fotos, france, tout ça…
Thursday, November 29th, 2007I thought I linked last night to my “france” set on flickr, but apparently I didn’t… it is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/erleichda/sets/72157603311042965/
Some photos of/in Blois:
From the steps in the center of town, named after someone named Denis Papin.
The cathedral, which has very pretty modernist (?) stained glass windows.
La Loire in the evening light.
The young expat community (i.e. Robin’s friends):
(cherry lambic is tasty)
Le lendemain matin, after a frost.
Robin saw me off at the train station with her bright yellow bike.
…And since then:
The view of the Seine, and Paris in the distance, from the park in St-Germain-en-Laye.
My hosts, Sylvain and Liliane, dans le jardin at the Rodin Museum in Paris this morning.
My favorite thing about museums is getting to see other people interacting with art. I liked the Rodin Museum also because not everything is presented against a plain white background (I mean, some of it is in the garden, like so). More on this later on in this entry…
Is that hot or what? I think it was a model for part of Rodin’s chef-d’oeuvre, “La Porte de l’Infer,” but I already knew that all the interesting, sexy people are going to hell or are there already…
Saw this on my way to the Centre Pompidou after lunch, when we went our separate ways for the afternoon.
The square outside the Centre Pompidou, from the escalators inside.
This installation was part of a temporary exhibit and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to take this photo, but it was so cool and I couldn’t resist. It was called “Forest Without Leaves,” I think.
Okay. So. Museums. Museums are cool. Sometimes by virtue of seeing a painting in real life, in real size, you see something new or different that it’s impossible or difficult to see in a reproduction. Sometimes you see things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise even as a reproduction ’cause you wouldn’t have thought to look. Or you’re not the type to look at art (especially modern and contemporary art) in books and such, but you go to museums anyway for the chic cultural experience, and you see something and have some epiphany, big or small, and you are changed by the experience. Inspired. Whatever. All this is REALLY GOOD.
But sometimes, especially if you are pretty well-educated and cultured and all that, or maybe if you’re particularly uneducated and have no idea how to look at what you’re seeing or no real interest in looking at it to begin with, museums can be SO BORING. That’s why I think museums should be more like theatre. Curators should be like directors… I mean, they kind of are already–they put works of art next to each other in a way that allows them to inform each other, be in dialogue with each other, complement each other, look awesome, whatever. But if directing was just putting pretty actors next to each other, theatre would be pretty boring too. It doesn’t HAVE to be, of course, and the actors are often powerful and beautiful, but even the best script can be improved by artful use of set, lighting, costumes, etc. And Shakespeare has been redone in such a myriad of ways because each production tries (and ocassionally even manages) to illuminate some new aspect of the work. So why boring white walls in museums? Maybe visual artists are afraid of people seeing their art in a context not precisely of their choosing, and so for simplicity’s sake that context has been frightfully standardized…
In conclusion, well, I heart installation art, and also I like museums and theatre both for the interaction of art and audience one finds in those media. Contemporary art museums are especially good for this because they tend to include works that are more interactive. So today I took pictures of people in the museum. Yeah.
No people in this one, but shadows… and I love Alexander Calder’s work.
Oh, and I also found this hilarious series of photos by Man Ray titled “Mr. and Mrs. Woodman”… see here, here and here (kinda not work safe). Reminded me that I’d meant to mention the strangest room at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, which was full of erotic sketches more or less contemporary with his blue period. They were definitely explicit and I think most of them had pretty predictable titles, but my favorite was this picture of a couple having oral sex, with their cat on the bed, and the title was “two figures and a cat.” Heh.
I was actually kind of rushed by the end of my visit because I told L and S that I would be back in St-Germain by 7 or 7:30, and I wanted to see the lights on the Champs-Elysee before I headed back: