Splendid Elles

I finally got to the Center Pompidou in Paris today - on the "free museum day" (first sunday of the month) - I was not too crazy about the other two exhibitions (Calder and Kandinsky) at the center, which weren't even free, plus, I have seen enough of these two, so I decided to experience the Pompidou on a budget instead.  Not a bad decision - there was one exhibition which was free. Actually, it was their permanent collection but presented in a different way than usual. I read some mixed reviews about it and decided to check out the exhibition titled ELLES, a rehanging of their permanent collection but designed to present the work of women artists.  Having received limited exposure to female artists throughout my education, as many of us have, I thought this sounded outstanding. 

The show did not disappoint. It was quite an ambitious exhibition with more than 200 works, and if you have been to the center pompidou, you know that each floor is gigantic. The exhibition was divided into seven different sub categories, thematically and chronologically - from the "pioneers" to the "activist body" to "eccentric abstraction", and finally "immateriality." Taking up almost two of the floors of the center, the exhibition had a nice flow to it,  very concise and enjoyable. I was really excited to see so many important works in the same room at times. Although visually intense, this shot was from one of my favorite rooms in the exhibition - I think there were about six different projections no more than four feet from each other: Anna Mandieta, Valie Export, Marina Abramovich, Carolee Scheemann, among a few others.

I ran into one of my colleagues from school at the exhibition, Dan - in the genitalia room actually- I was pretty amused by that. I knew he was going to be in Paris so I was not as surprised, but I had not spoken to many people in english for the past several weeks so it was pleasant. I was just thinking about Valie Export the other day when I read she will be one of the curators for a pavilion at the Venice biennale this year, which I will get to attend later this month. It was also great to see some of her key works in the exhibition, which I had only experienced in text form before today: Touch Cinema, Action Pants, as well with this one below, which came up earlier on this past semester for me.
In the room themed around Virginia Woolfe's essay, 'A Room of One's Own' I came across the Valie Export video that I could not recall this past semester while talking to one of the grad students at UNC, where a family is sitting watching television while eating dinner. Emily, the grad I'm talking about was working on a timed camera piece, where the timer took shots of different couples sitting in front of a TV throughout the span of an evening.

Another interesting piece was a Mona Hatoum that actually reminded me of a Valie Export installation in the last Venice Biennale. The stand alone cylinder with two entrances, required the viewer to enter and look into the ground at a round, floor projection of a camera traveling through what appeared to be parts of the human body.

Some of the other work that I enjoyed in the exhibition were Sophie Calle's hotel series and this awesome Pipilotti Rist floor projection.

The kids there had a blast interacting with this piece, which made me smile.  (I had been trying not to smile for two weeks- for I read in the book 'French or Foe' / a guide to living in Paris that smiling to strangers give you away as an american) They were running up and around everywhere and hijacking the piece as if it was a playground.  I was surprised of how many adults avoided stepping on the projected image.
I have read these Sophe Calle pieces below in several essays before, which I liked quite a lot, but they are originally in french and I could not revisit them fully this time around. The first one is from the hotel series.

I felt that the show was hung effectively as well, carrying the punch intended - the message of including only women in a history of 20th century art, yet also reflected on the caliber and great taste of the center's permanent collection, highlighting it's history.  The exhibition pretty much follows the same trajectory that a general 20th cent. collection should have, minus the men.

Another area of interests in the show were the rooms dedicated to minimal and conceptual art - areas that we are used to seeing dominated by male artists. This is an area of museums I often hover towards - being a fan of minimalism. It was refreshing seeing more than just the Agnes Martins in this collection, a little Vera Molnar, Silvia Bachli, Hanne Darboven and perhaps other artists who would not have associated themselves with these movements.

There were lots of other great moments in the show that I am not mentioning, like revisiting great pieces such as Rossler's 'Semiotics of the Kitchen' or Landau's 'Barbed Hula', Eleanor Antin's '100 Boots', Jana Sterbak's meat dress, Sadie Benning, Tania Bruguera, Adrian Piper, sorry for name dropping but I can go on and on...

I will end this post with a very frenetic quote I came across in the exhibition by Gertrude Stein that I liked and wanted to share - It was used in a section of the show dealing with narrative and autobiography (to give you some context) and it went really well with the work of Sophie Calle and perhaps Gina Pane, but I found some parallels to my own work as well:

"And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do not remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself"