Here are some images of art that I really liked from the exhibition of feminine art called “elles@centrepompidou” at the Centre Georges Pompidou that we went to yesterday.

Generally (this is were I whack the hornet’s nest), when ever I hear the term “feminist art”, I think about so many shows that I’ve seen that have been dominated with works dealing with, vaginas, blood and naked artists making statements about how they’re treated as sex objects. I’ve always had a problem with the notion of “feminist art” because I think that if we are all equal then it shouldn’t matter what sex a person is and their work should be judged on its own strengths and not the sex of its producer.

I’ve never liked the idea of victimhood from any group.

And before anyone gets full of righteous rage and wants to start jumping all over my case because I’m a middle aged white guy (the punching bag of choice by the world’s disaffected), all I have to say is, “try growing up as an overweight freckle faced red headed male”. I’ve never seen a poster of a guy like me on any teenage girl’s wall or my type described as the ideal, but yet life goes on and we can’t all be the focus of everyone’s desires and in control of the world.

Having had my little rant and bleat, there are of course many issues faced by women artists, like they are discriminated against and their work is often ignored. While at the exhibition, I gave myself the task of naming female artists and you know what, I could only name about five.

I hang my head in shame.

Having banged on about “feminist art”, the refreshing thing about the elles@centrepompidou exhibition was that the museum was displaying the feminine side of its own collections rather than making just a feminist statement.

The Guerilla Girls make plenty of salient points and combat discrimination with sharp wit and humor. No victimhood here just action.

Respect!

Alisa Andrasek’s “Biothing” is a beautiful tour de force of applied intelligence. 

Adaptive Agent Based Extreme Structures are created using a computer program, not unlike the one Engogirl uses in her work in Computational Fluid Dynamics. As a matter of fact my wife got very excited about Alisa Andrasek’s work and I’m sure that she’d like to meet her and play around with the software she uses.

Niki de Saint Phalle is someone I’ve been aware of for a while, and this work is quite different from most of her work that I’d seen before.

Kristin Backer’s “Passage at section K-P” (2004) acknowledges how structures are so dominant in the landscapes we now live in.

Lee Bontecou’s untitled work (1966) is about sitting on a jet airplane’s wing. I really loved this piece and it’s something that I’d like to own so I could look at it more often.

I’ve saved Helen Frankenthaler’s “Spring Bank” (1974) for last as it was the piece I liked the most.

Engogirl and I went to the Centre Georges Pompidou today as an antidote to going to the Prado a few days ago. We just had to see something that was more expressive than the visual catalogues of possessions owned by the rich and powerful from years gone by, that makes up most of the Prado’s collection. Let’s not even talk about the mountain of stuff with the guy nailed to a cross and his bummed-out friends.

It was just the same thing over and over again.

I’ve never been a fan of the outside of the Pompidou center. It just looks like a industrial plant that has become a little shabby over the years, but some of the interiors are fun. There are sections of the restaurant on the top floor that look as though they were lifted straight out of Kubrick’s “2001,  A Space Odyssey” and then crossed with Roger Dean’s designs.

Although the price of the automatic machine produced coffee was scandalously high (a whole family in a developing country could be fed for a week, for what we paid for our two drinks), it was a pretty cool place to hang out in for a while, just to soak up the design ideas.

A short while after we finished our coffee, a staff member came by and sprayed scent on all the roses. No, it didn’t smell anything like roses but the roses themselves were real.

Go figure?

This next shot is of a little bar (not open at the time we were there) that was tucked away in a little bubble-like silver dome structure.

Around the corner from the bar are restrooms, which have to been seen to be believed.

The whole place was mirrored and you can have the dubious pleasure of watching yourself on the can from four different directions……..

nice!

About three weeks ago I was in Burgos, Spain, where I visited the Catedral de Santa María which is the burial place of El Cid.

Needless to say Hollywood’s version of El Cid’s life bears no resemblance to the one lived by the man himself. There isn’t that much of El Cid’s life to be seen at the cathedral other than a marriage contract and an old trunk said to be his coffin. El Cid has been buried under the floor of the cathedral and unlike so many other people intered there, there is nothing but an inscription to mark where the great man is buried.

This brings me to the point at which I start my rant.

There are times when I look at gigantic structures like cathedrals and I think to myself, “what a colossal waste of time, money and effort”.

When I was in Bangkok a few years ago I can remember having the same thoughts about the Buddhist temples and then it occurred to me how much industry and commerce religion causes. For example in Thailand there is a whole industry employing thousands of people who just prepare the offerings that are changed everyday, that go into household shrines.

In short religion keeps a lot of people in employment.

