Shepard Fairey's Occupy Wall Street design supports the 99 Percent, although we're pretty sure he's a 1 percenter.

Meanwhile Europe is flailing and talk of a euro collapse is now a bit of a broken record.  The financial markets are whipsawed daily while the art market, on the eve of Art Basel Miami , steps around the see-saw and the swings and heads for the candy store where everything is shiny and new and all dressed up for the big lick.

But there’s a disconnect going on – and there has been for quite a while.  Anyone who seriously makes art has always felt the tug of war between what goes on in the studio and what goes on in the galleries. Work with paint, canvas, paper, wood, or video, and what you take in annually from these aesthetic investigations compared to what the blue chip artists pull in is undoubtedly a pittance.  Yet the art world ticks on. Yes, we understand it’s all supply and demand, but there’s also hype and myth and probably price rigging.  Recently a New York art dealer came to Paris and told me that he’s really only interested in working with artists whose works sell for at least $5000.

Clearly no parent in his or her right mind would encourage his or her art school child to attempt to earn a living as an actual artist. Better to become a baseball player; at least the odds seem better. (For the record there are fewer than 750 professional Major League baseball players and practically every boy and many girls entertain the fantasy of playing shortstop for the Yankees, or even the Phillies).  Most artists are in the 99.9 percent category.

So along comes the OWS, the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon,  the swelling ranks of the 99%, the disgruntled, often out-of-work folks gathering in New York’s Zuccotti Park and other public areas around the country and the world.  What are they doing?  Mostly grumbling about how the rich people are rich – and have great tax advantages! – and gosh darn it, they’re not and they don’t.  If they were rich, would they have spent nearly two months in the Park?

Clearly the wealthiest slaves of capitalism – the investment bankers, hedge fund traders, the quants – have done pretty well since the financial tsunami hit the shores of New York and London and the rest of the capitalized world – wiping out trillions in wealth, killing home values, and putting friends and family out of work.

The OWS crowd though recently turned its ire to another ivory tower of privilege and wealth – The Art World – surrounding the entrance of MoMA a month ago and whining about ticket prices ($25) and the elitism of high-priced objects in the Museum’s collection.  So, a quick vote, please check: Stupid [  ] Dumb [  ]. They could get an annual membership for $75 and come and go as they like. And support the museum in more fruitful ways than stopping traffic on W 53rd Street.

The OWS Art World splinter group is pissed off because…well, why?  They don’t like supporting an institution that is world class and not on the government teat? Or because these protesters (artists) are not in MoMA themselves?

An acute artist-observer of the 99 per-centers takes umbrage with me over my vitriol: “I think it’s appropriate to criticize art institutions because they mainly support the 1% of artists and art collector class,” he writes.  “And the commodification of that top 1% of art products to a hyped-up and overvalued object status is akin to what we have in the rest of society, particularly in the investment community.  I believe the only way to prevent the masses from revolting and killing the rich is to have a buffer class, a middle class. So, you spread the wealth around; in my opinion, this is the role of government.  Where is the 1% going to get their income from in the future if they’ve already taken it all  from the 99%?”

Well, okay, then. Why not Occupy Julian Schnabel? Or better, Occupy Jeff Koons!  Or heck, why not occupy The FIAC, the art fair in Paris?  It would have been easier to occupy this year as the fair was reunited under a single, glorious roof: The oxidized copper struts and gleaming glass of The Grand Palais. However, 33 euros a pop (FIAC’s ticket price) to have the opportunity to pay $3 million+ for a collection of Damien Hirst’s fish might irritate the Occupy folks.  In any case, you can download free Occupy posters made, one would believe, by the Occupy Artists, like the always controversial Shepard Fairey.

I have to admit I didn’t go to the FIAC this year, but I did stroll through the Tuilleries where several large-scale sculptures were on display during one of the most beautiful autumn days in Paris in my memory.  Here’s a report about the FIAC in The New York Times :  Sales were exceptionally strong despite the global economy swirling around in the “toilette.” Key quote: “Maybe we’re in a bubble.” – Nathalie Vallois, Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Gallery, Paris.

So last week, as I am ambling along rue Saint-André-des-Arts, between St Michel and Odéon in Paris, I pull into a retail store called Carré d’artistes, one door down from a Starbucks.  Their slogan (above the door) is for the 99 percenters: “L’art pour tous en grand format.”  (Art for everyone in large sizes). There were four artists on view – one who sticks things on canvases, another who schmeers paint, another who does a Latin number in a surreal portrait style and the last who knocks out cityscapes that capture, in thick globs of paint, the movement of yellow taxis and wet pavement.  It was all horrible, but hey it came in five sizes, and three prices, right up to 3000 euros.  I asked one of the half dozen sales girls if on this day, a Sunday, anything sold.  “Oh yes, we sold five works today.”  I couldn’t imagine anyone buying anything there, but that’s a pretty good day, I imagine, in any art gallery.

FYI, here’s the “concept” announced on their site:  Our ambitions  Liberate Art ! Carré d’artistes® is the crazy gamble of art lovers whose ambition is to revolutionize a market previously inaccessible and compartmentalized, and to become a major actor in that market. 
The self-service exhibition spaces of Carré d’artistes® do away with any distance, or any intermediary, between the spectator and the artwork. By presenting all the artists on an equal footing, Carré d’artistes® shakes up the traditional rules. It is an alternative that democratizes contemporary art, and a generous undertaking that is respectful of the artists.

Grapes of Wrath? Andy's "Grapes" pulled in $104,500 at Phillips de Pury's New York October editions sale.

Maybe we’re not in a bubble. Recently I had a phone conversation with the folks at London-based The Fine Art Fund, an investment group that uses art as an asset class for profit.  Its CEO, Phillip Hoffman, who famously doesn’t collect art himself says : “The world’s rich are putting their money into art.”  He said it here.

Launched in 2004, The Fine Art Fund is one of several new investment instruments that seeks to take a hard asset like art (it could be real estate or gold or teak wood futures for all that matters) and hold it for a time period until there’s interest enough to sell it for a profit.  The track record is actually pretty good according to Ruth Knowles, the Director of Global Marketing & Business Development at The Fine Art Fund.  While the private equity group remains tight lipped regarding most everything  – until, of course, you invest the minimum $250,000 –  the group reported more than 25 percent returns on one of their investment venues and better than that on others. And at the end of the 10-year run investors earned before management fees about six percent or better on their investment, and notably for The Western Art Fund the annualized return of 33% on works sold.

While The Fine Art Fund incubates the value of works, investors can “borrow” the paintings to hang on their walls. You just have to pay for the privilege. For the Fine Art Fund II, the minimum investment is $250,000; for the Chinese Fine Art Fund, the minimum investment is $100,000. As a shareholder, can publicize your savvy with an original Matisse in your study.

“We don’t speak about the names of the artists we have in our portfolio,” explains Morgan Long, Director of Art Investment at The Fine Art Fund.  She explained however that the composition of the portfolio is “35% Old Masters, 15% Impressionist, 15% Modernist and the balance in Contemporary. Old Masters are very much in demand and they are not correlated to the rise and fall of the stock market… Contemporary art, though, is highly risky asset.”

So who’s hot?  Who should the Occupy Art World folks be fuming at?  Morgan Long wouldn’t exactly say which artists the fund is buying but in mentioning Damien Hirst, and his 1990s stuffed and sliced horses, sharks and sheep, you’ve got a long term holding. She indicated that these works are “unique, iconic works,” adding: “I don’t think anyone disagrees that he’s the most important artist of his generation.  Tate Museum will do a major retrospective during the London Olympics and that will bump up his…I would put my money into these unique 1990 works…they are consistently high.”

What to do?  Don’t look at your 401k account and let go the creeping feeling we’re all going down the proverbial krapper.  As much as artists want to maintain some aesthetic integrity – and their dealers some kind of cash flow – it’s pretty clear that only the bluest of the blue chippers can maintain and increase their values as well as the distance (in dollars) between themselves and the rest of the pack.  So while few artists like talking about money, dinero, dinars and dollars are what make the world go round.  However seeing your own art star rise and zeroes added to your prices is another kettle of fish; complaining about your occupying art world career won’t get the pot to boil. Better to haul down those Old Master paintings your grandmother bought 70 years ago and call up Christie’s to come take a look. Then take your profits and get yourself a MoMA membership.  For most artists (and dealers), now is a great time to be poor.  Isn’t it?  Real artistic creation has nothing to do with creature comforts.  Think Van Gogh, think early Pollock, think early de Kooning, think early Me.

Dan Walker's installation of his Moleskine collage books filled an entire wall in his Unstuck exhibition in Paris.

1. I remember meeting you about a year ago and you showing me a collection of your Moleskin book collage journals.  At the time your production was intense but limited to smaller works in these books.  Your exhibition Unstuck is astonishing for both the range, size and quantity of works.  What happened?

DAN WALKER: The Moleskine journals (exhibited as an installation in Unstuck) are an ongoing project. I fill about a book a week with a mixture of diary entries, collected scraps, drawings and ideas. They are memory maps but also a simple and effective way to record and grasp what goes on around me each day. They’ve become my hard drive and I’ve relinquished a large part of my memory to them. I wanted to liberate myself a bit and started making bigger and freer works. Ideas would often incubate in the books and I allowed myself to develop them on a larger scale and this became “Unstuck”.

2. There is a very clear poetic sense in your works; they read like poetic musings literally torn out of books.  What is the genesis of your texts such as SHOUT QUIETLY PLEASE or KEEP IT FOR LATER?

Most of the words and phrases came from everyday conversations going on around me. Living in France and being surrounded by the French language is wonderful but I miss the idiosyncrasies and idioms of English and when I hear or see words that have nice shapes or meanings I pluck them away and stick them down.

Walker's compositions riff off of the Affichistes from the early 1960s, but add a twist with his own idiosyncratic texts and close cropping of his found papers..

3. Like many collage artists you employ scraps of paper and antique or vintage books as your supports. Your use of rubber stamps to write your texts also follows from a long line of art creation in the collage and dada traditions.  How did you come to this aesthetic?

I’ve always collected junk of all kinds so when it came to making bigger works it seemed natural to use stuff that was already in the cupboard. I think we’ve lost the reflex to re-use and re-condition things for new purposes and that’s a shame. It’s often far more aesthetically pleasing than the new stuff. I’ve collected rubber stamps since I was a child and love their imprecise form and the fact that each impression is as unique as a fingerprint.

EMPTY brings together found wall paper, paint, rubber stamps in a simple, elegant pun about the past.

4. Your history is as a film maker and producer. Your company Force Majeure has produced several films. Have you put that career on hold or are you still engaged in the industry.

I still write and produce films but the nature of the industry is sporadic and frustratingly slow. I’m hoping to produce a film next year about a stay at home mum who becomes an undercover operative with Emma Thompson in the lead.

5. What is the role of film in the production of these works?  Is there a narrative you are exploiting?  Or is Unstuck a play on the word collage, which is French and indicates gluing.

I think the works are more graphic than filmic. Unstuck is a reference to glue and “collage” but it’s also about giving myself the freedom to make pictures. We tend to be very compartmentalized in what we do and who we allow ourselves to be and I wanted to “unstick” myself and start doing more of what I really love.

6. Your compositions also touch upon the Nouveaux Realistes, particularly the affichistes like Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella who recuperated the torn posters from Paris and Italian walls and made keen sense of the sorts of juxtapositions exposed when one image – or rather a part of an image – was removed, revealing the underlying image.  The results there were often surreal and implied a new urban folk art, presaging in many ways graffiti. What do you consciously borrow from this action of artists to take the real and recompose it into a pictorial fiction?

Dan Walker with his Keep It For Later collages at his Unstuck exhibition.

It makes a lot of sense to me to take the mundane and everyday and recondition it into something different and hopefully meaningful and engaging.  We’re given hundreds of pieces of paper each day that we hardly glance at and generally throw away: envelopes, tickets, bags, invitations etc. Every shop and café receipt now has an address and the exact time it was printed and that fixes you in time and space. We do hundreds of things each day and without keeping a trace of them I’d forget most if not all of it.

7. In your exhibition you exhibit a mini architectural model of the installation – it’s lovely in its brut form.  Was this part of the original concept for this show? And by the way, the idea of serving Mojitos for the entire duration of the show is a great concept, too.

The installation included a model of the exhibition.

Originally, I only had the gallery space for three days including setting it all up. So I needed to pre-prepare roughly where each piece was going to go and be ready to get it on the walls in a morning.  I made the maquette from an old cinema décor I’d saved from a film set. Happily, the show has now been extended until November 19.  Although I’m not sure if I have enough rum to pour until the 19th.

8. Tell us a bit about your history as an artist – education, background, where you grew up and if you walked around as a child with a book of Kurt Schwitters under your arm….

I’ve had no formal art education but when I was a child my mum forced me to keep diaries when we went on holidays. So I guess it’s all her fault! I dreamt of becoming an architect but at that time you needed to be good at maths and physics and I was hopeless. So I trained and worked as a lawyer. It took me about 15 years to realize I was miserable and that’s when I started writing and producing. But it was also a large step towards a more creative existence and the collages and artworks grew from that.

9. You produced a series of collage works that are both painted and rubber stamped in the form of a bottle. These are very simple and elegant works. In the one large grouping of the grid of eight bottles is significant because the one in the middle is missing.  The work that stands next to it on its own features the printed word EMPTY.  Tell me about the origin of this work.  It feels quite different from the others.

I’m renovating an old house in Burgundy and found rooms with remnants of 19th Century handmade wallpaper. It’s extremely fragile and disintegrates upon being touched but is the most amazing color blue.  I’d made a piece of work based on the idea of the glass/bottle being half empty/full which I ultimately threw away but I retrieved the preparatory pictures of bottles and dressed them in pieces wallpaper that I could keep intact. The “empty” picture made at the same time escaped the formal grid but wanted to stick around.

10. The entrance to the exhibition features several vitrines filled not only with your Moleskine collage books but a number of assemblages of wood and metal works as well as time pieces, clocks and other detritus…

A nod to Duchamp. Unstuck: Installation view from the street.

There are two travel books from Japan and New York that document trips I took. They felt too lonely on their own so I thought I’d make a “cabinet de curiosités” from bits and pieces of junk I had lying around.

10 1/2. Finally, now that you’re “unstuck,” what’s next for Dan Walker, artist?

Well all this activity has generated a whole new set of material, I need to clear out my cupboard again and probably load up on the Moleskine books and a few gallons of glue. Say, care for another Mojito?

DAN WALKER: UNSTUCK Galerie d’Architecture, 11 Rue des Blancs Manteaux 75004 Paris, France – through November 19, 2011.

Ignatz loved Krazy Kat and Krazy loved getting the love kabosh with bricks. Would the French love bricks as much? Courtesy Estate of George Herriman.

The brainchild for this benefit sale came from Charles Gassot, director of the non-profit Ecoles du Monde (Schools of the World). A contemporary art collector himself, Mr. Gassot says he had the idea about two years ago and approached American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner about his idea to hand out 100 bricks to artists to aid Madagascar in building schools. “And you guessed it, all our schools are built with bricks – made on site in Madagascar,” adds Gassot. Weiner, whose texts are often pasted onto walls (and sometimes brick walls) immediately said yes. American artist Mark Dion, famous for excavating bricks, also signed on, and the auction came together quickly with many French street artists (no wonder) in particular finding the format extremely appealing. The Parisian public did too: At 8 pm on Monday March 28 maybe 500 people jammed into the bidding room, filling all the bridge chairs, the aisles and most of the available floor space.

Peter Klasen's brick construction is projected on the wall as it goes on the auction block at Artcurial in Paris. More than 100 bricks were sold to benefit the construction of new schools in Madagascar.

Each brick was featured on a number of video screens (as well as on the Internet), starting off its public life as an object worth 500 euros. Head auctioneer, François Tajan offered without a trace of irony free-flowing adjectives that began with “Voilà! Quelle jolie brique…” [“Here it is… Look at this beautiful brick.”] Needless to say with an A-list of international and up-and-coming French artists the locals nodded “Yes!” and bid up the entire sale to some 562,400 euros ($800,000), all of which went to Ecoles du Monde to build schools in the island nation of Madagascar.

Artcurial would take no premium from the sale, and the artists of course, donated their brickworks. Madagascar which floats just off the southeast coast of Africa is where nearly all the world’s vanilla beans are farmed; however, some 90 percent of its population of about 20 million lives on $2 a day. One can easily imagine how far a school will go to serve that country’s children. So the challenge was to create a buzz in Paris about 100 Bricks. Posters were distributed and the network of collectors contacted, recontacted and then contacted again with a sleek catalog on paper, and another – an overweight PDF sent out by e mail. Charles Gassot says that the reason why the auction attracted so many is because “the brick is universal.” It’s hard to argue with success. He’s currently planning another auction for Madagascar in Paris in two year’s time and is considering other cities to hold auction benefits. “Why not in New York?” adds Gassot.

The posters for the auction appeared all over Paris.

If New York doesn’t have an excess of bricks (it does, don’t worry), it certainly is piled high with art collectors. I attended one of the first giant art auctions at Sotheby’s in New York City in 1987 – ART AGAINST AIDS – headlined by a glittering Elizabeth Taylor and more than 100 artists; Carl Andre designed the catalog. It was a stunning New York art world event. Millions were raised for AMFAR, the research arm dedicated towards finding a cure for AIDS, and then everyone went off to dinner at one of some 30-odd restaurants scattered around Manhattan.

The cocktail of high-value art + collectors to benefit sick and dying people proved to be a winner. The collectors get the art and a fat tax deduction while the sick and dying get medical attention (or in the case of AMFAR, medical research). And the artists, of course, get to align their stars with a good cause and their names and art works in a collector’s home. Everybody wins. The art benefit auction has since become a staple of the art world. Not an autumn passes without a show of “postcards from the edge” or small canvases, boxes, shoes, t-shirts, prints or any other product manufactured by artists to support any of hundreds of worthy causes from playgrounds to seniors to hospitals to vets. The art benefit auction is a high-end bake sale that keeps on giving.

Carl Andre designed the catalog for the start-studded 1980s ART AGAINST AIDS auction at Sothebys for AMFAR.

The brick theme, however, is indicative of a new kind of group show, one that probably stems from the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse where four artists work blind to produce a drawing that is weirdly mismatched but interesting. If the bricks were to be used to build a house, perhaps such a corpse would be equally surreal, but think more in terms of post card group shows on the theme of Ecology, Peace, Women’s Rights, or even Death. Some years ago I was FED EX’d a canvas here in Paris for a group benefit in Connecticut. There were 500 identically-sized canvases, each offered in a silent auction. I have no idea what happened to the piece of Stalin with Flowers I produced or how much money it raised. Never received a thank you either. Same thing for a piece I donated to an auction in Chicago. Not a word after they received my work. But call me Krazy…

At first I thought the Paris auction 100 Briques was an artist call for brick works! So I immediately plotted a dozen strategies. Pulverize the brick into dust, wrap the brick up in a glass house, make 100 small bricks out of the one big brick, tuck a brick in a baby stroller, mail a brick to French First Lady Carla Bruni (and offer up the return-to-sender piece), or just collage a photo of a brick onto a brick to illustrate Frenchman Derrida’s simulacrum. Crestfallen I was when I learned that the auction was by invitation only, and all the artists were chosen. Rats. the good news is that 100 Bricks For Madagascar was extremely public, and viewable live on the Internet. My guess is that fewer artists will toss their works into some benefit auction affair without documentation either online or in a printed catalog. That said, 100 Bricks proved to be compelling on many fronts.

Lawrence Weiner offered a homily and a certificate with his GIVE & GET brickwork.

Two American collector friends, Alex Ernst and Garret Siegel, had a catalog and invited me to go with them. They were interested in several bricks. Once squashed into the bidding room, Garret and I went through the catalog. Most featured photos glued on the bricks; another had a hole in it and an egg perched inside, others were chipped, scored into a grid, painted gold or white, drawn on, featured trace marks of the artist or served as pedestals to some other art work the artist was well known for. Several artists offered drawings, water colors or photographs of bricks. One drawing showed angry folks throwing bricks – a nod to Ignatz, perhaps?

In fact there were more than 100 bricks in the auction and one artist emerged from the crowd to offer a brick he’d done that day into the auction. He was duly filmed as auctioneer François Tajan generously accepted the brick (it was later sold for 400 euros).  At roughly 8 PM, the parade of bricks and the machine gun fire of bids began – from the floor just beneath a bank of Artcurial worker bees taking bids via telephone and Internet across the planet.

I was stunned to see a drawing of a cartoon character by Enki Bilal scream towards 19,000 euros. I’d never even heard of the Serbian-born, French comic book artist. Lawrence Weiner’s brick featured a text: “GIVE & GET” and documentation, and soared to 20,000 euros; Giuseppe Penone’s brick was treated with (I believe) the artist’s finger prints on its edges; French sculptor Bernar Venet laid three curved ceramic stalks across his brick creating a frenzy that topped 27,000 euros.

J.R., the French street artist who is now famous for his TED Conference lecture about how he has plastered enormous black and white portraits of locals on the steps and walls and rooftops of their cities pulled in 12,500 euros for his photograph of an eye covering his brick. Peter Klasen turned his brick into a construction site with tools and signs: 14,500 euros. But French artists by and large prevailed. Space Invader (who was featured in the film about street artists, Exit Through The Gift Shop), produced a signature work on a brick and earned 15,000 euros for Ecoles du Monde. Architect Jean Nouvel had a golden touch for his “construction” and netted 6,500 euros.

Garret bid on a drawing by a young Paris-based Moroccan artist, Achraf Touloub – and won! Wow that was exciting. “My wife and I had just recently seen his work and were really intrigued. This was a terrific opportunity to purchase a nice drawing and benefit a great cause,” he says. The drawing featured a group of people throwing bricks.

Pierre Soulage's brick hit the sweet spot in the evening's sale: 60,000 euros.

The big winner for the evening was French painter Pierre Soulages (1919 – ). The elder minimalist whose black paintings have succeeded as the European answer to the American 1950s Abstract Expressionists came out far ahead of the pack with a black brick for 60,000 euros. It will make a fantastic gift for the people of Madagascar. I have never much appreciated Soulages’ black paintings, but I was reminded that this was all to build schools, after all. I did have a handful of discussions about how perhaps some dealers might be involved in the auction in order to support their artists’ prices – and with that I was a bit surprised Richard Deacon’s gridded brick, a work not that distant from his sculptures that map out a rooms architecture, only pulled in 4,700 euros. I wondered if the French just didn’t know who he was. But it didn’t really matter. There was plenty of poetry in and on and tossed at these brick works and what better way to spend a Monday evening in Paris – watching (or catching) French people throwing money at bricks.

