In The Meantime: A Playroom of My Own #11

Yuko Otomo
May 2016

Autumn in Europe

Part Three

Does time fly? I don’t know. But this metaphor is fitting. Now & then. It does disappear fast. I have been slow processing my writing on the last trip while being interrupted by the many aspects of NYC life. Living in this fast moving city is like swimming in gushing water; you lose yourself easily. It feels a bit strange to talk of last autumn, when the leaves were falling, now when the new leaves are budding. Yes, seasons do go ‘round & ‘round. Here you are, the concluding segments of an unexpectedly prolonged report.

France

Paris:

A Visit to Jim Haynes

As I was just starting to write about Jim Haynes, we got the news of his fall. He fell down in his atelier in Paris & the last Sunday salon of 2015 planned on Dec. 27^th was cancelled. Now, a circle of friends from all over the world are sending good wishes & love for the speedy recovery of this remarkable human being.

Who else is so fitted to give us the blessing for our 2 month trip than Jim Haynes? We’d known him for so many years through Ted Joans, but for some reason, we’d been missing each other & had surprisingly never met him in person till this visit. Ted & Jim met in Edinburgh UK in the early 60s & became life long friends. Jim published Ted’s work through his Handshake Press. After a lovely lunch with Penny Arcade, Bobby Yarra, Trine Prahm & Lu Pélieu in Abbess, we all visited him in his atelier on 83 rue de la Tomb-Issoire one afternoon.

Jim has a tremendous, wide scoped & multi-dimensional long history. The brief description of his life on the back cover of a fantastic book of his: Everything Is! Soft manifestos for our time speaks of its richness.

“Jim Hayes established the first paperback bookshop in Britain; co-produced the 1962 Conference on the Novel and 1963 Drama Conference in Edinburgh – which inspired the current Edinburgh International Book Festival; co-founded the Traverse Theatre, was a catalyst for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, established the London Traverse Theatre company, co-founded the newspaper, I.T., the underground pop club U.F.O., and the London Arts Lab. He taught Media Studies and Sexual Politics at the University of Paris VIII for three decades, co-founded the sexual freedom newspaper Suck, and directed the Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam. In his Paris atelier, he created a salon tradition with open dinners every Sunday evening for some 36 years and over 150, 000 guests to date.”

He’d just came back from his walk to the Post Office when we got to his atelier & welcomed us all with such graceful warmth. He’s been living in the same space, Atelier A-2, for a long time, & so many amazing things have taken place in this humble, clean & light-filled space. His notable, countless Sunday Salons; Handshake Press publication; emergency “nest” space for friends in need… I don’t know the detailed history of the Atelier building complex, but it is a typical early century “live/work” row house studio space created for artists in the cobble-stoned alley behind the door that separates the street from its woody silence inside. Trees & birds & light of the 4 seasons pour in through the big open windows… Jim adores his place. We soon all relaxed into the afternoon air that went by like a dream filled with love. He showed us editions from his Handshake Press, pointing at the big table in the kitchen/living room space where he does “a kitchen table publishing house” work. We saw honey spoon* (*re: the segment of my description of this book in “Let’s Get TEDucated!” in Perpetual Ripplets, Arteidolia, June 2015) & other books displayed on the shelf surrounding his couch. He told us of the origin of the friendship with Ted, of the theatre project in the near future & of his son with a Japanese daughter in law & their baby boy in Brooklyn.

As we left, he generously gave us some books as gifts including his own Everything Is! Thanks for Coming! Encore!, a few Handshake Press editions: Merveilleux Coup De Foundre: Poetry of Ted Joans & Jayne Cortez along with the galley of Ted’s Money Soon & a few more copies of honey spoon*. I was extremely moved to find that Ted had mentioned me in The After Thought of the unpublished, “reread & corrected on Sept 19, 99 in Pairs rainy Sunday*” (*his words) version of Money Soon. It’s written as a sequel to one of my favorite Ted Joans writings, a true gem, honey spoon as he calls it “Sister prose to the Honey Spoon.” Instead of “He,” every segment starts with “She”. As we shared a delicious afternoon with Jim, Steve & I totally understood why he & Ted had become such lifetime good friends. How beautiful he is! & how lovely it was to have finally met him in person!

There is no such thing as a “good” book, a “great” film, an “obscene” photo, or a “dirty” weekend. There is simply a book, a film, a photo and a weekend. Dogma and dogmatism is the enemy. By attempting to maintain a childlike sense of wonder, I find that I learn from most experiences, that I am rarely bored. Everything Is.  – Jim Haynes

We send our utmost love & all the best wishes for his speedy recovery.

PS: According to the latest news, he is doing quite well, resuming his “almost normal” activities.  Let’s send him more love & good wishes for the further recovery. 

Wilfredo Lam @Centre Pompidou 

1902-1982. A Chinese father & an Afro-Cuban mother. Early academic education in Spain. Discovery of Gris, Miro, Picasso & Matisse. Paris. Breton. Surrealism. Cuba. Aimé Césaire. Poetry. Asgar Jorn. The Jungle… The show concludes with the display of the collaboration book project work between Lam & a Cuban poet Gherasim Luca.

He carried the color tonality & sensitivity of his academic study period all through the career. With it, he went through the heavy influences by 4 major artists: Gris, Miro, Picasso & Matisse. Through the process, he created his own synthesis of surrealistic imaginary. Then, in a way, he got stuck in his own creation, although it was definitely his own. His Picasso & Matisse period was almost painful, but it was moving to see how deep he went inside them & almost got drowned in them. The most interesting work for me was the group of small Exquisite Corpse pieces he did with Breton & other Surrealists that were displayed on one wall. In front of them, we ran into Dove Bradshaw & William Anastasi who were in town for his show. Interestingly, I enjoyed his Academic studies the most.

Foundation Louis Vitton

We had to see the interior & the exterior of this new museum built by Frank Gehry. We wanted to experience how his renowned Museum architecture worked here. We had planned never to miss it, having put it on our Paris must-see list. Bernard Arnault, the head of The Foundation has managed to get the permit to build his “private” museum in a “public” space. It’s located at the edge of the Jarden d’Acclimataton in the Bois de Boulogne, where I could not think of it without relating to Proust.

Overall, it was less spectacular than we imagined it would be. Being too busy with the visual stimulus coming from the architecture itself, it was hard to focus naturally on the art. Everywhere you are, you are constantly bombarded by the visual elements – the lines, curves, weight & materiality of the architecture. Even if you are in a space with the art alone, you are carrying & dragging the effects of the over-stimulated visual experience caused by the architecture into the viewing experience. In this building, you can never relax to encounter the art alone. Your psychic, emotional, physical, metaphysical & intellectual capacity to face art is continuously in danger of being taken over by Gehry’s statement as an architect. Personally, I prefer a quieter, simpler building & environment as far as a museum building to contain art is concerned.

We saw the last & the 3^rd installment of the 3 part inaugural show Keys to a Passion: Pop et Musique. It was filled by a cliché of Pop art. We just stepped in & out as quickly as possible. One piece by Christian Marclay & another by Jean-Michel Basquiat were the only relief. We walked along Olaf Eliasson’s outdoor installation: Grotto by the fountain. It strangely looked “thin” in its psychic content. No matter, Gehry’s architecture interferes with the spirit of a space that contains art because of its aggressive self-expression. What most painfully suffered was Ellsworth Kelly in the auditorium. I’d never seen Kelly’s work massacred in such an uncared for manner. They were there as the color decoration of the space.

In Le Frank Café hung fish designed light fixtures. The building has so many concaves & convexes made of glass & steel complexly crisscrossing with each other. I wonder how it can be cleaned as time goes by once the initial sparkling freshness fades and it gets dirty. It’s in the woods, & leaves fall. The building has to endure the Nature’s elements. Then, I was told that the foundation had a contract to donate the museum to the city in the future. So, the joke is that the city would be the one that has to clean the mess & the dirt that accumulates on the building. Modern architecture does not age well, as we all sadly know. 

Splendour and  Misery: pictures of  prostitution, 1850-1919 @ Musee d’Osay

“La prostitution et le vol sont deux protestations vivantes, male et female de l’etat natural contra l’etat social.”  – Balzac,  Splendeurs et Miserèe des Courtesans, 1847

The perfect title of the show comes from Balzac’s novel, part of his epic La Comédie Humane. It is mostly a show on visual arts, but with social study materials scattered & displayed here & there, it has become more like a classroom lecture on the era of 1850 – 1910, from the 2^nd Empire to the Belle Epoque. It covers all sides of the beauty & ugliness at the birth of Modernism of this oldest of businesses. We see many familiar & unfamiliar names & their work: Constantin Guys (Mr. G in The Painter of Modern Life by Baudelaire), Paul Gavarni, 1852. Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Felicien Rops, VVG, Theophile Steinlen, Alexandre Cabanel, Courbet, E. Bernard, Picasso, Kees Van Dongen, Kupka, Auguste Chabaud….