Even the small shrines and chapels in the nooks and crannies of the cathedral would’ve kept teams of craftsmen busy for years. So when I was looking around the cathedral in Burgos I found myself once again thinking about all the people and the wide range of skills that were employed to construct such an amazing building. Make no mistake, the Burgos Cathedral is amazing. It has it all; beauty, size, complexity and history.

The trouble I started to have with the cathedral was when I started thinking about where the money came from to build it. The answer of course is the people. Back in medieval times the common person’s life was short, brutish and full of misery. Archeological evidence from medieval graves has shown that the lower classes quite often suffered from malnutrition and often went through long periods of starvation while their overlords lived the high life.

Which brings me to my next problem; the aristocracy.

Back in the old days if you were a bigger and nastier than other people you just took their stuff and if you were really good at fighting you built up a gang around yourself and made a career of making other weaker people’s lives miserable.

As Thucydides (c. 460 B.C. – c. 395 B.C.) once said, “”Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

The aristocracy is basically a group of people who have descended from the worst kind of people and who for some strange reason think that they are better than others. It always blows me away when I talk to people who defend the whole idea of rule by monarchs as though it were a good thing. The idea that someone who comes from a long line of selfish bloodthirsty bastards would make a good leader in this day and age strikes me as completely ridiculous.

So what has this got to do with Burgos cathedral?

Over time Burgos cathedral has become shrine to aristocratic hubris and ego. Huge chunks have been added to the original medieval cathedral by rich people trying to buy their way into heaven. All over the church are either paintings or statues of rich people that try and associate them with god.

For example there are paintings of archbishops (a common person could never hope to rise so far in the old church) in triptychs showing the crucifixion as if to say, here is god and I’m his best mate.

Probably the most disgusting display of overwhelming arrogance and cluelessness on display is the Chapel of the Constable which houses the bodies of Pedro Hernández de Velasco, Constable of Castile and his wife Doña Mencia de Mendoza.

The chapel it’s self is a tour de force in carved stone with lifelike carvings in Carrara marble of the constable and his wife. The chapel was begun just before Columbus found the Americas so gold that had been tortured out of the Indians wasn’t yet available for its construction so it can only be assumed that the peasantry of Castile paid for its construction with their blood sweat and tears.

Building a church that employs a lot of craftsmen because the people have a fervent faith is one thing, bleeding an already oppressed people to build a hugely expensive monument to one’s greed and desire to buy their way into St. Peter’s good books is utterly unforgivable.

A pox on Pedro Hernández and people like him.

These next two were variations on a theme that were all over Llubjana

Before leaving on our trip I knew that I wanted to buy something from the old bazaar in Sarajevo as I knew that Sarajevo is one of the last remaining places in Western Europe were there was still a Turkish influence.

Whenever I travel I like to buy something really nice from the area where I’m visiting. 

I’ve always thought that the cheap souvenirs that are on sale in so many places aren’t worth buying and that it was much better spend much more and buy something really good. The trouble with Western Europe is that it’s a first world place and anything very nice is going to cost real money of the kind that is just too rich for my blood.

Sarajevo, because of it’s recent history of war, is a country that is struggling to get back on it’s feet and it felt particularly good to leave a chunk of money there. Places like France and Germany don’t need our money like Sarajevo does. Needless to say, I still try and get the most I can for whatever I spend and when we decided to buy a hand embossed metal tray in the Turkish style by the noted coppersmith Sahib Bašcauševic (mentioned in the UNESCO book on Traditional arts and crafts of Bosnia and Herzegovina) I was ready to haggle to get the best deal.

Sahib Bašcauševic’s work is sold in a store located in the old bazaar by the very cultivated and self assured Mido.

Mido is one of those types of people who really knows his stuff and doesn’t mind telling a person when they are in the wrong. When I said I was interested in silver plated copperware instead of the tin plated stuff, he asked me why and when I said, “because the silver plated copper was better”, he calmly but forcefully said to me, “you are wrong” and then went on to explain why.

I can imagine that not too many people can handle such a response and would’ve tossed their plaits and stormed off in a huff. Knowing that I don’t know everything helped me cope with Mido’s directness and I was glad that I stuck around to get the skinny on the advantage of tin plating over silver plating.

Apparently hundreds of copper goods can be coated with a very fine coating of silver with just a few coins electrically and very quickly, but the trouble is that the silver wears off very easily. Tin plating is much harder to do because it’s manually applied with some skill and is much harder wearing. Mido then went on to explain that although many foreigners buy his copperware for decorative purposes, it’s all actually made to be used and the value of an item was based not only on the skill of it’s decoration but also on it’s utility and not just a few microns of a semi-precious metal like silver.