Is it cause and effect? Has the Los Angeles-based Vincent been working on these “riot pieces” in anticipation of a break out of street violence in the Middle East (or anywhere else?).  Or has his paintings of boys with bats or boys lined up in graphic propaganda style launched a revolution across the Arab world?  Try: Neither.

Source or result of Christian Vincent's Tunnel Vision paintings? Neither. Photo: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters.

Boys With Bats, 2010, by Christian Vincent. Anticipating mob violence the world over. Courtesy: Mike Weiss Gallery, NYC.

To be fair, gallery director, Anna Ortt, did write back responding to a request for elucidation.

“Let me clarify, the paintings are not about violence in the middle east,” she wrote.  “The artist made these over the last year.  It’s just that the images echo what is happening there right now – it could be anywhere. By calling attention to the parallel, I am just trying to open a door, and start a dialogue.  It’s my job to get people to look, and talk.  I think it’s interesting, regardless of whether or not you like the paintings.”

Ortt noted that many visitors to the gallery said Vincent’s “bat” paintings reminded them of “the Bensonhurst beatings.” And she qualified the entire media “alert” with the note: “The show is already almost entirely sold out so sales have nothing to do with the media alert.  (I can’t imagine violence would ever help sell a painting.)”

Well maybe not, but the Mike Weiss Gallery is actually asking people to come in and examine the painter’s work to better understand the news, then. Or at least the surface of the news. Or the striking parallels. The bald pitch for publicity is a bit frightening.  Why not just go to YouTube and check out the police beating of Rodney King (“Can’t we just all get along?”) Do we see an Egyptian flag of solidarity on the gallery web page?  How about one flying in front of the gallery? It’s a curious strategy while the various Egyptian museums are looted and busted up.

Well, we gave the Mike Weiss Gallery 15 minutes.  Mission accomplished. Now what?

Hitler in Paris, June 1940.

Alan Riding's book is a rich history of a morally impossible time for artists.

Paris during the Nazi Occupation is the vast subject Alan Riding takes on with a minesweeper’s verve.  The former European cultural editor for The New York Times recounts in vivid detail the rich history of this errant half decade in And The Show Went On, (Knopf, 2010) laying out how the Nazis rolled over France and how France’s cultural institutions literally played on, staging shows and singing songs and painting pictures.  The author argues in this 400-page history that the pre-war French art industry managed the morally impossible middle ground surprisingly well, and that the artists of the Occupation and their murky history of existence and collaboration during wartime is as we might expect: Conflicted. Following is an interview with Alan Riding that took place in Paris via e-mail over the last week of 2010.

On June 14, 1940, the Nazis effectively rolled over Paris and thus began, you write, the city’s “worst political moment of the 20th century.”  Was it also, in your estimation, the beginning of the end of French dominance of the global aesthetics industry? Wasn’t it almost just after the war that Pollack, de Kooning, Gorky and other Ab Ex painters were “exported” to a global audience? All the Surrealists had left Paris for New York and of course without full access to the press, disseminating French (or European art) was nearly impossible.

I am struck by your phrase “global aesthetics industry” because, when it comes to looking beautiful, the French still have a pretty firm grip on the luxury goods, fashion and frills business. But in the visual arts above all, the occupation permanently undermined Paris’s position as the cradle of artistic creativity and, as you point out, by the mid-1940s the vanguard had moved to New York. Most of the great post-war names on French art scene were already great pre-war names, giants like Matisse and Picasso but also many others like Dufy and Derain and even Chagall, who returned to Paris after fleeing the occupation in 1941. But few French artists who emerged after the liberation came to rank as household names. Even the Surrealists, who in the main followed André Breton to New York in 1941, never recovered the power they had enjoyed in France or beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. So why did New York take over from Paris? Well, it had money and collectors and crucially it also had art dealers. And post-war Paris had none of the three.

When you write about an artist’s moral responsibility, you touch upon both talent and status. During the occupation, one assumes the greater artist (more talent, more wealth, higher stature) would seem to have more responsibility. But is this true? Not many artists swim in the deep moral waters of any age, so why should these French and émigré artists have acted any differently, that is other than your basic, terrified neighbor during wartime?

Well, the premise of my book is that artists, writers and intellectuals – what one might call “cultural celebrities” – do have special responsibilities in times of trouble just as they enjoy special privileges during the good times. Why should that be asked of them since they are likely to be as brave or cowardly as anyone else? The reason is that in many countries, certainly France and many other Latin countries, people expect artists and writers to be more thoughtful, perhaps more intelligent, probably more independent than the rest of us. If someone is famous for possessing some creative or artistic talent, he or she is somehow regarded as spiritually superior.

Even in the US, where the notion of the “intellectual” is viewed with suspicion, public opinion is open to be swayed today by famous actors or pop singers who take public positions on, say, famine in Africa or violence in Darfur or even global warming. Of course, during the occupation of France, it was a bit one-sided: the artists and writers who were most visible were those who showed sympathy for or willingness to collaborate with the Germans or their puppet Vichy regime, while those who opposed the occupiers struggled to be heard through clandestine newspapers and the like. So the example being given to the public at large was invariably a bad one. But it is worth recalling that, after the liberation, artists and writers who collaborated were often punished more than “ordinary” citizens specifically because they were perceived to have had special responsibilities. Between heroes and collaborators, of course, there were also many artists who simply tried to make ends meet, which meant performing before German audiences but not being seen socializing with the occupier. Still, one fact cannot be denied: among non-Jewish artists and creators, those who refused to paint, compose, write, publish or perform during the occupation can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Guernica, 1937. Picasso rarely ventured into politics, but his portrait of the bombed city is a masterpiece.

Picasso famously stayed in Paris during the Occupation. Do you think it was Picasso’s stature that made him fearless and invulnerable to Nazi threats? Clearly Picasso wasn’t a political artist, but Guernica is of course one of the great political artworks of the 20th century.  How do you see Picasso standing out from other painters at this time? Did the war years, for example, enhance his reputation? When, during a visit from Nazi soldiers questioned him about Guernica (1937), “Did you do this?” the artist, replied, “No, you did.”  True story?

Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress from late in the occupation, insisted to me that the Guernica story was true. Beyond that, I have no way of knowing, though it does seem like the kind of remark that the self-confident Spaniard might have made. On the other hand, as a Spaniard and an outspoken critic of General Franco, he was also vulnerable since Franco’s idea of neutrality placed him very close to Hitler. But perhaps even the Germans might have thought twice about interning the world’s most famous artist. Picasso himself was not a trouble-maker during the occupation: he continued to work in his Left Bank studio, was visited occasionally by German officers (including the writer Ernst Jünger), ate in neighborhood restaurants and was visited by his mistresses, Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter (until Ms. Gilot came along).

Perhaps what distinguished him most was that, unlike Matisse and many of his contemporaries, he remained in Paris and, in a sense, his very presence was an act of defiance. But, nothwithstanding Guernica, he was never a political artist as such and, even after he joined the French Communist Party after the liberation, he was hardly one to follow orders from Moscow-line apparatchiks. In fact, in the end, I think that Picasso’s reputation was barely touched by either the occupation or his membership of the Communist Party. Today, with endless exhibitions still keeping Picasso in the public eye, neither of these periods is more than very occasionally mentioned.

You write that artists of all flavors moved to Paris to escape the confines of their native Catholicism and traditional norms in order to peel apart their potential and change the world.  French filmmakers, however, at first welcomed these actors, writers, doers but because they were slowly being crushed by Hollywood in the 1930s, sought some leverage and funds.  The Germans provided it, and a collaboration ensued. Because cinema was a powerful, new art, with the potential to spread both images and sound, and therefore ideas as well as current events (or propaganda) in the newsreels, how do you assess the French filmmakers on this score?  Are they more “guilty” than others in collaborating with the Nazis?

A German choir giving a lunchtime concert on the steps of the Paris Opera, during the Occupation. Photo: LAPI/Roger Viollet

French filmmakers generally had a “good” war, not least because the exclusion and departure of Jewish producers, directors and screenwriters left them more room. And soon they also had no competition from British or American films. Add to this, the Nazis, notably Goebbels, wanted the French to be distracted as much as possible – and movies could do a good job at that. Indeed, Goebbels even sent a German producer, Alfred Greven, to Paris to found his own studio, Continental Films, to make French movies.

The question that arose after the liberation was whether making an apolitical “entertainment” movie during the occupation comprised collaboration. Well, it transpired that, except for Jean Renoir and a handful of others who left for the US, everyone else among non-Jews continued working, which meant accepting German censorship of screenplays, casts, director and even technicians. So it was difficult for some who worked to condemn others who also worked. There was a small resistance group within the industry – portrayed in Bertrand Tavernier’s film, Laissez-Passer – but its impact was minimal.

Photograph by Brassaï showing artists gathered in 1944 in Paris after the private production of Picasso's surrealist play, Le Désire attrapé par le queue (Desire Caught By the Tail). Jean-Paul Sartre is seated on the floor with his pipe, Simone de Beauvoir is holding a book, Camus is staring at the dog, Picasso in the middle; his paintings seen in the background. Photo: Estate Brassaï - RMN.

The Occupation did not arrive in Paris without collaboration, you write, implying that no conquering army could come into a country, take it over without insider help. What shocked you most about some of the artists – people we would assume to be morally courageous against the Nazi regime and fight it – who not only fell in line with the Nazis, but advanced their cause?

I think I was most struck by how blind ideological faith – in this case, in fascism and even National Socialism – led some French writers actually to celebrate Hitler’s crushing of “corrupt” and “decadent” France. For them, France’s defeat proved them right: parliamentary democracy and socialism were destroying France; now the country could be rebuilt from scratch. In a way, these writers – men like Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – were not collaborators seeking some advantage for themselves; they were true believers. One other thing struck me forcefully, even if I was not exactly shocked: it was the vanity and narcissism of some artists, writers and performers who needed to be in the limelight – even if Nazi officers and soldiers were the ones applauding them. Among visual artists, for instance, why on earth did the likes of Derain, Vlaminck and van Dongen accept invitations from Goebbels to visit the Third Reich? The answer has to be that Goebbels made them feel important.

Once it was clear the Nazis would invade France, the Louvre was emptied of its paintings. Nazi looting focused almost exclusively on the Jewish collections in Paris. Here, the Louvre's Grand Galerie, 1939, stripped of its paintings. Photo: Roger-Viollet.

The Louvre was emptied out of its paintings, and yet many museums were looted by the Nazis.  What kind of operation was the preservation of art works in the great museums?  Still, the Nazis waltzed out of Paris with hundreds if not thousands of paintings… Do you think many of them were ultimately destroyed or lost during this time period?

