His last show is the result of a choice he made more than ten years ago to no longer fill the entire pictorial plane with paint and to  renounce all figuration. He now  prefers to compose exhibitions with semi complete  elements leading to a whole rather than necessarily making each element a work unto itself.

This tactic is clear when we visit the studio. No paintings are on display. The sculptures are pressed up against the wall ready to be deployed, or not. Mair seems happy to leave them be and to deploy them in his head. He pulls some out for me and kind of throws them out on the floor like carpets. He arranges them and then arranges them again. There is no set arrangement. The spectator can meddle there as well, I guess. But who would ever dare rearrange a show? Well actually there is Captain Culture & Herr Doktor Kropp, a team of art consultants who will fix your show free of charge, but that is another story.

Taken together Mair’s work has an  IKEA quality to it  – decoration that is derived from a furniture sensibility. You  are always wondering about a work’s  possible function.

The objects are more or less flat. Volume is derived by assembling flat elements. There is always a painted edge or plane somewhere that suggests an orientation. Paint is applied in strips in an allotted space. It doesn’t transfer, travel or overflow.

Color is emitted and diffused on neighboring elements of the painted plane. The color becomes lighting and the art/ furniture combination is fulfilled (but do not try to read by this light). According to Mair the color is a  residue of a greater mass or color that was there before.

Enclosing colored planes gives the color mass.

His works often suggest that they were once bigger but that a part was detached and dispersed.

Mair’s work is a little messy. Canvas and wood meet imperfectly in a jury rigged fashion, painted edges are vague and fuzzy. A straight line misses its mark . . . there is a fuzziness which avoids a conclusion. It is a  controlled messiness which alleviates the seriousness that this work could deploy.

Mair likes to brush up against the line separating art and utility. Is this a bookcase I see before mine eyes? Its shelves before my hands?

You are also free to turn his pictures this way and that (look above and below).

The tug in two opposing directions — that of painting and sculpture — that many artists have felt is at work in Mair as well.

In one work the frame slides out from behind the canvas. In another the two vertical elements of the frame rise like goal posts out of the top of the picture.

Mair uses canvas and stretcher structures as the building blocks  for his objects. The canvas and chassis entente remains as a support and surface for the paint, but they have become objets d’art in their own right. This is a sly way of painting and sculpting.

The paint, however, cannot reciprocate. It is happy to lie ensconced in or on the object. It bends to the will of the canvas stretcher structure and from there it faintly diffuses itself onto the white planes of its keeper.  Overall there is a persistent flatness which means that Mair is still mostly painting.

Mair’s studio is on the edge of a long straight canal typical of the landscapes of northern Europe with their straight lines and flat lands. I ask him if his proximity to this cityscape has influenced his work and he professes that the open space is a pleasure to be in but he cannot point to any work that might be a result of this landscape.

Although Mair’s work calls to mind many other artists he himself doesn’t work within those references. He is looking to make art that can still serve a  purpose and open new perspectives. If he proposes a hint of utility it is in hopes that the spectator will go beyond that and confirm the object as art. Letting the spectator confer the status and value of the work is risky but honest.

There is a lunge towards the infinite here and it is achieved without a draughtman’s means. Mair has come far from the huis clos of the picture where all is controlled and described to a place where suggestion sets us in motion.

The bits and pieces add up to what most bodies of work are becoming: a set of  pieces to a board game that are looking to be deployed on the great board of the contemporary art game.

However it seems that the more artists create the more fragmented art becomes. The number of pieces needed for the game is infinite and their signage forever evolving. There will always be missing pieces.

I like the line that Mair is pursuing. It is  unhurried and consists of a few brush strokes and a few strokes of the saw combined with gravity’s will and a certain nonchalance. You can follow the signs or not.

Sans Titre by Tonico Lemos Auad. Made of sculpted brick.

The Bird nested in the steel and glass Grand Palais, with her blue chip eggs, while her attendant flock cobbled together tents to create ephemeral spaces in niches and alcoves around town. The artists and collectors that have the privilege to ride under her wing slid down to the Parisian soil to begin posing, hanging, leaving samples and creating  impressions.

Beneath the  din of chirping there was no buzz. It was all birds and no bees.There was a self-conscious tentativeness all about, as perhaps the art world sales people and collectors were dogged by the European financial chaos. This is in contrast to the exuberance that the FIAC as well as Frieze exhibited in the face of brewing financial storms in 2008, ’09 and ’10. Personnally I was surprised that no one stormed the fair in order to reclaim some art — to be redeemed for shelter and perhaps used for start up capital for a small business. Instead the line to get in on opening night wound its way around the palace like a long worm that was going to feed itself to the multi-materialed, multi-clolored shimmering Art Fair Bird.

Effet Pas D'Affect by Simon Nicaise. The table turns the track beneath the train.

