Badaude

Rose Garden

 Matthew Rose, American (artist) in Paris, spells with scissors.

His works are secrets wrapped in riddles that are visually open and often French-fried.

We'll be crossing each other on the Eurostar today as I head from London to fashion-week-Paris and he speeds in the opposite direction to open his exhibition in London tomorrow. Here's your invite...

SCARED BUT FRESH
An Exhibition of Collages and Unusual Objects from Matthew Rose 

Is opening tomorrow 5th October at the Orange Dot Gallery, 54 Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury, London, WC1H

JOIN MATTHEW AND ORANGE DOT FOR THE PRIVATE VIEW, 6pm - 9pm
 

RSVP ESSENTIAL: danielle@theorangedot.co.uk

Along with the works on display and the exclusive prints, signed exhibition posters will be available to purchase on the night.

The poster can be downloaded from here (a 15 mb high res PDF that can be printed the size of a house, should you want to wallpaper your place with Matthew's work - not a bad idea at that).

Here's a preview to the preview...

... and you can see more of Mr Rose's work here.

 

SCARED BUT FRESH WILL ALSO BE PART OF THE BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL which takes place from Saturday 23 October, all day; Sunday 24 October, all day.

The Bomb

What's almost good as being asked to draw on the walls of immortal bookshop, Shakespeare & Company? Maybe being interviewed about it by immortal arts mag, Bomb.

I was flattered to be questioned by the human embodiment of the digital arm of the 28-year-old publication that artist Betsy Sussler founded asking, "Wouldn't it be great if we started a magazine where we talked about the artwork the way we talk about it among ourselves?"

Bomb's Digital Editor, Paul Morris, took some photos and asked me questions such as:

 

Paul Morris: Your illustrations are an interesting fusion of image and text. How does your experience as an artist inform your appreciation for literature in general, and for literary figures in particular?

and

PM: What kind of research did you have to do in selecting your subjects? And when you finally had your list of writers sorted out, what was your approach to locating the right archival image of to use as source material?

and

Paul Morris: BOMB readers are most interested in the creative process: how artists and writers think and talk about their own work is of primary concern to us. What can you tell us about your own process, and your progress, as your style has evolved?

Want to know what I answered?

read on at Bomb...

Straightlines

At the Summer show at the Tate Saint Ives, there are no straight lines. It's a wonder the modernist concrete sandcastle can stand up straight out of the tangle of streets so vertiginous you think your car won't be able to cling on. It does. Like a ladybird on a watermelon. In this country, which way is up?

In the Tate's lobby, we're scattered like so much lopsided human jestsam against its perfect late 20th century curves. Upstairs, in the white galleries' minimalism, just like when the Habitat phenomenon, when you wander around the white space, everyone looks perfect; their quirks showing like the subtle inventions of stylists.

Katy Moran, the Tate's current artist in residence works in tideswept curves, serendipitiously washed in layers of paint over collage. Alfred Wallis's vertical sea and townscapes are more realistic than the non-Cornish eye would allow. Lucie Rie's pots are glazed with a froth of sea-spume textured glaze. Bojan Sarcevic's filmed sculpture turns you upside-down and Carol Bove collects flotsam from the 20th Century washed up in Brooklyn.

Barbara Hepworth is the acknowledged master: her skewed perspectives winking from every angle. No one gets the asymmetry of the peninsula like she can, in every finish from yachtboard to marble furnished from a neighbor's mantelpiece.

As for me, without Paris's Hausmannian straight lines, I'm lost. But I'm enjoying it...

Because I would not stop for death...

My first post as guest editor at www.coudal.com:

Let's start at the end then, like Benjamin Button, we can only get younger every day.

US Artist, Matthew Rose curates A Book About Death. Book your coffin for the NYC opening/happening on 10th September.

Longterm American in Paris, Matthew Rose runs Lalande Digital Art Press as well as producing visceral, witty and graphically delightful collage pieces. He initiated A Book About Death, partly a tribute to gallerist Emily Harvey and to his mother who died this year as well as in homage to Ray Johnson's punk postcard art.

This March he asked artists to contribute a print run of 500 postcards of one design, expressing their views or experiences around death. So far nearly 400 have responded.

The postcards will form an unbound book on view at the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery, NYC, on 10th September. This is literally a once in a 'lifetime' event: all postcards will disappear into the hands of guests on the night of the show. Too busy to die? ('Beacause I would not stop for death' either - Matthew asked me to contribute and I signally failed.) Hi-res dowloadable art and posters here.