The Germans – inspired by Hitler and Goering – helped themselves to thousands of works of art, but the overwhelming majority of these were taken from Jewish collections and not French museums. The Louvre and other leading museums were emptied of their paintings – most large statues had to remain – and these were placed in rural chateaux, but the Germans knew where they were (one exception is Mona Lisa which was kept hidden until the liberation). Of the Jewish-owned art that left France, some of the major collections, such as that of the Rothchschilds, were recovered and restituted after the war. But several thousand works brought back to France in the late 1940s were never returned to their owners. In fact, only after Hector Feliciano denounced France’s minimal efforts to restitute this art in his book The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art did the French government begin to advertise the existence of “looted” art in its museums.

The degenerate art exhibition (entartete Kunst) shown in Munich in 1937 was a  reaction, among other notions, against Modernism. The Nazis attempted to purify art… yet as the war churned on, and the Nazis obviously attempted to control French cultural output, they didn’t exactly stamp out what was then the center of Modernist creation.  What’s your take on the historical task the Nazis set themselves up for and yet couldn’t quite manage?

Hitler and Goering were interested principally in Renaissance and post-Renaissance northern European art and they took what they wanted from Jewish collections to fill their planned museums. But since the Nazis were grabbing everything they could find belonging to Jews, they also collected a large quantity of Modern art, much of its classified by them as “degenerate.” There is one report of several hundred such works being destroyed by fire outside the Jeu de Paume in Paris, but Nazis often preferred to exchange or sell works by the likes of Picasso, Klee or Kandinsky. Fauvist art had also been included in the Entarte Kunst exhibition, but, as noted, leading Fauvist painters like Vlaminck and van Dongen were “forgiven” when they agreed to travel to Germany. Still, apart from Picasso, Braque, Dufy, Bonnard and others continued to work and exhibit and a new generation of abstract artists first made its appearance in small discreet shows in Paris during the occupation. In other words, when the liberation came, Modernism soon followed.

German propaganda poster in French: "Abandoned Populations, Have Trust in the German Soldier." Photo from Paris, 1942.

The rise of Soviet Socialist Realism, or “tractor art” in both the USSR and China, was a marriage of artists and politicians with the goal of strengthening society… What were the equivalents that stand out for you in Nazi-occupied Paris?  From the French or the Nazi point of view?

The Vichy regime felt that artists could contribute to France’s moral rebirth and it promoted music, dance and theater to this end. But, for instance, when artists belonging to a nationwide cultural movement called Jeune France began displaying too much independence, the organization was hurriedly closed. In practice, apart from writers like Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle who spouted pro-Nazi propaganda as journalists and those like Céline who spewed anti-Semitic venom in all directions, there was almost no political – in the sense of pro-Nazi or pro-Vichy – art created between 1940 and 1944. In fact, even in movies, apart from propaganda newsreels, there were no more than two blatantly pro-fascist films among the 220 released during the occupation. Somehow the aesthetics of occupation never caught on.

Surrealist artists at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York apartment, 1942. Front Row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonara Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second Row: Max Ernst, Amedee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third Row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian.

How would you assess contemporary French art (and writing) 70 years later… are there traces of this legacy?

Evidently both French art and literature have failed to recover their pre-war glory. In the case of art, the lead passed initially to New York, but now it is shared by many other cities, with Paris still lagging behind as a motor of contemporary art. With literature, I believe that French writing is only just recovering from the impact of the Nouveau Roman which, from the 1950s, gave stylistic experimentation precedence over narrative. That said, not all is lost in French culture! The New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that French creativity was alive in other art forms. To this I would add dance because, while the likes of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham led the way in transforming contemporary dance, French choreographers and companies have proven talented disciples. And, by the way, the Paris Opera Ballet is rightly considered one of the world’s best classical dance companies.

"In His Infinite Wisdom" by British artist, Damien Hirst. London, victor in the artworld lottery, boosted Hirst to the top of the pile. Few Frenchman have equalled Hirst's success since WW II.

Do you believe that New York and London are the aesthetic victors of a war fought more than half a century ago?  Or has the very idea of contemporary creation resisted national borders and gone “wifi” – that is, international, decimating the need for some kind of national cultural, aesthetic creation?

The true victor in any aesthetic post-war “war” has of course been American popular culture which is now so engrained around the world that everywhere it blends with local cultures to reproduce itself in new forms. Conversely, national cultures take on international characteristics so that world music was merely the first in a long line of world arts, such as world movies, world conceptual art, world architecture, etc. Artists like to win recognition in, say, New York or London because both cities have media that can multiply the impact of their success. And in the case of visual artists, the auctions in New York and London are still those that bring the highest prices. In other words, money and recognition go hand-in-hand. And as evidence of this, I would say no more than Damien Hirst. Had he been French, without a scandalous tabloid press willing to draw attention to his gimmicks, without a collector like Charles Saatchi eager to speculate in art, without a City of London swimming in cash, he would have remained a peripheral figure. Instead, Hirst became a commercial phenomenon in which Being Damien was more important than any art he created. Then the money ran out in Britain, the Damien bubble burst and it was time to look elsewhere for new fashionable artists. Shanghai? Mumbai? São Paulo? Why not? Just follow the money. And, as we all know, money no longer has borders.

ALAN RIDING WEB SITE.

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.
– T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Technica Schweiz, The Garage Project. 2007-2009. The garage band in the garage project. Smoke, beer and the global phenomenon of teen lust. Courtesy Photo Lumen, Hungary.

1.  Tehnica Schweiz: The Garage Project, 2007-2009, Photo Lumen, Hungary.

This series of photo set ups in garage storage spaces in an old iron town in Hungary – Dunaújváros – is the brainchild of the innovative conceptual artist team Tehnica Schweiz – Gergely László and Péter Rákosi.  Tehnica Schweiz playfully borrows its name from a rusted sign sitting in a field in Switzerland, and a good deal of what they did in the Garage Project is playful as well, somewhat reinventing (and perhaps perverting) the Apple Computer myth.  Here, in a terribly buzzy and local series of photographs-cum installations,  the project played with the secrets behind the closed doors of the garage park. Over the course of three years, some 20 artists turned the garage spaces into tableaux vivants.  A piano, a llama, a garage filled with tools (!), strange objects piled up and other installations came from a joyous collaborative coup.   I would have loved seeing the pot grow room garage or the man on the moon with US flag garage.

What I really enjoyed was the idea that many artists came together and that a festival was launched to celebrate this creativity in 2007.  Presented  by Lumen Photography Foundation and Lumen Gallery in Budapest, the Garage Project was one of a dozen headlining the Eastern European flavor of the fair.

“What people use garages for was the point of departure…but the 1,200 garage photos based on 1,200 garages that sit here became a kind of master Utopian plan,” explains László, giving me a tour of the works at the stand. “We celebrated the project with a giant festival in 2008 and another one in 2009.”

Today, the garage-city is mostly a meeting-place for men, according to the Tehnica Schweiz website: “a location for escaping family life, or a scene of alternative youth culture.”  Still, he adds, the garages all hide secrets.

Tom Hunter takes Christina's World to a British suburb. Anchor and Hope, 2009.

2. Tom Hunter: Anchor and Hope 2009, Purdy Hicks Gallery, London.

Tom Hunter’s contemporary riff on Andrew Wyeth’s iconic Christina’s World caught my eye immediately, largely because this was one of the very first contemporary art images I saw that meant anything to me. I was about 15 and my high school girlfriend took me by the hand to MoMA’s second floor, pointed me in front of this painting and said : “Just look.”  I did.  And I’ve been looking at this painting for many years; I can fairly say that regardless of what I think of it now, Wyeth’s painting is very much a landmark of my personal aesthetic landscape.

A strong image says a great deal about discovering art and its possibilities, as well as about how icons are recognized, and then re-recognized in other works.  Tom Hunter’s take on the crippled girl in a field is simple – with some – but not obsessive attention paid to detail.  What is compelling is how the message is filtered through the reference and still sticks, even if “Christina” is in a field in some British suburb.

Wim Delvoye's Kiss 1, 2001. High tech porn?

3. Wim Delvoye, Kiss 1, 2001, Beaumont Public, Luxembourg.

I didn’t see much pornography masquerading as art in this edition of Paris Photo, but perhaps I wasn’t looking very hard for it.  Or perhaps there just wasn’t.  However, I did notice this fairly large. 100 x 125 cm, Cibachrome print on aluminum by Wim Delvoye.  Kiss 1, 2001, is of course an x-ray.  Which is a photograph, and this is clearly somewhat about sex.  Well, not somewhat. It is about sex. Mostly. And it’s one of a series about penetration.

Delvoye is known better for his tattooed pigskins (and live pigs) as well as refashioned Coca-Cola cans, anal prints on hotel stationary (with lipstick as the ink), as well a number of sensationally strange and terribly unusual objects like his 2008 Corten steel cement truck in red.

Some folks at the fair bitched a bit that there were lots of objects masquerading as photographs, as if it weren’t right, as if the rules were being broken.  And to that I mumbled: Thank goodness.  Do x-rays count?  The next artist… seems concerned with that as well.

Use by expiration date? Not a chance. Alison Rossiter is an expert photo alchemist.

4. Alison Rossiter, Fuji Expiration (series), 2010.  Stephen Bulger Gallery, Ontario, Canada

The geometric, abstract photo compositions of the youngish Alison Rossiter bridged several worlds of art and photograph with a single wall.  Working in a similar way to German photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans – that is, turning photo-processed paper into sculptural or abstract works – Rossiter apparently spends a great deal of time in the darkroom. Her own process is to work with expired photo paper she’s collected, and then experiment with the strange qualities of gelatin silver papers using differing vats of chemicals, light and what have you and essentially work as an alchemist.  Her results are spectacular “finds” in the way the old Ab Ex painters discovered their content while working. Her bio explains that in 2003 she became interested in photo conservation while working as a volunteer at the Metropolitan in New York, and has since become something of an expert on the history of photographic materials.  No surprise, she’s also a graduate of the the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY, around the corner from Kodak. These works are like tourists from the 1920s and 1930s.  And welcome ones, too. See Alisson Rossiter’s web site, click here.

Fun with gravity: Sigurdur Gudmundsson takes flight with philosophical notions in black and white.

5. Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Dialogue, 1979. i8 Gallery, Iceland

Sigurdur Gudmundsson is something else.  Part performer, part photographer, part one-man band, his pieces are poetic essays on wit and nonsense, or as his Icelandic gallery explains “Visual poems.”  Anyone with an interest in Fluxus will enjoy these well produced documents.  I’m reminded of Dennis Oppenheim’s five-hour sunburn, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970, Jones Beach, New York. Oppenheim is the wonderful artist who fell asleep in the sun for a good part of the day, a book on his bare chest.  Gudmundsson plays the sunny fool, here, too, but to almost philosophical effect, asking what and how meaning is implied when (and if) a human performer is present at the center of it all.

We see Gudmundsson doing all sorts of visual tricks with his camera and his body; you have the very distinct feeling you like this artist because he’s so present, so interested in engaging you and in doing what he’s doing – like this work with his hair being pulled upward by a helium balloon, or in another work where he stands – as if for fun – between two halves of a pyramid of books. One can image these images being sent off to space as an indication of what sort of society we are.  Works for me.

Hat Fashion, 1949. Norman Parkinson captured the exuberance of post war New York.

