Le Pompi

Today was a boring day of class, (I’m still waiting for human rights to get interesting. Nothing has yet surpassed my knowledge from the UN debate topic a whole 5 years ago.) we decided to go museum hoping because it was raining. Paris seems so gray when it rains.

We visited the Pompi, the museum of modern art. [ Ok, I’m going to catch hell from you art freaks – but let me get this out. I have a difficult time understanding most modern art. Usually it takes too long to figure out what the artist is getting at, it falls in the realm of post modernist, existentialist, or beyond philosophy (ies) that I am not familiar enough with to comprehend, or its just something so plain I don’t get it. I saw a blue box today. Just a blue freaking box. Fantastic. It was artsy. There was a toilette seat. Art? Really…]

I think the only exhibit that I was most turned off by was ironically the feminist modern art floor. I enjoy feminist art. I do. However, sometimes I feel like artists, in their plight to be so radical, can fulfill every expectation of irrationality. I understand the repetition of images, the rhetoric and images that are graphic to stimulate your thinking. Yet, I think that some images are either overkill or serve to detriment the movement. I feel like the Booker T Washington of civil rights, and the feminist 3^rd wave is Malcolm X. In order to conquer the oppression of women, what it means to be a female, and still be ‘normal’ in society, the continued screaming of inequality must stop. You can’t explain, talk, or be social by yelling. Maybe this is my naivety, my views might have totally changed by the time I get home.

For the most part, I was very impressed with the art. I understood most every exhibit, except “untitled. The chicken experiment.” It was a video of a naked girl standing, holding a chicken by its feet. You stand and watch the chicken flap its wings and struggle, but the model keeps it still upside down. After a few minutes, the blood has rushed all to the chicken’s head, making movement of its wings nearly impossible. The model then puts it down, still nude, and kneels down as the chicken’s head is cut off. Then she stands up, holding the headless, blood squirting corpse of the animal. End clip. I just don’t see the appeal in killing an animal for art’s sake. I was pretty upset. Even if you want to show the strangulation, mutilation, and ultimate death of the female nude, there are other ways repetition of violent images.

So I’ve dwelled on this long enough. The next few special exhibits were phenomenal. I confess that I’m no art snob, and that Calder and Karinsky were new names to me. I recognized Karinsky’s work once I started wandering amid the literal hundreds of original paintings. I loved the mixing of colors and geometric forms, and I’m not quite sure. The best exhibit by far though, was the Calder. Two floors of his figurines, wire figures, and wire head portraits. I was absolutely in shock with the wire figure portraits of people’s faces when they were shadowed. The silhouettes of the wires were shocking – they so closely resembled the actual person. The wires seemed to come alive…it really was amazing. If you are unfamiliar of these two artists, they are worth looking up. Calder’s figurines really explore and push the image of the human body as just wires and ligaments, almost simplifying the whole body of mankind.

I snuck a few pictures of the masters that I do enjoy – Frieda, Miro, and a Picasso. I was so excited to steal away a few images to keep for a later date.

Oh! Point of interest – the Pompi is one of Paris’s tallest structures. We towered over the city, over Notre Dame. The pictures, although gray, are phenomenal. MonMartre is breathtaking…the whole city is beautiful. I’m really falling in love with this city.