Here are some impressive works that caught my eyes: a famed courtesan salonist Apollonie Sabatier’s portrait done by Vincent Vital (1850); Manet’s Olympia naturally; Constantin Guys’ sketches (1860); Cezanne’s oil on canvas Une Modern Olympia (1873-1874); E. Bernard’s early oil on canvas with his very progressive & expressionistic allure a la VVG titled Au Cabaret (1887), Toulouse-Lautrec’s white graphite on cardboard A Saint Lazare (*what a great painter he was! Beautiful!), VVG’s oil on canvas portrait of a prostitute (1885) (a small o/c piece with a profound sadness… what a great artist he was!!!), Munch, Picasso’s erotic drawings from Blue Period (1902), some Kupka, some Kees Van Dongen… Naturally, Toulouse-Lautrec’s work prevails the most here since this was his world.

The display of name cards (*business cards) of prostitutes & the brothel proprietors, a mock recreation of the brothel bedroom, manikins with syphilis symptoms, early erotic films etc. along with writings of Baudelaire, Flaubert & Zola’s Nana (1880) made the show exciting enough to fulfill viewers’ curiosities. No wonder why it was a big hit! How interesting it is to realize that the oldest business is still prospering quite well in the city of Light even in our time! Just go to an area such as St. Denis or Belleville in the late afternoon or in the early evening. You’ll see plenty of modern day Olympias working hard to catch customers. 

The 44^th Festival D’Automne A Paris 

It’s the season again. Art is everywhere in Paris in the fall. One day, we went to Grand Marché D’Art Contemparain 2015 in Bastille. It was one of the biggest art fairs we’d ever experienced. Stuart (Krusee)’s friend, Kaia Kiik, shared the booth with her friend. It’s so huge that we walked the part of St. Martin’s Canal we’d never walked before.

We also did St. Germaine galley hopping with Sylvan (Kassap). His friend Denis Monfleur was part of the big sculpture show @Galarie Claude Bernard. This area had tuned more conservative & commercial in taste.  Some of what we saw was good, but it was mostly not too satisfying. Interesting to see Cubist paintings by Maurice Esteve (of 30s, 50s & 70s) in 2 different galleries with most of works having been sold. After a stroll, we rested at La Palette, an old café that used to be a hangout for the artists in this area in the heydays.

Paris 11/13/15 

In the afternoon on 10/31, instead of our annual tradition of being part of the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, NYC, Steve & I walked with our friend Stuart (Krusee) in one of the most massive demonstrations for “Justice & Anti-Racism” ever held in Paris. Angela Davis was rumored to be in the front line. It was a beautiful fall day, & the march initiated by women organizers moved on Blvd. Magenta to Place de Republique to Bastille peacefully & enthusiastically. With many handmade signs, speeches from the loud speakers & the shared sense of solidarity, it was a lot like the political marches we have in NYC.

In the evening, we went to a Halloween party at the artists’ squat “La Petite Maison” on Rue Charrone. It reminded us of the ABC No Rio in the East Village scene in the old days. The graffiti on the wall said “Squat is not a crime”. More than 200 people gathered in the front yard with the gates open as well as on all the floors, drinking, talking & enjoying themselves. Then, almost 2 weeks later, Stuart told us that one of the terrorist targets was a restaurant right across the squat called La Bell Equip. When the event took place on “Friday the 13^th” instead of “Halloween”, we were in the middle of the 2^nd set of a salon reading/performance in Bordeaux. We got back a day & a half later to a “quiet & somber” Paris. Unlike the extreme tension we’d felt after 9/11 in NYC, Paris quieted itself down heavily “as if nothing had ever happened.” In a few days, people gradually started to come back to café outdoor tables & chairs. “Sitting outside” had become the symbolic gesture of the most defiant pose to show the resilience & the courage not to  cave into fear.

After a few days, we started to hear news of “so & so’s family member or friends were killed or hurt…” It was very similar to the post 9/11 NYC. Naturally we discussed over the “whys” of the tragedy. Our friends explained to us that it was not just caused by the religious or political reasons alone as assumed, but it was caused by the frustrations & hopelessness propelled by the inequality caused by the ills of the hierarchical system of post-colonialist French society. Bataclan, the major massacre scene, & most of the cafes that were attacked are located in an area equivalent to our East Village or Williamsburg. Now, most of our friends there were very concerned about the coming election & feared that the general consensus might move to the extreme right as fear mongers tried to use it as part of their political maneuvering. The Climate March preceding the global Climate Talk got cancelled because of state of emergency law. No one could congregate in public spaces. But events in private spaces didn’t get affected. Creative spirits took the breath back immediately & every event we partook in was packed with enthusiasm.

Paris wants NYC flavors, & NYC wants to be Parisian. There, more & more “hamburgers” are on the restaurant menus. “Happy Hour” (*in English!) is a normal service. Supermarkets sell bagels in a bag. Halloween is becoming a hip social event. In NYC, more & more French restaurants & pastry shops are opening. Globalization & gentrification of “taste” are taking place all over the globe whether we like it or not.   