6. Norman Parkinson, (Hat Fashion), Young Velvets, Young Prices, New York, 1949.

Few other photographers captured the optimism – and the burgeoning post-war wealth – of the late 20th century as did British fashion photographer Norman Parkinson (1913–1990).  Parkinson absolutely nails what we now consume as mandatory icons of an era that launched so many icons from Doris Day and Television to Frank Sinatra and the preeminence of the New American style. I came upon this reprinted jewel, Young Velvets, Young Prices, New York, 1949, and just had to dream a bit.  (Originally published in Vogue, this work was printed in 2010, under the supervision of the Norman Parkinson Archive, London).

Norman Parkinson's New York, New York. What more is there to say? Those two could be my mom and dad.

It was my parents’ world and I’m certain they saw these and other works by Parkinson, especially this absolute Manhattan icon, New York, New York, East River Drive, from the early 1960s, and went out and lived that dream. Parkinson defined an era with his photographs and continued on through the 1980s to conceive of photographs that would stand out for their composition, color and celebrity portraiture.  He photographed Jerry Hall in 1975 on a Soviet plinth in a red bathing suit that is simple and gorgeous.  Check out the Norman Parkinson Archive.

Michael Eastman's Fidel Stairway 2, from a series of Havana, Cuba staircases.

7. Michael Eastman, Fidel’s Stairway 2 (1999). Barry Friedman Gallery, New York.

These are some of the largest works (framed) I saw at Paris Photo: A series of Havana staircases, beaten by time and use, and captured by the American photographer Michael Eastman. Eastman likes his settings to be large, dated, sometimes grandiose (ballrooms in Venice, parking lots in Guadaloupe, glistening steel-paneled elevators, doors open like a mouth about to swallow the world whole). Marked with a paint-on-stone sign FIDEL, one immediately thinks that this was indeed Fidel Castro’s private staircase and the name printed there is to remind everyone, even perhaps the aging Castro, of this fact in case they took a wrong turn.  It’s a warm photograph and from the right distance offers the illusion one would certainly desire from such a subject.  Up close, the detail is rich and rewarding – especially for an urban decay sleuth.

Eastman, like many photographers in love with architectural details, is very content pointing his considerable talent at walls for a series of abstractions that sniff out the underlying colors and history of a particular slice of some building.  What’s generous here, even though Fidel was produced in 1999, is the color, something real, dramatic and oddly comforting. Like many artists working with a camera these days, much of these abstractions is owed to the 1950s Ab Ex’ers, who generated the vast emotional palimpsest that informed the aesthetics of post war America until the snappy arrival of the Pop Stars.

Manuel Alvarez-Bravo's 1928 masterpiece, Snail and Squash.

8. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Squash and Snail, 1928

I didn’t really remember who produced this very simple and small image of a snail slowly motoring over the top of a squash, but I absolutely knew this image.  Closely cropped, it’s an odd nature piece without much reference to place or time or much else.  I first saw this photograph in the Port Washington, Long Island library in 1990 or so, and for some reason it took complete possession of me. I had an invitation for the show (the name of it eludes me), but there were several dozen black and white photographs from the early 20th century, among them Garry Winogrand, Bill Brandt, and Paul Strand. And Manuel Álvarez Bravo. I photocopied this piece and set off adding a text using the alphabet for the hearing impaired: “SNOTHING,” I spelled out.  I bonded with the work, and when I saw the modest black and white print, I stopped as if to hug a friend I hadn’t seen in decades.  The meeting was wonderful, and gave me a chance to scribble something about this wonderful photographer.

Born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1902, Manuel Álvarez Bravo began photographing in 1924. Some years later he came in contact with Diego Rivera, and through Tina Modotti (photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways), showed his work to Edward Weston. It was the start of a rich and somewhat surreal career in photography.  Bravo’s works are extremely varied but always interesting thanks to a distinct contemporary point of view with regards to composition and subject matter. He’s concerned with geometry and a super awareness of the rectangular frame the camera’s eye allows him.

Here’s a woman’s breast popping out of the landscape (and her shirt), an assassinated striking worker (1934), a pair of fire workers covered in head-to-toe asbestos outfits (1935), or a boy sweeping up a sidewalk, the entire composition rust colored. You can sense the joy and discovery in his photographs.

Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico in 1930, and Bravo took over her position as photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways.  The rest is history.  Manuel Alvarez Bravo became something of a giant in the world of Modernist photography. Bravo passed away in Mexico City in 2001.  A sample of his work can be seen here.

Carmela Garcia's Casting: Nathalie Portman as Thelma Wood.

9. Carmela Garcia: Casting Series, Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Spain.

These double celebrity portraits are wonderfully ridiculous. More of a bait and switch performance of conceptual art than photography as we live and breathe it on our iPhone cameras, they still take you in, largely because you recognize the actresses and you just have to see the texts. Some samples Carmela Garcia offers us: Kate Bates as Gertrude Stein, Nathalie Portman as Thelma Wood (American sculptor, 1901-1970), Jodie Foster as Peggy Guggenheim…and there you go. Get ready for the next art bio pic.  Check out the Casting Series portfolio here.

Chris Shaw in silver wig and Polaroid, doing Paris Photo as Andy Warhol.

10. & 11. Chris Shaw, Taking Polaroids, Playing Warhol & Katrzyna Mirczak

I met the wandering Chris Shaw as he was pausing for a moment to photograph a couple of budding superstars, noticing his silver wig and vintage Polaroid camera.  Mr. Shaw is ostensibly working on a new project (top secret), but was very pleased to tell me about his book, Life as a Night Porter, published by Twin Palms.  Here Mr. Shaw details his 10 years working in London hotels and using his camera to document the various “chance meetings” while he observed the prostitutes waiting for their Johns, inebriated guests falling across the lobby and the others – hundreds– caught in mid-stream with an iron or cigarette or someone’s private parts in their hands.

Very nice man, Mr. Chris Shaw.  He took my picture (Polaroid cooling off from the hot-on-the-spot photo session) and said, “No, he doesn’t usually give away his work.”  Perhaps it will appear in a new book somewhere at sometime in the future?  “Maybe.”

Nothing says "I love you" like tattoo you. Katrzyna Mirczak's prisoner's tatoos on real skin.

Behind Mr. Shaw (in the photo of him), are the extremely fascinating (and totally appropriate) photographs by Katrzyna Mirczak’s — showing off her collection of tattoos in embalming fluid.  These pieces (on their original skins) belonged to prisoners.  They somehow made their way into someone’s collection and before Mirczak’s camera.  The tattoos are crude and even sometimes silly – a man on a bicycle, some kind of ’20s flapper – others typical: Jesus.  See more at Eric Franck Gallery.  Yes, I think Warhol would have bought the entire series.

Magnum great, Czech-born Joseph Koudelka takes in Paris Photo 2010, gets his photo taken.

13. Joseph Koudelka. The great Magnum always-in-motion photographer was roaming the aisles and paused long enough for me to capture him without creating a blur. Well, almost. Hard to photograph a legend. See more of Koudelka’s work here.

Want more?  See a selection of Paris Photo works: PARIS PHOTO.

Mathieu Briand, Le Chasseur, 2010, poudre polyamide, 50 x 32 x 13,5 cm. From Galerie de Marseille.

The FIAC's Opening Blast: WWII by Atelier Van Lieshout at Jousse Enterprise Paris and Theo-Mario Coppola stand guard.

So upon entering the Cour Carrée part of the FIAC, cozily situated in a big tent in the Louvre’s square courtyard, one is immediately confronted with a massive gun, perhaps a howitzer, aptly titled WWII by Atelier Van Lieshout.  The 2010 cannon in polyurea (300 x 140 x 335 cm), dripping with a tar-like paint, is a unique piece: a dirge of sorts on war and aesthetics. And of course, we all love big guns, don’t we?  The affable Theo-Mario Coppola of Jousse Enterprise Paris, gives me the tour of the weapon. “No, it’s not iron,” he says. “It’s like styrofoam.”  I think it’s an interesting welcome work for the fair, but not overly friendly. Coppola, on the other hand is perhaps the friendliest person working behind the stands at the fair (and he’s only an intern!), speaks a handful of languages, but knows his “nothing,” too. Pointing myself in the direction of the cannon, I lock and load to make my rounds.

Stéphane Thidet: The Case for Rocks at Aline Vidal Paris.

I’m struck by the endless array of weird, artist-designed objects (painted motorcycles, cinder block archways, a drum set painted black, a monster-style slide and swing set, an immense bookshelf filled with rocks, a giant fiberglass banana protesting happily with a tomato sign, a collection of singing and jiggling bricks) all vying to become the FIAC mascot of the year.  Hmm…maybe Cyrill Hatt’s stapled Mickey Mouse sculpture is the ticket? However, these works all fight with one of the most persistent images at the stands: the ever-busy art dealers and their teams pounding away at their MacBooks, apparently sending off e-mails to interested collectors. Sure. Even though the WiFi has been down all day and no one can get on the net under this tent. So, as the dear reader probably knows, visitors to art fairs are routinely ignored. (A strange kind of nothing to be sure). It seems that most of the important sales have been made, and wearing a baseball cap doesn’t advance my cause to get some conversation going.  I offer a polite “Excuse me…?” in English.  The maniacally-typing dealers barely look up to acknowledge my presence. 

FIAC mascot? Cyril Hatt's Mickey Mouse, stapled photographic paper.

While looking at the photo-op ready Banane by Bruno Peinado at Loevenbruck Gallery, I strike up a conversation with a girl admiring the banana.  I ask her about her tag and she tells me she is working with Sylvie Amar at the Galerie de Marseille’s booth. “You must see the work of Matthew Briand,” she says.  She adds that it’s amazing and … all sold out. The sculptures are quite something – technically flawless and technologically so new (to me, at least), I wonder how these dozen or so Escher-like towers and figures, and skulls suspended from the ceiling with fishing line, are produced. “Briand uses 3-D drawings and the works are assembled with lasers based upon this software,” explains dealer Sylvie Amar. There are towers of men climbing stairs, a lynching taking place in a skull, a puzzle of hundreds of well-defined mice and other pieces that are nothing less than spires of fairy tale puzzles. Seemingly constructed out of a single sheet of paper, Briand’s pieces are both fragile and powerful; one suddenly feels like a giant in their presence, and a man with a back pack nearly smashes into one. They not only echo Escher, but a touch of Harry Potter’s Hogworts, and exude a brand of fantasy much more compelling than the banana.

Mathieu Briand's lynching, a tiny figure inside a skull from a 3-D drawing.

Justin Matherly, who builds abstract concrete figures that spill over their aluminum walkers, crutches and commodes is happy to tell me about the sculpture he produced for the FIAC in the Jardin des Tuilleries.  “The experience was very strange for a first trip to France to be locked in a warehouse in the Paris suburb Vitry-sur-Seine the whole time,” he says, exhausted.  Matherly, who lives in New York, says he spent 10 days constructing what he calls The Belevdere Torso (Why don’t you put your beautiful head between your legs, where your reason sits among the lice of your debauchery and the running sores of your depravity, 2010) for the Tuilleries (which was sold). The piece in the Bureau-Inc space at the Cour Carrée is typical of this artist’s longtime interest in “ambulatory products.”

Concrete & Crutches: Justin Matherly's installation at Bureau-Inc. Justin Matherly, What counts is the example, death means nothing; Let us now work together. 2010. Concrete, ambulatory equipment.