The unheralded highlight of the fair was embodied by a drawing that was more a carte de visite or artist’s signature than drawing. A bird was drawn swooping down towards the bottom left of the picture. On the lower right was a hole left by the artist where he made a cut out on which he wrote his name and then pasted it by the bird’s beak. His name became the bird’s song. The bird sang “Marcel Duchamp”. For 385,000 euros this original Marcel Duchamp sheet music on show at the  UBU / Sophie Scheidecker space could be yours.

Trunk by Jonathon Callan consisting of previously soggy Reader's Digest.

If Cubism opened the door to infinite possibilities of form, shape and perspective, Duchamp certainly opened an even bigger door on the other side of which all and/or nothing could be art. Duchamp is the artist everyone has to deal with at one point or another. Part of knowing who one is as an artist and affirming that identity entails determining what is art and what art one is going to make . . .as well as what one will wear and what games one will play. This part of the artistic identity journey takes place on Duchamp Lane. We all pass through…and it is a toll road.

Dark Star by Pierre Besson

I am surprised that the drawing wasn’t sold the day before in the pre-opening where the millionaires get first dibs. What are collectors thinking? Is this reviewer stuck in pre-world-war-thought-mode admiring defunct prophets? Is the drawing just detritus? Are we in a post-industrial era where there will be no more readymades? Was Duchamp a charlatan and a hoax?  Do we really think that  Maurizio Cattelan is a deus ex machina phenomenon?

This sad gentle supine giant in a Moscow suburb moved me. Photo by Boris Mikhailov.

Any other Duchamp would be literally priceless on the open market. It is true that this drawing was little more than a signature . .. . and so lacked the heft of a pivotal art work such as the readymade urinal, aka Fountain.   Still, it was surprising to see a Duchamp for sale with an actual price. It somehow didn’t feel Duchampian . . . . In contrast consider Impressionism. Impressionist works continue to increase in price no matter what the economic climate. This  is because these works are caught in the buddy system where millionaires heap money on each other in an endless cycle of selling perpetually-appreciating goods to each other. They are like mother birds regurgitating food to feed their offspring and brethren.

Forking Circle In Pea Bog. Drawing by Robert Smithson which was not for sale.

Duchamp made too little to be a player in the art market. There aren’t enough works to go around. That that drawing was unmolested by a buyer infers a rewriting of modern art history, confirms a general blindness in the collectors’ ranks and a warp in the values conferred on art works today. Like a rippled 33 1/3 record warped by the sun, or a radiator, the resulting hump  distorts the music. The Art Fair Bird’s beak used to be the needle on this record which was her song. Now recorded music is all digital and warp has to be built in.

Best in show goes to Taysir Batniji principally for his admixture of humor and the history of destruction:

Sans Titre. Taysir Batniji. Photos of homes and land for sale that were destroyed by hostile forces.

For Taysir Batniji it's a free market. The Fiac crowd dialled in instantly to the real estate format.

On Monday morning I saw the Art Fair Bird spread her wings and preen herself while her passengers climbed onboard. She cocked her head for a bearing and then  launched into the air  to  soar towards her  next destination where the artists and the public  have prepared her a nest and her next meal.

Richard Jackson.

Last Tuesday a Degas painting was estimated to sell for more than twice the price it was bought for in 2000. It failed to sell. Always use the buddy system when buying and selling art.

Alfredo and Isabel AQUILIZAN's "Exodus"

The fair was spread out over 3 spaces. The Grand Palais was the central, mother ship, space and housed the blue chip galleries and works while to the west and east were her satelites.

To the West was Slick housed in a big tent and offering the youngest and rawest works of the fair. To the east was an open air sculpture area as well as the  Cour Carre housing the players whose feet are almost in the door of the Grand Palais. A quick survey proved this not to be a binding rule. Market value determined the grid.Though not as comic strip and drawing-oriented as in last years  the fair had a juvenile and even regressive undercurrent.

Notable tendencies were double-faced guitars, plastic objects deformed by heat, and muslim prayer rugs. With a smattering of  faux weapons the fair felt like The Bazaar of All Nations. A lot of works for under 10,000 euros were on offer. Your average artist can’t collect at those prices but the still-affluent can.

There were a few arab artists tackling Islamic subjects and calligraphy. The two notable ones were both women. Mounir Fatmi’s “I Like America” is an American flag transformed into a  giant Pick Up Sticks game

" I Like America" Mounir FATMI

and then Latifa Echakhch’s “Frames” which are Muslim prayer rugs with their centers cut out. Thus the praying must touch the “unclean” earth.

Bring the faithful back to earth.

The theme continued with Mounir Fatmi’s  prayer rugged skateboards in a traffic jam.

I can feel the Fatwa...