 New Presentation of the Collection of Modern Art 1905-1960 @ Centre Pompidou

Some article on the show I read before we left for the south inspired us to go see it. When we got back to Paris, we were nervous, thinking that we might have to miss it because of the closing of all the public spaces, including museums, after the attack. We didn’t have too many days left there before we flew back to NYC. Luckily, most of the museums opened much sooner than we’d expected & we were pleasantly shocked with the new interpretation of the development of modern art presented here.

In the New Presentation of the permanent collection, “mold breaking” configurations & unusual pairings of artists & artwork successfully demonstrated a fresh vision. It encouraged us to stimulate our minds to go over the fixed familiarities of the various movements & ideas about the modern art that emerged between 1905 & 1960 from its birth to the maturity. We were invited to re-think & to re-examine the history of modernism.  How fascinating it was to see a room after a room of the old collection presented in a new light!  The most convincing element of the show was the inclusion of thinkers: poets, writers & historians as major creative forces in the history making process. Appollinaire, George Duthuit, Will Grohmann, Breton, Bataille, Jean Paulham… they were presented as supporters of the new consciousness & creative ideas. Independent rooms with enough materials (letters, books & magazines) given to these thinkers powerfully exemplified the vital roles they played in the development of modern art & helped set the historical flow more accurately than ever.

Some of the unusual pairings of artists & their work were such delightful visual treats. Suzanne Valadon & Albert Gleizes; Gabriel Munter & Kandinsky; Brancusi & Moholy-Nagy; Kurt Schwitters & Sophie Taeuber-Arp; George Groz & Raul Hausman; Wols & Michaux (*Superb!!!); Dubuffet & Giacometti; Pollock & Sam Francis; Kazuo Shiraga & Pierre Soulage… Kupka, Lettrists, CoBra, Fluxus, Art Prouvre, Material-Concepts, Spacialism… they each got their own room along with the usual suspects, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Gestural Abstraction (instead of more familiar terminology “Abstract Expressionism”) etc.

Starting with Baudelaire’s 1863 Modern Painter, the whole reconfiguration gave us a chance to think over the conventional understanding of Modernism’s development & its history. One of the biggest problems of the history of modern art does not reside in its origin, but in the post WWII period & how it’s presented. The general idea of Ab-Ex & Pop Art as the solo movements of the immediate post WWII modern art was challenged to be re-examined by the inclusion of other European post-war movements. I’d personally been sharing the same doubts about this simplified version of its history. Here in this show, Ab-Ex & Pop Art were just the “part” of the global postwar phenomenon that took place, but nothing as predominant as we’d been trained to believe. The show tried to help us correct a provincialism of post-war American aesthetic domination, equally presenting every movement without any nationalistic & regional favoritism. It offered us a needed opportunity not only to re-define Modernism, but also to investigate curious subjects such as Lettrists & CoBra’s influences on the Situationists where art & politics merge.

On a personal level, I was excited to see the room dedicated to Lettrists to find an original book by Gabriel Pomerand’s Saint Ghetto des Prêts (1949) (*one of the first books by Ugly Duckling Presse’s “Lost Literature Series” edited & re-published by one of the founding members of the press Ryan Haley). Although we’d seen it before, the recreation of Breton’s study in his 42 Rue Fontaine apt. filled with more than 10,000 objects was superbly fascinating to re-encounter.

An unexpected bonus we had after seeing this exhilarating show was Karel Appel: Work on Paper at the lower floor of the Centre Pompidou. A founding member of CoBra group, Appel’s work is not too hard to see in NYC, but to see this much of his work on paper as a complete show was a real treat. Steve & I could not stop relating his work to the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat. We said to each other “Did SAMO knew of Appel?” Some pieces were so similar to JMB’s work in spirit & technique, it was almost hard not to assume Appel’s influences on him.

I love John Giono, exhibition &  reading @ Palias de Tokyo

It’s amazing to see a super packed poetry reading conducted in English with no French translation only a week after 11/13. Standing room only Palais de Tokyo space was occupied with hundreds of his fans. On a simple stage, Giono read his poems by heart. He memorizes all his poems in the repertoire. His Buddhist inspired poetic messages were conveyed to an audience that had still not yet recovered from the shock of the tragedy. He is a super-star in France & people love him there. The place was heated with the enthusiastic reaction from the “mostly-non-English-speaking” audience.

