a transformed into something alien and foreboding. If as Henry has stated the work Objectif Terre is concerned with a sense of “ecology” its presentation within the conext of the La Defense site provided a compelling argument for the ability of art (however abstract in its form) to enter into a dialogue with the apparatus of power.

It is indeed one of life’s strange coincidences that Michelangelo Antonioni should pass away on July 30 2007 the very same day as Ingmar Bergman. As one friend has put it, if Antonioni’s death was a shock it was perhaps due to the assumption that many had, that he had died years ago, such was his physical state and absolute inactivity. L’Avventura, L’Eclisse and Il Desserto Rosso are among my favourite films ever, such visually arresting, open ended tales of existential impasse. For me these are films that engage with the environment (built or otherwise) in a startlingly original manner. For Antonioni site does not simply equal stage. Rather, architecture is unmistakably implicated in the proceedings. From the detached modernism of the EUR district of Rome to the almost alien industrial landscape featured in Il Desserto Rosso we are shown are world that is strangely ill at ease with itself and a time out of joint.

Monica Vitti in L’Eclisse 1962

Yet another great of 20th C. cinema leaves this world. Some fitting tributes can be found on The Guardian site here .

“Every moment in our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual perception on the one side and recollection on the other…Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.”

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory as quoted by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2 P.79

In the words of much loved Sydney late 70s/early 80s outfit The Particles, Lets bang bits of wood together:

I picked this up the other day (after an small search in the woefully organised and stocked Bastille FNAC) and must say I am intrigued. The latest from Norwegian duo Alog on the ever engaging Rune Grammofon label is their most perplexing and (perhaps) rewarding work to date. While their previous releases have been marked by an ever increasing concern with using organic sound sources in the digital environment Amateur sees them taking this to a whole new level. Human, voice, bells, creaking doors and as evidenced by the photo on the CD sleeve nails in blocks of wood all jostle for prominence in the sound space. Overlaps and juxtapositions of sound create rhythms and textures that put me in mind of later period Matmos which can only be good thing. Check out the video of the lead track “Son of King” on the Alog website.

I finally got the chance to see Alan Clarke’s 1988 made-for-TV film Elephant. It is a little seen work that is now most famous for providing the inspiration (and title) for Gus Van Sant’s haunting meditation on the Columbine massacre. Clark’s Elephant was included in the exhibition L’image D’aprés at the Cinémathéque Française. The Exhibition itself was an ambitious curatorial undertaking that sought to uncover “how cinema inspires photographers” or more precisely, a selection of Magnum agency photographers. 10 Magnum shooters were asked to nominate a film, filmmaker, or in some cases body of films that had influenced their visual and philosophical approach. These photographers were exhibited in the gallery space in relation to the chosen film works. As to be expected the results were somewhat varied both in terms of visual and conceptual resonance. The more successful pairings, as in the case of Gueorgui Pinkhassoh’s touching elegy to Andrei Tarkovski and Mark Power’s installation, operated through a strategy that foregrounded the “personal” as a way through the implied resoluteness of the photographic medium. Mark Power’s work used Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1979 “Camera Buff” as a cypher of sorts through which to consider his own blurred photographs and the super-8 artefacts of his youth. These family films were shown at the bottom of a specially constructed tank, the images literally submerged like so many memories.

Selected by photographer Donovan Wylie, Alan Clarke’s film Elephant formed a type of exclamation mark to a deeply personal exploration of the political situation in Northern Ireland of 1970s and 80s. Using an ensemble of materials that ranged through scrapbook cuttings (his great uncle’s), photographs, film loops and stills, and assorted ephemera Wylie alluded to the very specific conditions of that time and place. A time and place, that in Wylie’s own words, facilitated “…a great tension between the private and the collective, the personal and the political, the normal life and the abnormal life..” It is this slippage between the “normal life and the abnormal life” that also powers Alan Clarke’s film Elephant, albeit in a much more detached and focused manner

Commissioned in 1988 by BBC Northern Ireland the 39 minute film presents 18 sectarian murders in succession with no other narrative support. Each murder is presented using the same formal strategy: a single steady-cam shot doggedly follows a lone figure through the endlessly bleak urban landscape. A journey that invariable climaxes in the figure drawing a gun and shooting a usually surprised, sometimes desperately scared victim. After which reigns silence, as the now static camera lingers on the lifeless body of the victim. Seen singularly each murder is all the more chilling for the matter of fact way in which it is portrayed. The camera’s viewpoint is at once detached and involving as we hover over the killers shoulder through the often circuitous journey to the “event”. But it is only when the murders are viewed collectively that the real weight of this work can be felt. With each more murder a powerful sense of inevitability pervades. There is no rational hope that anyone escapes their fate, put simply, this is not that kind of film. Within the exhibition installation the film is shown as a loop in small dedicated screening space, a format that further reinforces a sense of the endless inevitability of violence. One can only imagine how this film would have originally appeared on television being as it is a medium not renowned for its promotion of such audacious conceptual or formal statements.