As a counterpoint is this carpet piece by Gedi Sibony that speaks above all about the sculptural process. Two pieces of the same  carpet underside to underside go  vertical and become like a door. The underside of the carpet,  ordinarily hidden, is the greater part of the piece. Both  strips are notched to create shoulders in proportion to their mass and suggests that they fit into a specific  place.  Where would that be? You can still feel its rolled-up-ness and smell the factory it came from. Simply flipping, notching and hanging prefab elements surprisingly and successfully confirms the sculptural process here.

Gedi Sibony

The door hits the floor  in this curious piece by Roman Ondak

" Door Leading To Many Directions"

I am always on the lookout for a potential boat. This inverted podium by Amalia PICA suggests that there cannot be winners without losers. Here the winner is the ballast.

Amalia PICA at the Galerie Diana Stigter

For as much as I love to find beauty in machines and the utilitarian I have yet to meet a beautiful weapon:

This year's gun by Frank Perrin.

But I am tired of seeing pictures of Taliban soldiers crouching on a craggy outcrop of rock.

Taliban Chair by Emeric Lhuisset and Afghan artist Aman Mojadidi. This presupposes a beach. If terrorists went on vacation they might change their point of view.

Otherwise just give me what appears to be artistic vandalism such as Mr. Kintera’s cut lamp post:

Kristof Kintera's lamp is from Prague.

Only time will tell what will become of the 26-year old FIAC and ages-old human art in general. My favorite work was the 1,000-year watch. Designed by Patrick Bernatchez  in collaboration with a Swiss  horloger the 1,000-year  watch will complete a 24 hour cycle in 1,000 years. The watch is ticking and yet the movement of the hands is imperceptible. A future centenarian may see 5 minutes fly by in his or her lifetime.

Self winding, I hope.

Meanwhile someone will need to take out the trash. We are what we throw out. The holy receptacle so hermetic, the psychopomp between the new and the used deserves the sarcophagraphic touch by Blokhin and Kuznetsov:

"Sarcophagus" by Blokhin and Kuznetsov.

At the Gagosian Gallery  ( Mr. Gagosian was awarded the French Legion d’Honneur on Monday the 19th of October for opening a gallery in Paris)  there was a guard assigned to protecting a delicate Giacometti bronze that was clamped down to its pedestal with two big pieces of steel. Everyone’s attention was turned towards the guard. The price for dismissing the guard — $10,000,000 for that little Giacometti. A small black and blue Warhol of Jackie Kennedy in mourning  hung on the same wall as a 1930′s Picasso portrait of a woman. Warhol’s shadowing created the signature Picasso  trick of putting a profile of the sitter down the middle of the sitter’s face seen frontally. No photos allowed. Everywhere else people snapped away with great abandon.

Art and Design continue to honeymoon together. One confounding piece for me was  Sleeping Hermaphrodite by Barry X Ball. It is a re-rendering, slick up  in black marble of the original white marble work housed in the Louvre. The body has been buffed to our teen magazine standard of physical beauty. This is art meets interior decoration and it went immediately for 450.000 euros. That’s a good deal compared to the one in the Louvre ( not for sale).

Or is this like when Picasso sits down to repaint Manet's Dejeuner sur L'Herbe?

While we are here let me thank all of the artists of the world who continue to work and produce culture fodder  for the world to engage and trade with on all levels. Most artists continue to do this against all odds and without going on strike ( because no one is asking them to work, really?). It is fairs like this that can fuel the hopes that at the end of the tunnel there could be cash.

"Erasure" by Adamo. The strikers believe that they'll get a stick like this for retirement. They're right.

Artists I spoke to said that it was getting harder and harder to get invitations to the FIAC while tickets cost 30 euros a piece. The FIAC is a real bazaar but you know it is an art fair when you ask “How much?”  The answer is never artist-as-collector friendly. Perhaps they should let artists shoot at pyramides of cans and fish for rubber ducks to try and win some tickets to redeem for high quality art?  Artists need other  artist’s art in their life spaces, after all.

At the FIAC it takes a leap of faith and bulging pockets to leave with anything . .  . and even with empty pockets  the guards asked us if we were stealing art as we left. This said, a gallery representing Louise Bourgeois was selling posters to some of her former shows for 35 euros. The Louvre Museum was taking orders for etchings by well known artists such as Tony Cragg and Guisseppe Penoni, price tag – 250 euros . . . unsigned of course. Worthless then? Yes. All the more reason, then, to buy one. It let’s you know what you like. I bought the Penoni.

Assembled like bird’s nests and yet fully exposed and not fully anchored or integrated into the external beams of the centre on which they sit, Kawamata’s wooden cabin structures contrast greatly with their host glass and steel structure. Built of planks most of which seem to be non structural they evoke a gamut of sheltering possibilities from urban allotment shacks and shanty town homes to ersatz work site shelters and offices. They are eerily vacant and suggest a Matthew Barney Drawing Restraint Moment where art is being made in the most improbable places.

We aren’t allowed the pleasure of climbing up to and into them and thus relive the childhood experience of the tree house. Because they are unattainable these outposts become metaphor boxes akin to castles in the sky as seen in  japanese animes. Perhaps there is a scale game going on here whereby Kawamata is suggesting that we somehow wouldn’t fit into these assemblies. Perhaps they are the magnified images of tiny things.We are left, then, to dream of climbing up into one thus inhabiting an inner city outpost, deliciously suspended above and beyond the masses.

The incongruity of these plank clouds dotting the Pompidou doesn’t suggest symbiosis but rather benign parasitism. The groups of boards recall a swarm of bees,  a nomadic colony creating a “structure” by virtue of the way individuals converge to form a group. Weather, material deterioration, exhibition schedules and derogations will send this stuff on its way to regroup elsewhere.

This isn’t the first time that the Pompidou has housed a temporary structure. The Japanese architect Shigeru BAN used to have his cardboard offices on the roof. It was there that he designed his portion of the new Centre Pompidou Metz which is currently just a few days away from completion. Ban is well known for cardboard structures including the Nomad Museum and his paper emergency shelters for UNHCR. The paper shelters consisted of cardboard tubes covered in plastic. The tubes were cheap and easy to manufacture on site thus eliminating transportation costs.

Kawamata and Ban are cardboard soul mates but at opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. A sheet of this ubiquitous packaging material is almost fragile enough to do origami and yet when combined in layers and compressed can be used to build a museum. Kawamata takes his chances and opts for fragility while Ban must follow long term imperatives, including housing Kawamata creations.

Inside the museum Kawamata reverts to cardboard and  has set up a children’ workshop in a cardboard niche within the museum. A monumental gateway to this workshop that seems to have been eroded by the sands of time lends historic weight to the corrugated paper. Sound is muffled. We learn that cardboard is highly transformable and the workshop reveals many of its different states whether it be a solid wall or the support for a series of folds.  We slowly begin to see out of the cardboard box.

Elsewhere in the workshop space were learning stations consisting of metal closets complete the binders containing information sheets, a TV with a video and a fold out table. These are learning outposts for a country with neither computers nor internet.

The playfulness and delicateness of this mixture of corrugated paper works and woodworks is heartwarming even if a certain sad vacantness pervades. Cubic cardboard structures  lodged in the pipework like lost  balloons that escaped someone’s hands dot the Pompidou’s ceiling.Does the sadness come from ours and the artist’s knowledge that his work will disappear?  Kawamata’s structures as compared to the Pompidou present us with degrees of the temporary and the cobbled as compared to the engineered. How long will it be before Kawamata’s boxes become debris?

Humans depend on the temporary for short term solutions but we crave the solid and the enduring. As witnessed by today’s museum-building race we are constantly creating permanence to house impermanence. One social advantage with  temporary projects is that they give us time to either adopt or reject them. Perhaps the label “temporary” is a ploy to place new and potentially  antagonistic buildings within old quarters. Happy to know that it will all go the locals forget about it and then, before long, no one can live without it.

In any case Kawamata will never derange for long if he deranges at all. Here at the Pompidou he searches to establish outposts in far and unexploitable  places that are in sight and just out of arm’s length. He is interesting noise between information nodes, a gremlin dancing in and around the permanent collection pulling our gaze upwards and over, happily distracting us from the main feature.

When mentioning bagging a work of art we think of a collector shooting money at the latest work to come out of the hottest  studio. But Vincent Who’s work keeps this hunting metaphor in the studio where the artist is trying to capture, hold and materialize that moment when the art he or she has been tracking is discovered , shot and bagged. This isn’t recreational, catch and let go hunting. It is hunting for keeps. Like a hunter, the artist brings back the work from the wilderness, the wilderness of creation. By chance the work is hung on a wall or put on a pedestal as the prize and the result of relentless tracking. If it sustains us, the artist is a hero.

The works composed of wood have a peasant feel to them. They hint at a world without animals, or a world in which the animal has become a citizen with rights including the right not to be hunted–hence these sculptures. They are as basic as a log cabin. As opposed to the pig’s head in Lord of The Flies, there is no decay and there was no animal sufferring. They invoke stags and rhinos and derive their energy from this invocation. But there are no black beady eyes staring back at us and pulling us into other lights and times; just holes or knots of wood. There are no pelts, only bark and rubber skins. No animal died so that another might eat. Unless the artist is making sacrifices in order to bring this work to us? These details feed the idea that the artists creates his quarry with materials at hand and in so doing bags it.

The head composed of basketballs, a bucket and real (?) horns is especially intriguing. The choice of material suggests that Vincent Who has unleashed the animal in the objects of play. The trophy is not a silver cup but the ball transfigured into the beast the player became  during the match.

In a Damien Hirst gesture of sacralizing the object, gold leaf  cauterizes the extremities of these sculptures: a shovel’s tip, the cut  tip of a log, the point of a horn. The gold wraps these points of potential violence, growth and work in muteness and finality. It would have been fascinating to see these works flower. Because they won’t, the metaphor of  creation as a hunt returns. More meat and art are always needed and it needs to be fresh.

After the initial guffaw we see that there is a lot of wishful thinking going on here which is the result of an inner rhetoric of non violence.  Vincent Who cries out for immortality.   He plays at killing and, iconographically speaking, positions his work in the place of the kill and yet he wants eternal life. In a series entitled “Here and There” he mashes up national flags (i.e  the British flag becomes that of Belgium the Swiss flag that of Bolivia) and transposes national symbols suggesting cross pollination of nations without war.

Vegetal and animal energies are channeled by human sign language signifying deep cultural clashes between , literally, billions of people, and yet no blood is being spilled. In all fairness this could work over time by suggestion. The work is slick. Vincent seems to be a nomad rifling through debris on several different continents and the show is on a communication/web site design premises suggesting extreme symbolic control. And yet, contrived or not, there is a non-slickness to it  suggesting exuberant restlessness and well meaning naivite.

In any case, the heads recall Fall and the hunting season when proteins are trapped to round out the cereal and fruit that was stored after the harvest. Imagine. The branches of bare trees rustle in the artist’s face in the Fall wind. The artist has no gun and so, at the end of the day, of the hunt,  picks up sticks and goes home. The rest is an exhibition.

Alba is , in her words, obsessed with cancelling the usefulness of objects as well as with table legs and their standard 72cm length. A week earlier she had shown me a large wooden die and a faggot of table legs that were meant to be screwed into the die on each face. The number of legs per face were to correspond to the number on the face of the die.

This results in an object that evokes either a virus or a creature from the Burgess shale.

" I-de" pronounced ee-day which is a play on words between 'ee-day" which is french for idea and "day" which is french for die.

Luck is a fundamental component of every human enterprise. Behind every action a pair of dice is rolling. Machiavelli insisted that the Prince be aware that he was Prince mostly by luck. His job was to never admit it. Many artist have employed luck and randomness in their work. Here, Pistolesi has cancelled luck. First, one of the dice is missing. Where is it? Is it in use? Second, this die cannot be rolled. Its uselessness  stops time,  stops  gaming, and  reaffirms the non utilitarian nature of art. In this process “I-de” becomes art because it cannot function, even though the utility of the table legs remain whole. This die can stand on sides 4, 5 and 6. Standing on sides 1, 2 and 3 it will fall over unless supported by a wall. However, “I-de” invokes walls and/or flooring at the point of each table leg. It is easy to imagine it enclosed in an unmarked  box  like Schroedinger’s cat. We would always be uncertain of its position. Heaven forbid we should mark the box like a die and roll it. What would be the true roll? The internal or external result? Forget it. By the time you’ve boxed it it would be too big to roll anyway.

Where do people like to throw the dice? In games. Backgammon, for example,  presents the sublime opportunity to make the most of a roll. In board games  winning and losing are clearly defined and the game time is finite. Not so in art, if we consider it as a game. We can spend a lifetime rolling and never know what we rolled or if we have won or lost. There is no board but rather just one big slippery slope. “I-de” highlights one of the strategies that artists can employ to skirt appraisal and outcome in unfavorable or confusing  circumstances  and gain a home advantage in the process: change the rules and block the dice. Or, create a system wherein the element of luck and its properties are controlled by the artist. In other words, load the dice.

This piece is a progenitor of  Duchamp’s iron, of course and the joyful cheating that characterized his work (he loaded the dice, indifferently, of course). Use the iron and you’ll rip a shirt. Pistolesi’s die cannot tumble. The useless creates sacredness. Nothing will be broken or fixed which  is a pronouncement with an air of finality to it like that of a roll of the dice. Still, while  ”I-de” is stopped  other dice are rolling and contingency is still at work.

No Title. A table made only of legs would look great. In the meantime, we have useless tableware. A tabletop would have been too useful.

72 centimetres (28 inches) is the standard length for table legs in the human world. This measure creates a plane transiting human domestic space across the face of the planet. This notion of measuring human presence and needs as well as the notion of canons of ideal proportion was recently  encountered in this blog with the artist Antti Laitenen. Laitenen measures his existence on this earth via direct confrontation with natural forces such as tide and solid earth.

Does the natural world  roll dice ? It can. In a project entitled Aqua Dice I plan to set a pair of dice out at sea and have them rolled by wave and wind action. Nature won’t use them but maybe natural forces  will determine another probability curve for future rolls.

The old G blade?

Speaking of luck, I am glad that the guillotine has been cancelled in France! While walking through the Tuileries garden in central Paris I saw what I thought was a reminder of capital punishment a la Francaise when heads, in addition to dice, used to roll. In France when upper management messes up they still  say “Heads will roll!”. In fact these weren’t blades but rather the arcs of a circle. It was chilling to see such a formal coincidence near the Place de La Concorde where the guillotine was working overtime during the Revolution.

No! It's art! One of six "Arcs de Cercle Complementaires" by Francois Morellet.

Shit Head. One of the earliest works.

The survey is organized  chronologically from beginning to current. Dung, with its fibrous texture, is there from the beginning. (I recall Ofili’s self portrait from art school of a boy sitting on a toilet with his pants at his ankles). Dung ties the show together without ever being developed as a sculpting or painting material in its own right. In ball form it serves as painting pedestal, a solar, earthly or meteoric reference in his orbital compositions and a cute puppet-like entity that follows his subjects wherever they go. But the sculptural potential as enunciated by ” Shit Head” is abandoned. Rather, it establishes a formal identity throughout all of the works and creates ambiguities between the human forms and the piles of dung.

Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary

Up until 1999 or so the paintings are exuberant, sexy, rythmical and musical. They are like a fantastic series of album covers employing glitter, resin and magazine cut outs. Offili’s mojo is on fire. The notorious Virgin painting is an  eye opener. Unbeknownst to this writer the painting abounds with balls of female genitalia. It was the controversial dung that was the red herring. Offili’s 90′s feel like 1970′s kaleidoscopes on steroids.

Detail from Virgin

Next we come to the “Upper Room”, a plywood chapel designed by David Adjaye to house a series of 13 chalice bearing (Holy Grail?) Macaque monkies, a primate known for its strict hierarchical society as well as posessing  keen compassion. I am told that the monkey also symbolises sexuality in Christian iconography. There are six in profile on each side of the chapel  and are identical save for their colors which seem to be under some kind of aural sway . They lead to the head monkey which is facing us and painted in gold.  You may need a monkey on your back to fully appreciate this work which seems more like Ofili’s private chapel.  It is at this point that we start to wish for unholy alliances to crown all of these provocative proximities but Offili won’t let them consumate. The Virgin feeding the monkey  or even loving it as in the film ” Max Mon Amour’ where Charlotte Rampling falls in love with a gorilla, would have been exciting.

The upper room at the Tate.

The next room is contains larger and darker paintings whose subjects are set in the jungle. A setting resulting from Ofili’s relocation from London to Trinidad. Has Ofili found lasting love? Red abounds and couples enlace. There are more beads than ever and the light is dimming. We then pass back into a room full of earlier  exuberant watercolors of hairdos and odalisques. The heads of hair are joyful and the braids and clumps evoke the fibrous dung balls.

'Blossom', 1997, by Chris Ofili - © Chris Ofili

The nudes are flat and brown. Their eyes and mouths are left blank so that the paper comes through. This space is delicately decorated with colorful lines but they also transform these nudes into masks which in turn has a powerful affect on our own body as we seem to slide into the body of the nude herself. These works sum up the joyful provocation that Ofili has always been engaged in. Dung balls, black hairdos and brown odalisques are self referring but to what end? All we can do is laugh it off and the humorousness of the works enables this.

Chris Ofili, "Watercolor"

We then take up where we left off with the painting and enter a dark room with four tall dark blue paintings. It is hard to see in the weak moonlight of the pictures. We discern vegetal things in two,  a hanging with a serenade in a third and a pair of horseman in the last one. This is a truncated series and it is a place where Offili could have spent more time letting the moon wax to reveal murderous ongoings in the jungle, for example. Instead we wander out of the semi darkness into a room too far.

Here Ofili has de-typified his entire opus. He has been pulled  from the dark places to which he had  retreated, or wandered, and is now in full moult in plain daylight. Sloppy monsters and elongated nudes in uncertain landscapes are  represented in the most naive manner conceivable. The paint has been thinned and the glitter has blown away. The frailness of the figuration and composition is abetted by  a choice of size and format that clearly overwhelm the artist.

Les Demoiselles de Trinidad.

As works to show to the public they are of questionable value but as works that will enable the artist to evolve they are invaluable. In an ode to reality TV we see the face of creation that is often kept out of sight. Ofili is cooking with  a new recipe and new ingredients. Will a meal take form before everything boils away and all that is left is a  black crust at the bottom of the pot?

" The Claw is our Master!" from Toy Story.

After we pass under elegant stone arches and through the filigree of the Grand Palais’ doors we hit a wall. Its height blocks our view of the Palace  and it consists of identical, stacked, rusting boxes each marked with a meaningless number. They don’t have openings. On top of the wall is a row of what appear to be reading lamps inviting us to look closely and become cozy with a source of information. But of course the lights are far too small to light the whole wall and at our level we are almost in darkness.  This is the Boltanski coda, compartimentalization , anonymity and humanity reduced to small homogenous spaces.