 

This post is part of my guest-editorship at www.coudal.com. I'll be posting at the site almost every day.

Bread and Roses in 6e

American in Paris, Matthew Rose, is currently exhibiting at popular sandwich bar, Cosi in rue de Seine. Go see... and do you want mayo with that?

 

For one week only!

How could I have missed this?

I must get over to London before the end of the week...

See Peter Campbell's account for the London Review of Books in September, an edition which had somehow been 'mislaid' since its publication and has only just surfaced (and, yes, if you're reading this, I know who hid it...).

The knack of being invited

"I have a vernissage* at the Palais de Tokyo tonight." Mélusine pauses to examine me for a moment. "I think it will be fun. Why don't you come?"

I don't know Mélusine. I met her for the first time today. She's a curator and owner of an art gallery  I wandered into this morning, near the mysterious hotel. I meet her there again in the evening before taking a taxi to the Palais.

Next door to the gallery is a boules pitche. Old men play while old women with immaculate red lipstick sit and watch. Mélusine goes over to one, to several of them; she embraces them, talks for a while. She turns to me. "They're - I don't know how to say it in English. Voyous. Do you know that word? You know, the guys, the real men of the neighborhood?"

"Do you mean like local guys, like Cockneys? In London they have Cockneys, like Titi Parisien?"

"No, I mean they're voyous. Men, guys. You know, they're always boasting about that they've been in prison. Like, 'I've been in prison for ten years; Yeah and I have for twelve.' ."

"Oh, voyous."

I realise I've heard the word before in a 1950s movie. Now, here they are at the end of their stretch, enjoying their retirement, playing boules peacefully in the sun.

Mélusine insists we take a taxi. In Paris, I don't take taxis. I walk or take the metro. While I watch the buildings peel by unfamiliarly from my low bucket seat, Mélusine takes calls on her mobile. How much French does she think I understand? We've been talking in English. I hear her say,

"Yes, I'm on my way... I know. She's not very attractive. Is it because she dresses so badly?" I wonder whether she's talking about me.

Mélusine wears black. A black jacket, which she does not remove; black t-shirt; black twisted rope necklace. She also wears perfume. Lots of it. Poison by Christian Dior, she says. It's so thick it forms a barrier between us. On anyone else it might have been oppressive, but on Mélusine, it's part of her allure. I've always loathed strong perfume, especially in cars where it makes me carsick.However if, as Diana Vreeland said, 'Pink is the navy blue of India' but it doesn't necessarily work everywhere ( just as certain shades of orange-red, I've noticed, look dull in the grey light of London), maybe overpowering scent also only makes sense in its heady city of origin. 

"You know," says Mélusine, "I have to do an interview at the Palais. I do an emission about the arts. For la télé. Do you know that arts show, with the chairs? But I'm so tired." She leans back into her leatherette seat. "I just got back from the Maldives last night."

We pull up on the wrong side of the multi-laned avenue du Président Wilson and jaywalk to the Palais, dodging the rush hour traffic.

...

The Palais de Tokyo is artfully distressed. It's walls, inside and out, are peeling, greyish concrete. When a building looks as hubristically Fascistic as this (the enormous winged typewriter was built, optimistically, in 1937), the only thing to do with it is to make a romantic, post-industrial ruin of it.

The exhibition inside is inspired by the Superdome stadium in Atlanta which was used as a disaster centre for the poorest and most resourceless victims of Hurricane Katrina in the US. When we arrive, the main exhibit, inspired by the stadium after its occupation, is still being prepared; curators carfully distributing crumpled Macdonalds wrappers, empty plastic water bottles and other human waste to their pre-appointed places on the artist's floor-grid. The preview-goers form temporary alliances and hang about in groups, waiting for the opening, leaving their own debris of tickets, magazines, and waterbottles. Here we are, the survivors, the stragglers, waiting for our handouts of free champagne.

What do art girls look like this year? The art girls in Paris are all wearing sarouel this summer. And weird shoes. Art girls all over the world wear weird shoes...

Mélusine, who is wearing terrifyingly high black patent platforms with dagger heels, meets an artist friend. He shows me pictures of his work on his blackberry: a car and an uprooted tree turning slowly in the white cube of a gallery. "They're beautiful, huh?"

"I have to meet with les télé people." says Mélusine. "I have a ticket for you. Go in. Have a look around. We can get together later."

I wander in past the works on time, by Jonathan Monk which I like more and more, as I take more time to look. They include a two part exhibit - possibly the most conspicuously luxurious in the World - as you have to travel to Tokyo to see the other half in order to appreciate the whole piece.

I walk past the machine that fires beer bottles at 600km per hour, making everyone jump, and laugh, dissolving the gallery atmosphere. I circle the stuffed elephant balanced on its trunk, examining it's beautifully detailed trunk-hairs; and the group of ceramic Darth Vader heads, which hum like Mongolian throat singers.

But the biggest queue is up the central stairwell is a sign to the free champagne bar. I follow the crowd. The bouncer at the foot of the staircase tears my ticket and sternly indicates the sign, 'Toute sortie est definitive' (no re-entry).

I look up at the beautiful people standing around the balcony about my head, and see something else. On the artfully peeling concrete walls, an enormously enlarged, cheerily wholesome woman in late middle age beams from a huge posters showing cartons of her new flavours - mint tea, Irish coffee and lychee. Yes, the exhibition is sponsored by Mamie's Yogurt.

...

After as much free champagne and yoghurt as I can stand, I catch sight of my friend Vic, a fashion writer, on my way out. I didn't spot him in the exhibition, despite his gleaming peroxide hair and the tightly-buttoned waistcoat worn over his freshly-waxed bare chest which curves in two unnaturally tan sculpted mounds like the breast of a roast chicken.

 I ask him.

"Did you eat the yogurt?"

"Yes. The violette is divine. It goes so well with the champagne. Are you here alone?"

"I'm with Mélusine."

"Who's she?"

"I don't know her. I just met her today. She owns an art gallery. She just asked me here."

"And you're going home already?"

"I promised to be at another vernissage in the Marais. A smaller one. Photographs. A friend is organising it."

He looks at me with a newfound respect.

"You," he says, "have the knack of being invited."

...

Click on the illustration to see it bigger. Click again to resize.

*vernissage - (n.) A private showing held before the opening of an art exhibition. [French, from vernis, varnish, from Old French]. There also is a comparable ceremonial ending of art exhibitions, called finissage. Bigger art exhibitions also may have such an event at half time of the exhibition (midissage).

Parisiennes at the Musee Carnavalet

I lost my umbrella at the Kiraz exhibition last week in the Musee Carnavalet. It was that Tuesday when the storm we'd been warned about all weekend finally broke and the rain came down in the rue that Kerouac called 'the street of the Middle Class French People' the size of old franc pieces.

I ran into Carnavalet to get dry. Not that it ever rains in Kiraz's Paris watercolours. Sometimes it's night, sometimes it's Spring or Winter. Sometimes it's not Paris but Deauville or Biarritz, but it's always the same and it's always beautiful.

I walk up and down the ranks of his charmed Parisiennes all with the same, endlessly-repeated cute/shocked sex-doll face (it's no surprise Kiraz was asked to illustrate for Playboy) each topped by a differnt hairstyle (as Flaubert said: 'blondes; hotter than brunettes - see 'brunettes': brunettes: hotter than blondes - see 'blondes'; redheads - see blondes, brunettes').

His every-ready bachelors - goofy-toothed hicks perpetually on the edge of uncomfortable adolescence - are even more indistinguishable from each other - avatars for the artist himself?

The sugar-daddies and outraged older generation are generally out of the frame. There are some scenes from young married life, and a few stern grannies and disapproving matrons, but what happens to his girls during the time in which they grow from adorable Lolitas to comic redoutables?

Maybe they buy some of the products aimed at middle-aged women which his youthful drawings were used to promote: Candarel sugar-substitute and Scandale (an early form of  'magic knickers').

There always has to be a punchline to justify these semi-naked sirens. Kiraz frequently adds his own one-liners to his publicity drawings which, though changed for the final advertisement, work just as well. There's something interchangeable about the humour - just as there is about the girls.

So what - apart from the soft-porn element - makes Kiraz's drawings so attractive? What really sets them apart is his use of colour. The bottomless twilight of his indigo summer nights on the Champs Elysees and la Croisette. The sheer lace with which he drapes his girls, subtly altering the colour of their bodies; the transparent sheen of their reflections as they dive into a swimming pool, their feet skimming the water without ever getting wet (it seems appropriate that he drew advertisements for Perrier). He loves to show women with luminous, grey-shadowed skin, the sun behind them. Like Delacroix, he can paint "the skin of Venus with mud".

