Spending a day out of Cambridge?  If you wish you were in Paris but can only make it to New York -– take your dreams to the Met and see  “Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris” and “Paris as Muse: Photography 1840s-1930s,”  (both through May 4) and “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux” (through May 26)

[Rue de Constantine]
Charles Marville (French, Paris 1813–1879 Paris)
Date: ca. 1865 Medium: Albumen silver print from glass negative Dimensions: 27.3 x 36.8 cm (10 3/4 x 14 1/2 in.) Classification: Photographs Credit Line Permission Requested: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986 Accession Number: 1986.1141
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CHARLES MARVILLE AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Fifth Avenue at East 79^th Street

“ A bittersweet meditation on the meaning of nostalgia and the evolution of urban centers”

The Met’s current exhibit of Paris street scenes by 19^th-century French photographer Charles Marville is a revelation of memory and awareness that rebuffs the notion of nostalgia.

Marville (1813-1879), the son of modest tradespeople, used various techniques to document the destruction and re-creation of Paris from the early 1850’s through the 1870’s.  From 1862 on, he was the official photographer of the city of Paris.

    The neighborhoods and buildings Marville captured in these wondrous and sad images are long gone, having made way for the Paris of Napoleon III and his chief architect and planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Hausmann.The gilded, historic Paris that many of us know — the Belle Epoque city of grand boulevards and the Palais Garnier — was born in Marville’s time.  Preservationism was evolving, as well, through the necessary process of repairing and cleaning such monuments as the great cathedral of Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, and the Sainte-Chapelle.   

   The impulse to capture the past while obliterating it from sight is the beating heart of these photographs, which preserve the gritty city of Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème and Hugo’s Les Misérables     .In Marville’s photos, the outskirts of this Paris still look rural, even desolate.  Most of its streets appear to be empty, in part because images were taken very early in the day, but also because Marville’s exposures weren’t long enough to capture pedestrians and carriages in motion.  The rare figures here and there were actually posed within the frame by the artist.The “Hausmannization” of Paris, a cramped, crowded, and less romantic city than the one we imagine, began in the 1850’s under Emperor Napoleon III.   In addition to clearing medieval slums, upgrading sanitation, building parks, and restoring public monuments, the creation of boulevards and wider streets was intended to thwart those who might build and mount barricades, as they  had in the uprisings of 1830 and 1848.Marville recorded everything.  The old buildings, covered with advertising and all kinds of affiches  touting such modern conveniences as the folding umbrella.   The glass-covered, shop-lined alleys called passages, soon to be overshadowed by the department stores, les grand magasins.  The old industrial areas that dumped waste into the Seine tributaries and canals.  The timeless stares of tannery workers.The emerging wonders of the city are displayed here, too.   Hausmann’s “street furniture,” advertising kiosks, gas lamps, and – mais oui – public urinals, are respectfully and meticulously documented by Marville’s camera.  Most remarkable, perhaps, are the photographer’s views of the Avenue de l’Opéra as it was being built in the 1870’s.  Leading to the new Opéra, now called the Palais Garnier, the neighborhood is shown post-demolition and pre-construction, looking like nothing so much as a war zone.One of the final ironies is learning that Marville himself was a victim of Hausmann’s grand plan.  The photographer’s own studios were demolished and, during the 1871 uprising afterthe Franco-Prussian War, the Hôtel de Ville came under attack and much of its archival material – including Marville’s work as official photographer — was destroyed.

The exhibition is a bittersweet meditation on the meaning of nostalgia and the evolution of urban centers, whose periodic re-invention is both necessary and heartless.  Nostalgia is a construct; there are many pasts beyond the ones we recall and imagine.   The home that you long for may be just one of a cascade of images, seen for an instant in a series of receding mirrors.

–Rachel Yurman,  Cambridge, MA
© 2014

 

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

 

 

Chakaia Booker 5-21-10

  Another must see:  Chakaia Booker’s  big black sculptures made from rubber tires, at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA.

Outdoor sculptures include a  huge “picture frame” made of tire scraps assembled on some sort of armature– through which you can see a corner of the museum . Also,  inverted tee-pee-like structure, composed of V-shaped scraps, on a scaffolding.

"No More Milk and Cookies"

 Indoors: complex forms,  freestanding and on the walls–which embody shapes, textures, and visually complex abstract scenes “referencing African textiles and body decoration to evoke issues of black culture, identity, gender, and environmentalism,” as the DeCordova Web site explains.