When it came to haggle, Mido made it clear that he wasn’t going to knock much off the price, pointing out that the tray I wanted took over a week to produce by one of the best craftsman in the country. I did get Mido to drop his price a bit but when I pressed him to take another $25 off, he said, “that sort of money won’t make you a poor man and it won’t make me a rich man so let’s stop here”. He was right of course in the face of such truth I just paid up. To be honest, I didn’t mind at all because it was a pleasure dealing with someone who was so straight up and we all pay for things that we value more than the money that we hand over.

Following Epicurienne and Pat’s advice, Engogirl and I went and had a look at the Guggenheim museum and some of the Biennale art exhibits that are on at the moment.

The Guggenheim was a tour de force of some of the biggest names in 20th century art. It was a real who’s who of modern art. I’d see a painting and I’d think to myself, “gee that looks like Léger’s stuff, but surely it can’t be”, but it was and so it went on. I kept on seeing styles that I recognized but couldn’t believe I was seeing them for real.

There was even one of (there are nine bronzes) Brancusi’s “Bird in space”. I couldn’t believe that such a famous statue was once owned by one person and not an institution. Every time I’ve seen pictures of “Bird in space”, I’ve wondered about the thinnest part of the statue near its base, as it looks too thin hold the weight of the rest of the statue. Sure enough, the thinnest part of the statue does look like it has been repaired, and not that well to boot.

Unfortunately, no photos are allowed in the museum so I wasn’t able to take many shots of the art there. Out at the rear of the museum that backs onto to Venice’s Grand Canal is Wim Delvoye’s “Torre”.

As stunning as Delvoye’s sculpture is from the outside, a shot from underneath shoes even more amazing detail.

Just down from the Guggenheim is the French billionaire, François Pinault’s new art museum in the Punta della Dogana. We didn’t go in (the cheeky bastards wanted 15 Euro) but at the back of the museum is Charles Ray’s “Boy with frog”.

Apparently Ray had wanted to make the statue larger but changed his mind in consideration of the locals who enjoyed walking in the area in the past. Trouble is that the statue is small enough to vulnerable to vandalism and now has to be guarded full time. It’s not hard to see why. That frog would snap off real easy.

Near where the hotel where we are staying are a few Biennale exhibitions. One is by Grazia Toderi

and the other was by Iranian artists.

Minding the Iranian art was the photographer Ali Reza Karimi Saremi. Ali is a very friendly and personable guy but unfortunately we couldn’t communicate with each other too well because of language difficulties.

I tried to ask Ali about the human and animal representations in the exhibition and if that meant that the religious leaders of his country weren’t so fundamentalist (the Koran proscribes Muslims from creating images of people and animals) as the western media shows them to be. Ali didn’t understand what I was trying to ask but he did understand that his country gets a lot of bad press in the west.

As best as he could, Ali explained to me that Iran is a beautiful country full of decent people who create art and lovely music. He then went on to explain that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was only one man and that not all people in Iran were like him. Then Ali went on to say that just like the various artists in the Iranian exhibition who all created different art, the people of Iran all have their own ideas.

It was easy for me to see how sincere Ali was being and it was obvious that what the western media had to say about his country hurt him but that didn’t prevent him from showing me the utmost courtesy and hospitality. As we were leaving I shook his hand and as I did, he asked me to wait and he ran out the back, brought back a small box and presented it to Engogirl, saying that he hoped we would one day visit his country.

In the box was a lovely pendant made of blue Persian tile.

Paris is like a reef of culture that is encrusted with sculpture. Sculpture is all over the city. It’s almost like the Parisians despise an empty flat spaces and have some primal urge to decorate pristine places and make them conform to their will.

When I visited La Cuesta Encantada, also nick-named “Hearst Castle” in California, USA, I was struck by how much religious art, William Randolph Hearst had carpet-bagged during his lifetime. It wasn’t that Hearst was a particularly religious man; it’s just that the best art from the time periods that Hearst was interested in was religious in nature because the Catholic Church with its enormous appetite for iconic images was the greatest patron of the arts in Europe during those eras.

In Paris, the church still seems to play an important role in supporting the arts. Not so much in the commissioning of new work but by providing space to display it.

One such place is the huge neo-classical pile known as Église de la Madeleine or just La Madeleine. It’s a dark inside the church but the outside is surrounded with sculpture.

All the parks are populated with sculpture that range from overwrought romantic nonsense through to surprising modern pieces like Dubuffet’s “Le Bel Costumé”, which was almost hidden by a hedge of trees in the Jardin des Tuileries.