The main exhibition, organized by Ugo Rondinone, a long time life partner of Giono, consists of the personal archives of family photos, announcements of readings/events, pages of magazines, letters & other memorabilia neatly bound into the multiple folders according to the year since the birth to today. Incredible to see how many “childhood” photos his family took of him as an only child. Also presented were some of his artwork done when he was very young. The entire wall space was covered with the multi-electric-colored I Love John Giono posters of the show. An attendant on roller skates moved around the space, handing his poems printed also on multi-colored sheets of paper to the viewers. Dial-A-Poem was presented as an installation encouraging for the audience participation in the next room. An adjunct room was set to show his serious involvement in Tibetan Buddhism with some icon statues, banners & the recreated altar of his loft in the Bunker on the Bowery in NYC.

Next to this museum, in Musee d’Art Modern de la Villa de Paris, a Warhol show: Warhol Unlimited was on view. As we skipped Picasso Mania at Grand Palais since we couldn’t take any more Picasso, we just couldn’t take any more Warhol. So, we passed them voluntarily.

The South West of France:

Things Fall Where They Lie

This film project by Nicole Peyraffite is what initiated our trip to France this time. She had been nurturing the idea of making a film of Bagnères-de-Luchon in the Pyrenees, where she was born & grew up. Her hometown would be the main theme, the stage & the star, with a quartet of protagonists moving through it. She picked Steve & me to be 2 of the 4. We asked her “why us?” & she just kept saying, “You are perfect! That’s why you are in it.” She told us the basic concept of the film in advance. Michel Wallop, a famed, classically trained Jazz violinist of the late 30s to mid-40s, who died at the age of 36, & Marc Lafargue, Karl Marx’s grandson, a child of Paul Lafargue & Marx’s second daughter Laura Marx, who died at 6 months would be the thread to weave the story. Somehow they both ended up being buried in the old mountainside Luchon cemetery. Curiously, she kept the details from all of us as secrets as well. So, we were invited to be part of a big surprise of “L’Adventure du Jour” everyday as the project moved on!

The small team with Nicole as the director; Zia Anger & Asa Westcott as cinematographers; Agnès Mathon as a sound engineer, Jean-Louis Peyraffite, Nicole’s brother, & Pierre Joris as production assistants worked well in harmony. Just imagine Pierre driving a mini-golf-cart for the camera crew! We met a wonderful couple: Eric Sarner, poet/film maker & his wife Katelin Pataki, the other 2 of the quartet of protagonists, with whom we enjoyed developing a new friendship. Eric, French; Katelin, Hungarian; Steve, Brooklynite; myself, Japanese, we all shared the daily adventure together from the mountain top of the Super-Bagnères, to the natural vapororium grotto, to the winding steep mountain paths of the Pyrenees, to the French/Spanish border, to La Grotte de Gargas of the famed Le Sanctuaire des Mains, to a field with sheep, sheep dogs & a real Gascon Shepard, to Roman ruins & Romaneque churches of the region. Occitan Culture breathes its mystical power & beauty here in this region in such a way.

It was a life transforming experience in every sense & dimension to be in the cleanest, crisp mountaintop air, where I’d never been so close to the clouds, & then to go down into the cave with its mysterious prehistoric art. It was very special & moving to see/experience the origin: seed & roots of a close friend; where she was born & grew up. The project gave me another unexpected present. I was introduced to Paul Lafargue, the father of the baby Marc, & to his book: The Right To Be Lazy.

So much to say about the whole thing, but I’ll stop here not to give away too much of its fun.  

La Garrone

From its origin in the high mountains of the Pyrenees to the old capital of Toulouse, where the river matures & changes itself into the widening majesty & offshoot of canals, & to Bordeaux, where it finally reaches the ocean, we followed the flow of La Garrone as our trip in the Southwest moved on. Like the Mississippi River, it runs through many different regions of the Southwest, nurturing Occitan culture & its rich & old history. From a glacier melting tiny drops, to a tiny stream, to a brook, to a river, & then to the ocean, La Garonne changes its faces, colors, sounds & the nuances of its personality as its surroundings change. It breathes its own life & history physically, metaphysically & poetically, as it flows. I love the French language tradition of treating a river as a woman. La Garonne is a majestic queen, & it is definitely one of the most impressively beautiful rivers we’ve ever seen.

Toulouse

La Ville Rose: The City of Rose; an old capital of the Southwest; a capital of Occitan Culture. The pink clay bricks (of the buildings, houses & churches) make the whole city glow in a rose-pink color at dusk. It is irresistibly magical & indescribably beautiful. If Paris is the city of the 17, 18 & 19th centuries, Toulouse is the city of the 12, 13 & 14th Centuries. It is a medieval city with Romanesque architecture still part of the cityscape. We stayed at poet/artist Serge Pey & artist/film maker Chiara Mulas’s museum-like apt.  Every inch of the space was filled with uncountable magical objects, & it was located in the old section of the city where the spirit of the medieval age still breathed. We had a special honor of sleeping in the same bed that Che Guevara’s daughter Aleida Guevara slept when she was visiting there. Serge called his street “the street of Alchemy” & explained that the study of alchemy had originally taken place in his street in medieval times.

