Paris - Hyperallergic (Page 18)

Art

The Pleasures and Risks of Ahistorical Curating

PARIS — In Carambolages, currently at the Grand Palais, we are plunged into the big, fuzzy, ahistorical world of anti-categories typical of the networked global economic order.

In Brief

The Louvre and Musée d'Orsay Shut Down as Seine River Floods [UPDATED]

Record rainfall in Paris has caused intense and dangerous flooding of the Seine River to the extent that the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay are closing temporarily to safeguard their collections.

Art

Art That Takes Flight Toward a Higher Consciousness

PARIS — An uplifting yet melancholy poetry pervades Ken Matsubara’s show at Galerie Eric Mouchet, Hou-Chou, Releasing Birds, through the flickering of endlessly looped moving images that suggest shadowy ghosts.

Art

A Monumental Critique of Empire, from Napoleonic to Corporate Times

PARIS — Scattered throughout the cavernous nave of the Grand Palais are mountains of shipping containers.

Art

Tracing Imaginary Lines and Fluid Borders in the Midst of a Migrant Crisis

PARIS — Just outside the gates of the National Museum of the History of Immigration, an enormous, dreamy-faced, freestyle swimmer surges from the ground.

Art

Mel Chin Crowdfunds a Film About Climate Change, Featuring an Inuit Hunter and Poodles

Artist Mel Chin's plan was to film an Inuit hunter racing through the streets of Paris on a sled pulled by seven fluffy white poodles, timing this vision of the Arctic in the French capital with the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in December of last year.

Art

Surveying Modern and Contemporary Art's Embrace of Ceramics

PARIS — Conversations about art and medium-specificity are almost always conversations about history.

Art

A Photographer Who Captured Workers Without Romanticizing Them

PARIS — Poignancy pervades A Working Eye, the first comprehensive retrospective of François Kollar’s Constructivist-style photography that, through nuanced grays and deep blacks, dramatized French workers’ empowerment.

Art

The Poetics of Torn Posters

PARIS — Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois has launched a chic additional space wth a historical show of Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains’s abstract, 35mm animated film “Pénélope” (1953).

Art

Anselm Kiefer's Heady and Heavy-Handed Behemoths

PARIS — Anselm Kiefer’s swashbuckling, material-laden, paint-encrusted canvases and “alchemical” vitrines supposedly transport us into thick intellectual zones of passion for German history and land.

Art

Connecting with Humanity in the Paris Catacombs

PARIS — We rarely experience the oceanic sensation of our bodies as continuous and equal with all other humans.

Art

In Paris, a Museum of African Art Brings Out Its Jewels

PARIS — In his prescient book Black Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein describes certain transcendent examples of African sculpture as a form of “fixed ecstasy.”