Travel: France : Paris Part II The Art Galleries

Musée Picasso 7/11/04 09:27 pm

Forget about the pink period, forget about the blue period, the bathers, and even all the guitars. Just look at the fantastic, little known assemblies of Picasso, and you'll realize here is one of the greatest known creative minds in the art world: A soup lqdel becomes a head, a garden hand rake could be a hand, a bicycle seat and handle gets thrown together and turns into an O'Keefean skull of a bull. It's almost akin to seeing the world through the eyes of a child again.

When one thinks sculpturally, one thinks not only in three dimension, but also in-the-round, in relief, and in negative space.

This morning, I woke up at dawn and I thought: When we complain- which is easier done by virtue of the fact that complaining identifies yet another familiar node of unhappiness (which greatly outnumbers the abstract qualities of happiness) - we are accenting gripes, and pushing the blessings of life into relief. I think we are commonly trained to see filled spaces, as opposed to negative spaces.

Perhaps we may look at life as a sculptor does, treating both pluses and minuses on an equal plane, because things that have been left in the dark too long, are sometimes forgotten.

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Centre Pompidou

After a day at the Centre Pompidou admiring the seldom seen fashion illustrations of Zoltan Kemeny for the German magazine Annabelle (which I think is really from the hand of his artist wife, Marie), I sit in my room and read Pierre Klossowski while a couple has loud sex in the adjacent room. I often think about the words of Jimbo while we were all sitting at an old Irish bar in the town of our alma mater: "We are at the crest of our sexuality, our bodies are in tip-top condition of all-night fucking machines, and here we all are, sitting stagnant, inert. Sometimes I feel like it's all going to waste."

Yeah. Sometimes I feel like it's all going to waste.

I open the windows and look outside and down on the street. A homeless man is carefully measuring out and cutting pieces of artwork to create a beautiful white horse following the images of a book. He's out there, without shelter. And he's thinking of art.

I feel like I'm Snow White.

Someday My Prince Will Be MAN enough to come and get me. But until then...

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Le Louvre 7/12/04 11:35 pm

Not having seen the Louvre properly at seven, today I did the Louvre in seven hours straight. After only a few hours of sleep from the last night. Of course, the Albrecht Durers, the Asiatic and Dutch wings were closed for renovation.

The genius of La Jaconde, or Mona Lisa lies in the fact that this undistinguished painting of an undistinguished face, holds court in a room filled with spectators who have recently been informed that they were not allowed to use their cameras. I know it kills most people, especially many of the Asian tourists, who have a penchant for getting a pic of themselves standing next to an attraction, before promptly running off without even a cursory glance at the work, nor a questioning of it's value.

The joke of La Jaconde is that this prefabricated icon sits on a shelf and tauntingly half-smiles over the sea of sad, bewildered faces. What? We endured hours of silver spoons and forks, people who wear automotive air filters on their necks, and naked men exasperatingly throwing their arms in the air as if the chee-tohs have been bought and nobody knows where the remote control is?!!! And now they are being told they can no longer get their show-off prize possession "I've been there" snap? It's like fighting that swordfish for 90 minutes only to find out you've reeled in a pair of Converses.

The dessert treat is watching all the disgusted disappointed faces march past the last hall. Who cares?! We've had enough! David, Delacroix, LeBrun, Manet. Who are these people, and why don't they just go away already? Just tell me how I get back to my bus!

Catching Canova's Psyche and Cupid, I looked at their loving, tender embrace and I wondered why my undistinguished life has been unable to reach this level of lovingness and tenderness. (I know we all wish for this blinding magnificence, even if it is in varying levels of denial.) As I was about to frown, I looked at a girl standing next to to me, and at that very instant, an identical frown and a silent sigh came across her face. I quickly turned and look out the window.

So nobody in the room would see the living tears roll down my cheeks.

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