The surfaces of the buildings haven’t escaped attention either, and many have been covered with so much carving they seem to be writhing with life. Even the portico roof (which most people wouldn’t even look at) of the Pantheon is stunning, never mind the rest of the building.

It just goes on and on.

I think that if I lived in Paris I’d want my home to be a plain white minimalist cube. Not because I don’t like sculpture, but to just to give my brain and eyes a rest.

When I was very young I read a biography of Charlemagne by his chronicler Einhard, so from that time I’ve had an interest in him and it was for this reason we (my wife, Engogirl and I) visited Aachen in Germany. Aachen’s big claim to fame is that it was Charlemagne’s capitol and he built a cathedral there known as the Dom.

The original Dom was an eight sided church that was originally built 1,200 years ago and it has been so rearranged; added to and redecorated that as our tour guide said, “you will not see any Carolingian decoration, only Carolingian form.

Years ago I visited the famous cathedral in Chartes, France and the guide there said that an analysis of the mathematics of gothic architecture hadn’t led to an understanding of the origins and reasons behind the design style. A few years after I’d been to Chartes, I was lying on my back on an autumn day in the forest in British Columbia; as I looked up at the deciduous trees over arching me with their multicoloured leaves I was suddenly made conscious of where the gothic architects got some of their inspiration from.

In the picture above, of a gothic addition to the Dom you can also see where H R Giger (the designer of the “Alien” movies) may have mined some of his ideas from.

Whilst listening to the guide talk about the various changes that the Dom has been through, I found myself thinking of what Joseph Campbell had to say in his “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” about the oedipal desire in the immature for things to stay the same.

In today’s western culture there is a reverence for things that are old just because of the fact that they are ancient. Cultures like the Japanese don’t care that much if something is old; they are more interested in if it is good on an aesthetic level.

The Dom was changed over the years to suit whatever the prevailing taste of whoever was in charge was. As I thought about the mentality of the people who decided to make the changes, I wondered if they made the changes through a self confident and mature sense of themselves or was it just pure ignorant arrogance. I’m pretty sure it was arrogance, but at least it got me thinking.
 
Is our reverence for old things, and desire to preserve them a manifestation of an oedipal desire for things to stay the same; the intellectual equivalent of not wanting to grow up? Are we now an anally retentive culture?

If our ancestors had the same attitude to the past and old things as we do, then no new art would’ve been produced to cover or replace the old, and our culture would’ve become as moribund as ancient Egyptian culture which didn’t change that much for thousands of years.

Another thing that caught my attention at the Dom was all the relics. First off there was the garments of Mary, the diaper of Christ and the beheading cloth (WTF!) of John the Baptist.

Yeh right!

I wish I was around when that load of crock was sold; I’d have been in with an offer to sell them a bridge.

Schumks!

To be fair to the contemporary people of Aachen, all the descriptions of the relics are prefaced in the tourist literature with, “the so called”. I got the impression that nowadays, no one outside of the church seriously thought that the relics were anything more than the products of medieval con artists. I’d also be willing to bet that there wouldn’t be too many Jesuits who think that the “so called” relics were real.

Then there was the alleged throne of Charlemagne (no one is sure he ever sat in it), said to be made from marble from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It’s a fairly pedestrian affair (I was reminded of an outhouse seat) but the interesting thing about it and the relics is that that were all used to add legitimacy to Charlemagne’s rule and the rule of those who followed him.

God always seems to get dragged into whatever causes suits those in power. Funny how every side sees god as being on their side. I suppose for many people in power way back then, the fact that they were in power, was proof of god’s favour. It’s sort of similar to the thing that those bible thumping evangelists who are into “prosperity preaching” go on about. I’m rich and powerful, therefore god is my co-pilot or god is my co-pilot and therefore I will be rich. The need for physical proof of the existence of god in the form of relics goes against the whole Christian teaching of the need to have faith alone. I guess back in Charlemagne’s times, Christianity was still on shaky ground. The same could be said for some congregations in parts of today’s affluent cultures. 

In the Dom there is also what is left of Charlemagne’s bones. Apparently there are only about 50% remaining, due to various bits and pieces ending up in other churches and hands. It would seem that everyone wanted a piece of the legitimacy that anything to do with Charlemagne bestowed.

All the talk of Charlemagne’s bones reminded me of The Venerable Bede’s book, “Ecclesiastical History of the English People”. In Bede’s book he mentioned about the medical practices of the 8th century. Bede told of how prayers were said over the sick person and “holy” relics (usually the bones of a saint) were waved over the affected area. Since Charlemagne was eventually canonised, his “relics” would’ve held powerful juju in the minds of many believers back in the old days.

It sounds an awful lot like the witchcraft from Africa that is lampooned so often in movies.

