DiVA
October 6-9, 2005, Paris
By Lillian Fellmann, AC
Thursday
We arrive and don’t really know if we are here. The taxi driver assures us, we don’t believe him but get out anyway.
Entrez par là, he grins and points towards a white wooden wall. How? A guy is hovering the poorly cut black carpet that launches into the street. He is too concentrated to be disturbed. Someone takes our luggage and we follow. It is one hour before the opening, we are tired from a delayed flight and in a similarly disastrous state is the environment we are entering. Completely under construction, a dark, no, black, but fully enthusiastic bees hive. Young dynamic busy things are buzzing around, sum sum sum.
The DiVA venue is a straightened out and re-three-dimensionalized Escher-house; Kafka’s sinister soul smeared onto the hallways. Piercing and physical.
Wear something white and you are at least a partial self in this murkiness. Sorry, can I feel your face, I can’t see if I can trust you.
I hear the strenuous noises of my squinting eye muscles.
Two hours after the VIP opening we sit in a rather empty lounge, the air is filled with sassy kling-klang. The Kube hotel resurrected out of its former ashes into an unexpected glory.
Thierry arrives, smiling. This time in a suit, no bathing outfit like at POOL. Everybody seems to strive for an extra layer of make-up or -over, c’est Paris, after all.
Many young men in black are running around. Looking like multiple twins. They work the bar. We exchange smiles, I ask him if this is his job or a part-time occupation.
AC is located, we immerse into and invade a hotel, an art fair and a party location. On fume. Are we dressed for the occasion?
Laurent comes by. He is the kind of type who sits down when he talks to you and asks before he does so. We like Laurent.
I take another sip of champagne and observe a journalist checking out the lounge, the details, and the one art piece in the room.
I turn around. Doctor Schiwago is talking to Julie Christie in my back. She doesn’t like it. They ignore me. I can’t. We are surrounded by bigger than life photographs of 60ies stars and starlets in fur. Freedom to starve. Why are you in the lounge and not upstairs in the show rooms? “I needed a cigarette and some coffee, the photos are scary, though,” Yvonne, 41, from Paris. “The fact that there is more than one copy of each makes me feel like sitting in a mirror space, but where is my reflection?”
We look at a magic half-way installed glass cube that sits outside in the garden, in the green court that opens up to the street, or will open to the street once the wooden wall comes off. Where are the women? Men are gathering at the bar, nervous, trying to find the right posture.
I walk over to the entrance hall and pause. I stare at Andy Warhol’s slightly open mouth. Centered on a large screen, black and white. The image depicts a whole group of people and is full of details but I stare at his mouth. The vigor of its lines are cataclysmic, completely unexpected. The perfectly drawn bow of his upper lip is petrifying, a lusciously black cave is opening up between this voracious upper and soft lower rim. I feel pleasure, thrill. This is Roland Barthes at his fleshiest. I encounter the punctum. A highlight in a photograph that is objectively insignificant, but penetrating for an individual, for me. While being fixated, I remember my friend Alex who once in the midst of a techno rave walked up to me with a big beam saying, “I just got fucked by Rony Size.”
The next shot shows Andy’s eyes. His dark melancholic sad eyes. Clearly, they are a comment on the obscene greediness of his mouth: Never enough, always too much.
On fume. Holly says merci to a middle-aged man who had eye contact with her. What for.
It is amazing how French Paris is.
The DJ is on the second floor. Invisible.
Two men with cameras, film and video. “The whole shebang of 001…how do I call home, what I do, I write 001, but what computers do, they write plus. Plus, one, and whatever the number is.”
We are being filmed. The critics are being documented while they take the scene apart, word by word. An older man, grey hair, a rough and ready face, the forever 35-type, is trying to fix the monitor for that one art piece in the lounge while chewing gum. His lover looks scent-controlled, Asian by coincidence.
Still no women at the bar, the one who was there, wore a skirt in almost the exact pattern of the lounge chairs.
On fume.
By the way, the film that shows Warhol is made by Jonas Mekas. What do we learn about him through this material? What does the catalogue say? Are people watching the screen, are they being informed about what it is they are looking at? Wall text can distinguish art from decoration, although that’s probably an outdated phantasy.
Mekas has a big archive, mainly documentary stuff, on 4th and 4th in New York.
We get some Badoit. My throat hurts from the smoke and the chilly air in this old stone house.
Young male dealer: very ambitious, often stereotypically dressed, modest but stylish, longish hair, an non-imposing body language, copied, learned, often unoriginal. If it comes with a personal detail, a fancy flaw, it might mean success. The young female dealers?
”Tenir sans servir c’est resister,” says a line written by the artist Michel de Bronin.
(His work is exhibited like a doorstopper; you enter one step into the room and that is it. You have almost already stumbled over the piece. Behind it an endless space opens up, it seems, that wants you, you want it, but you can’t have it. If the gallerist feels it is right to squeeze himself in-between the wall and the display table, I guess I have to hold my horses too.)