His rough concrete wall comes up to one’s belly button, and is buttressed by a cadre of aluminum crutches. Matherly’s art brut constructions are poetic send-ups of the human form with a little help from the medical industry; but they’re not silly. There’s a vague whiff of Robert Gober about them (a stretch, I know) and a kind of DIY aesthetic, too, that rings true.  They also look great on the raw wooden crate floor.  “Is there a premium for the warehouse style?”  Bureau-inc dealer Gabrielle Giattino says “No,” but adds she could have had the carpet for the same price.  She says the wood with its beat-up look, edged in bruised metal, was more her gallery’s style.  Playing the clown, I say: “I thought it might have been imported…as an art piece, a kind of nothing piece, an invisible Carl Andre….”

Ian Tweedy's drawing on the backside of a old canvas.

Ian Tweedy’s drawings in pencil and ink on the backs of canvases and scraps of paper at Monitor, a Rome-based gallery, give me pause.  Beautifully done, but rough enough to seem like genuine efforts at getting (literally) at the strange structure of images, I find myself poring over this young American’s work for quite a while.  One senses the effort and intelligence in these works – delicate but aggressive reworkings of printed materials on a variety of supports.

Atsushi Kaga's "I'm God I'm Everywhere." Acrylic on board, 20.3 x 25.4 cm. 2009

Similarly, Atsushi Kaga‘s clever painted drawings/cartoons, pull me in immediately for different reasons.  Clever, funny, irreverent, these small works on canvas or board arranged in an ensemble or in a line on a wall, fall in between David Shrigley and Yoshitomo Nara, and take Hello Kitty to art hell and back.  Kaga’s dopey, lonely bunnies rowing in the dark, or others produced like Grateful Dead posters (“A World Without You Is Fucking Brilliant“) in magic marker, pen and watercolors, or pathetic care bears in wheelchairs gazing forlornly into space with their amputated legs and smoldering cigarettes, like “I’m God  I’m everywhere” (2009), just kind of break your stupid heart.

Diego Santomé plays with the edition as unique piece. Silkcreen, 50 x 70 cm. 2010.

The work by Diego Santomé at Madrid-based gallery, Parra & Romero interested me for what it wasn’t: A work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the late Cuban artist whose installations of candy piled in a corner or prints stacked high on gallery floors were nibbled away as visitors removed them piece by piece.  Santomé’s “I will repeat it to you 100 times,” a 2010 unique piece of 100 silkscreen images (one framed, 99 stacked on a crate), evokes Gonzalez-Torres, but is more interested, perhaps, in purchase than participation.  I wonder openly to the Parra & Romero dealer what would happen if a collector purchased the work, then distributes each of the 100 prints to friends, or resells them.  “They would destroy the piece,” he says.  “Would they?”  I’m not so sure.

Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni's double take on "nothing." Comes with frames.

Of course, there’s still quite a lot of nothing here, as well, as my terrible photo of a diptych nothing by Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni testifies.  Their Sans titre (Untitled, 2010), is composed of compressed Arches 300 gram paper, an action accomplished by squeezing it into their frames.  This DIY piece was offered by Loevenbruck Gallery, and met my medium level standard for “nothing.”  Regardless, I did like it, and will possibly try this at home, irreverent philistine that I am.

Music of the spheres: Bird rock band video by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.

No FIAC is complete without the totally watchable video.  Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s Les Oiseaux de Céleste (Céleste’s Birds, 2008), a piece produced for the installation From Here to Ear, fascinates with the hard rock rhythms of birds picking away at an electric guitar.  Right out of Christian Marclay’s playbook, the video is simple and utterly absorbing, and the sounds emanating from this bird band are deliriously wonderful for the full 7 minutes.  Boursier-Mougenot’s work touches often upon music, sound and the odd visuals she creates to produce them. She should be picked up by MTV.  More of her work here, from Galerie Xippas Paris.

To get the flavor of the Cour Carrée space, which I do like, one should note that all art aisles lead to the café where a show of new Ricard pastis in rainbow flavors (green, yellow, orange, reddish…I don’t know what the flavors are) is currently being beta-tested with the art crowd, along with the limited edition Heineken aluminum beer can-bottle hybrid. When I see people quaffing these down, I’m wondering “Why are they drinking milk?” Limited edition?  I liked it, sure, but not enough to squirrel it away in my collection.

Got milk? Heineken offered limited edition beer can bottles.

Like most people window shopping here, I enjoy the compression of the FIAC…and the odd collage of works invading your view as you mosy, and isn’t this the point of the art fairs anyway?  It’s like the Internet! A recent debate – Art Fairs Are About Money Not Art was posted on the Saatchi Gallery website and focuses largely on the Frieze. And some of its commercial, critical and artist proponents and detractors get in a few swings including Frieze director, Matthew Slotover, Simon de Pury, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Jasper Joffe, Matthew Collings and Louisa Buck.  It’s longish, but well worth the time to read . Click here to view. Art fairs have always been about art and money, and most dealers will say that without the art fairs, surviving on local sales is impossible.

Clearly the art fairs are here to stay, and the larger ones like the FIAC, along with Frieze and Art Basel, draw crowds that don’t buy anything but rather plop down their $20 to get a sense of what’s out there, and what kind of world we live in.  And yet there’s always that funny competition that rises up among artists who nearly break the backs of their dealers in the go-go art market that is also on display at the fairs.  Case in point: the exhibition card for David Kramer from Galerie Laurent Godin, a Paris space which just launched a show of the artist’s work entitled, “Untitled (Because I am Not Richard Prince….).”   One of Kramer’s pieces on view, not exactly a Prince knock-off, comes pretty close.  There’s some kind of tongue in cheeky joke here. See the exhibition card for yourself:

David Kramer Invitation Card for his exhibition, (Untitled), Because I Am Not Richard Prince, at Laurent Godin Paris.

My art browsing only took me to the Cour Carrée and not the Slick Art Fair nestled on the esplanade at the Trocadero, and not to the Jardin du Tuilleries where a number of sculptural installations lined the gorgeous walk ways through the trees; not to the newbie fair, Cutlog at the Bourse, and finally not to the other half of the FIAC at the gorgeous 19th century wrought-iron masterpiece, the Grand Palais, where the more expensive art works were on offer. Perhaps I’m suffering from art exhaustion. (As the FIAC launches, there are no less than 109 exhibitions on view, with 54 gallery openings). Clearly the Paris fair season is expanding in all directions at once in an effort to capture the city and hold it hostage while protesters swell the streets and block fuel depots in an effort to preserve their retirement benefits at age 60.  But folks had no trouble jamming into the opening of Larry Gogosian’s new space in Paris to admire Cy Twombly’s expensive, painted scribbles “Camino Real,” or Jean Prouvé’s elegant constructions in tin and wood; or jamming into the Paris style shop, Colette, to see Dan Colen’s “En Grêve” (On Strike, 2010), his pile-up of the omnipresent Velib bicycles in a collaboration with Gogosian. More of everything. Seems an apt metaphor for the art fairs in general.

Dan Colen's En Grêve at Colette, in collaboration with Larry Gogosian Paris.

Want more? Enjoy this video from ARTE, the Franco-German television channel: Arte: FIAC PARIS 2010

Kohei Yoshiyuki's voyeuristic series The Park, at the Tate Modern, catches lovers unaware, late at night while peeping Toms watch and sometimes touch.

In an immense, multi-cultural cauldron like London with virtually no one on the streets knowing how to read the Tube map or help you find a street a block away, you are bound to find yourself mediating the gap between private and public worlds, or if you like, ruminating on being lonely. London, if you haven’t heard, has more surveillance cameras spying on its inhabitants and visitors than any other city on the planet. You can sing the melancholic “All By Myself” in a park and be viewed by paid observers, somewhere in the sky above London Town.

The Park series brings together multiple layers of voyeurism at The Tate Modern's Exposed. You're never alone.

So the following day I take the Tube to the Tate Modern to see the highly-regarded (pun intended) “Exposed” exhibition.  More than a dozen rooms, jam packed with visitors, cover the history of voyeurism, surveillance and the camera. Hundreds of works are neatly assembled with clear explanations outlining the surreptitious image-stealing activities in which we are all participants, each expressing the odd and obvious revelation that we are not alone. It’s troubling and, if you can believe it, thrilling.  And, as you might expect, visitors are not allowed to take photographs in the Exposed exhibition. A kind of “so there” thing, no?

Walker Evans Subway Riders, circal 1938-1941, Gelatin Silver Print. The William Hood Dunwoody Fund. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

That said, there’s quite a lot to see here: Walker Evans captures sleepy, staring, often sullen subway riders with a camera in order to document the real.  I remember that his was an age of grit and realism, and his works here indicate rather than radiate. But there is a quality to them that allows us to understand a bit more deeply how Evans (1903-1975), the great documentary photographer of the dust bowl and the Great Depression really worked, and what he was really after: the person behind the face, the face of poverty, the real.  Yet his invasion of these passengers’ privacy set a low bar on what would soon happen as the photographic image took over newspapers, magazines and everything else.

Jacob Riis and Paul Strand, each in their own ways refined this art of portraying everyday people, probably shocking many in the same way Manet’s paintings blew apart the mannered tastes of mid-19th century Paris with their casual approach to portraiture – the unfinished canvases, the smudgy contours, and above all the common loiterers as subjects.

Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932 - Place de l'Europe, Paris © Cartier Bresson, Magnum Photos

Many great photographers soon appeared in the 1930s and 1940s, above all Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Frenchman who was so effective at grabbing the instant. Most people today probably believe his “decisive moment” – Behind the Gare St Lazare – is the most perfectly made candid photograph ever taken. Reams have been written about it, but Cartier-Bresson produced hundreds of these street scenes that are perfect in so many ways we wish (or at least I do) we were captured by him in some banal activity like riding a bike or carrying a tray of hot rolls up a stone staircase. Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, and Garry Winogrand fill out the greats from this era, and their works are diamonds of reality sleuthing.

One of Miroslav Tichy's homemade cameras. The Czech photographer liked to take pictures of pretty women, their legs and bottoms.

A wonderful surprise is the work of Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy, who created junky-looking cameras to snatch images of people, mostly women, in his native Kyjov. His home-made cameras are sensational objects, and his works are nostalgic-looking images of women’s legs and bottoms, portraits of people unaware of his activity. An exhibition of his work also appeared in February at The International Center of Photography in New York (it ended in May, 2010).  See the review in the New York Times here.

Weegee (Arthur Felig) Marilyn Monroe c1950s © Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images

Much of what passes for eye candy these days is clearly the celebrity snapshot.  Lindsay Lohan caught in a club boozing it up, heading into jail (or coming out) is almost expected fare for newspapers, magazines and television. It’s a global obsession, and the appetite is ravenous.  But a half a century ago, there was Weegee, the Johnny-on-spot image maker.  Yes, there’s Marilyn Monroe (circa 1950) with her white pleated skirt blown skyward thanks to a subway air grate. While a good amount of his known work concerns crime scenes, Weegee also focused on everyday life: A fascinating image of his captures a cinema audience from above: We see a couple making out in the center of the frame. The unposed beauty of this innocent age is both romantic and to our contemporary eyes, unreal. Can we actually behave like this now that everyone has a camera on their cell phone? The exhibition wall literature makes it clear that a faster camera shutter allowed photographers to steal these fleeting moments before they were folded into the past.

