THE NEW YORK TIMES  2 DECEMBER 2011
 
 

PARIS — Half a century ago, fairground hucksters in Europe would whet the curiosity of provincial crowds with dead whales and giant squids, pickled in formaldehyde and carted from place to place aboard large trucks designed for the purpose. These days dead sea monsters are out. Art’s sacred monsters are making the rounds instead.

Chaumont-sur-Marne, a small town in eastern France, population 30,000, is the first stop of the new Pompidou Mobile, a travelling gallery of modern and contemporary art conceived by Alain Seban, the current director of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

One in two people in France has never visited a museum, according to Mr. Seban. So in 2007, he said during a recent interview, he decided to take his museum to the French.

The director chose the iconclastic architect Patrick Bouchain, a specialist in nomadic constructions, to execute his project. The result is three tents, shaped like origami birds, covering a total area of 650 square meters, or 7,000 square feet, that can be fitted together in a variety of configurations to adapt to the available space. Two tents hold the exhibition spaces and another the reception area.

The total cost of designing and building the project was €2.5 million, or $3.3 million, financed by the Pompidou Center, the Ministry of Culture and a group of four private-sector sponsors (Galeries Lafayette, GDF SUEZ, La Parisienne Insurance and the Total Foundation).

The curator Emma Lavigne was chosen by Mr. Seban to put together “La Couleur,” the Pompidou Mobile’s first show, which opened in Chaumont in mid-October and runs until Jan. 15. Inside the tents are displayed 14 masterpieces from the Paris museum’s permanent collection. The artists include modern masters — Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Alexander Calder and Niki de Saint Phalle — and a sprinkling of contemporary artists including Olafur Eliasson and Bruce Nauman.

Entrance to the museum is free — a rarity in France — and the €400,000 cost of each stage in the museum’s journey is being split equally among the local council and the four private sector sponsors. “The aim is not to compete with existing museums but to go and put ourselves in front of people who never go to museums,” Mr. Seban said. “We want to create a festive event, something popular and free, that everybody, I hope, will want to take part in.”

The exhibition area inside the tents is a sequence of spare, white uncluttered spaces, each dominated by a large display caisson. The caisson, a sort of giant safe, showcases the paintings through non-reflective security-glass windows. Sculptures and mobiles are distributed around the perimeter of the spaces, placed to create a dialogue between the sculptural and pictorial displays.

An audio guide gives a concise, jargon-free explanation of each work in a choice of languages while local actors have been hired and trained by the Pompidou as tour guides for group visits, reciting a specially written story-line enhanced with sound effects.

Chaumont’s actor-guides will in turn train a replacement team from Cambrai, where the museum will next set up camp on its tour of France, early next year. From Cambrai it heads to Boulogne-sur-Mer in May.

In sharp contrast to the minimalist interior, the outside is brightly colored in bold panes of red, orange and blue, reminiscent of a circus tent. Made in a tough double-ply canvas, with an insulating airspace between the two fabric layers, like double glazing, to ensure a controlled temperature inside the tents, it is designed to be put up using a system of masts, ropes and pulleys. Once erected, it is held up by counterweights formed of enormous water-filled balloons.

Putting more than a dozen major artworks, each worth in the millions of dollars, in a tent in the middle of nowhere might be thought to raise some security concerns. Still, Mr. Seban, while declining to go into details, said adequate precautions had been taken.

“The safety of the works has been very carefully studied and we have multiple security measures — physical, electronic and human — in place,” he said. “Our insurer, a specialist in artworks, has signed off on the overall system.”

Occupying the parade ground of an abandoned army barracks on the edge of town, the colorful tent brings a dash of energy to the drab surroundings of Chaumont, a post-industrial town once known for its glove-making industry.

“Fernand Léger wrote a very fine text on the function of painting and color in advertising, clothing and architecture,” Mr. Bouchain, the architect, said, drawing a link between his design and the show. “He worked with Corbusier and taught him to use color in architecture. For my part I think it’s good that 20th-century works are being shown in a way that renders homage, after a century, to the people who envisaged adding color to architecture.”

The architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers drew inspiration from Le Corbusier’s ideas in their groundbreaking 1972 design for the Pompidou Center, with its blue and green exposed ducts and red external stairway elements. The decision to endow the Pompidou Mobile with a bright fairground exterior was also a nod to its Paris parent and “a homage to Renzo Piano and Fernand Léger,” Mr. Bouchain said.

