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35 Parisian New Year's Resolutions

Image: I Still Shoot Film

Text: Guillermo Martinez de Velasco

1-Don't go to the Eiffel Tower on New Year's Eve

2-Actually do that thing where I pick an area of the Louvre per week, and visit it very attentively

3-Buy a bicycle and throw away my carte imagineR

4-Actually go to Château de Vincennes, not just talk about going

5-Promise to go to one of the presentations/lectures/workshops at Beaubourg or the Fondation Cartier per month

6-Don't cheap out on French Vogue or Egoïste

7-Finally get my membership for the Hôtel-de-Ville Library and The Bibliothèque Fornier / Go study in these libraries

8-Get photographed by The Sartorialist, at least

9-Volunteer at Shakespeare and Co. (But also check out the Abbey Bookstore)

10- Promise to learn more about wines, it's embarrassing that you always go for the 4-5 euro Bordeaux

Minuit à Musée d'Orsay ~ The American Friends Gala

Photo: Anastasia Nielsen

Text: Natalie Turturro

At 7 pm sharp on Saturday November twelfth, a group of prompt and elegant patrons stood outside Musée d’Orsay.  Flicking cigarettes and talking gaily in tight circles, they waited for their exclusive entrance inside the museum to mark the launch of the American Friends of Musee d’Orsay (AFMO). 

Cork popping and hors d’oeuvres noshing (pinky out!) was to last until midnight.  I stood alone, hoping that my borrowed Chanel heels wouldn’t turn into soppy pumpkin on the twelfth stroke by those two massive clocks. 

The gala was sold out: 300 well-to-do members of the Franco-American community had come to see what museum president Guy Cogeval dubbed “the crème de la crème of our collection.”  An aura of sophistication danced around the ground floor statues in silver stilettos and polka dotted bow ties.  The night was ripe with celebration to foster American and French artistic relations. 

Performance from far away in Montmartre

Photo: From the video “Déjà Vu” by Filippo Berta After this weeks many contemporary art fairs you may think the Parisian art scene is up for a little, well deserved break. But there's still new art to be explored, and fun openings to go to. One of them is the exhibition PIXELPOPS! featuring performance videos by a large number of international artists.  PIXELPOPS! is an ongoing, traveling series of annual digital art exhibits, founded in 2005 by the artist and web developer Colleen Tully. The series changes with each year's new locale and the creativity each new curator brings. Year after year, the online catalogue continues to grow and provide new resonances and global connections in artistic interpretation. This years curator of PIXELPOPS! is Paris based Philip Tonda from Transient Projects To People. The theme of the exhibit is "Performance from far away": More specifically performance art made distinctly for the video camera. The videos are shown in the miniature-sized, but large-minded gallery space Nouvel Organon, located on an eclectic street in the lower part of Montmartre, creating an intimate setting for an intriguing art experience.  The opening event takes place Friday October 28, 2011 from 7pm. Between 10pm and midnight there'll be music provided by Graham Peel from the Paris/Berlin based WITTY BANTER. The event will be live broadcasted on TPTP's website. Details: TPTP in cooperation with Nouvel Organon : 20 Rue Muller, 75018 Paris. (Metro Chateau Rouge (line 4) and Anvers (line 2). Further information can be found on the website of TPTP.

 

Poésie et Prose

Text: Emily Ruck-Keene

The Irish cultural centre in the 5^th arrondissment is known for a consistently high-quality events programme, celebrating a wealth of Irish culture in all art forms. This month, from October 20-22, it is putting on a packed weekend of free poetry and prose, where readings include works from both contemporary Irish and English language writers. Friday evening will have a memoir theme, Saturday afternoon has been organised to appeal to a younger audience, and Saturday evening will examine the detective novel, or polar (slang for roman policier).

Even before Dublin being crowned the fourth UNESCO City of Literature earlier this year, Ireland has never needed to prove her literary credentials. Amongst other writers, the event will feature familiar faces such as Jennifer Johnston (former Whitbread Book Award winner) and Keith Ridgway (whose next novel Hawthorn & Child is to be published in 2012). Poets will be represented by Enda Wyley and Michael O’Loughlin, whose Widow’s Prayers feels like the brilliant and coarse result of letting Stephen Dedalus wander around The Waste Land while reading Proust. As the publicity for the event proudly states, “his poetry has a marked visual quality”.

For me, it is the soirée polar which presents the biggest attraction during the event. It will be especially fascinating to hear Declan Hughes on the subject, whose novels add a contemporary twist to the hard-boiled American novel. Ireland has so much to contribute to this genre with its history of violent secrets: from the religious to the political, lower to upper class. It is appropriate that this evening should take place in France, where the polar developed a dark and political shade with writers like Didier Daeninckx using crime fiction as a vehicle for crime truths.

Paris is not black and white..It’s grey!

A conversation between Susie Hollands, Director of Vingt Paris and Philip Tonda, artist and curator.

Image: Kristijan Radakovic

Philip: When did you first get the idea of creating an artist-in-residence program?

Susie: I got the idea when I came to Paris in 2003 or 2004 to pursuit my own artistic ambitions. I met a lot of people and everybody seemed to have something in common - they came because Paris is a good place for creative souls. However, it's really hard to find a place to live and work here!

At this time I was also starting an art gallery with some friends. While this was not necessarily a sustainable undertaking, it did give some insight to the Parisian art scene and the situation for artists: Rents are sky high and there are very few spaces available. But artists need space to work.

Then we developed a community of people who nevertheless lived here, artists, photographers, writers etc. And this community has grown to what Vingt Paris Magazine is today. The idea of a residency project is really an extension of this.

2011 Nuit Blanche: Montmartre / Anvers (18e)

 
Image: Frances Dubois
Text: Susie Kahlich

Some very cool stuff is happening around Montmartre / Anvers, where everything is within a stone’s throw of a bar or café open all night to keep your whistle wet and your nuit, well, blanche:

For reasons I have yet to discover, Montmartre is home to frequent parades and Nuit Blanche is no different.  Nuit Blanche 2011 kicks off with Italian artist Marcello Maloberti and his troupe forming a human caravan, parading 70 porcelain tigers through the winding streets up to the Arènes de Montmartre off rue Chappe, where the tigers will be on display throughout the night. The official literature says this performance is somehow supposed to combine art and social utopia, which makes sense if your utopia includes socializing with porcelain jungle cats.

Not to be a big creep about it, but as someone without children it’s a treat to get a peek inside Paris’ elementary schools without worrying about being arrested.  At the École Élementaire Foyatier, Icelander Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation “The End – Rocky Mountains” will be projected on five screens positioned around the gymnasium, while in the school courtyard artist Virgina Yassef’s mythological paleontology findings are on display.

At the Gymnase Ronsard, get a preview of art collective BGL’s installation “Entertainment + problems”, on exposition in October at the MAC / VAL.  Using recycled materials and found objects to evoke a huge bonfire, the piece is meant to “tickle the urban tribal instinct.”  Kind of like Burning Man, without the sand, hippies and actual flames.

Befitting an area rife with sex clubs, transvestites and hookers, Jesper Just's experimental film No Man Is An Island plays at Le Divan du Monde.  A meditation on masculinity, gender roles and societal masks set in a dying strip club, the film is centered around interpretations of Roy Orbison’s classic broken-heart song, “Crying.”

Montmartre's famous funicular will be transformed to a moving heartbeat in France Dubois’ installation “Extra-systole”.  Bathing the cab in pulsing red light that refer to a beating heart, watch the pulse slow down on the cab’s descent and speed up on the cab’s rise, just like your own heartbeat will be doing if you decide to walk the 200+ steps to the top.

At the top of the hill at Place Louise Michel, just in front of the very Catholic Sacre Coeur, artist Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil recreates his tribute to the 400^th anniversary of Galileo’s presentation of his telescope on Mount Gianicolo.  Using 500 candles, the installation maps out what the sky will look like 100 years in the future on 1 October 2111. And while you’re at the top, visit the Église St. Pierre and watch Adrian Paci’s 35mm film “Per Speculum” a beautiful and pastoral work depicting children playing with mirrors, slings and the reflection of sunlight.

More installations and performances are scattered around the Butte, but one of the most interesting is Belgian artist Filip Gilissen’s installation at the Église St. Jean de Montmartre just across from Place des Abbesses.  Titled “The Winner Takes It All”, the work will only be activated once during the night, when the 5000^th visitor triggers a golden explosion inside the beautiful Art Nouveau church.  Easily revisited in between verres du vin, check in repeatedly to try and catch the 5000^th visitor, or park yourself at one of the cafés across the Place and start counting. If you haven't had too much to drink, race across the Place and into the church as soon as you get to 4999.  Bonne Nuit!

 

Tragédiennes de l'Opéra

Image: Exposition Official Poster   
Text: Natalie Turturro

Opera is a religion, and the house that Charles Garnier built is the cathedral where Paris comes to worship its divas.  As I walk up and down the Grand Staircase and through the Grand Foyer trying to find my way to the exhibit “Tragédiennes de l’Opéra,” it is as though I’m walking through a hall of ghosts.  There is a rehearsal going on inside the auditorium, and I can hear faint operatic shrills in the background.  It’s eerie, yet appropriate.  I find the exposition tucked away in what seems to be a dusty back corner on the second floor.  It is shrouded in darkness with chiaroscuro spotlights on fading black-and-white photographs.  There are headphones attached to the wall, so I take in the exhibit while listening to celebrated arias by long-dead sopranos.  It feels just like when the lights dim in the theatre before the curtain goes up.  I become appropriately soothed and embrace the spookiness of it all.

The terms diva and tragédienne dance in my mind, and I wonder if Beyoncé's song “Diva” was inspired by the classic tragédiennes of French opera. Are the famous tragédiennes: Gabrielle Krauss, Rose Caron, Lucienne Bréval, etc... ‘female versions of a hustla’ from a former generation?  How can divas of today continue to carry their "ardent torch of beauty"?

"Tragédiennes de l'Opéra" teaches us how:

1. Obliterate the image of runway models on nicotine and champagne diets from your aesthetic memory.  A tragédienne’s life is usually hanging on by the thinnest of threads; at the very least one can hold onto one’s ample proportions!  Thus, we must look to the voluptuous Adele, and eat sumptuous treats from Dalloyau.

2. It is a requirement to own at least one fabulous headdress and subsequent matching jewelry.  For daily purposes, a well-adorned sparkly headband from Le Bon Marché will suffice.

Musée Arts et Métiers- Métro... Ticket pour une Expo

Image: Official "Metro...Ticket pour une expo" poster

Text: Emily Ruck-Keene

Whilst the Paris metro isn’t everyone’s favourite place to spend an afternoon, the exhibition ‘Métro... Ticket pour une expo’ at the Arts et Métiers Museum is proving to be a must-see on the list of current exhibitions in the capital.

On average, five million people per day will make use of Paris’ metro system, which provides service 20h/24h, and which is now entering a new phase with the creation of line 14, and the automatisation of line 1.

The exhibition, although located in the small temporary exhibition room, manages to pack a lot in. Small-scale models of Paris’ first trains make one realise just how far -and fast- the technological advance has been. The most impressive construction feat would have to be the draining of a part of the Seine in order to build the line 4 connection between Châtelet and Saint Michel from 1905-1910. Also remarkable, and slightly unnerving, are the multiple overlap of metro lines at Opéra, and the spider’s web of lines that had to be carefully calculated at the Gare d’Austerlitz.

Soirée Ramadan a l'Hotel de Ville

Jamel Oubechou, Director of Equality Promotion at la HALDE & President l'Institut des Cultures Islam meets Bertrand Delanoe. Image: Flora Boumia
Text: Ndali Amobi

In collaboration with La Maison des Cultures du Monde, the Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë invited Parisians and visitors of all faiths and cultures to a special Ramadan celebration at the illustrious Hôtel de Ville.

Members of the public were able to pick up free tickets for a limited period, and around a thousand people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, attended the event.

The evening kicked off with live music from a Tunisian Malouf group, followed by a buffet of canapés, baklava, dates and mint tea. The buffet was announced at sundown – a time for those practising Ramadan to break fast.

Viewing The Strauss-Kahn Scandal Through A Historical Lens

Image: AFP / Getty Images
Text: Corrie Goldman

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in The Human Experience.

On May 14, 2011, just before takeoff for a flight from New York City to Paris, police arrested French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a leading candidate for the 2012 French presidential elections. Strauss-Kahn was charged with allegedly sexually assaulting a housekeeper at the hotel where he had been staying in New York. The resulting scandal, which has most recently seen Strauss-Kahn released from prison on parole, has revealed distinct differences between American and French perspectives on gender roles, riling the media and the public in both nations.

Cécile Alduy, an associate professor of French at Stanford University, has been following the case with great interest. Her research centres on the history of the body and of sexuality in literature, and she sees the furious debate that has erupted in the aftermath of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal as a story with roots that trace back to Renaissance-era France.

 Alduy’s study of French poetry and literature, from the 16th century to today, has allowed her to examine the cultural history of France through a number of scholarly lenses. Her specific emphasis on the history of the representation of the female body in texts and art has broadened the scope of her literary expertise to include feminist and gender studies.

Close to 60% of respondents to a poll taken in France on May 16, 2011, shortly after Strauss-Kahn was indicted, believed he was more likely framed by a political competitor than guilty of the charges. In an opinion column published in the French newspaper Le Monde on May 26, 2011, Professor Alduy indicated that this first, massive wave of support for Strauss-Kahn and the little attention paid to the alleged victim in the first few days after the news are evidence of the way that issues of sexual harassment, sexual aggression, or sexism are routinely downplayed and under scrutinised in a society that on the surface appears to support gender equality.