Art Outings with George Vance & others...

Geo and I had a

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groove thing happening for awhile there, in this midwinter winterness, getting a little spice and fun into our snowy-rainy afternoons.

Our most recent Friday end-of-week art outing was an afternoon at galleries in the marais--Martine Aboucaya, Almine Rech Gallery, Yvon Lambert and Karsten Grève. It was a rainy, rainy day (as the pic of Geo in front of Karsten Grève shows!) and we needed a bit of cheer--so I suppose you could say our pics, esp with the conceptual art at the "Wall & Floor" show (going from 9 Janvier through 6 March 2010), were the way to amusement. So, I thought I would share a few here.

Our first stop: the very black and white group show entitled GROUP: Detanico Lain, Peter Downsbrough, Anthony McCall, Thu Van Tran. (Currently they have a show entitled NARCISSA to see!) Anyway, at the Groupe show going at la galerie Martine Aboucaya 5 rue sainte Anastase, 75003 Paris, here are pictures of George Vance and I in relief as a projector projects a mobile oval, which shifts, becomes curves, round, etc. There was a smoke machine that would puff smoke into the projection line and thus make it take on a cloudlike form. This is not visible in the profile pics of George or of me. Then here is a profile pic of me, in the same projection light.

After, we got dripping wet as we intended to head to Almine Rech so instead stopped off at Karsten Grève Paris, 5, rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris. A beautiful show was underway: Claire Morgan "Life. Blood." Work so delicate it surprised (complete with a "do not blow on artwork" sign!) The taxidermied animals or dried insects suspended in geometrical forms made up of tiny shreds of plastic or other debris tied or folded onto fishing lines, the entire space in suspension, a mastery of geometry while elliciting naturally the tenuous balance of man and nature, life and death, solidity and air, transparency and visible line. Here are a few of the pictures I took in this space, and just outside as we headed with George and his slightly beaten up umbrella off to the next spot. The photos do no justice to the mastery of this work--go go go right away before the show ends on Feb 25th!!!!

Rejeuvinated by this exciting show, we struck off again for Almine Rech, but as the drizzle kept drizzling and the streets were soggy and grey, instead of finding Rech first, we detoured again, to Yvon Lambert. This galerie is always a pleasure to stop into, and doubly that day because of the very fun word art being shown: Charles Sandison's Writing With Light. We lingered, laughed, made sentences of the descending words as if they were refrigerator poetry magnets, discussed the techniques involved in this, the successes and failures of hypertext poetry, the more financially rewording move of making that poetry visual art (thus for sale!) and also just enjoyed the lava-lamp quality work that is Sandison's: mesmerizing, evocative and provocative. Sandison made a really exciting choice by mounting his visual word art on rectangular dark screens, and the movement of the words and colors, the way the words group and shift, was amoebic, lifelike, and recalled also viral images on slides. Perhaps this is because I am the daughter of a hematologist-pathologist, but it was impossible not to see the parallels with a sense of bacterial-like infection taking place on screen. Fun, exciting, colorful infections, but nontheless infective. Unfortunately for anyone thinking of skipping over to the gallery right now to check out Sandison's work, that show is over, but there is a NEW SHOW.

By this point, Geo and I were flagging, but it had been George's goal all afternoon to get to Almine Rech, and so we got out our map and found it was now only a few streets off (really, we had hardly gone blocks the entire afternoon, but it was so very wet wet wet!!!) At Almine Rech, 19 rue Saintonge, 75003 Paris, the door squeaked resistence as we let in a big bluster of wind and spitting rain behind us, but inside we found 2 floors covering a sort of retrospective of conceptual works, by an array of artists from Sol Lewitt, Dan Graham, Frank Stella and Donald Judd to 2009 pieces by Katja Strunz, Aaron Young, or Andrei Molodkin (FYI: go to the gallery's site and click "artists" then click the artist's name to see an excellent slide show of each artist's work!). Though we enjoyed the RdC, it was upstairs where we found our bonheur--as these pics show! We took pics of ourselves recorded on vinyl surfaces in sections of Tom BURR's 2007 piece "Black Vinyl Weil Board", making faces, giggling, making the noise that those vinyl records have lost the ability to produce. There were some lovely pieces, too, upstairs, and then some you had to note carefully the artfullness of to admire their construction. In particular, the title "After Malevich, 2009" tells us everything about Andrei Molokin's work made up of blocks of acrylic filled with Russian brute petrol. I wondered what Malevich would've thought? I think he would have really admired the work, the move from his paintings into a 3-D world and the use of the materials as comment on the industrial state of the next century (that being this one). Here (above) I also include a version of Malevich's "Black Cross" for those who may have forgotten it. This pic is from the old MOMA files, I think, though this version of Malevich's painting is on display in Russia. George and I had seen a LOT of black and white work.

so it was with circuslike giggles we encountered Donald Judd's "Untitled (Lascaux 89.53)" from 1989--a painted aluminum structure on a wall through which we could look at each other and admire not only the work itself but how light and reflection played inside of it.

This ended our afternoon, so with a little hot cocoa at a café to warm us up, we headed home.

Friday: a week before George and I's outing, I went on another outing with students from the EHESS: To see Christian Boltanski's show MONUMENTA at Le Grand Palais in La Nef.

Yes, I do recommend it. There are pics and pics and pics of this show (even by Le Grand Palais: galérie de pics), but really it is a sound and space experience not represented by the volumes of pictures people like me and everyone else have taken. Here, an image of Jonathan Regier and Diego listening to Anastasia explain what she sees in all of this clothing.

And the week before that? Yes, again, ART!
Again, with George Vance--we checked out the Pierre Soulages show at the Centre Pompidou.
But even more impressive were the scenes--here--of Paris in the snowy brouillard. One view out towards Sacre Coeur, the city already so grey suddenly soft white grey, downy. And in the other direction, the drained sculpture pond along the side of St Merri church. Kids had gotten into the drained pond and were sliding about on the tiny bits of ice, as if skating, arms thrown wide out at their sides like some of the bright circus-colored sculptures beside them. And here, a last pic of a picture-taking George Vance capturing the parallels between the beams of architechture and what was felt in the Soulages work. Line, space, dimensionality.

And so, tomorrow is another Friday. Will it be an art day? Hmmmmm.... I must say, there is so much to do right now it feels doubtful, but I hope someone else, perhaps someone who reads this, will pick up my slack.