In planning the museum’s itinerary, the Pompidou invited mayors from all over France to put in bids. Chaumont was one of the first to respond, Mr. Seban said, and the fact that the nearest museum was 100 kilometers, or about 60 miles, away also played in its favor.

Still, the decision to start the ball rolling in Chaumont probably owed less to competitive tendering than to the fact that its mayor, Luc Chatel, is minister of education in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

“We approached the minister of education to get him involved in the project,” Mr. Bouchain said. “We wanted to get his approval to facilitate and give an impetus to the project’s work with schools.”

In Chaumont, the schools program has been fully booked for the museum’s three-month stay. Total attendance, meanwhile, has surpassed expectations, at an average 700 visitors a day and 2,000 on weekends.

With the Pompidou mobile journey on its way, Mr. Bouchain is now working on something very different — the next Monumenta installation at the Grand Palais. It will be a minimalist production, he said, with the artist Daniel Buren.

 
— Claudia Barbieri, The New York Times

PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW  15 JUNE 2011
 
 

If, as scholars would have us believe, artists are the canaries in the coal mine of our culture, now comes an exhibit that pegs them as potential seers of the future.

The exhibit “Contemporary Magic: A Tarot Deck Art Project,” on display at the Andy Warhol Museum, features the minor and major arcana as reinterpreted by 78 artists, photographers, fashion designers and other creative types, many of whom are known the world over.

Organized by curator Stacy Engman of the National Arts Club, the exhibit is a varied display of 78 tarot cards, each created by a different artist in a wide range of media, including photography, painting and collage.

The Tarot Card deck first originated in Marseilles, France, in the 1400s. But only in the past century were the cards themselves given pictorial meaning. That changed with what has come to be known as the “Rider-Waite tarot deck,” which was commissioned by occult scholar Edward Waite (1857-1942) about 100 years ago.

“It was the first time in the history of the tarot that all of the suit cards were illustrated in the way that has now become familiar to many,” Engman says. “Prior to that, all of the suit cards — the wands, the coins, the cups, the swords — were depicted only by numbers.”

Engman says that, in relation to art history, the Rider-Waite deck probably is the most important modernist tarot deck because it’s the first deck that introduced pictorial equivalents to every single card. “Since then you see different kinds of tarot decks everywhere, and a lot of artists have done their own,” she says. “Salvador Dali did his own tarot card deck; Niki de Saint Phalle made sculptures of the tarot. This is the first deck in history that incorporates 78 interpretations by 78 different creative icons.”

For this project, each artist was matched with a card based on themes that recur in their work. For example, fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was given the King of Wands, and responded with a picture of himself sitting quite regally in an ultra-modern Lucite chair.

Fashion photographer Terry Richardson, assigned the Two of Wands, submitted an image of himself as a modern day hombre, wearing a Black Flag t-shirt, arms crossed, holding rather ominous looking pistols on each hand. With his tattooed forearms and menacing look, the picture easily could be an ad for the jeans he’s wearing or the cover of a men’s magazine.

And onetime Carnegie Mellon University art student-turned-art-world superstar John Currin turned in a masterful little figural composition of a laughing, party-going couple, in his inimitable style for the Ten of Cups.

Recognizing that with tarot, each combination of cards drawn “is like an art installation in front of you that always changes based on the cards drawn,” Engman began the project three years ago with the idea of combining art and tarot.

“It was a big project that I’ve worked on and researched for several years,” she says. “The artists’ interpretations were really inspired, and liberated the deck in a really amazing way. They’re the true magic in the project. It was a labor of love and wonderful surprises throughout.”

Every single one of the cards is unique and resonant.

“They’re all archetypes and notions of the heroic, transformation, and contemplation in some form,” Engman says. “Without being planned as such, as this project was an experiment as much as anything, you do see incredible archetypal themes that artists gravitated towards within each suit. Even without knowing what the others were doing, for example, the Cups suit has many beautiful aquatic themes, often that reference the sea, in new and diverse ways.”

Although the exhibit debuted in the fall at the National Arts Club in New York, this second presentation at the Andy Warhol Museum is a little different, having integrated Warhol’s personal tarot cards, and a film he shot in 1966 called “Velvet Underground Tarot Cards,” which never has before been exhibited publicly. It was just refurbished last year.

Locals likely will take delight in Yayoi Kusama’s “Queen of Cups,” which features a self-portrait of the reclusive artist who created it. Kusama is the creator of “Infinity Dots Mirrored Room” (1996), the now iconic permanent installation at that museum of the red-dotted mannequins and floor that seem to go on endlessly in a mirrored room.

These additions, plus Patrick McMullan’s card “The Hanged Man,” which features an upside down Andy Warhol, make the exhibit all the more relevant for Pittsburghers, not just in terms of contemporary art, but in relationship to Warhol and Pittsburgh as well.

“It was amazing seeing the project situated in a Warholian context at the museum,” Engman says. “Andy exemplified so much the intersections and cross-over of art and life, which this project is so much about, in addition to questions of contemporary archetypes and notions of the iconic in visual and conceptual themes.”

 
— Kurt Shaw, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Kurt Shaw is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review art critic.

 
Photo — Patrick McMullan’s “The Hanged Man” (left) and Karl Lagerfeld’s “King of Wands.” Andy Warhol Museum.

CHARLOTTE OBSERVER  5 JUNE 2011
 
 

We live in arid times.

Snug in our cubicles, we are cut off from nature. Safe in our suburban redoubts, we are separated from animals.

Most striking of all, given thousands of years of human history, we live without myths. The stories and images of gods and goddesses that nourished our ancestors, helping them understand themselves and the world, are gone. We’re left with pale substitutes: celebrities. J Lo is a poor stand-in for Athena.

Niki de Saint Phalle understood all this. And the French-American artist, who died in 2002 at age 71, determined to do something about it. She made paintings, prints and sculptures full of images and forms to reconnect us to what we’ve lost. At the same time, she sought to inject a quality not often found in contemporary art — fun.

See how well she succeeded in “Niki de Saint Phalle: Creation of a New Mythology” at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art uptown. Surely you’ve seen her five large sculptures on The Green across from the museum. Don’t stop there. The 54 works from the Niki Charitable Art Foundation inside the Bechtler brim with emotions, ideas and colors to ravish the optic nerve.

Saint Phalle was self-taught. Working and living with artists in the mid-20th century, she sponged up influences from movements such as Cubism and especially Surrealism with its love of the unconscious and use of a distorted reality to express the inner self, dreams in particular.

Employing the strategies of the naïve artist, her work is about emotional directness, not achieving a polished finish. Rather than seduce, she compels. She was unafraid of trying something new. She was also part of her time, and could not avoid, for instance, telling about the changing role of women.

“The Bride,” a larger-than-life sculpture, is a looming figure, benign and scary, covered with found objects such as toy babies, guns, dolls and airplanes. Both a figure to worship and a cultural critique, it’s the wildest “Bridezilla” you’ll ever see.

Saint Phalle loved symbols such as the rising sun on her “Firebird,” the much-photographed sculpture outside the Bechtler. The sun and firebirds appear in several other works as do hearts, skulls, stars and flowers.

She especially loved snakes. They appear over and over, mostly, I think, as symbols of wisdom. That, after all, is what the serpent in the Garden of Eden offered Eve.

Refashioned mythical figures from Egypt (Horus), early America, Mexico and India (Ganesh) appear. She also invented her own. Feeling a lack of positive African-American heroes, she created sculptures of several. On the Green stands a Miles Davis, the jazz great wearing a coat of many colors and blowing a golden trumpet.

Saint Phalle believed in color to chase the blues away. And in fun. A sculpture outdoors on the museum’s second level depicts a man and wife taking their pet tarantula for a walk. What a hoot!

All these works show a marked use of pattern. Saint Phalle covered her pieces, whether in two or three dimensions, with fragments: bits of gold leaf, mirrors, glitter, colored glass, ceramic tiles and polished stones.

As a technique, it breaks up surfaces and gives them visual energy. But it does something more. All that variety in material, texture and color subsume into a satisfying whole, a representation of the interconnectedness of life.

Walking in The Green past “La Cabeza” (“The Skull”), I heard screeching children inside the huge sculpture. They could have been checking out the echo. Or feeling the shivering fear of being inside such a fantastic object. Most likely their sounds were the sounds of pure delight.

They are at the precubicle stage of life and know how to have fun. They gave, I think, what Saint Phalle’s art demands from all of us: a response from the heart.

 
— Richard Maschal, Charlotte Observer

Richard Maschal is a retired Observer visual art and architecture writer.

 
Photo 1 — On the Green is Niki de Saint Phalle’s sculpture of Miles Davis. Photo by T. Ortega Gaines.

Photo 2 — “I Woke Up Last Night” (1994) is one of 54 works on display by Niki de Saint Phalle that brims with colors, ideas and emotions. Photo by T. Ortega Gaines.

Photo 3 — “Le Banc (The Bench)” (1991) by Niki de Saint Phalle is on view at The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art through October 3. Photo by T. Ortega Gaines.

Photo 4 — Author Richard Maschal. Photo by Wendy Yang.

LA PENSÉE DU DISCOURS  25 MAI 2011
 
 

Dimanche dernier 22 mai l’association Osez le féminisme ! avait appelé à un rassemblement place Igor Stravinski à Paris pour protester contre les remarques sexistes et pour certaines clairement phallocrates d’hommes politiques et médiatiques français à propos de l’affaire DSK. Le thème du rassemblement était bien celui-là, il est utile de le préciser dans un moment où doit s’exercer une réflexivité discursive et une vigilance lexicale soutenues : refuser les propos sexistes et la minimisation voire la négation de l’évocation d’un crime grave à l’égard des femmes (elles sont très largement majoritaires chez les victimes de viol, comme le montre V. Le Goaziou dans son livre tout récent, écrit à partir d’une ample enquête sur des données judiciaires). Le rassemblement a donné lieu à quelques slogans intéressants, soit dans la veine classique, soit dans une veine plus novatrice et humoristique. Petite revue en texte et en image.

Le slogan « officiel » du rassemblement avait été lancé en même temps que l’appel à manifestation : « Sexisme. Ils se lâchent, les femmes trinquent » .

L’increvable « Nous sommes tou.te.s des… » a été décliné en « Nous sommes toutes des femmes de chambre » , « Nous sommes toutes des Guinéennes » et « Nous sommes toutes des Africaines » . Cet efficace slogan fonctionne en tous temps et en tous lieux car il est indexical, c’est-à-dire qu’il est appropriable par tout un chacun à la première personne, du singulier ou du pluriel. Il vient d’une chanson de Dominique Grange, « La pègre », sortie en 1968, à partir de laquelle Daniel Cohn-Bendit a popularisé le célèbre « Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands » . Les paroles originales du refrain sont les suivantes :

Nous sommes tous des Juifs et des Allemands
Nous sommes tous des dissous en puissance
Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands !

Et les couplets continuent la déclinaison :

Nous sommes des gauchistes,
Des aventuristes
Marxistes léninistes guévaristes ou trotskystes,
Nous sommes des anars
Nous en avons marre
De voir vos flicards quadriller nos boulevards (D. Grange, « La pègre », 1968).

Ce slogan mène une riche vie discursive puisque j’ai pu relever : « Nous sommes tous des immigrés », « Nous sommes tous des étrangers », « Nous sommes tous des sans-papiers », « Nous sommes tous des Tibétains », et même « Nous sommes tous des juifs musulmans » (Nadia Benhelal et Philippe Corcuff, en 2004 sur le site Bella Ciao). Mais revenons à nos femmes de chambre guinéennes.

Les autres slogans étaient plus contextuels, liés à l’affaire DSK (mention de la désormais fameuse « soubrette ») :

— Sexisme. Ça part en couilles !

— Les soubrettes sont en colère !

— Le machisme tue les femmes

— Sortons l’homme des cavernes

— Femmes coeur battant de la démocratie

— Droit de troussage ? Droit de cuissage ? Mort d’homme ? On est où, là ? Le féminisme est un humanisme

— F. H. égaux en droit cherchent traitement équitable

— Non aux régressions, non aux violences. Défendons les droits des femmes !

Un panneau assez important proclame :

Le sexisme, premier racisme de l’histoire
Le viol, premier outil politique
Le viol, première arme politique
En tous temps
en touts lieux (sic)

On ne pouvait s’empêcher, en regardant la fontaine de Niki de Saint-Phalle et de Jean Tinguely, devant laquelle une femme-sandwich affichait : « Respect mutuel et dignité. Now. Tout de suite » , de penser à cet ouvrage écrit tardivement, Mon secret, émouvant témoignage, écrit à la main, du viol de l’artiste, à 11 ans, par son père, banquier respecté.

 
— Marie-Anne Paveau, La pensée du discours