christine angot writes autofiction. having explained my style of writing, a french man/lover told me my writing sounds like this. so i'm curious, and want to read.
today i remember bruce springsteen and how i haven't listened to the born to run album in quite some time. i play it now.
yesterday i went to the pompidou. i didn't want to, but was seduced by the mondrian exhibition. i also liked the sound of Gabriel Orozco's work, which is about celebrating the everyday. but i was underwhelmed. then i walked into the Saãdane Afif exhibit, Anthologie de l'humour noir (anthology of black humour, a reference to Breton), and i smiled a lot.
in the centre of the room is a sculpture of the pompidou as coffin. on the walls are song lyrics by 12 friends of sàadane whom were asked to respond to the sculpture. there's a few aluminium cylinders cast from a mould of a pompidou bollard (also commissioned works), but they are barely noticeable, despite intermittent spotlights falling upon them. they are dead matter. unlike the words on the wall, which of course, are all about death - of art, artists, institutions, and more. funny, absurd, satirical, words.
i didn't want to visit galleries. this is a first for me in paris. i wince at being amongst the cattle of cultural tourists, or at the thought of appreciating art as isolated, singular, evenly spaced works propped high on white walls. i know that my attitude is a little ridiculous, and thankfully, i had to eat my bias here, in this room, surrounded by words about the morgue, the cemetery, death and decay. the erosion of art and its institutions. and yes, i found myself nourished. the death of art is alive and well in paris.
how can i not fall in love with the institution that houses a celebration of its own decay? or the artist that makes this (but doesn't, because he commissions much of the work)? he's a collaborationist, which is as beautiful as the black humour, the referencing, the ensemble surrounding me. mostly, for me, it's about the words, but they can't be separated from the artist, the institution, the networks between them, or the responses i have. the songs are in english and french (half of each) and i manage to comprehend most of the latter. they're not sung, but printed on a wall, so they too are dead. but also they're not, because the reader gives them life.
where i don't comprehend words and phrases, i skim, i make meaning. i fall in love via my own skewed interpretation. much like how i fall in love with people. it's about my experience of the assembled words, objects, feelings, and not the thing itself (the art work). in the room i'm connected to artists/people both dead and alive. i'm drawn into a politics of the past (1968, surrealism, anarchy, etc), yet a politics still to come. dismantling and erosion takes place in this room, but it's also the sound of a future death. a rumble, an almost, a could-be. a mire of words and sensations that i can't quite crystallise with my own words, but of course, i want to. and of course, there's the beauty. what is beyond me seduces me. it moves me, or rather it propels me, to run towards something.
j'étais né pour courir.
j'étais né pour mourir.
No comments:
Post a Comment