Weegee (Arthur Felig) Audience in the Palace Theater c1943 © Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images

The exhibition covers an enormous amount of ground from Nan Goldin’s famous slide show of her battered and drug-addled friends, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1966), to Kohei Yoshiyuki’s astonishing series, The Park. And it’s with The Park I’ll meander a bit.

During a period in the 1970s (1971-1979), Yoshiyuki wandered Tokyo’s Aoyama, Shinjuku and Yoyogi parks at night, following veritable peeping Toms watching couples involved in secretive sexual encounters.  Turns out, the trysts on the grass were not very secret.  Yoshiyuki captures the hordes as they group and descend on their hands and knees to get extremely close to these lovers, sometimes even touching them.  The photographer who behaved as if he were one of the peepers stands back a bit and takes photo after photo revealing a layering of voyeurism rarely observed. The Park became wildly famous and its place at Exposed is truly phenomenal for its depiction of desire and desperation. The images are clear enough to fully understand what’s happening, but the faces are hidden.

Untitled, from Kohei Yoshiyuki's series The Park, Gelatin Silver Print, 1971

The photographer stopped taking these photos in 1973, but returned to the series in 1979.  He exhibited them that year at Tokyo’s Komai Gallery as life-sized prints; lights were turned off, and visitors were given flashlights to view the works, an effort to recreate the scene as Yoshiyuki had experienced it– as a voyeur. One should note that, according to the New York Times, the photographer “seemed to lose his nerve” and destroyed the prints. It was only in 2007 that New York gallerist Yossi Milo brought the work back to the public’s attention.

One is reminded in The Park works that many things go on in our world we have nary a hint of…and that is why Exposed yields so much, taking the observable, restating the obvious, and making a high art form out of it even in a world where every 12-year old has a camera attached to his or her phone. See more from this NYT piece.

My theory: We are all exposed, and we are all voyeurs, spying non-stop on all sorts of things we’re somewhat invited to see and other events that are strictly verboten.  But we steal these images, the close ups, as we machete our way through reality.  Taking a picture, though, and making it our own, is addictive, and a minor source of guilt. It is evidence, or better living proof, the actual trace of another reality not our own. Spying on someone has never been a nice thing to do.  Ever catch your sibling or grandmother on the toilet? Or your significant other in bed with someone besides yourself? Or see you and your lover via Las Vegas-style love mirror mounted on the ceiling of your heart-shaped honey-moon suite?  (Me, neither). Rubber-necking at a traffic accident, or even staring at the photos of jumpers at the World Trade Center attack on September 11? Or worse, a photo of you staring at the jumpers. It’s all a form of dread, is it not?  That toxic cocktail of attraction + repulsion. Then it passes.

Exposed is an exhibition that is more necessary than gratuitous.  The show is a high-end distillation of the voracious visual animals and consumers we’ve become, historically unpacking our fascination with the other. Seeing what we see is what we need museums for, and this exhibition lays out our guilty pleasures at seeing ourselves unaware.  Candid camera! The world revealed and yet still unknowable.

Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror, Red, 2007, reflects London's sky in from Kensignton Garden's lake.

Anish Kapoor: Turning The World Upside Down
Finally, to really do justice to the English sky business, Anish Kapoor, offers up his discs and mirrors that reflect the gardens, trees and yes, the sky with four installations in Kensington Gardens – Turning The World Upside Down.

During an early morning walk in October, I come upon Sky Mirror, Red, 2007, a gorgeous polished stainless steel mirror tinted red and situated in the Queen’s lake.  Swans swim around this enormous disk (2.74 m x 2.9 m) as its concave eye captures the shifting sky through a red filter or tint. A guard stands nearby to make sure no one swims out to the piece, or tosses sausages at it (I didn’t).  It’s quite beautiful and silent and smart in the way Kapoor’s work can be: reflective and introspective in a multi-metaphoric fashion.  And there is the beautiful sky, looking somewhat Martian-like, on this wonderful morning.

Non-object (Spire), 2007, allows you to see the object reflecting itself and the sky and the trees, but not yourself.

Further on, one comes across Non-object (Spire), also from 2007, a stainless steel cone, polished to a brilliance one sees only in quicksilver (mercury) and that when approached reflects only itself and the trees around it.  Another guard here cautions me not to fall on the piece (I don’t).  I consider the interest in this work for geometry students on a field trip, trying to figure out the exact nature of this million dollar object.  It’s a wonderful sculpture to find in a park as big and green as Kensington Gardens.  Like us, walking alone considering the nature of the universe (and ourselves), Kapoor’s work seems to be busy doing the same.

Another Sky Mirror  from 2006 and five times as large as the red work, is positioned directly opposite the red piece, nearly a quarter mile away; as I walk towards the exit, workmen are installing and polishing C-Curve from 2007 (302 x 300 x 300 cm).  The piece is comprised of a large curved hunk of steel that sits on a low lying plinth; my guess is you can walk up to it and touch your image, if the guards allow you. At the very least, you can see yourself expanded and distorted, your image brilliantly thrown back at you : a fun house mirror with an inside and outside, a pristine Richard Serra work without the rust or the overly masculine overtone. (See photographs of the installed pieces, courtesy of DesignBoom).

My fear is that the hundreds of dogs who have free run of Kensington might have a go at this piece.  Dogs, from my experience, don’t have much use for contemporary art. And they don’t really care, do they, if they are exposed or not, photographed or ignored.

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera
Tate Modern 28 May  –  3 October 2010
Tate Modern Exposed Website

Anish Kapoor: Turning The World Upside Down
Kensington Gardens, London
September 28th, 2010 to march 13th, 2011

Matthew Rose is an American artist based in Paris, France.  His current exhibition of collage works and terribly unusual objects, Scared But Fresh at The Orange Dot Gallery in London, runs through October 31, 2010.

Brit artist Mike Ballard in the closet-cum installation for "Whose Coat Is That Jacket You're Wearing?" in an abandoned tailor shop in London. After a binge of stealing some 200 jackets, he's trying to give them all back.

Ballard says he lifted the jackets in a decade-long revenge binge, nicking them from pubs, and once back in his studio, emptied the pockets, cataloged the contents, scribbled poetic notes about each item and never told a soul. The artist’s kleptomania, inspired by the theft of his own prized blue Diesel 55 jacket when he moved to London from North Wales, came to an end in 2009 when he sought therapeutic help.

“I’d saved up for it,” says Ballard about his own jacket, “It was hooded, cost me about 150 pounds and was stolen from The Griffen, a Shoreditch bar, an old boozer type pub. It made me livid. So I went in the same area looking for my jacket… it was winter and I was a bit cold, but I didn’t find any like mine.”

Ballard did find others, however. Lots of them. Since 1999 he’s walked out of crowded pubs with more than 200 jackets by simply putting them on – his own jacket on top – and sailing out the door. Cheers, folks!

View from the outside of Walker's Tailor shop, the site of Mike Ballard's installation.

And now, a week before the annual London art orgy – the Frieze Art Fair – Mike Ballard lifts the veil on his secret store of stolen jackets, asking the world to come and get them, to please forgive him, and at the same time lift his star high above the door as he exits through the cloak room, a nod to fellow Brit guerrilla street artist Banksy. The installation in the abandoned Walker’s Tailor shop near the Great Portland Street tube station is a wall-to-wall closet: The jackets hang from the ceiling like sides of beef, tagged, dated and numbered, ready for pick up.

The cocoon of cotton, wool, leather and nylon is impressive in this tiny store.  You can’t stand up without getting lost in the stink of beery bars, smoke and body odor which is overwhelming. (The artist is considering spraying Febreze around to deodorize the show, but remains undecided.) He hasn’t worn any of these jackets since he stole them, nor has he smoked any of the hash or spent the cash (about 1000 pounds) he’s found in the pockets; nor has even thought about selling off the diamond ring he discovered. Instead, Mike Ballard turned into an archivist of sorts, cataloging everything down to the loose rolling papers and 2 penny coins, photographing them, and scribbling a bit of prose and poetry as well as the relevant dates and locations of each theft.  The texts are printed on tags hanging from the sleeves, along with the cross-referencing numbers which, when flashed against the petitioner’s claim, will prove if in fact this is their stolen jacket.

The victims are invited to pop in, submit their request, look around, and see if Ballard’s trove includes one of theirs. While I’m not certain anyone will quite remember their stolen jacket, the one which held the diamond ring will probably find its way back to its rightful owner; the others with the incriminating hash or out of date cellphones, will linger and perhaps find their way “to a charity auction,” says Ballard.

More than 200 coats and jackets hang from the ceiling of the shop like sides of beef, tagged and cataloged.

Unlike another art world clothes horse, the thoughtful Frenchman Christian Boltanski whose installations of tons of real Salvation Army castoffs made waves in Paris, Milan and New York this past year and focused largely on memory and loss, Ballard’s is an effort to gain forgiveness and garner attention for being bad. But in a way, it does touch upon memory and loss as well.

Sam Leith, a writer for the UK Guardian raised the question that perhaps these jackets are not stolen at all, but just swiped (or worse, bought!) from a Salvation Army depot and put on display. Ballard disputes this, and argues that he’s even sought professional help for his obsession. He told the Guardian: “I want them out of my life.”  Meaning the jackets, not the shrinks. He tells me: “Art and crime has always gone hand-in-hand with me.  Making artwork out of other people’s property is what I’ve always done.  This didn’t start out as an art piece; at first it was a compulsion, then it became an obsession, then the idea of giving them back became an installation and art piece.”

Last Friday afternoon when the exhibition had officially opened, five men in suits walked into the abandoned tailor shop where Mike Ballard had turned his obsession into an installation, claiming they were looking for a camel-colored Cromby jacket.  Ballard, known for wall-to-wall graffiti installations (as well as other works on various walls throughout London), was justifiably a bit nervous they would “have a go” at him.  The men, he says, had enjoyed a few pints during lunch, so Ballard’s anxiety was well-placed. After descriptions were given – time, place, contents in the pockets – it was determined the Cromby wasn’t there.  “Fair enough,” said one of the men, and with a sigh of relief Ballard watched them leave. (Thus far, no one has successfully claimed their jacket.)

The questions Ballard raises with “Whose Coat Is That Jacket You’re Wearing?” are not terribly new: Art and Crime is at home in every newspaper on the planet. Artists have been appropriating (stealing) from others (many of them artists) since time began, and vandalism (graffiti) is now an art world staple (Banksy: Exit Through The Gift Shop).  Thousands of fakes (Picasso, Dali, Chagall) float through the auction markets, hundreds of artists routinely rip off other artists or corporate logos in their art (Koons, Warhol), and theft of great works from great museums is almost a daily occurrence. But jackets? It does make you think … about folks heading home in the cold or the rain or the snow, angry and miserable.

The contents of one jacket contained keys, coins, lighter, lip balm, cellphone and a diamond ring.

I check the pickings myself, looking for a black overcoat that an ex-friend had borrowed many years ago wondering if he’d gotten it pinched by Ballard, but no, I didn’t find it; the only things I probably had in the pockets were Tums, which I’m sure if they were still there had both lost their fruity taste and their power to quell acid reflux.  Mike eyes my own leather jacket with a kind of glee and finally says that yes, it’s something he indeed would steal back in the day, but not any more. “I don’t want to encourage artists to steal, or launch a wave of stolen goods exhibitions,” he adds, assuring me of his conversion to the up and up, the good and moral.  I tell him I picked this beauty up in the Oxfam shop on Gloucester Road for only 49 pounds.  “Nice find,” he says. “Yeah,” I say. “It was a real steal.”