The city has so much historical significance & it’s impossible to digest what you encounter in one gasp. It is the city of the Inquisition; the city of Alchemy; the city of Rose-Croix; the city of the Troubadours; the city of Henri-de-Toulouse-Lautrec’s ancestry; the city of the 2nd oldest university of France; the city of the 2^nd oldest museum in France; the city of the church of the Black Madonna; the city of Paganism, the city of the oldest/biggest surviving Romanesque church: St. Sernin; the city of the Southern Route of the Pilgrimage, the city where the expression “OK” originated… La Garrone runs through this old capital center of Occitan culture. Anyone who is there will get mystified with the spirit of the alchemy of these different elements brewed & spewed out one way or the other. Wherever & whenever you are, it will capture you with such a mysterious power that only a “personal, secret & psychic” connection allows one to have.

There are many wonderful museums & beautiful churches in La Ville Rose. The Abbatier Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art (with its current exhibition: Picasso: Horizontal Mythologique) was closed on the day we visited. So, instead, we went to the Foundation Bemberg. It’s a private museum with a collection that spans both the historical & modern. Curiously, they have an array of minor works by major artists as well as works by some unexpected artists as well as unheard of artists. A self-portrait (1910) by Sarah Bernhardt; Paul Serusier (French, 1863-1927)’s ala Gauguin work; Walter Sickert (English, 1860-1942); Henri Fautin-Latour’s La Chaise a la fenetre/A Chair at the Window & Self-portrait (1860); some Redons; Kees van Dogen; a very special, very early work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Maitre d’Equipage (1882); Louis Valtate; Raul Dufy; Matisee’s Vue d’Antibes (1925); the beautiful Egon Schiele’s Jardin Flaur, a small garden painting; Pissaro’s portrait work of 1886 & a color collage of 1871; the very impressive Bertha Morisot pastel work; Monet’s 1868 portrait of his son & more follow: Gaugin, Mogdiliani, Rouault, Nolde, Picasso, Cezanne (watercolors), Bonnard (lots of them) & Constaintin Guys…

I enjoyed the whole experience of going through them without having a rigid purpose of analyzing anything special. I walked among them letting myself be surprised, & I enjoyed contemplating the everyday lives of these artists.

Our final night in Toulouse, Serge & Chiara took us to a concert of Tolosa barròca: Toulouse baroque at Auditorium Saint-Pierre des Cuisines.  The poet Pierre Gogolin wrote texts (poems) for music in the Occitan language of the Baroque era. The Auditorium where the concert took place was built inside an ancient Romanesque church undergoing pre-Roman ruins excavation. Although we didn’t understand the language spoken & sung in the music to appreciate it in a  full sense, it was a beautiful experience to be with the somewhat melancholic & very romantic, almost dark & dry tone of the melodies. What a perfect & special way it was to spend the last night in the city we fell in love with!

In the afternoon right before we took the train to Bordeaux, we visited Le Musee des Augustins with Chiara. She guided us though one of the most amazing museums we’d ever been in. It is the second oldest museum in France after the Louvre. Art is embraced inside the medieval church convent building. The collection includes Romanesque, Gothic, Pre-Roman, Renaissance & Modern Art. I enjoyed the Gothic sculptures with their innocent & elemental expressions. They were originally painted in bright colors when they were objects of worship. Now the colors are faded or gone with the passing of time. The museum also holds a good 19^th Century art collection from Delacroix to Rodin. It was much too rich to digest in one afternoon alone. We’d definitely love to visit there again to explore its treasures further or even just to see those amazing gargoyles!

Sculptural works by Marc Arcis of the Renaissance period gave me a strong impression with their great physical dynamics. Interesting to see the bust of Pierre Gogolin, who wrote the poems for the Toulouse baroque music we’d just heard the night before, among them, & this powerful poet is now almost forgotten, known only in his home country but not outside of it. It’s always curious to pay attention to how the cultural tide moves on.

Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux

It’s a beautiful museum that originally used to be a storage space for spices, when the city was busy with its trade. We’d been there before & saw a show of Annette Messenger a while back. Unfortunately, we found out that we had just had missed an Alejandro Jodorowsky exhibition: La Poésie (*Too bad!!!), & it was in a transitional phase between shows. Naturally, it was empty. Richard Long’s outdoor sculpture piece looked lonely in the balcony garden. This was the second Richard Long piece we saw on this trip to the Southwest. Interestingly, the St. Augustine Museum in Toulouse had indoor sculpture of his. 

