Paris bulletin 2 2012

There are clay figurines and bits of pottery in the Louvre that have been recovered from burial sites dating back to 3,000 BC. Many of them are only fragments of a whole but you can still see that they were intricately decorated, individualised works of art. In rooms nearby and at the other end of the scale there are monumental stone friezes of Sumerian kings, winged bulls, the guardians of ancient gateways, giant effigies of seated pharaohs and blind-eyed gods.

There are also several rooms in the Louvre that are full of nothing but busts of Roman emperors. It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages when rich and influential merchants and statesmen began to commission portraits of themselves – and occasionally of their wives and mistresses - that ordinary human beings began to displace the god-kings, saints and myths as suitable subjects for the artist and sculptor. As nation states took shape governments started using large-scale public art to reinforce a sense of national identity. An excellent example of this is Jean Cardot’s statue of Charles de Gaulle, installed outside the Grand Palais as recently as 2000. This is ‘the real-life hero’ writ large, and who more suited to the role than Charles de Gaulle, welded firmly onto his plinth but striding forward eternally to victory?

The Tuileries Gardens have been home to all sorts of statuary since the 16^th century when Marie de Medicis cleared the space of the tuiliers’ workshops to make room for her new palace and the garden she wanted round about it. (The tuiliers were the artisans who made the roof tiles for the city, from whom the Gardens take their name). All the great statues, a lot of them inspired by Greek myths, that were sculpted and installed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries are still there for the Parisian flâneur to enjoy. But there are others now, that show us how much sculpture has changed since then.

One installation is a work by Yayoi Kusama. It is halfway along the garden and is entitled ‘The Flowers that Bloom at Midnight’, a cluster of brilliantly coloured flowers and leaves in reinforced fibre-glass plastic. They lie like giant pieces of resin jewellery on their carpet of dull green grass and on a winter’s day they make a cheerful contrast to the leafless trees and scores of people promenading the avenues, Lowry-like figures in their dark coats.

I can’t think of any big building in the centre of Paris that has gone in for the kind of installations that you see outside banks and insurance companies in cities like New York.  For that kind of corporate bling you have to take a ride on the line 1 of the metro to la Défense, the huddle of skyscrapers that extends the axis of the Champs Elysées out west. Once there you can admire sixty or so large chunks of contemporary work on the central piazza – a veritable ‘musée en plein air’. If ever there was a statement about ‘where power now lies’, this is it.

The Pompidou Centre always has one big exhibit on the parvis in front. Until late last year it was the giant golden flower pot by Jean Pierre Raynaud. Now it is a towering installation by Alexander Calder, topped with turning coloured blades that put you in mind of paintings by Miro.

Sculpture is not alone in having pushed back the boundaries. The Pompidou is running an  outstanding exhibition, ‘Danser sa Vie’ (on until early April), which illustrates a very similar process,  from the set steps and positions of classical ballet right through to work of artists like Bausch, Forsyth and Cunningham. There’s one video of a design workshop where some of the staff are ‘dancing’ among colleagues who go about their business in the normal way, another of a man who repeatedly lifts and repositions what looks like a sheet of plasterboard. If classical dance is your template you probably think that ‘it’s interesting but it isn’t dance’, just as Tracey Ermin’s bed and dirty underwear ‘isn’t art’ and John Cage’s silent ‘4 minutes 33 seconds’ ‘isn’t music’. With that mindset and living in Paris in 1863, you might have been among those who thought the jury was absolutely right to refuse to hang Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ at the Salon.

For the casual observer it can be hard to see the connection between a giant flower pot and the titanic heroes on the Arc de Triomphe. The ‘artistic terms of engagement’ may have changed but the forces behind them are much the same as those that have always pushed human beings to decorate, deconstruct, beautify, interpret and refashion. There is a link, tenuous but real, between Kusama’s glossy fibre-glass flowers and the grave goods, separated though they are by 5,000 years of history.