The sculptures also bring up important questions about relationships of man-made waste materials, landscape, and culture.

Some  of the sculptures look like whimsical worms or insects; despite the overall “heavy” message of the show, these  are simply fun….and so highly textural that  you want to touch them. (I have to admit…my friend E and I each copped a feel—tho appearing soft, most of the rubber pieces are hard–before discovering a demonstration area near the exhibit where you can actually play with tire materials).

As the Decordova points out on its Web site:

Formally, Booker’s work is engaged in dialogue with the history of Western sculpture, from the ancient and classical tradition of the human figure through the Modernist non-objective sculpture of the twentieth century.

What sets her work apart, and significantly expands upon the history of sculpture, is her ability–with rubber tires–to create surfaces on objects that resemble skins, feathers, scales, spikes, armor, or attire.

Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn is a must-see restrospective by painter/photographer/sculptor/poet named…you guessed it:  “Roni Horn.” 

At Boston’s  Institute of Contemporary Art, the show, the first to compile such a large body of her work,  explores the changing nature of identity and perception.

In several galleries, the show  does so through photographic portraits of the artist and others at different stages of life.  

On the ICA’s first floor, photographs of the artist juxtapose images of her looking  traditionally masculine with others in which she appears “traditionally feminine–” from early childhood to the present.

On the fourth floor,   large portaits of her niece, also taken at different ages,  show slightly different expressions, moods, attitudes– are repeated, Warhol-like, in photo after photo.

Another gallery features pairs of seemingly identical photos of the heads and necks of owls and other birds taken from behind. 

Yet another includes two identical? photos of a white owl on a black perch.

Dead Owl, 1998

An ICA brochure explains  that many of Horne’s works are  “composed as pairs, series or with multiple sides, inviting us to notice subtle yet infinte difference between their parts. ”

I was particularly intrigued and impressed with Horn’s large format photographs of water in nature–roiling, calm, on rocks, with glints of sun–many taken of London’s River Thames–and Horn’s accompanying poetic commentary on the changing nature of water and our perception of it. 

Still Water, 1999

The “water” gallery  also includes two glass sculptures–one largely clear and white, the other mostly black–which, at times,  appear to be receptacles filled with water but have surfaces that seem to change shape. 

  Through a doorway in this gallery, the viewer can see out onto the water in Boston Harbor–highlighting all the more our involvement in/relation to/changing perception of the substance that is part and parcel of our existence–but can also destroy us.  

I also enjoyed Horn’s colorful glass sculptures–one, entitled “Pink Tons” , is the largest chunk of glass ever cast; the other, a  red  hassock-like piece with a squished-in corner that reminded me of a gigantic “gummy bear.”

Pink Tons

Both appeared to change in form and texture depending on the viewer’s vantage point. 

“Peer over the top of Pink Tons’ opaque cast sides into a seemingly liquid center that reacts to the atomsospheric changes of Boston’s light and weather. This five-ton glass cube is at once imposing and inviting, brutish yet pink, ”  the  brochure explains.

“Integrating difference is the basis of identity, not the exclusion of it,” Horn writes. “You are this and this and that….”

Not only is each work beautiful and provocative in itself–but the show as a whole,  which integrates a multitude of media and art forms,  is a brilliant expression encorporating the artist’s multiple talents and perceptions –and our own.  

—Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group. We also publish HarrisCom Blog and Ithaca Diaries Blog.

From its title, “Oppression and Pleasure,” I expected  the Pierre Menard Gallery’s current show of works by the feminist writer and artist Kate Millett to be  heavy-duty, in-your-face and  angry but was pleased to find,  for the most part, colorful, simple brush-strokes that looked like Japanese characters, one to a painting.  Perhaps I am slow, but it  took me awhile  to realize that each was a representation of female genitalia  or other body parts.

Kate Millett artwork

I didn’t agree with one observer who found the work overly aggressive; to me,  the paintings seemed lighthearted and whimsical–despite my interpretation of the title’s message that women’s sexuality can lead to both misery and  joy.

I did wonder, however, if the two huge black and white close-up photographs of female sex organs (from which even the staunchest of men looked away)  had been placed just over the food table to cut down on the demand for wine and chips.

The show, at 10 Arrow Street,  in Cambridge, will be up through April 12.
AMH

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, of Cambridge, MA.