Pick a number. One person's secret is another's need to know.

We walk around the wall and seem to enter a factory. The wall of boxes has been replaced by a wall of sound. A most unexpected spectacle sits on the far side of the palace:  a 10 metre high mountain of colored shreds of fabric over which is a crane that plunges a giant red claw into the mound. The claw rises up with a mass of dangling shreds and when it reached the crane arm it stops for a moment before releasing the fabric  which falls with flapping grace back onto the pile.

To get to the pile we pass through a grid stretching from end to end of the palace. It consists of neatly arranged squares of jackets and other outerwear lying flat on the ground and on each other. It is a thin layer like a dusting. We have no idea who wore this stuff. Each square is lit with a neon light and contains its own soundtrack of industrial noise like a unique  workshop/ensemble within the factory . Is it trains or just machinery in general?

At the foot of the mound we realise that the shreds are all manner of used clothing. The claw descends and hovers over the apex not able to decide where to clasp next. There is no transfer from one pile to another. There is no further redistribution throughout the grid. The industrial action is Sisyphean and although the sound suggests heavy industry working at full capacity we  see nothing either being produced or destroyed. What kind of a factory is this? Who’s in charge?

Clearance.

To the side of the pile Boltanski asks us to participate in a paralell project. He asks to record our heartbeat so that he can compile the heartbeats of humanity. Here we learn that the industrial sounds are in fact a montage of human heartbeats.

The author becoming heartbeat number 000436.

Boltanski is fascinated with history and the Shoah in particualar. The Shoah was the first time that the killing of humans became industrialized. One of its legacies is the human quest to remember that such things happened in order that they may not happen again. But of course humans forget. They need to after such acts of folly otherwise they couldn’t continue to function. This show suggests that there doesn’t seem to be any more space available for us to remember the disappeared. There is no demand for this clothing or for the stories of those who wore it. We will buy new clothing which will be added to the pile . . .

The grid and its lighting evoke large  sorting centres ( aka refugee camps). These centers are the portals through which the displaced and disinherited usually pass. They are usually but not always gates to Hell . . . or to nowhere. Boltanski, aided by winter,  twists our concept of Hell. It is no longer a place where we burn but rather a place where we lose our heat. The coats on the cold cement floor promise warmth but the clothing is as cold as the ground. Humanity’s great disappearances become a thermal phenomonon.  Pictures of recent history flood the mind. All of these “no bodies” once stood naked in line somewhere, on the way to total heat loss.

The skins of human civilisation. Notice the fast forward sign suggested by the lighting.

This show pits our fascination with industrial processes against the horror of dehumanisation via the same processes. The great machine here is the human heart,  our metabolic furnace. This heat produces the zone of bodily heat in which we flourish. But it can be used to produce mortal cold as well. As long as our hearts beat this kind of factory will be running somewhere. Even though history furnishes us with large supplies of this kind of sordid history there will always be  some  kind of demand for this output.

In french "personnes' can mean either "people" or 'nobodies". Here we see the man himself.

‘Personnes’, Grand Palais, Paris, until February 21. www.monumenta.com

The new Jurg Conzett bridge. Welcome to Vals.

The new asymmetrical bridge replaces a light steel bridge dating from the 1920s. The bridge’s 80-foot steeply arced span  springs out  from a tight convergence of main road, houses, mountainside and river. It aims just to the left of the village church and fountain and drops you onto the small hill leading down into the snug, low lying,  house-lined main square of the village.

Dorfplatz. Parking for snow only.

When you first arrive at the bridge after your long journey ( because Vals is far from everywhere) you glimpse the  bodily and spiritual refreshment awaiting you just a few steps away on the other side. But prepare to be transported elsewhere in the interval. As you cross, the walls curve high above your head, obliterating all of the usual visual experiences associated with crossing a bridge.   You can’t see or hear the water. The vistas carved by running water are eclipsed and you can’t watch the trout swimming in your shadow. Once you are in  mid-span you can stop. There is never much traffic. You are now somewhere deep inside of the bridge as if in a tunnel or in a room or on some kind of observation deck, observing your isolation from the danger flowing beneath your feet. Its massiveness girdles you like a battleship. You hit a comfort zone  in the hands of strength and safety. For some, though, being cut off from the water and the pleasures of being suspended over it makes the experience analogous to crossing the river stuck inside of a giant rubber boot.

The wall.

For centuries the Valsers lived in fear of the elements, especially water. When they weren’t being crushed by avalanches they were being flooded by the river. Mastering, exploiting and respecting the elements has been their creed, and this bridge embodies their will to stand up to the elements with stone and engineering. Form and spirit  combine to make this arch appear to be a natural shape hewn out of stone by erosive forces.

"Stone and Water", the Vals slogan.