And then there is the “Russian space”. The only interactive one. Very young, quietly eloquent space guard. (He will later on email me with CV and explain his background and future professional ambition. We had kind of a bond-thing going on.) The main film piece shows portraits of women filmed in an old sewing industry in Russia. Their eyes demonstrate proud disconnection. One of them ruptures my reading with a gust of self-centrism: She takes out her comb and slowly leads it through her hair. When and where exactly did she come across this stereotypical gesture of Western male sexiness and reeking Hollywood fame?
The Chicago-based gallery Walsh has 3 or 4 rooms, how can they finance it? I forgot to ask Maggie. They got our room for another piece when we left.
“I have been at Scope for 5 years; they canceled Paris this year”. “Well, FIAC is hard to compete with, you know”.
Another rumor I hear is that Foucault owns the place. Well, that would explain the black walls (Society and Surveillance, a little experiment perhaps?) but still sounds too unlikely. On the other hand I could if asked for it find a connection between his texts on sexuality and the fur-theme…
A digital video installation is being thrown onto the three walls of the hotel court. I saw the work installed inside in one of the hotel rooms (a bigger one than we had). It was intriguing. I was tempted to jump on the bed that was pushed to one wall and immerse into the moving and waving colors and lines. The bed looked so white, so un-touched. Unusual for a hotel room-art fair where art and humans are frequently mingling in the sheets.
On the way to our room: The cast shadows where the light of a room fumbles with the darkness of the hallways are colossal, like overfed Chinese shadow theatre puppets.
Friday
Pierre came by the Hospitality Suite and we discussed the paper he is writing for AC. He lives a bit outside Paris. Many questions, one of them: How can the genius be translated into a collaborator without having to castrate his creativity? I am not using the female form and I have my reasons.
Trying to call Jerome Sans the director of the Palais de Tokyo, didn’t work out. Jerome, can audience and art collaborate, form new social bonds, or does one of them always have to consume the other? (I will meet him later at an opening, a brief but inspiring and haunting encounter.) Our international phone is down.
The Neistat brothers should come by too. Casey and Van.
The lounge is calm today, people meet, sit with their laptops. Many wear suits, and all men wear their hair long. As if to say, I can do it, so I do it.
I am longing for a silent fair with sound boxes or headphones.
I am longing for a fair in darkness. A nightmare.
“My brother and I want to invite you and xx to Bruxelles, so we can hang out, the four of us”. “Yes, I am traveling a lot, have been this year. Especially now that I am involved with DiVA. I am a lawyer”. I think we coincidentally ran into that same woman later in a random place in Paris when we had our after-midnight diner.
Coralie Huon, 20, designer. She designed a tent that one can pack into a bag and carry around. I have to think of a friend of mine who is sewing biker bags out of dumped museum flags. This hotel room is very convivial, pillows on the floor. Discussion going on. I later talk to the dealer of the gallery, she refers to the objects in it as ‘non-sense’, or was it ‘stupid’.
I should go back, but I am a spy I cannot talk to everybody.
“Tutto bene?”
“Si tutto bene”.
The people are gathering.
It is the saddest thing having to sit with one’s art, incarcerated by the rules one has accepted. “I wish I could walk around like you”. Gallerist on the 5th floor.
Visibility issues. We are here as a critical writing project. Do you have a minute?
And then Angela shows up. I follow her with my eyes, she moves briskly but placidly, with a light-hearted self-confidence. Do you have a minute? Sure, can I sit with you and drink a glass? Please. We smile, we like.
Her chef is at the FIAC. She wonders about the darkness. “It evokes sentiments; I can read it because of my pop background, dark music, black clothes. I think the hallways are fantastic. It is dark and groovy. I feel like in a film, like being in a movie with my natural body. I fall in out of these moments of consciousness. I was wondering whether this hotel is an art fair-venue, exclusively, I mean, more than once, regularly”. It is her second time in Paris. She almost didn’t find the place. “It looks very different here from the other Paris with its artsy places and the big names”.
Slaves of a fair: gallery assistants/all guards/assistant’s assistants/dealers/consumers/ etc.
La dame qui travaille pour la Utrecht gallery est ici pour quatre heures, elle parle anglais et francais c’est pourquoi elle etait choisi. The gallery owner herself will be back soon. Oh, no, I can talk to you.
Saturday
Journalists have to be tough.
“Fairs are good business, the only business”. We talk to a Swiss dealer and fair participant. “This is a complete mess. But I like the trashy places. The darkness in the hotel is a mess, but the videos look better, and people are more concentrated, can’t move very quickly. Everybody was furious, it was luck that they could get the whole thing up in time. I am impressed. I have been to LOOP in Barcelona, they show only video. DiVA in New York? No, but I am in the catalogue. I don’t go to fairs when they are new, I see first how they develop”.
