SHARING WITH ME

How do you start talking, writing or getting your thoughts straight about the Great War of 1914-1918? This is a huge multidisciplinary exhibition which gives an immediate view of one year of the war. «1917». Why this particular year was of extreme diversity and overly creative, I do not know. It is not an exhibition that you go from picture to picture, photo to photo or object to object - not unless you are a historian and know a lot about that period. I certainly knew something about what was going on in the art world but seeing it in this context is entirely different. One of the many propoganda posters  Time needs to be taken to read the texts, study the artifacts, look at the propoganda   and try to understand just what was going on artistically, in the battlefields and how did the war artists (eg. Pierre Bonnard,1867-1949,  Edouard Vuillard 1888-1940...) and artists who were called up such as Otto Dix, (1891-1968) cope with what they saw. Otto Dix - De...

Yesterday I went to the Pompidou centre in Metz. The last time I was there a couple of years ago just after the opening and Gianni and I gaped at the queues when we arrived. Many people come from Luxembourg, Brussels and the north. It was raining when I arrived yesterday and I wondered if the museum wasn’t closed. Beaubourg Metz Two exhibitions I planned to see and five h ours to do so. «1917» which will my main chapter and Sol Lewitt. His wall drawings.  In between the two exhibitions, I discovered this. Is Daniel Buren following me? Or perhaps, I am following him ! This was an extension work of what he had done for the Pompidou -Metz in 2011. This installation «From Above» the mirror becomes a template, highlighting the wooden structure which is one of the key structures in the building. In the Monumenta Installation there are 377 coloured circles . (see «Art and Eccentric Light» - May 30th)  Here there are 1600 pieces of curved wood covered by Teflon-fibreglass. It...

Earlier in the week I went to an exhibition of photography-montage-collage by Joel-Peter Witkin. The title was «Enfer ou Ciel» or «Hell or Heaven».  The last way I would describe myself is as  puritanical but seeing deformed bodies, mass of flesh and female or males changed physically into the opposite sex - and naked - doesn’t shock me it just leaves me cold. A good friend asked me «but why Bacon and Picasso then ?» This is painting and not changed form through montage. Even if Witkin’s references are Renaissance and many of the photo-montages recognizable in terms of where they came from - somehow that irritated me even more...I came out with a nasty taste in my mouth and walked across the Palais Royal where of course there is the Daniel Buren installation. In 1986 Buren  created a 3,000 m² sculpture in the great Palais Royal with «public money» -  Called «Les Deux Plateaux  but more commonly referred to as the "Colonnes de Buren" ("Buren's Columns"), this ...

Since when ? Forever I would think, the word Opera and I don’t go well together. There are modern operas I really enjoy or modernizing the classics can be marvelous. But classical or traditional opera leaves me as cold as listening to John Cage. As a child I spent hours of my free time pretending to dance and sing in musical comedy and consequently knew every show that was on or off Broadway or in London. I was living in Launcestion. Tasmania. Then at the age of 16 in London for the first time, I was  taken to the world premieres of both «My Fair Lady» and «West Side Story». I made up my mind that I would become a musical comedy star. So I broke my voice singing, my back dancing and it never happened. Even so I am still passionate about -most- musical comedies and there is hope for pop opera. Having reserved for the Chatelet theatre season earlier in the year, I knew what to expect when I sas «Nixon in China» and loved it - but was a little doubtful about what I would see with «...

Is this art ? A good friend who came with me to see «Excentrique(s) Travail in Situ» or perhaps « Excentriques(s) Art on the spot», did not think so. When I ventured to say that it was changing colour - she added that in a church with stained glass windows there would also be changing colours if the sun was shining in. Murielle is right but on the other hand, this work is colour - changing colour - and changing light. With every footstep I seemed to see another colour and another perspective of Daniel Buren’s work. Thanks to Claude who was our speaker, we had the time to look closer and see structures and colours which we may not have seen otherwise. Claude also described this creation as art. Monumenta, is just  that - monumental. Every year an artist is invited to «invade» the 13 500m2 and 45 metres of height in the Grand Palais. A work of art which is created for this space. Two of the five artists so far have created ephemeral works. Daniel Buren’s is one of them. He is one of...