All tagged Paris

A Monumental Arte Povera Survey in a Parisian Palace of Wealth Sidesteps Anti-Capitalist Critiques

A Monumental Arte Povera Survey in a Parisian Palace of Wealth Sidesteps Anti-Capitalist Critiques

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Reviews

Arte Povera responded directly to Italy’s postwar economic boom, aided by the US Marshall Plan. During that time, northern cities like Turin and Milan industrialized rapidly, leading to mass migration from the south. By the late 1960s, Cold War tensions were escalating, and the Italian Communist Party was gaining significant political influence, earning 12.6 million votes in the 1976 general election. During these “Years of Lead” (late 1960s–late ’80s), terrorist paramilitary groups—some covertly supported by the NATO project Gladio—battled police, bombed train stations, and even murdered the Christian Democrat President Aldo Moro.

Paris Gallery Weekend marks a decade of progress

Paris Gallery Weekend marks a decade of progress

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Art Market

Paris Gallery Weekend has undergone significant changes in the past decade. Although it is now a city-spanning exploration of dealerships and institutions, the first edition, staged in 2014, consisted of a single group show of artists nominated by their respective galleries. This year’s iteration retained something of that initial concept through an initiative called Cartes Blanches, in which a dozen dealers invited curators to organise exhibitions of whatever they desired in their galleries.

An Exhibition in Paris Confronts the Brutalization of Women

An Exhibition in Paris Confronts the Brutalization of Women

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Reviews

Galindo’s videos and photographs document performances in which she positioned herself in scenes of staged precarity and abuse as a way of representing violence against women in her native country. The works on display range from somewhat absurd images – La Sombra (The Shadow, 2017), for instance, in which the subject runs towards the camera as a tank rolls behind her – to the less graphic but more disturbing video-performance La Verdad (The Truth, 2013). In this piece, Galindo reads aloud first-hand accounts of rape and genocide during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War. La Verdad is punctuated by the intervention of a dentist, who periodically injects local anaesthetic into her mouth, causing her speech to slur. It is the most potent work in the show for the way that it stages and dramatizes a history of physical and sexual violence and for its allusion to ongoing forms of government censorship, obfuscation and forgetting. In works such as a still from the video of the performance Piel (Skin, 2001), the artist utilizes her naked body as a conduit for articulating the reification of women. However, La Verdad feels more impactful because it is the only piece in the exhibition where the brutalized women speak. Even if the viewer cannot see their faces nor knows their names, Galindo’s ventriloquizing of her own voice to bear witness for these women’s suffering offers them agency and presence in a way that the other works do not.

What to See in Paris During FIAC

What to See in Paris During FIAC

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Reviews

The conceptual work of Palestinian-French artist Taysir Batniji retraces his bureaucracy-filled journey from the Gaza Strip to Paris, exploring themes of displacement, erasure and loss. In the video installation Background Noise (2007), currently on view at MAC VAL, the artist films himself during an air-raid. Staring stoically into the camera as the walls around him shake from the force of nearby explosions, Batniji offers a glimpse of the untenability of daily life for Palestinians. Alongside this piece is another of the exhibition’s most moving works, the series ‘To my Brother’ (2012), which consists of 60 incisions into paper that trace the contours of photographs taken at the artist’s brother’s wedding. The drawings offer up ghostly likenesses of Batniji’s family and sibling, who was felled by an Israeli sniper’s bullet during the first Intifada in 1987, which, from a certain distance, begin to disappear like faded memories.

Understanding ‘L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped’

Understanding ‘L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped’

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Reviews

Death and beauty go hand in hand. As paradoxical and macabre as that idea might seem, many anthropologists will tell you that ancestral burial rituals are a significant measure of human civilization. Many of the first objects shaped by human sensibilities, such as the Triangular Tombstones from Le Moustier in Peyzac-le-Moustier, Dordogne, France, were related to death and the afterlife. Ancient humans were entombed with their most precious possessions. Bones of ancestors conferred legitimacy upon rulers, proving royal descendance, giving birth to modern notions of cultural heritage or, in the case of relics, like the Byzantine Reliquary in the Shape of a Sarcophagus (400–600) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, an unbroken lineage with divine actors.