“I find art fairs extremely boring but it is the only place to make business, I have a space in Berlin and I like it, it is important to show the pieces on site. I travel with a lot of equipment, and there is always something that doesn’t work. I sometimes feel I should go back to paintings”.
“I sometimes deal with the film sometimes with the art world. Depending on the work or where it goes I have 3, 5 or 10 copies. I have two with me, now, and then I have to work on the jpegs before I send the purchased piece to the client”.
“FIAC is a Bazaar, awful”.
But why do you want to get in at the ART Basel then?
“You are right, it is a bazaar too, but when you are accepted there, you have made it”.
“I applied for The Young Liste, I was invited”. And then it was too crowded; they didn’t let him in. “I said that they are idiots, and he said, I understand that you are frustrated”.
Artissima in Turin, young galleries.
“ART UNLIMITED invited a project, but ART hasn’t accepted me. It’s the dealers who pay for the space at the big ART that show at ART UNLIMITED, otherwise you can’t get in”.
“I love the hotel, the glass”. Nad is a Lebanese Frenchman. “My neighbor has an art gallery. I am into English training, company development. I stay in France another year then I have the French passport. I lived in North California, I should never have left that girl, she was a millionaire. I was young, proud and stupid”.
“Tatjana who gave the performance is an artist of my neighbor’s gallery”.
(I personally didn’t like that performance. Absolute obsolete.)
“I discovered that we are not rational when I re-met my mother. Economics. Theory is one thing. What do you want, she asked. She dumped me yesterday. I couldn’t answer. I am working on building a Lebanon focused project, need foundation money. Omar Sharif is Lebanese. Christian from South Lebanese”. I think he heard that.
“The London Gallery, the woman who took pictures from female stars and put her eyes in it, I liked that one the best, and the Spanish filmmaker, performer, he is amazing. Excellent use of sound and image, has an advertising rhythm”.
(He promised me love letters; AC said we would share them.)
A couple of Chinese students who lived in Paris for more than three years. We had an especially hard conversation. Their French is bad, English not really an option. He is a design student and found the dark hallways pleasing. He thought one could see enough, only in the 5th floor it was definitely too dark. They didn’t like the displayed work too much, except for one piece they couldn’t remember the name of. They thought this was a hotel for art fairs only. She is studying literature and just accompanied him. She had no opinion. ”Isn’t there supposed to be a performance?” Yes, it is on right now. This is it, see, in the courtyard.
I would like to know why people look each other in the eye and see nothing?
“If you start to intellectually analyze a person, your partner, it’s endless, you fall into a black hole”. I ran into Nad again.
The last visit to a room. I feel fragile and have to kneel down. Fake interest in the laid out brochures and fliers. I withdraw after those polite few minutes you have to stand in front of a piece when you are alone in the space before you can leave. You look the dealer in the eye, smile the smile of encouragement and honesty. And turn, not too fast. Looking back real quick is a sign of conciliation. (Remain alert and have a safe day; New York we are coming home.)
Sunday is packing day, talking, saying goodbye, yes, this is my card, thank you, finally George got through to us. Blueberry and sesame crackers.
The taxi is waiting.
FIAC
Two women. Two busy women in a white box and a table. They don’t talk to each other, but move with vigor and decisiveness. It is calm but concentrated in here. André Chenue S.A. is the name of this little cave.
The Directeur générale of the art shipping company André Chenue S.A. explains that any artwork below $50,000 should be Fed-ex-ed. Only artwork above this threshold is worth all the extras: boxes, trucking (2 men always, in case the motor breaks down and one of them has to get help), insurance, installing the work etc.
“Because there is over-priced art everybody thinks art has to cost an enormous lot. The cumbersome shipping conditions to the US and Switzerland aren’t easily changed, they are a political issue. Art dealing is considered the business of the millionaires and the population or the politicians don’t want to pamper them. It concerns only a few too rich ones, and we can make tax money, why changing the policy? The decision makers forget about the middle leveled artists and galleries that need to ship too. And maybe sell less because the shipping process is so complicated, why paying another 15% for a piece that costs only a few thousand?”
“Sometimes dealers throw their pieces in the car and drive up to Bruxelles and ship from there”. Here you pay tax and you have to apply for an art pass. Pieces that are 40 years old and below a certain financial limit you have to wait for a month. For art pieces that cost more you can sometimes wait for several months, half a year, because the museums involved need to check on it”.
I try to photograph the whole text of this young Swiss artist who sells a few hundred red paintings, painted and signed on the back by Chinese workers. The paintings are stored and wrapped up in the fair hall, 100 dollars each. The stacks are almost empty. I have a look at the prototype. Red, but yes inscribed individually, by an individual far away, what has he earned for it, what must that Chinese laborer have felt, consternation, pride, indifference, just another form of exploitation by western so called critical originality? The text written on the cube wall in large letters reads something about western economy and Chinese labor. The same old simmer. But then again, it wasn’t. But I can’t remember why not, people stand in my way. I have to check the photographs.