Artists We Met:

We do what we do. We give our lives to what we do & what we do becomes who we are. As we traveled, we encountered various artists with strong devotional commitments to what they do.  Some are known; some are not too known to the world. But equally, they gave us chances to meditate on “why art?” in the most sincere sense.

Michel De Postard @ Gallerie Hus, Paris

As we settled down in Paris, we took our first walk in Montmartre & dropped by at our friend Tristan Cormier’s Galerie Hus to say hello. There, we were welcomed by some of the most exquisite works on paper by Michel de Potestad. Mostly from 2013 to 2014, these ‘hands-on” black & white abstractions with a minimalist bend done on modest size “encre de Chine paper” drew us into his work with a quite, but, profound sense of mysterious strength. Naturally we asked Tristan about the artist, since we’d never heard of him & knew nothing of him.  “He is not an artist. He is an architect & this is his first show! He is 83 years old!” Tristan’s reply was refreshingly surprising.

The artist was born in 1932 in Paris & worked all his life as an architect. No wonder his sense of space is totally open, I thought. They are intuitively balanced & alive without being forced by creative calculations. Here, paper & ink: tools & materials for the architect are reborn as the tools & materials of his art. Unlike most “professional” artists, no creative ego or overly self-conscious spirit is involved in his art making. How moving it was to see such a pure, deep & transparent result of his involvement! Now that he is a full time artist, having retired from his profession as an architect, we can’t wait to see more of his work! Such a moving experience to see such superb works done by a “non-artist” when a big majority of the “professional artists”so drenched in market driven consciousness. Seeing his personal & solitary world was like feeling ourselves in a fresh breeze & woken up to the real meaning of “why art?”  How blessed we felt seeing his art as the first Paris art experience for this trip!    

Siegfried Kuhl @ Kuhl Spot, Berlin

Ed Montgomery, who’d relocated himself to Berlin from NYC, kindly arranged a place for us to stay overnight at Kuhl Spot. Ed used to operate a creative space in the East Village called Context Studio in the 90s. The precursor to the Vision Festival: Improvisers’ Collective (& many other organizations) used his place. It was one of the epic centers of the East Village art scene. In Berlin, he co-runs the “cool” creative space called “Kuhl Spot” with the artist, Christoph Kuhl.

Arriving the “Kuhl Spot,, we were greeted by works of Christoph’s father, the artist Siegfried Kuhl, who’d just passed away in July. The space used to be his studio, & after his passing, it transformed itself into the collective art space. Born in 1928 in Berlin, Siegfried Kuhl had gone through all the political/social changes along with the shifts of the art world as an artist, an art teacher & as a citizen. Christoph told us that we were free to go through his father’s flat files (packed with his works on paper ranging from his travel sketches, to academic student studies to his alchemically experimental abstract works). Soon we were invited to check out Siegfried’s art storage space that was filled with his 3 dimensional sculptural works. Our bed was set up in the middle of it. The storage space looked like a “forest” created by countless works of his. They are all very deeply emotional charged & heavy in both materials & content. We were told that we were to sleep inside there: in his forest! We walked around it & saw uncountable standing assembled sculptures in Dada/Surrealists tradition with a touch of early Pop art ala Rauchenberg. The same materials & images are used recurrently in his work. Wood, metal & “Hands.” Since his studio was located in East Berlin, I couldn’t stop thinking of the cold-war period of the divided 2 Berlins.

We went through his flat files to get a sense of his personal creative history. He also played a piano (which still resided in the middle of the main space) & other music alinstruments.  He was a great teacher, admired & loved by the younger generation. His outdoor installation photos by the river showed him more as a natural spirit than an artist per se in a general sense. His last work done before passing was graphite drawings of the trees roots. As he closed his life cycle, he went back to his origin: Woodlands of Germany; the true German spirit. Unfortunately we missed seeing him in person, but it was another moving experience to be able to trace back his creative life directly in the studio where he’d spent his life. 

Daniel  Estrade in Luchon

Rilke wrote of & for Hokusai, who created “One Hundred Views with Mt. Fuji,” in his poem Mountain. He talks of the artist’s obsessive & devotional challenge to capture the mountain. It is said that Hokusai never climbed Mt. Fuji, although he must have seen it from his Edo (Tokyo) house on a superbly clear day, I assume. Likewise, Daniel Estrade, an artist & print maker, a Luchon local is obsessed with the mountain. But unlike Hokusai, he actually climbs up to the highest level spot humans can be, setting himself in a face to face/a spirit to spirit challenge with the mystery & the majesty of the mountains, if the weather permits. We met him through his friendship with Nicole (Peyraffite) & Pierre (Joris) while we were doing the film project in Luchon. We were invited to his studio to see his work. Antonin Artaud, Jimi Hendrix & St. Terese are his guiding spirits. Their images are on the walls & on the shelves in his studio like altar pieces. He also creates some mystical works using found objects along with their images.