The Parisian Open-Air Museum

The Parisian Open-Air Museum

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he first public artworks in the Jardin des Tuileries were placed there by Louis XV in the 18th century and, following the French Revolution, more were transferred from royal estates. Today, the gardens are a veritable outdoor museum for sculptures from the 17th to 21st centuries.

Street art. Le pochoir couché sur papier

Street art. Le pochoir couché sur papier

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Reviews, Book Review

Si le street art nous paraît aujourd’hui lié à une certaine modernité urbaine, ses origines remontent en réalité à l’art néolithique, comme nous le rappelle une photographie de la main en négatif sur le mur de la grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc. Cette photo ne représente qu’un des aspects du portrait que Christian Guémy, alias C215, dresse du pochoir. Son Manuel du pochoir retrace l’histoire de cet art, sans doute l’outil le plus utilisé dans la réalisation d’une œuvre de street art, après la bombe de peinture. Dans cette histoire originelle se mêlent l’expérience personnelle et un grand savoir-faire technique qui découle d’une vie passée à peindre les murs du monde entier. Mais la biographie de C215 n’est que suggérée ici et là par le Manuel, qui se concentre plutôt sur des explications synthétiques mais complètes de la multitude d’aspects propres à la peinture au pochoir. Loin d’être un outil simplifiant la peinture jusqu’à la transformer en geste mécanique, il s’agit d’un instrument qui démultiplie les possibilités du rendu de l’image. L’ouvrage évoque les liens entre la peinture au pochoir et d’autres techniques artistiques à l’instar de l’estampe et la photographie. Afin d’exposer pleinement la multiplicité d’usages que cette méthode, l’ouvrage insère des entretiens avec 17 différents street artistes. Au total, il reste accessible tout en étant didactique.

DAU’s Totalitarian Reality Show: Artwork of the Century or Stalinist Cosplay?

DAU’s Totalitarian Reality Show: Artwork of the Century or Stalinist Cosplay?

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Reviews

It is more than a film but not exactly an exhibition. Not quite theatre or performance, although elements of both are omnipresent. It has Mongolian shamans, Russian orthodox priests, rabbis, imams and psychoanalysts, if you need to vent. There are meticulously detailed recreations of Soviet-era apartments inhabited by people who only speak Russian. Eminent performance artist Marina Abramović is supposed to make an appearance. (She is one of the project’s many celebrity ‘ambassadors’ who also include physicists and mathematicians Carlo Rovelli and Dimitri Kaledin, theatre directors Peter Sellars and Romeo Castellucci, artists Carsten Höller and Philippe Parreno and the designer Rei Kawakubo, among others.) And, for one euro, a stony-faced barman will serve you watery coffee or a litre of beer. It is DAU, the multimedia art ‘experience’-cum-independent Soviet state that is being hailed by its creators as the art-event of the century and by the French press as a disastrous flop.

Apollinaire, the Immigrant Poet Who Shaped the Parisian Avant-Garde

Apollinaire, the Immigrant Poet Who Shaped the Parisian Avant-Garde

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Reviews

PARIS — On September 7, 1911, French police arrested poet Guillame Apollinaire for stealing the Mona Lisa. Apollinaire hadn’t actually taken the iconic treasure; however, a few days prior to his arrest, he had attempted to anonymously return a pair of ancient Iberian busts stolen for him and Pablo Picasso by their associate, Géry Piéret. Picasso, who modeled the central figures of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” on the bust Piéret procured for him, was also brought in for questioning. Miraculously, neither the painter nor the poet was charged with receiving stolen goods. If they had been, their status as foreigners in the French Republic would most certainly have resulted in their deportation. Luckily, lack of evidence and pressure from the Parisian art and literary establishments forced the police to release Apollinaire six days later — thereby consigning the episode to one of the wilder footnotes of art history rather than to one of its major chapters.

Paris’s Art Models Protest for Job Security and Better Wages

Paris’s Art Models Protest for Job Security and Better Wages

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Articles

PARIS — On Saturday afternoon, people trickled across the large plaza in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Pausing to admire city hall’s façade, some snapped pictures while others gathered around a group of break-dancers before shuffling off. Meanwhile, tucked away in a far corner of the plaza, an eclectic group was hanging painted banners that read “Modèles” (“Models”), “Modèles d’art: Poser c’est un métier!” (“Live modeling: it’s a job too!”), and the name of their organization, Collectif des Modèles d’Art de Paris (Art Models Collective of Paris).