Paris bulletin 4 2009

France like everywhere else feels the financial crisis bite deeper every week. Still that doesn’t stop a fair number of commentators on the radio claiming the relative virtues of the French economic model, itself partly moulded by those republican values of  ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ you see incised into the stone of every town hall building. France with its powerful centralised state, it is claimed, is more protected (that’s unless you’re among the unlucky thousands whose jobs are disappearing ..), than those credit-junkies the ‘pays anglo-saxones’ which have got everyone, even the most cautious, into this unholy mess.

Some of those commentators are of the ‘Ha! Ha! We were right all along’ variety but more are honest enough to admit that young French professionals went in droves on the Eurostar to the UK or in a Boeing to the US, to live more dangerously but more ‘freely’ with risk and reward – too much reward and too much risk, with other people’s money no doubt but we can’t simply condemn out of hand all those optimistic young ex-pats as ‘greedy, self-seeking egoists’. In France the wheels turn very slowly - so slowly you can think they’re at a standstill sometimes - because of the republic, its conservatism and bureaucracy. It’s not so easy to be innovative in such a climate.

Still, it’s true you hear the words liberté and egalité all the time and those same commentators will equally frequently remind you that France is the birthplace of ‘les droits de l’homme’ (never mind that Thomas Paine was an Englishman and took his ideas on the rights of man to the US before he brought them back here …) ‘Fine words butter no parsnips’, as my granny used to say, and despite the rhetoric, France is also a country still sorting out its colonialist past, and not making a very good show of it either. Witness the recent strikes in the overseas dependencies, Guadeloupe, Martinique and La Reunion, where a sense of grievous economic inégalité emptied the shops of goods and closed businesses for weeks.

We can leave the whole ‘liberté’ bit to one side – the figures for imprisonment in France are better than the UK’s but the conditions in their jails are staggeringly bad and the suicides, murders and self-harmings worse with each year that passes. Sarkozy came to power on an economic reform ticket that promised to be as far-reaching as anything the UK had put in place. If he’s claiming France as one of the wise maidens now, he must also be getting down on his knees beside his bed every night to say a prayer of thanks that the crisis erupted before he’d taken the country quite past the point of no return on the road to the free market.

I’ll not get started on the question of ‘la fraternite’ either because it would take too long. Suffice to say that I think the French take on fraternity is as different from the British one as their wine from our whisky.

 

 

                                                         Upside-down in the Centre Beaubourg

One of the most exhilarating aspects of life in Paris is its devotion to the arts and the way people get out and use the resources the city puts at their disposal. You get a renewed sense of that if you go as I did on a late Saturday afternoon to the Beaubourg, the Centre Pompidou, to give it its official title. The building and the parvis in front of it are bursting with people. You can hardly get past the crowd waiting to get into a showing of ‘le cinéma du réel’. And where else in Europe could you find eight completely empty rooms full of people wandering around and listening to a ‘guided visit’? How much guidance one needs to get round a set of empty rooms is perhaps the question. But this isn’t any set of empty rooms. This is a retrospective of ‘the Void’. The rooms are empty because that was how each artist ‘filled’ them. Some went further and didn’t have a room at all, which defeated even the curators of this extraordinary exhibition. Perhaps you do need a guide when the emptiness is intentional.

 I loved it all – the emptiness and the young people taking it over and acting out various silly scenes for the benefit of their camera-toting mates. And I loved the texts that ‘filled you in’ on what each artist was about. Robert Barony decided, for example, that for his solo shows in Amsterdam, Turin and LA, he’d declare the galleries closed so there was nothing for anyone to go and see. Laurie Parsons went one better, She decided not to present anything at all for her third solo exhibition in NY. The invite, we are told, bore only the address of the gallery with neither artist’s name or date of the exhibition shown. She crowned this act of nothingness by subsequently deleting all mention of it from her biography. Thus completing the erasure.

You can laugh and I did but there is a serious – and thought-provoking - purpose under the emptiness. I definitely came away thinking more about the museum space itself and what we get – or don’t – from it. Where else but Paris, eh? It takes the Yanks to play around with emptiness but we need the French to prompt us to look a little harder at the whole idea. Now how do we harness those qualities to get us a decent, in the full sense of that word, global economic strategy?