One of Ballard's tags, replete with a story about how he filched the jacket and the catalog number.

The project, sponsored by The Makers Union, offers up a modest demi-confession in the press release: Speaking about his work, Ballard admits, “I’m not proud about what I’ve done, and I realize that I need to make amends and return the coats to their rightful owners.” Appropriation has long been present in the art world, but never before has a show been constructed entirely out of stolen items. “I recognize the risk that comes with doing this show, but as Picasso once said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’.”
Getting caught is another story. Once, when stopped in mid-theft, Ballard explained to the owner, hey, it was an honest mistake, he recalls. No harm done, on to another pub!  Ballard is after all a graduate from the elite London art factory, Central St Martins, so he understands how to complete his projects.

An article about the exhibition in Britain’s The Evening Standard got things rolling and several people, says Ballard, came in looking for their stolen jackets, but none had a good enough story to earn them the lost prize. The artist is hopeful that the jackets will all be returned along with everything found in the pockets. The police, he adds, have not come knocking at the door, no charges have been filed either. “The lawyers say that a person would have to file a personal charge,” says Ballard. In the meantime, the artist believes he’s doing the “right thing. Absolutely. There’s no moral code with graffiti. With this – a jacket – it’s personal; it’s an extension of your skin.”

Mike Ballard wants to come clean...during the Frieze Art Fair.

And no, not just the art crowd will care about this, but those barflies and Yuppie cocktail punters from the time capsule of the Blair and Bush years. If they hear about it and care enough, they’ll come in, says Ballard, and try to get their coats back. That is, if the former owners are still alive. And if they are, think the jackets are still in fashion.

Just in case, see if any of this stuff is yours: http://www.whostolemycoat.com/

“Whose Coat is that Jacket You’re Wearing?” Dates: October 8– 23 October 2010  Hours: Wednesday- Saturday, 12pm-7pm

Location: Walker’s Tailor, 157 Robert Street, London, NW1 3QR
  Admission: Free  Website: www.whostolemycoat.com/

Matthew Rose is an American artist based in Paris, France.  His current exhibition of collage works and terribly unusual objects, Scared But Fresh at The Orange Dot Gallery in London, runs through October 31, 2010.

Just off the entrance to The Serpentine Gallery stands a temporary pavilion in hospital white.  I approach the small building just as one of the last English heartbeats is recorded for posterity; that is, copied to a fat hard drive to be added to yet another fat hard drive then shipped to the uninhabited Japanese island of Teshima and digitally secured at the Benesse Art Site Naoshima…until Doomsday. This is the premise of the expanding and ongoing work of Christian Boltanski, Les Archives du Coeur, registering a rambling sample of the world’s pulse. 

Boltanski Beat: Charlotte Cooper with her heartbeat on CD, treasured souvenir of Christian Boltanski's Archives du Coeur

Charlotte Cooper, an English teenager who with her mother trained down from Bristol to have the sound of her heart recorded for all time, emerges with her dog Toffee (on a outfit-matching pink leash), tenderly holding the two-minute CD of her heart’s lively beat, (she’s no. 001449). Boltanski souvenir in hand, Charlotte and Mom Cooper chat with the amiable artist-musician-and-guy-who-looks-like-a-doctor-but-is-only-a-guide, Thomas Hawkins. Ms. Cooper is excited to have donated her young unbroken heartbeat to Boltanski’s project.  “It didn’t hurt,” she says. “It was fun.” Hers is one of thousands.

Charlotte Cooper, Toffee and artist-musician and heartbeat administrator, Thomas Hawkins, on the last day of Les Archives du Coeur. "I'm not a doctor," says Hawkins.

Boltanski along with his artist wife, Annette Messager, pass for France’s aesthetic power couple.  The artist maintains a studio near Paris in Malakoff, a self-styled communist suburb filled with old factory-turned-loft spaces, and easy access to the inside ring of Paris via Métro or side street. Arguably France’s most important artistic export after Yves Klein, Boltanski often wanders around my street, the rue Daguerre, window shopping, buying bread, enjoying a coffee on a café terrace, smoking his pipe and in general pretty quiet for such a famous guy.  During these walks, the artist says, he gets his ideas.  In the studio, he claims, he does nothing.  Yet for more than 40 years, Boltanski has been quite busy mining the detritus of the world in a “career-long examination of the issues of death, memory, disappearance and loss,” according to The Serpentine Gallery press release. Most recently, these examinations have involved tons and tons of clothes.

The Serpentine Gallery installation, however, has no clothes, unlike his exhibitions in Paris, New York and Milan; Boltanski’s effort in London was designed solely to gather heartbeats, like a mushroom picker in an English garden.

Christian Boltanski in the Grand Palais, Paris 2010 Courtesy: Kewenig Galerie and Monumenta 2010. Photo by Didier Plowy

In June 1992 when I flew up to Montreal from New York to participate as an art writer person in the opening of the new Contemporary Art Museum. I sat next to a man I was certain was the artist Leon Golub. I was too timid to start a conversation with Mr. Golub, besides punching out poetic jewels like “Excuse me … bumpy ride … hey, we’re here.” It wasn’t the American painter Leon Golub (1922-2004), I learned 10 years after I’d moved to Paris.

A few times I’ve sat with him at in a café, and it was one of those times, Boltanski told me that indeed he was on that plane jetting to Montreal. We had a nice laugh about that and I tried to account for their facial similarities but it made little difference. He enjoyed the case of mistaken identity. Then, about two years ago while walking towards Montparnasse from my studio, I heard a grumbling sound behind me, growing louder and louder. Whoa! A greenish Volkswagen was bearing down on me. My heart skipped a beat. “Hey!” I shouted at the driver, as I skittered out of the way. It was Boltanski. He laughed, gave that French shrug, waved and motored on. Art performance? No, Christian Boltanski doesn’t run over American artists in Paris, no matter how quaint that idea might be.

"No Man's Land," May 2010 at New York's Armory. Photo by James Ewing/Courtesy Park Avenue Armory.

What Boltanski does do is collect. He’s a collector par excellence, or better, an archivist on an ambitious and wonderfully absurd quest. Born in Paris in 1944, Boltanski has spent most of his adult life growing his installations into ever more enormous monuments of memory and loss. You had to be in a coma to miss the installation shots this past January of “Personne” (Nobody), the Monumenta exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. For this, Boltanski assembled piles and piles of used clothing in a tremendous grid on the floor, a poetic field intimating death, absurdity and anonymity. Worn out pants, ratty sweaters, kids’ t-shirts, out-of-fashion skirts and boots are laid out, as one writer said, “flower beds.” Or, let’s say, grave sites.  Clothes were lifted and dropped repeatedly, day in and day out, from a crane to the pounding mix of 15,000 heartbeats. Something Sisyphus could appreciate.

(Listen to the UK Guardian’s Adrian Searle and the heartbeats played at the Grand Palais during “Personne.”)

Read Max Mulhern’s artblog review of “Personne,”– Boltanski People – published on January 16, 2010.

This installation was repeated in New York’s Armory in May in a more spectacular display entitled “No Man’s Land.” This time, Boltanski employed a five-story crane to lift and then drop the used clothing onto a 25-foot pile.  In these exhibitions, Boltanski set up the Archives du Coeur as an ongoing heartbeat-gathering laboratory, but also as a counterpoint to the big bass sound of emptiness moaning from the hollow of these immense spaces. In New York, as in Paris, the heartbeats played in a pounding harmony of thousands.

While some may dismiss as slight or simpleminded, these large displays of tossed clothing roaming the world’s art spaces (Boltanski reprised this symphony of heartbeats and old clothes in Milan’s Hangar Bicocca Contemporary Art Museum) – and one can easily imagine comments like, “What is this a some new kind of French laundry?” – it impossible not to be moved by Boltanski’s vision, which is precise and all-encompassing even if it spills over across the floor. His is an art that touches an individual from afar – like a storm cloud – and from up close, like the pinch of a syringe. But instead of medical devices, he employs memory in the form of your father’s well-worn sport coat or your mother’s kitchen apron or your brother’s torn blue jeans – or your living heartbeat.

"Personnes" at the Hangar Bicocca Contemporary Art Museum on June 25, 2010 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.

For some 40 years Christian Boltanski has arranged tin biscuit boxes, yellowed identity photographs, and now giant piles of Salvation Army discards into archives, presented in profoundly absorbing walk-through installations in order to examine, present and document the exacting sense of loss this world offers through the objects we use and to some extent, fetishize. It’s a personal project on many levels; it would have to be. One can only surmise that these works constitute the artist’s own deep confrontation of the consciousness of death.

I remember back in 1992 speaking with Rachel Stella (daughter of Barbara Rose and Frank Stella, currently director of Stellar Graphics), at her gallery/loft in Paris’s 16th arrondisement.  We talked about a number of artists and Boltanski’s 1990 work, “Les Suisses morts” (The Dead Swiss), came up.  Here the artist used photographs from from Swiss obituaries in an installation; photographs the family had chosen to publish – smiling studio shots, candids, graduation poses. The installation was funerary with the images affixed to a wall of tin boxes, and others, enlarged slightly larger than life beyond the wall of tins, were strung up of head shots of now-forgotten Swiss people; memorialized shadows of once very real lives.

Ms. Stella was furious, calling it a terrible violation of someone’s privacy. I was more shocked by her attack than I was by the artist’s work, but it stuck with me.  Death and art, are of course, old friends; indeed what would one be without the other? And now when I walk through the Montparnasse cemetery, where hundreds of France’s literary and artist greats endure the great sleep, I half imagine it all to be a Boltanski installation. Parisians and tourists wander through with their maps of the famous dead buried here, placing stones on the graves of Jean-Paul Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir or Métro tickets on Serge Gainsbourg in a similar fashion as those visiting a Boltanski exhibition – with reverence, melancholy and a wistful smile. You end up listening to your own heartbeat race in the presence this death. Wars and hospitals no doubt engender similar reactions.

Christian Boltantski's "Les Suisses morts" from 1990. Monumental funerary art, praised and criticized.

While Boltanski began his career in the 1960s as a painter – he says he still paints – his signature works are clearly these Mount Rushmore-sized installations. No, the installations aren’t amusement parks, but rather specific and sober experiences, like a cold bath and no towel. The undertakings are beautiful and breathtaking, and engagingly sad. There is a touch of the preposterous in it all as well, but Boltanski’s sweeping irony is apparent, too: his own dress rehearsal for death.

As I take leave of Les Archives du Coeur, I’m thinking that this is really all about something quite simple: eternal heartbreak.

[1] One should note that the word, “record” derives from the Latin (and thus Old French), recordari, based on cor, cord- “heart.” Remember by heart, commit to memory. The noun was earliest used in law to denote the fact of being written down as evidence.

Serpentine Gallery, June 26 – August 8, 2010.
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/
Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. His next exhibition, Scared But Fresh, opens at The Orange Dot Gallery in London. His prints are available at Keep Calm Gallery.