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Last night I attended
"Nuit Blanche" (literally a "white night" but has
come to mean an all-night celebration of art) in Nice. The
published
intent was to reach out to the "neophytes" by offering one night when
the galleries would be open and welcoming. So, armed with the map
that
accompanied the newspaper article I drove to the part of Nice
where I assumed all this would be taking place and parked in one of the
subterranean parking garages. |
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The parking/walking problems, common to all densely
populated
cities, were to be solved by offering free trips to the galleries via
the small sightseeing "trains" that normally shuttle tourists around
town. I managed to find my way to the
departure
sight and, with a small leap of faith, boarded one of the trains as if
I knew what I was doing and off it went...somewhere.
When we arrived, the train driver seemed not to know what to
tell us beyond
"Sortie
Sil Vous Plais" (please get out). A bewildered crowd of people
exited
with little clue as to where to go. As I am accustomed to this
feeling
I merely followed the people in front of me. Apparently that is
what
the people behind me and the people behind them did as well because we
all
walked for a few blocks then stopped in a confused mass as we consulted
maps and pointed at road names. I felt right at home. As I
had a map,
I was actually considered prepared. Someone came and spoke a few words
of
instruction in French and off we went. From there, all illusion
of
order ceased.
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Most of the art was
experimental and pretty much what I have come to
expect. There were a few artists that, for me, were really
interesting:
One piece that was highly regarded was in a small square where a
sequence of images was being projected onto a large balloon
overhead.
Most of the images were abstract but the sequence ended with
advertising for local supermarkets and cell phone companies. |
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My expectation was that somehow the little train would
be more
useful in getting from gallery to gallery but it quickly became clear
from the other bewildered patrons wandering around staring at maps and
pointing
that we were on our own. Finding the sometimes tiny galleries was
a
struggle at times because the map, with its little dots to indicate
galleries, was rarely accurate. Fortunately, this got easier as
time
went on because most of the competing storefronts closed so we all just
looked for crowds of odd-looking people.
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Conceptually, the most
interesting piece was an interactive-real-time-internet/gallery exhibit
by an artist named Fred Forest. My impression was that he was
using the gallery exhibit
as a way to interact
directly with the public real-time via the internet. There was a
lot
of text, in French, to explain all this. I just observed.
As this was
the last exhibit I saw that night, the crowd had thinned considerably
and was
mostly populated with artists and collectors. You can tell which
are
artists because of the dress code: weird hair, shabbily dressed for the
younger crowd but possibly sharply dressed "avec beret" for the older
guys, possibly accompanied with some sort of backpack or musical
instrument. Collectors look like they do everywhere: elegantly
dressed,
middle-aged, bewildered looks that matched mine. I guess people
thought I was a collector.
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The grande finale of
the evening was a party in a parking garage.
Perhaps they had planned a party in some other more elegant location
(like the big museum of contemporary art just above) and couldn't
afford it. The story was that they were "showing that common
spaces
could be transformed for artistic uses". It worked.
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This is an idea
that should be repeated. Some of the parking spaces were taped
off as
galleries so there was no shortage of space.
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One section became a
stage for musical performances while
yet another became the snack counter. (Speaking of snacks, the
French
don't do the cheese-and-cracker thing very much but wine flows freely.)
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A "band" played an impromptu
collection of sounds using a couple of mixing boards, a trombone, and a
percussionist who played two xylophones, a drum and sometimes the head
of an uninvited poet.
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The uninvited poet and his
friend the bagpiper joined in the general mayhem of sound making.
The crowd seemed quite interested to listen to the resulting
cacophony.
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The trip home in the early morning hours was refreshing
because
one can freely get lost, turn onto one-way streets, make U-turns, and
other
erratic behavior without risking lives or being observed. No, I
didn't
drink the wine. I am quite capable of this without any special
effects.
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