When you think about it, twelve hundred years ago isn’t that long ago. If a generation can be considered to be twenty five years, then a thousand two hundred years would be forty eight generations. It might sound like a lot but imagine a group of forty eight, twenty five years olds and you’d be looking at a thousand two hundred years manifest in the flesh in one hit.

We’re not that far ahead of cultures that we think of as primitive.

My wife, Engogirl was interested to see the coast near Brugge so we looked at our map and saw that the coastal town Knokke was marked with a blue star which indicated that it was “nice”. We asked the landlady of the B&B we were staying at, about Knokke and she said it was very chic and then went on to suggest that nearby Damme was nicer. To me the word “chic”, when applied to a town, means a place with expensive stores with overly coiffed peopled wearing sunglasses with large vulgar golden logos showing how much money they’ve spent.

We took our landlady’s advice and went to Damme. I was O.K. but no big deal, but while we were there we saw a poster for a sculpture exhibition by the sea at Knokke, so we set aside our feelings about “chic” and went to check it out.

We were both expecting something like the “Sculpture by the Sea” that is held in Sydney each year but we were disappointed to see that there were only a few brightly decorated statues, all of a similar type. Sure enough, Knokke was what I had imagined chic to be, but it was also fascinating to see how the Belgians relate to the beach.

The beach of Knokke is lined with a promenade where the well heeled stroll up and down checking out each other and the shop windows of stores like Yves Saint Laurent. The beach itself is entirely covered with little shacks that served as storage and changing rooms.

I’m not sure what the deal with the booths was but they weren’t uniform in construction so I suppose they were privately owned. The little shacks were like little holiday homes. People would lay and play near them and the sea seemed to merely provide a backdrop for their activities.

The sea was dead flat and it looked like it was the sand that the Belgians were more interested in.

What also seemed odd to me as an Australian, who grew up at the beach, is that the Belgians don’t face the sea, they face inland and ignore it.

There were lots of places where those who didn’t have a shed of their own could go and feel like they had staked a claim of a small part of the beach for themselves.

The whole beach had been compartmentalised into different functions. There were areas for kids to play in.

There was even a place that had an inflatable pool with heated water to swim in (it was too ugly to photograph).

The whole town of Knokke may be chic but I have to admit, as interesting as it was, it wasn’t our cup of tea, even if its first aid station had wind socks which looked like old fashioned bathing suits.

Before I left on this current trip I had hopes of posting every day, but of course reality popped its ugly head into my world and messed with me.

Our flight was in two legs. The first leg was Sydney to Singapore and it was an eight hour flight with a five hour stop over. Instead of waiting around in the airport we went into town, had dinner and took a few photos.

Singapore is a fairly affluent place and to be honest for us, as Australians who live in a city with a large Asian population, Singapore didn’t have much to offer that wasn’t available at home. In short we didn’t find the city all that appealing. Poor old Singapore, in its headlong rush into the future and prosperity, it has transformed itself into just other bland city.

For my money, Bangkok is much more interesting.

One of the things that westerners will notice about Asia and Asians in general is that “cute” is in.

The girl in the shot is dressed like a person that might a student or someone who is into the art or music scene, but the T-shirt is jarringly at odds with such a look. Sure, I bet that an arty type with post modernist leanings, wanting to make an ironical statement might wear such a shirt, but the girl in the photo was also holding a “Hello Kitty” type of clutch.

She is into “cute”

As a piece of visual communication this girl is a walking contradiction. On one hand, there is the darker clothing that is the uniform of the disaffected with the jaded countenance that goes with the look. On the other hand is the cute little logo on the T-shirt that speaks of childlike simplicity and desire to giggle.

It’s interesting to see western culture being interpreted through Asian eyes. Various ideological stances expressed through dress have be reduced to mere fashion that can be mixed and matched. All of which is one of the reasons why I like to travel so I can see how other people live and think.

I was hoping to write this article and edit my Singapore photos on the next leg of the flight which was twelve hours, on the way to Paris but two things got in my way.

Air Singapore provide power in it’s armrests but unfortunately, the distance between the seats in cattle class doesn’t allow one to work on their laptop. The other issue that stopped my effort to get a post out was the fact that the dodgy copy of Photoshop I put on the laptop didn’t have the camera RAW plug-in and I couldn’t open my shots.

The flight started off on Friday morning and finished on Saturday morning. Twenty four hours of flying with a five hour gap in the middle.

What a grind! No wonder comedians always harp on about flying, it’s a drag.

On arrival in Paris we went straight to our hotel near the airport, checked in, had a shower and went into the city.

More about that in my next post.