His fine art canvasses explore the Leger-like solidity of his heavy-legged, tiny-bosomed muses (not at all the build of most real-life Parisiennes I see) as he tries with Cubist symmetry, to turn his subjects inside out and get access to all sides of the girl at once.

This is some of the most lustful art I've ever seen.

Kiraz is the MacDonald's of sex (albeit with haute-cuisine execution) offering a reassuringly familiar experience again and again and again. Men are always horny, and women a combination of idealist and gold digger worthy of Anita Loos. The most sophisticated sexual situations become light as bubbly Perrier water because the his characters' feelings are never serious. Ideas, politics, business can never change anything as they all lead circularly from their motivating force to their ultimate goal: sex. It's an utterly charming, cynical, self-contained universe. But...

As I leave Kiraz's rainless paradise for the wet street, a final cartoon catches my eye: A BCBG mamie tackles her soixantehuitarde granddaughter on what odd ideas could have prompted her desire to move from her family's Neuilly townhouse to the Left Bank.

Mais, Francoise, je ne comprends pas ce qui t'empeche de vivre 'intensement' avenue Foch.

(But, Francoise, I don't understand what's preventing you from living 'intensely' on the Avenue Foch.)

In Kiraz's world, what indeed?

"Well... I guess that's what you'd call 'the conscious'."

“I am a scientific person. I believe in psychoanalysis, in philosophy. For me the only thing that matters is the tangible.” Louise Bourgeois

I'm reading the guide notes on the walls of the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. They're annoying me. I'm seeing the exhibition with a friend. It's always good to have someone to complain to.

"Look, here it says about how miserable she is again: 'depression, anxiety, the fear of abandonment, of loss of love.' It says it's all going on in the 'depths of her unconscious'."

Although Bourgeois' material comes from the unconscious, and often from misery, she transforms it with tough, highly-articulate and playful, conscious thought.

Ok - let's look at the most immediately obvious things about an artist who is shown in the bank of photos outside her exhibition, unfailingly smiling. She smiles wisely, secretly, ironically, openly; she smiles from inside her sculptures; she smiles at Andy Warhol; she smiles wickedly and most famously holding under her arm a latex phallic sculpture entitled, 'little girl'.

Let's look at her early, isolated, stick-like, sculptured human figures whose fragile attempts to connect with each other are described by the artist with a nod and a wink - look at those two stick-people standing together, the 'female' inclining her head toward the 'male', 'listening' (as in the title of the piece) clearly not only with affection, but a definite touch of 'yes, very nice, dear,' in her attitude.

It's so hard to ignore the hard hysterical, joke-y surrealism which inhabits her sketches and prints of 'house-wives' - women imprisoned by their domestic role. So - let's not ignore it.

Her 1960s 'body parts' sculptures of penis-breasts, which she teasingly denies are sexual, are not only 'repellant, and unsettling' but also meltingly and sensually textured: here is someone who enjoys sex and likes to play around with gender.

It's good to see a room of pieces inspired by the artist's mother whom Bourgeois had a deep need to rehabilitate from her role as silent witeness to a powerful and adulterous husband. Bourgeois transforms her into an enourmous spider - a huge, twisted being; the domestic become monstrous through a change of size -  but also a friendly maternal force with her well-protected bundle of eggs. In the end, this spider scares me less than the ones I find in the bath. I'd like to have this spider on my side.

And let's not shy away from the fact that Bourgeois' work is and has always consciously followed fashion. As maxi-skirts followed minis, so Bourgeois' early Giacommeti-like figures were superseded by her installation works in the 1980s then by her currently fashionable use of embroidery and textiles. If she's 'impossible to categorise' it's not due to iconoclasm but to her knowing and eclectic use of any art movement she finds lying around.

The slightly po-faced exhibition guide has concentrated on Bourgeois' pain rather than the angry, intelligent, tough jouissance with which she transformed - into a clearly-articulated visual language - her hard, priviliged, trivial, serious life.

We get to the last of the noticeboards. My friend agrees:

"They keep on going on about the subconscious meaning. I don't think it's subconscious. It's - what do they call that thing that's above the subconscious."

"Well... I guess that's what you'd call 'the conscious'."

...

The exhibition continues at the Centre Pompidou, Paris until June 2 2008, 11h00 - 21h00

Prenez Soin de Vous - Sophie Calle at the BNF

Do not bring your boyfriend to this exhibition. This is not an exhibition for couples. And, if you are male, don't bring your girlfriend. In fact, maybe don't come at all.

There are a few couples here to see Sophie Calle's multimedia project set in the beautiful 19th Salle Labrouste domed reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, but I don't fancy their chances. Most of the spectators are women in groups, or women alone. A few lone men wander through, glancing tentatively at the desktop screens scattered throughout the room. Most of them are looking increasingly queasy.

You see, once upon a time, Artist Sophie Calle's ex-lover sent her an email of breathtaking audacity in which he explained that he had begun to see other women and, out of respect for her desire for a limited form of monogamy (the man rumored to be Monsieur X is married), had decided to chuck her and hold onto them. But hey, he ends, "Prenez soin de vous - Take care of yourself.".

What's a girl to do? Well, Ms Calle decided that, as she was too devastated to reply to this message personally, she could best take care of herself by sending copies of it to 107 other Frenchwomen, from a police psychiatrist to a schoolgirl, asking for their advice and opinions on the break-up message, then exhibit the results for everyone in Paris (and the World, via her participation in this year's Venice Biennale) to see, hear and read.

Sophie Calle's previous work has similarly relied on letting other people tell her what to do. She let a stranger dictate her daily movements (Suite Venetienne, 1980) and imitated a fictional version of herself created by American writer Paul Auster (Double Game 1998). Yet, through this self-abandonment, she obtains an odd kind of power.

This time, she has asked a screenwriter, a poet, two sibling romance-novelists, a translator, a cartoonist, a florist, a judge, magazine and book editors, a journalist, a mathematician, and a schoolteacher, amongst others, to explain her life to her. They've responded, not only as women, but according to their metier, and their opinions on the ex range from possible violent psychosis (from the police psychiatrist) to the only woman (I’m afraid I forget her metier but I think it may have been something to do with astrology) who takes the email at face value, believing that the writer has a great and genuine love and respect for the artist.

If you've ever been dumped, the result is exhilarating fun. In a reading-room full of old books, mostly written by men, Calle has made new books from the replies she received, all written by women. There is also a 'livre d'or' of responses to the exhibition to which men can contribute: I notice the entry, "I'M JUST A NORMAL, BORING MAN!" written in the largest and most self-aggrandising script in the album.

But the exhibition is not just about revenge. It's a patchwork, a firework, a peacock's tail, a hall of mirrors of the diverse lives modern Frenchwomen are able to lead. Reading the responses, you can no longer tell where the woman ends and her metier begins.

She has also asked actresses, singers, dancers and a sign-language interpreter to perform their versions of the email, which are played on a loop on screens suspended form the ceiling. Some of them have chosen to enact the voice of the man, some that of the woman reading the letter. You hear the noise of women everywhere. The sounds from the screens mix with reactions of the female spectators to create a constant buzz. It reminds me of the British novelist and critic, Marina Warner who, speaking at her old college in my hometown, Oxford, UK, told an audience of present-day, mixed-sex undergraduates how shocking and disturbing, then how empowering, she had found the unfiltered noise of 300 raucous female students when she joined the then all-girl institution as an undergraduate. In the Salle Lebrouste, the voice of one man has become the voice of many women: a parliament of poulets. It's jubilant.

I'm at the far end of the hall, watching a video screen of a classical ballerina dance her version of the message, when the man in front of me, hypnotised by the image, backs me against a library desk. In order to see better, he steps backwards, squarely and heavily onto one of my feet. He stays there. I am wearing sandals. He is not slightly built. It hurts. He appears not to notice what he has done. I am about to protest when he cranes his neck further back and steps, heavily and squarely, onto my other foot. Now he has me trapped, unable to move, between himself and the desk. Only when he leans into me does he realise there is another body behind him. He turns abruptly, horrified and, before scuttling toward the exit whispers, shamefacedly,  'Pardon, Madame!"

This piece was written for IVY Paris.

Sophie Calle, Prenez Soin de Vous, continues at the Richlieu site of the BNF until 8th June. Tuesday - Saturday 10am-8pm (late night opening till 10pm on Thursdays). Sundays from midday - 8pm. Closed Mondays. Adults 7 euros, concessions 5 euros More info: www.bnf.fr