The last seven days can be summed up with one word: Metro. Indeed after buying my weekly Navigo Pass (hebdomadeire) and studying each of the 14 lines, their terminals and where they intersect in junctions and interchanges, I gained some liberty in going around Paris a little bit more, and further. The Metro is so convenient to use as the station Pont Marie is just outside the main gate of Cité des Arts and the interchange Chatelet is one station away. Add to this I also received my Museum Pass which sadly does not cover the Louvre. But nevertheless both the Pass and the Navigo were to determine my residency in transformative ways.
With Monday being the day most museums in my Pass did not cover, I took my first Metro ride to see the other parts of the city and ended up under the Eiffel Tower. My interest in finding my way to the Eiffel was the Museè du Quai Branly which was beside it. The following day I was among the first in line at the Museum and was able to use my pass to gain entrance. The Museum is also known as Museé Arts Premiers and features a wide and vast collection of objects and artifacts from "primary cultures" or indigenous populations in four regions: Asia, Africa, Oceania and America. The central theme of the museum is the River, arguing that all communities arose from the banks of many rivers. (Paris being one of them!) The spectacle in seeing the richness of the collection of objects cannot be simply articulated in interjections of wonder and surprise. But a curious student of archeological discoveries that I am (with childhood heroes like Bingham, Schliemann and Carter) I was overjoyed to see all these objects on one place. The African section contained many outstanding pieces like the Dogon masks and the life size wood sculptures of a royal household in central Africa. I was interested in smaller objects as well like the punishment dolls of Saharan peoples and the fertility deities that seemed to be everywhere across continents. Could not help but compare Picasso's cubism with the African masks he studied. Then I ask: if modernism was born with a fascination with centuries old art of the Africans, Asians and Oceanic peoples, whence does the claim to the avant-garde then come from? Modernism was born from a retrospective of cultures outside the Greco-Roman traditions espoused and enriched by the Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Baroque. As an Asian and a Filipino, I beg to ask: so our ancestors were more avant-garde in the eyes of the early 20th century? Hardly. We have to consider that in Europe there was this concept called "the Noble Savage", a Romantic idea, so persistent that even in the 30's Andre Breton called Surrealism as a movement of the "savage eye". There was an attraction, if not projection, to the purity of expression in arts premieres that was contrary and revolutionary against the institutionalized academic tradition of Western Art.
This rumination continued in my head as I took note of the sanguine artifacts of the American Maya and Aztecs. Then I proceeded to take notice more of the objects from Oceania and thought of their regard of the world as divided into planes of consciousness/wakefulness/living as opposed to unconsciousness/dreaming/death. For the Polynesians the sea was the world of the dead and of dreams and of the gods. Turtles and sharks, being able to breach the confines of the sea to the shore were regarded as holy intermediaries. One very inspiring work was of a wooden shark with a cavity in its belly and a skull imbedded in it. At once I understood the mythology in its concreteness and began to think of the Ilocano epic hero Lam Ang who was also devoured by a great fish.
The Filipino section of Quai Branly is an embarrassment. With only a few objects not even filling up a cabinet window, consisting of an Ilongot bracelet, headgear and some jewelry one wonders where did the French explorers of the 19th century in the Philippines bequeath their collection....or did they even collect samples at all? Quite unlikely, as even Napoleon brought archeologists with his army to Egypt. But then again, the Asian section seemed to be the weakest of all four sections, and with only one Thai Buddha sculpture attests to this scarcity. Perhaps if the African section have their own area of Christian era paintings, could Quai Branly even acquire or be open to donations of antique santos at the very least? Or am I just looking in the wrong museum.
On Wednesday to celebrate my seventh day of arrival in France I took time to go to Cimetrie Montparnasse and visit the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre. To participate in the tradition of leaving used Metro Tickets at his grave I left a Philippine LRT card and a small note of thanks to the man whose writings opened a whole new way of thinking about the world. Also visited the burial places of Eugene Ionesco, Baudelaire and Man Ray. Tried but didnt find Brancusi's. Because I was already in Raspail Boulevard I went to nearby Fondation Cartier where they were featuring Show and Tell, an exhibit of naive art.
The exhibit was heartwarming, owing to the fact most of the self-taught artists featured in the show were seniors still active in their creative work. The Brazilian sculptures were the ones that caught my attention as they resonated the same type of imagery that I explore in my own pieces. But I was more moved by a video documentary about the Guaneiro people, a nomadic tribe who used to access territories in now Argentina, Brazil etc but were forced to roam in smaller areas, as vagrants. In the documentary they spoke of myths and legends about a snake that kills and eats children and also of colonialists who similarly gave limits to their nomadic existence with ideas of property and state lines. I realized how powerful documentaries can be and perhaps I can also do the same back home. The exhibit resuscitated the idea of savage in my head and thought why this can be either used as an agent to instigate fresh changes in perception; or this can be used as a justification for the projects of civilization.
I spent the remaining days of the week working with drawings at the Museé d'Orsay, while struggling last throngs, groups and lines of tourists wanting to gaze at Van Gogh and the Impressionists. Or even to take a snapshot or two which was strictly interdit, forbidden. I was there for the Rodins, the Maillols and even for Bourdelle (whose work I really do not like, for some reason). The sculptures in the Museé are really second attractions, displayed as they are in areas where seating is available and you can gaze at them as respite and with tired eyes. Yet, sadly the sculptures do not face the people in the seating area, so most of the time you are confronted with all different visions of various rumps and buttocks from plaster to bronze and to marble. Even Rodin's Balzac faces the entrance to Van Gogh's gallery like a monstrous ogre getting in line. I noted a sylistic progression from Rodin to Bourdelle, to Maillol and then to Brancusi - each artist resolving a problem of sculptural form that became the point of departure from all the classicizing approach that characterizes sculpture since the Greco Roman times. There is a sense of contrivance in trying to outdo the works of the Ancients, and while I admire Carpeaux and his works at the Museé, I found the honesty and truth of material and technique in Rodin and Maillol and later in Brancusi more appealing and more significant. Perhaps this sense of honest handling, and vulnerable craftsmanship that draws the works of the so-called savages in Quai Branly and these modern sculptors in the same spirit.
Then I am reminded of Sartre's philosophical emphasis on authenticity. Often times in the creative practice one is not judged good because one if right, but if one is true. To be trapped in the confines of a school, or a style or a period, just to be in the right crowd is a great lure.
I ended the week with a visit to St. Merry where Marguerite Lantz arranged a quick tour of the rooftop of this 15th century mini Notre Dame. My purpose was to see the chimeres up close and also to see how medieval church construction was done. I was able to see the wood work and the masonry by entering the church's roof. The last, but poignant point of the tour was when Marguerite showed me the Sacristy and where I discovered, among the discarded and stored electronic equipment, saints and used posters, was a cabinet full of reliquaries. One reliquary even had a thigh bone in it, along with an unreadable latin text of the now-legless saint's name. Shelved, I thought, are the mementoes of the past, even those as powerful as the Church's. At the entrance I saw defaced angels and saints' faces on a wooden screen that dates back to the Renaissance period: a victim of the vandals of the Revolution. It was said the church walls were once scraped for its saltpeter, the turned into a textile factory in Napoleonic times. St. Merry is to date the only church in Paris that I have seen under initial renovation and hence it bears the grime, the dark, the stain and the gloom of centuries past still. You could feel a thousand years groaning in St. Merry.
To end this morose feeling I came back to terms with present-day Paris and bought two books at the Shakespeare and Company at rue Bucherie near the Notre Dame. It is one of a few stores selling English paperbacks and used books. The store is noted to be the first location of the 2007 film Before Sunset by Richard Linklater, starting Ethan Hawke and French actress Julie Delpy. A book on the film is prominently displayed in one of the sections of the bookstore. When I walked away from the store through the banks of the Seine, a lovely sunset warmed up the otherwise chilly autumn afternoon.
Then I had an insight. What I have encountered within the week - the romance with the noble savage, the demand for authenticity, the delight in the modern by the Impressionists, the shelving of past relics, and even the Metro and the Eiffel Tower - are all but components of a spirit celebrating (and fighting for) the experience of the Present. Paris is speaking to me about relishing what is here-and-now and not to be extremely hung up on glorifying the past. By renovating its churches and old buildings Paris is renewing, making the past relevant as its heritage, but yet still functional for today. It is also a place for renewal.
With Monday being the day most museums in my Pass did not cover, I took my first Metro ride to see the other parts of the city and ended up under the Eiffel Tower. My interest in finding my way to the Eiffel was the Museè du Quai Branly which was beside it. The following day I was among the first in line at the Museum and was able to use my pass to gain entrance. The Museum is also known as Museé Arts Premiers and features a wide and vast collection of objects and artifacts from "primary cultures" or indigenous populations in four regions: Asia, Africa, Oceania and America. The central theme of the museum is the River, arguing that all communities arose from the banks of many rivers. (Paris being one of them!) The spectacle in seeing the richness of the collection of objects cannot be simply articulated in interjections of wonder and surprise. But a curious student of archeological discoveries that I am (with childhood heroes like Bingham, Schliemann and Carter) I was overjoyed to see all these objects on one place. The African section contained many outstanding pieces like the Dogon masks and the life size wood sculptures of a royal household in central Africa. I was interested in smaller objects as well like the punishment dolls of Saharan peoples and the fertility deities that seemed to be everywhere across continents. Could not help but compare Picasso's cubism with the African masks he studied. Then I ask: if modernism was born with a fascination with centuries old art of the Africans, Asians and Oceanic peoples, whence does the claim to the avant-garde then come from? Modernism was born from a retrospective of cultures outside the Greco-Roman traditions espoused and enriched by the Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Baroque. As an Asian and a Filipino, I beg to ask: so our ancestors were more avant-garde in the eyes of the early 20th century? Hardly. We have to consider that in Europe there was this concept called "the Noble Savage", a Romantic idea, so persistent that even in the 30's Andre Breton called Surrealism as a movement of the "savage eye". There was an attraction, if not projection, to the purity of expression in arts premieres that was contrary and revolutionary against the institutionalized academic tradition of Western Art.
This rumination continued in my head as I took note of the sanguine artifacts of the American Maya and Aztecs. Then I proceeded to take notice more of the objects from Oceania and thought of their regard of the world as divided into planes of consciousness/wakefulness/living as opposed to unconsciousness/dreaming/death. For the Polynesians the sea was the world of the dead and of dreams and of the gods. Turtles and sharks, being able to breach the confines of the sea to the shore were regarded as holy intermediaries. One very inspiring work was of a wooden shark with a cavity in its belly and a skull imbedded in it. At once I understood the mythology in its concreteness and began to think of the Ilocano epic hero Lam Ang who was also devoured by a great fish.
The Filipino section of Quai Branly is an embarrassment. With only a few objects not even filling up a cabinet window, consisting of an Ilongot bracelet, headgear and some jewelry one wonders where did the French explorers of the 19th century in the Philippines bequeath their collection....or did they even collect samples at all? Quite unlikely, as even Napoleon brought archeologists with his army to Egypt. But then again, the Asian section seemed to be the weakest of all four sections, and with only one Thai Buddha sculpture attests to this scarcity. Perhaps if the African section have their own area of Christian era paintings, could Quai Branly even acquire or be open to donations of antique santos at the very least? Or am I just looking in the wrong museum.
On Wednesday to celebrate my seventh day of arrival in France I took time to go to Cimetrie Montparnasse and visit the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre. To participate in the tradition of leaving used Metro Tickets at his grave I left a Philippine LRT card and a small note of thanks to the man whose writings opened a whole new way of thinking about the world. Also visited the burial places of Eugene Ionesco, Baudelaire and Man Ray. Tried but didnt find Brancusi's. Because I was already in Raspail Boulevard I went to nearby Fondation Cartier where they were featuring Show and Tell, an exhibit of naive art.
The exhibit was heartwarming, owing to the fact most of the self-taught artists featured in the show were seniors still active in their creative work. The Brazilian sculptures were the ones that caught my attention as they resonated the same type of imagery that I explore in my own pieces. But I was more moved by a video documentary about the Guaneiro people, a nomadic tribe who used to access territories in now Argentina, Brazil etc but were forced to roam in smaller areas, as vagrants. In the documentary they spoke of myths and legends about a snake that kills and eats children and also of colonialists who similarly gave limits to their nomadic existence with ideas of property and state lines. I realized how powerful documentaries can be and perhaps I can also do the same back home. The exhibit resuscitated the idea of savage in my head and thought why this can be either used as an agent to instigate fresh changes in perception; or this can be used as a justification for the projects of civilization.
I spent the remaining days of the week working with drawings at the Museé d'Orsay, while struggling last throngs, groups and lines of tourists wanting to gaze at Van Gogh and the Impressionists. Or even to take a snapshot or two which was strictly interdit, forbidden. I was there for the Rodins, the Maillols and even for Bourdelle (whose work I really do not like, for some reason). The sculptures in the Museé are really second attractions, displayed as they are in areas where seating is available and you can gaze at them as respite and with tired eyes. Yet, sadly the sculptures do not face the people in the seating area, so most of the time you are confronted with all different visions of various rumps and buttocks from plaster to bronze and to marble. Even Rodin's Balzac faces the entrance to Van Gogh's gallery like a monstrous ogre getting in line. I noted a sylistic progression from Rodin to Bourdelle, to Maillol and then to Brancusi - each artist resolving a problem of sculptural form that became the point of departure from all the classicizing approach that characterizes sculpture since the Greco Roman times. There is a sense of contrivance in trying to outdo the works of the Ancients, and while I admire Carpeaux and his works at the Museé, I found the honesty and truth of material and technique in Rodin and Maillol and later in Brancusi more appealing and more significant. Perhaps this sense of honest handling, and vulnerable craftsmanship that draws the works of the so-called savages in Quai Branly and these modern sculptors in the same spirit.
Then I am reminded of Sartre's philosophical emphasis on authenticity. Often times in the creative practice one is not judged good because one if right, but if one is true. To be trapped in the confines of a school, or a style or a period, just to be in the right crowd is a great lure.
I ended the week with a visit to St. Merry where Marguerite Lantz arranged a quick tour of the rooftop of this 15th century mini Notre Dame. My purpose was to see the chimeres up close and also to see how medieval church construction was done. I was able to see the wood work and the masonry by entering the church's roof. The last, but poignant point of the tour was when Marguerite showed me the Sacristy and where I discovered, among the discarded and stored electronic equipment, saints and used posters, was a cabinet full of reliquaries. One reliquary even had a thigh bone in it, along with an unreadable latin text of the now-legless saint's name. Shelved, I thought, are the mementoes of the past, even those as powerful as the Church's. At the entrance I saw defaced angels and saints' faces on a wooden screen that dates back to the Renaissance period: a victim of the vandals of the Revolution. It was said the church walls were once scraped for its saltpeter, the turned into a textile factory in Napoleonic times. St. Merry is to date the only church in Paris that I have seen under initial renovation and hence it bears the grime, the dark, the stain and the gloom of centuries past still. You could feel a thousand years groaning in St. Merry.
To end this morose feeling I came back to terms with present-day Paris and bought two books at the Shakespeare and Company at rue Bucherie near the Notre Dame. It is one of a few stores selling English paperbacks and used books. The store is noted to be the first location of the 2007 film Before Sunset by Richard Linklater, starting Ethan Hawke and French actress Julie Delpy. A book on the film is prominently displayed in one of the sections of the bookstore. When I walked away from the store through the banks of the Seine, a lovely sunset warmed up the otherwise chilly autumn afternoon.
Then I had an insight. What I have encountered within the week - the romance with the noble savage, the demand for authenticity, the delight in the modern by the Impressionists, the shelving of past relics, and even the Metro and the Eiffel Tower - are all but components of a spirit celebrating (and fighting for) the experience of the Present. Paris is speaking to me about relishing what is here-and-now and not to be extremely hung up on glorifying the past. By renovating its churches and old buildings Paris is renewing, making the past relevant as its heritage, but yet still functional for today. It is also a place for renewal.
Viewing Francis Bacon at the Centre Georges Pompidou.
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