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An American in Paris, Looking for Answers

January 20, 2002

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP


PARIS -- Be a patriot: go to Paris. If everything must be
privatized, then it is up to you to establish your own
private NATO. I started putting mine together on a recent
trip to the City of Light. Our philosophical roots are
there, our notions of modernity took shape there, too, and
the political sacrifices made on behalf of these
progressive steps are inscribed everywhere in the
cityscape. Those who dread dark days ahead on the American
cultural front owe themselves a visit home.

This season, several events should serve to reinforce
Franco-American ties, especially those stretching between
Paris and New York. A retrospective of the French architect
Jean Nouvel, now on view at the Pompidou Center, includes
three designs for New York projects. Two of them are still
on the drawing board. Overall, the show establishes Nouvel
as one of the four or five leading mythologists of the
contemporary city.

A new venue for contemporary art has just opened at the
Palais de Tokyo, a 1930's Trocadero-style building
handsomely remodeled by two young architects from Bordeaux.
Open from noon to midnight, and envisioned as a hangout,
this self-styled "site of contemporary creation" promises
to rekindle some of the tensions between Paris and New York
that enlivened 20th- century life.

Not least, there was a magnificent and macabre show at the
Louvre, "La Peinture comme Crime" ("Painting as Crime").
Featuring the lithographs of Odilon Redon, one of the great
figures of fin de siècle decadence, the exhibition cast an
unearthly light on the theme of terror, a topic that is
likely to grip the American imagination for some time.
Though the show has closed, a catalog is available from the
Louvre.

But the streets of Paris are the most illuminating draw at
any time of year, particularly if you prepare yourself
beforehand by sampling Walter Benjamin's "Arcades
Projects," which Harvard University Press will issue in
paperback next month. This stupendous, 1,000-page book is
the urban equivalent of Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams."
In it, Benjamin deciphers the 19th-century industrial city
through what he considers its paradigmatic architectural
form: the glass-vaulted, enclosed shopping passages that
riddle the cityscape between the Opera and the Marais.

Baudelaire is the book's violet eminence. He was, Benjamin
says, the first poet to write about the city as other poets
had rhapsodized about nature. The "Arcades" is a portrait
of the Paris that Baudelaire might have seen had he been
retrofitted with Surrealist spectacles. The network of
interior streets, packed with luxury goods, is transformed
by Benjamin into a labyrinth of subconscious desire.
Surrealism as an analytic method begins with Benjamin's
errand into the maze.

You can test your own subconscious responses by visiting
two adjacent arcades that run parallel to each other off
Rue des Petits Champs near Place des Victoires. The Galerie
Vivienne looks much as it did in Benjamin's time, a musty
relic of its original deluxe self, now housing laundries,
shoe repair shops and other downscale dispensaries. The
Galerie Colbert, newly gentrified, contains an upscale
brasserie along with fancy shops for books, antiques and
fashions. Both passages are authentic and artificial, but
the Colbert has lost its sense of the uncanny, which for
fans of Benjamin (and Atget) may be one of the more
precious commodities Paris has to offer.

If the media reflect us accurately, Americans are more
comfortable with either/or than with both/and. Though the
idea that opposites go together is not specifically French,
Paris probably offers the most solid training in the art of
living with contradiction. The Louvre show, "La Peinture
comme Crime," probably could not be exhibited in the United
States without being heavily sanitized. The Holocaust
images would have to come out. The sex images would have to
come out. The idea that subjective perception is not easily
separated from objective reality would disappear without a
trace. And yet we need this awareness more than ever.

The show, subtitled "Modernity's Forbidden Side," was based
on a premise as old as the Enlightenment itself: modernity,
seen as an empire of reason, is accompanied by its shadow,
a realm of political and aesthetic nightmares, from the
fantastical visions of Henry Fuseli and Goya to the
mass-produced infernos of Hitler and Stalin. Such political
references may arouse the anger of those who justifiably
oppose the exploitation of the Holocaust to score cultural
points. Images of the death camps were not sensationalized,
however. "La Peinture comme Crime" challenged the moral
neutrality of art, or at least the formalist interpretation
of it long taken as integral to modernism itself. Its goal
was not to aestheticize history but to historicize art, and
thereby subject its interpretation to moral scrutiny.

The exhibition also presented work by William Blake, George
Romney, Johan Tobias Sergel and Antonio Canova. The show's
curators, Sandrine Billot and Philippe Maffre, emphasized
sketches and studies over completed works, to make the
point that polished images tend to sanitize their origins
in instinct. Perversely, several paintings by Jackson
Pollock were presented under glass, which made them look
like glossy photographs. History can drain the life away
from even a maestro of spontaneity, the installation
implied.

Redon was presented as the anti-Cézanne. Instead of
rendering the external world by novel formal means, Redon
plunges into the intensified realism of dreams. Since I
dream in color, I tend to disbelieve the claim that most
dreams are black and white. Redon's blacks, however, are
legendary for their dreadfulness, an effect that was
magnified here by the pitch-dark rooms in which the Louvre
show was installed, with the works illuminated by pin
spots. This reversal of the white cube established, by
itself, the nature of the intellectual terrain the show was
pitched on. Situated below ground, it was entered within
eye range of I. M. Pei's great glass pyramid and the
light-filled sunken courtyard beneath it. The pyramid's
transparent abstract geometry relocates the Louvre within
the empire of reason. Thus the presentation of Redon and
others relied on the Enlightenment context as a foil to a
subconscious architecture of aggression and desire. The
historically astute will be reminded by this pairing of the
Terror that was waged in Reason's name at the Republic's
founding.

The recurring figure, among the scores of Redon lithographs
on view, was the human eye. The eye peered out from cracks
in the wall, floated aloft on a hot air balloon, hovered
disembodied over the waters. Symbol of the portal between
inner and outer worlds, the eye is therefore part of the
neural equipment with which meanings are made. Redon's eye
is baleful: not to be trusted. And for that very reason an
organ to be reckoned with, never to be allowed out of
sight. Events take place both in the psyche and in the
realm of the objectively verifiable. Events in the outer
worlds cannot be accurately gauged without paying strict
attention to the apparatus of perception. That apparatus
affects objective events in turn.

In one series, Redon depicted spiders with humanoid faces.
One face was laughing, the eyes of another were shedding
tears. Several skittered on long legs over a checkerboard:
the grid of Descartes, or of Manhattan; the game of chance.
The pictures reminded me of the spider sculptures by Louise
Bourgeois, beautifully installed last year at Rockefeller
Center. Symbolism feeds into Surrealism, which feeds into
mediated and virtual reality. The "surreal scene in Lower
Manhattan" is how newscasters routinely described the
atmosphere at ground zero.

Among the sensory faculties, the visual has assumed a
particular prominence in the modern age. In theory,
authority has passed from the externally constructed
hierarchies of church and state to the interior sovereignty
of individuals. The public realm is therefore generated by
the interaction among sovereign selves. Surveillance,
visual stimulation, Rashomon effects, parallax, multiple
perspectives, transparency, opacity, veils, lenses, framing
devices: the technology of perception becomes fundamental
to a continuing process of negotiating the elastic
boundaries between public and private space.

THE eye is also the lens of a projector. Inner conflicts
are screened on other people. To acknowledge this is not to
deny the menace that two people named Osama and Omar
present to the world. Rather, it is to guard against
internalizing more of the menace than is necessary to bring
terrorists to justice.

Baudelaire, the apostle of artifice, said crime is the only
luxury nature allows herself. I believe he meant crime
against nature: the artificial paradise. French theorists
of the 1970's aimed to solve the crime: to unpack the
artificial, starting with language and proceeding toward
the vocabulary of cities. Troublemakers in paradise,
postmodern theorists made it impossible to lap up
appetizing forms without considering their causes. But
their troublemaking has made the city a richer place.

Later, I walked up the city's great ceremonial axis toward
the Arc de Triomphe, pausing at the raised terrace that
overlooks the Place de la Concorde from the Jeu de Paume. A
pleasant surprise: Louise Bourgeois's bronze sculptures of
human arms were draped over the terrace's balustrade. These
were the same pieces that had caused controversy at Battery
Park City in New York in 1997. Because the site was close
to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, then under construction,
it was feared that someone might mistake the sculptures for
the body parts of Nazi victims.

And what if they did? In the shadow of a Holocaust
memorial, why shouldn't people be upset? In Paris, a city
once brutalized by Nazis, I watched as several pairs of
lovers cupped their hands with Bourgeois's. And felt an
extraordinary sense of freedom at the sight. This
atmosphere can exist in a city that holds itself
accountable for educating its citizens in public life.

I'm idealizing Paris. That's what Paris is for. I wouldn't
enjoy living there. After a few days of acute sensory
stimulation - oysters, perfumes, jewels, Parisiennes,
paintings, streetscapes - the old Existentialist nausea
starts to set in. At the same time, I wouldn't want to live
in a world without the French tradition of self-criticism
that goes hand in hand with the smugness: the willingness
to regard reality as if it were a crime, or at least the
alibi for one. When the nausea arrives, at least the ghosts
of Sartre and de Beauvoir are there to take my temperature.


Kivi Sotamaa, a young architect from Helsinki who was
visiting Paris on New Year's Eve, said, "The airplane is
the greatest communications hardware ever invented." The
plane fosters contact not only with others, but also with
the self. New Yorkers may lack self-reflection, but we have
energy - including the capacity to annex Paris to make up
for what we lack. Or, as Verushka put it in Antonioni's
"Blow-Up," "I am in Paris."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/arts/design/20MUSC.html?ex=1012547436&ei=1&en=de944b45576df271



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