The architect Jurg Conzett is an engineer and former Peter Zumthor employee. He has riffed in the bridge architecture on the same long, thin granite slabs-stacked-like-bricks  construction of the Zumthor /Vals Thermal Baths, in the engineering of which he was also involved. In the bridge, thin granite slabs are arranged vertically like  a hand fan at 90 degrees to the street.

Curiously everyone who sees the bridge, or any other major works in town, assumes that it is a Zumthor creation. The fame of the Baths is so great and widespread that a boomerang effect has made Vals into a sort of Zumthorville. I asked a member of staff at the town hall if there were some kind of Master Plan for transforming  the village to which he replied ‘No! This is a democracy!” Then he showed me the Zumthor plans for transforming the dusty and gritty asphalt  mountain road by which we came to Vals into a newly stone-paved black-and-white walk and drive way. . . in the spirit of the Yellow Brick Road? Who’s the Wicked Witch of the East then? And who would be Wizard?

An earlier Conzett bridge.

It wasn’t until the advent of the baths that any architects worked in Vals. Before then buildings were constructed in the local idiom which included specific granite roof tiling.  A builder absorbed this language (no women builders I’m afraid) while learning to build. Today regional architects expand the local idioms. Their objects have clear origins, as witnessed in the barns dotting the hillsides.

No matter what architect holds the reins future construction in the village will be the combined result of the needs, will and vision of the people (as persuaded by smooth talk of course) and resolutely modern/traditional ( or “motrad”) structures with only frugal adornment.

As seen from upriver.

I don’t know how hard it was to have democracy cross this hefty bridge when it came to it. But just one step  onto it confirms that  it is lithe like an athlete and its structural dexterity enables us to step briefly into a zone of  weightlessness at its apex. Crossing this bridge is a short but remarkable trip.

"Pour Commencer" or "To Start With". Nathalie Elemento 2002. My daughter wants me to make this for our new flat.

Through the window a combination desk/bookcase by Nathalie Elemento beckons. It is functional but it is an object that seeks to be the architect of its space. Your home will have to fit it and not vise versa. This will be a problem.

In an ode to Claus Oldenberg we cross the room to turn off the lights with a very large, but not giant, lightswitch. Though not thoughtfully installed it never the less shifts the scale of the space without denaturing it.

N. Elemento. It makes a big "Click". It is the memory of place that is the deformer in this show.

It is not a  will to subvert the useful that is transforming the furniture. Rather we see furniture succumbing to our sadness at leaving as well as determining the shape of the new home. This is epitomized by “Entre” or “Between”. We have a chair but nowhere to sit. The practice of sitting between two chairs (le cul entre deux chaises) is not tolerated here either. We have to find another place to put the chair back down . . . unless we wish to wander the world in a moving van which we never unpack?

"Entre" or "Between". The hinge reveals the interior and creates a new corner within an enclosed space. N. Elemento.2002

Moving home is a painful. Money may be gained but many intangibles are lost. Their is a physical loss as well; the familiar creaking of floors, light and shadows at certain times of day and the configuration of walls that  you used to navigate through. Peter Soriano’s sculpture “”Other Side #23″ is, among other things,  a culmination of the desire  to take the house with us.

"Other Side #23" P. Soriano . . . in the pure tradition of vanishing points and perspective. Which way should we go? Here the round is triangular.

The number of elements put into play here thrills me. With a deft “pschtt” of spray paint  a few grams of pigment have taken posession of the mass of the walls. The cable strung between the arrow head and the tip of a “T” square compresses these mechanical/architectural drawing symbolizing dimensions without deforming them.  I hear Figaro singing out the dimensions of his new bridal bedroom. The painted symbols become load bearing. The wire pushes and pulls. Its line continues beyond itself while encouraging us to close the walls like a book or a suitcase and take them and their contents with us. It also  seems to keep a corner of our disappearing world intact.  Of course, the triangle/ arrowhead created by the two walls and the cable suggest a teepee as an alternative solution. This piece is indelible for me and I see it  in every corner I look into now.

Fragmentation is what Pierre Buraglio proposes with the lower left hand corner of a poorly maintained window. The caulking could be new: was the window recently replaced? The green pane seems like a kind of graph. Perhaps with each new abode our view through the window is tinted. Or perhaps the house is under water? This piece is achingly sad  but the right angle at its base promises stability and  structure if we can get the curves of the graph right . . .

"Fenetre" or "Window". P. Buraglio. The corner is the the point from which the world expands.

Finally, the architectural detail common to all coming and going is the door.  Emmanual Van der Meulen’s painting  ”Untitled” proposes a painted one with a floating architrave that the door seems to wear on its shoulders. It is not a door but simply door. The black entrance(way) is strangely riveting. Although on the other side one would half expect to meet with a scewed and lumpy funny house floor that would  send us sprawling, we fully gather the experience of passing through yet another doorway, from one garden to another, in our search for Paradise on earth.

"Untitled #61". Van der Meulen.