My special purpose

Paris_Pompidou-VoyeurSelf, originally uploaded by david_stirling.

After much consideration the last few days, I have decided to become a disciple of Miroslav Tichy. I have taken to lurking the local museums and snapping photos of unsupecting women. However, it will take some time to grow out my beard and adopt a sufficiently disheveled look. Until then I may still appear too much like a regular tourist and not enough like a true artist. Time will only tell if I can ultimately do this one thing worse than anyone else in the world...

The coolest rec room ever

Salon of the Palace Elysée while president Georges Pompidou was president

Paris_Pompidou_Agam1, originally uploaded by david_stirling.

This piece at the Pompidou Museum is a reinstallation of the "salon" commissioned by Georges Pompidou to the artist Agam for the Palace Elysée (French White House) during his presidency 1971-1974. The colored doors slide, creating a variable effect on the walls and carpets as the panels filter different parts of the design.




Can you imagine this room in any serious world leader's professional or personal space these days? Pompidou was the man.

Miroslav Tichy: maverick artist or creepy weirdo?

A response to Miroslav Tichy: Untitled (women watching Tichy)

Paris_Pompidou-Tichy, originally uploaded by david_stirling.

The Centre Pompidou is holding an exhibition by the Czech Miroslav Tichy. It consists entirely of photos of women taken over the course of about 30 years. What makes these art, apparently, is that he took the photos primarily without the subjects' knowledge, often hiding the camera under his trenchcoat. Furthermore, his cameras consisted of a variety of junked parts, household refuse, and jerry-rigged elements, held together with tape and wire. To gather the exhibit, the curator and staff sifted through thousands of prints scattered throughout his run-down house. The fact that the photos were haphazardly mounted on construction paper or newsprint, stained with coffee or cigarette ash, or doodled upon with pen and pencil, serves to heighten their artistic merit, it would seem.



So where exactly is the line between artistic genius and obsessive sociopathy? Is his photography art simply because he did it relentlessly for thirty some-odd years, despite being locked up in an assylum on more than one occasion? Or has he produced something that transcends what a camera lens can transfer onto paper?



Part of the exhibition features a short documentary about Tichy, and in it he is disarmingly matter-of-fact about his pursuit. It has nothing to do with women per se, he claims; it's all about shape and line. "I am an atomist," he says. That makes the underlying sensualism in the photos the more unsettling.



At one point he wryly sums up his feelings on his "discovery" as an artist in a way that supports my suspicions about a lot of post-modern art: "The way to become famous," he says, "is to do something worse than anyone else in the world."



And yet, three days later, I'm still thinking about his photos. They have kind of gotten under my skin, and that I suppose is the measure of what we each as individuals can consider art.

The Picasso Museum

No photography allowed in the Picasso museum, so I had to sneak this one.

Paris_Picasso-sculptures, originally uploaded by david_stirling.

Picasso troubles me. I have been trying for years to develop an appreciation for what he was doing. But I'm still haunted by the suspicion that he was above all a terrific self-promoter and extremely charismatic--that by the force of his personality he convinced people that his work was important and therefore it became de jure important.

But I have found that the best way of understanding what he was up to with those crazy distorted figures is to look at the studies he did in preparation for the final work. The Picasso museum in Barcelona has a fantastic exhibit where they project Velasquez's painting of Las Meninas, then gradually superimpose several of Picasso's studies, followed by his final piece (which is housed at that museum). Seeing them in sequence shows how he was deconstructing ideas of light and shape, in ways that I don't pretend to understand, but at least I can appreciate that he wasn't just splashing paint on the wall. Now, Pollack, that's another story.

But anyhow...

Most guidebooks will say the Paris Picasso museum is far more important than the Barcelona one. However, I found that the Barcelona museum has a lot more of his earlier works, especially from the blue period, which I really like. I thought it actually did a better job showing Picasso's development than the Paris museum did, even though that is specifically what the Paris museum claims to be doing. There's not enough of his more traditional paintings, so the transition to his cubist and post-cubist work seems abrupt. Futhermore, the commentary on the walls eschews commenting on his work in favor of giving more of a timeline of events and people he worked with, along with occasional quotes from him at those periods. Not to mention it's only in French, which means there were probably a lot of details I blipped over once I started to get tired.

That said, it is a very impressive building with a lovely courtyard (but a conspicuous lack of sculptures outside--only one spindly piece).

Photography was not permitted in the museum. In spite of this, dozens of people were brazenly waltzing though the rooms shooting photos at will. Of course, as soon as I pulled out my camera, that's when the guard barked "Photographie interdit!" It brought me right back to eighth grade, when I was invariably the only kid caught throwing erasers. So I positioned myself casually near a doorway, and at the right moment I was able to pretend my camera was a handkerchief and sneeze this photo. (No, not really.)