He goes to Super Bagnères to be with the highest peaks of the Pyrenees & sketches his spiritual union with clouds & the mountains. Then in the studio, he finishes transforming them into different formats, sizes & materials. He never uses photography or any other technological devices to capture his creative reaction, but chooses to do it in watercolors, ink & graphite. The results are totally mystical & powerful as if he carries the untouched primordial force of the nature & the cosmos down to our human ground. His sense of abstraction helps his “mountain” art to be precise, solid & alive. Yes, as his art tells us, the mountains are alive, breathing light, shadows, clouds & the sky. Yes, they are moving & changing every moment.

Serge Pey & Chiara Mulas, Touloluse

We met Serge & Chiara almost 10 years ago through a poetry festival, & then we got reunited again when they were briefly in NYC. What can I say about these two artists with endless passion, devotion, curiosity & their history!  When you meet genuine creative spirits, you’ll know it right away. Serge & Chiara are definitely the case. They live & breathe art every moment whenever & wherever they are.

Serge, a poet, a visual artist, a performance artist, a historian of Occutan culture, a loved & respected professor a the University of Toulouse is a hero & a living legend of the city. A through & through “Toulousian,” born, grew up, lives & teaches there. Everything he does is an integral part of who/what he is as a creative soul. As a visual artist, he does fascinating line drawings incorporating language & visual elements mixed in one. His long walking sticks in the tradition of “bourbon” for pilgrims also carry the same amalgam of art & poetry. Well published in France & in Europe, but not too known yet in US for some reason. We heard the English translation of his poetry book that was coming out via some major university press in the US soon. We are very excited with this good news.

Chiara Mulas, Serge’s partner in life & art, is also a multi-disciplinary artist of a genuine, unique quality & devotion. She performs, makes films, draws, makes magical objects & Ex Botos, designs costumes & writes. Originally from Sardinia, she lives & works in their magical museum-like apt, sharing her creative life with him. We saw her film work shown once during their last NYC visit & were impressed by its sharp psyche that held the content in a total concentration from the beginning to the end. In fact, interestingly film works are, most of cases, the end results of her expansive wholesome creative endeavors. She writes/draws/scores the piece out of her inspiration & imagination into her notebooks & then makes costumes, selects the environment & performs in them. She makes a film of the performance to make her involvement a total art. It goes far beyond the documentation of the performance art per se. Her film work definitely stands on its own remarkable merits.

Neither Serge nor Chiara do not like the terminology “Performance” generally used to describe what they do. As a matter of fact, they abhor it. They prefer to call it “Action.” It’s poetry most & first of all. It’s Poésie d’Action: Poetry in Action. They are clearly aware of the difference between “theater” & what they do philosophically, theoretically & technically. Their collaborative work, highly charged with the genuine creative spirit shared by both, definitely goes beyond performance or theater, taking us to a different dimension of poetic meditation.

Franck Wallerand @ Au 192!, Lille

We met the artist first through our mutual friend Franck Andfrieux in Lille. Whenever we are in the city, we stayed at Franck’s in a 19th century building with a garden full of rose bushes & willow trees. There Franck A organizes a collective style salon: Au 192!, presenting local & international musicians, poets & artists. It has become one of Lille’s vital creative spots. That’s where we saw Franck Wallerand’s work first in Franck A’s personal collection & then in the show that took place in the Au 192! (hall-way) gallery.

He’s been painting “Tête” (Head: the head quarter of human activities) for decades. He challenges the limitless scope of the art of painting through the consciously limited subject as in Robert Ryman & “White.” We were introduced to many versions of “Head” paintings with different materials & sizes, mostly in a series format. Some have an improvisational approach & some have a worked-on approach. All his heads are not representational, but abstractly depicted. His “Head” paining makes me think of St. Dennis who chopped his head & ran carrying it miles & miles in 250 AD. Like Ryman & “White,” Wallerand’s heads are not the subjects per se, but the starting point of his investigation. He loves music & poetry & his work shows the passion. Every nuance of the tonality of his work shows the intricately delicate poetic sensitivity to the subtlety of the colors=tones. Another moving experience of witnessing the humble, but devotional dedication of an artist to his art & the art making.