Love letter to the Museion
Museum, I love you
(Je t’aime aussi en français 🥐)
I’ve been walking up and down your bright halls for a few years now. At age 3, I painted my bedroom (and myself) after visiting the Van Gogh Museum (❤️) in Amsterdam. Ventral slides on Mondays on the freshly waxed floor of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles (❤️). I comment your works aloud. I remain for 10 minutes, 10 inches from the canvas, squinting on a touch of bright yellow. I overhear what your visitors are saying about you. Sometimes I laugh condescendingly, sometimes I nod, in awe. I never queue except in the queue-jumping queues (Sesame card-holders (Grand Palais ❤️) know where I’m coming from). Besides, I do not visit you like a building, I visit you as a friend. I go to the Louvre for 15 minutes, just to read the newspaper quietly (you have to know the right rooms), to say hi to the Antiques and the Vincis. I fell in love with all your Venuses, your Victories, your Artemisses (?). I listened to all your guides over the shoulder of their true clients. I took all the forbidden photos. At yours I feel at home, a bit like Eloise at the Plaza (❤️).
At yours I feel at home, a bit like Eloise at the Plaza.
But beware, I feel at home but I do feel the thrill (“tremendum”) in front of the sacred! I would never touch a work of art, I have too much respect for their benjaminian aura, not like this genius ingenuous instagram account: Touching Contemporary Art (❤️).
Living Rooms
I have to tell you something, Museum. Your name is assumed, your honor is betrayed. Today “museification” sounds gloomy. It sounds like frosted immobile dust… Their Muses are made of stone more than flesh, and it’s not cool for you.
When Ptolemy Sôter gave you birth in Alexandria in 290 BC, Museion, O incarnation of the brilliant Hellenistic period, you sheltered the famous Library of Alexandria, gardens, an observatory, mathematicians named Euclid, Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, the poet Theocritus, the engineer Archimedes… In fierce opposition to the Saints of the Saints or closed treasury rooms found in archaic temples, Ptolemy wanted a living place, where people would research, debate, wander freely and where the best brains of the region would produce knowledge and design the future. Ptolemy, former “bodyguard” of Alexander the Great, became diadoch and spent extravagantly to subsidize the purchase of papyrus rolls, and maintain all those brilliant minds.
A few millions slammed, a dynasty that will last three centuries. Betting on live intelligence: Success.
The social impact of museums
Why does a proper Museion help civilizations to cross centuries (#softpower)? Because it “trickles down”, says Rodin in The Art*, and impacts society in depth. Today, a universal museum like the Louvre Abu Dhabi (❤️) aims to highlight, at the crossroads of three continents, what brings us together rather than what separates us. A wooden Virgin Mary meets a Buddha’s head or a Fayum for a contemplation without borders, in a scenography imagined in collaboration with the Louvre Paris. Openness against obscurantism, education against barbarity, tolerance against radicalism… Ideally, this spirit of openness and welcoming “trickles down” into society and the world, “polishing in turn some of the facets of [the] national soul”*.
“Art reveals mankind with the meaning of life” Auguste Rodin
Societal impact but also impact on individuals. Rodin says: “Art reveals mankind with the meaning of life, it sheds light on our destiny and consequently guides us into existence”. About Puvis de Chavannes: “Just look at one of his masterpieces to feel capable of noble actions.”*
Dear museum, I do not want to be too long about your impact because I will write more seriously soon, so I will let Rodin conclude with a somewhat delphic sentence: “Artists hand out a mirror to other Men so they know themselves better”. Art Gallery 🤜🤛Hall of Mirrors.
Free your eyes !
So yes, Mom is an artist (❤️), but she’s a great mom above all, who introduced me to you, Muses’ Palace, from a very young age. She taught me how to look beyond the canvas and the medium, to get rid of ideas and embrace the work, and simply listen to what it is telling me. She made me understand that there was nothing to understand; that the best way to look at it was to look for nothing and to dive in, as one explores a seabed or a starry night sky. Let yourself be surprised by a detail, a diagonal, a hand, a crease, a color.
Alone at the museum, but always well accompanied
At my own tiny scale, and without any budget, I tried to invent capsules that would transcribe my very personal apprehension of masterpieces.
First, I wanted to reproduce what I had felt once at the Guimet Museum (❤️), like hypnotized, just a few inches from Shiva; you know this kind of vertigo, when very close to the statue, too close. CONTOURS (2015) is a sequence shot, set to music and narration (pardon my terrible voice), where the camera strolls around the statue in macro mode, to finally move away and reveal the work as a whole.
“So the paintings seen from too far and too close. And there is only one invisible point that is the real place. The others are too close, too far, too high or too low. “
Pascal, Thoughts (ard. 1670)**
This is what I tried to enhance in a “video game” version with TERRA INCOGNITA (2018), produced with the irreplaceable complicity of my pal Léon Denise (❤️) as part of the first “Artistic Hackathon” organized by the Cité des Sciences (❤️) and the RMN Photo Agency — Grand Palais (❤️), who provided us with 3D models and photogrammetries of dozens of Paul Gauguin’s works. I’m a hackathon regular, thanks to MakeSense (❤️), Startup Weekend (❤️) and others, so even though I found the initiative interesting, I believe everything remains to be invented. However, I was amazed by the results: construction games, tactile boards, modern lithographs, 3D printed statuettes, puzzles… Students, independent or agency developers, retirees… all obviously passionate about art and ready to hack masterpieces for a weekend.
TERRA INCOGNITA allows the “player” to learn more about a statue. Floating questions encourage him to become familiar with the work, guess who it is, or what it represents, and finally contemplate it from a distance. To play it, you need to download the (free) Unity3D player, it’s worth it.
But since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, since you are giving us “a mirror to know ourselves better” *, I wanted to push the limits of absurdity, O Museion, by making 100% audio visits of exhibitions: TWO OBNOXIOUS VISITORS (2018). So I simply recorded what usually happens when I come to see you with a friend of mine: a casual, light-hearted discussion. It is a little contemplative and surrealist, a bit cubist, and a tad forbidden, because I record my friends’ and my reactions, but also those of all other anonymous visitors… without their knowing about it 😇.
I thus pay tribute to the tacit rules of visit that are often internalized, sometimes wrongly: do not talk to other visitors, follow the path of visit, read all the rails, pretend you “understand”… When you visit with “free eyes”, you’ll understand sometimes, but feel all the time.
“When you visit with “free eyes”, you’ll understand sometimes, and feel all the time.”
You will have understood, dear Museum, I am your humble servant and I would do everything to stir the curiosity of my fellow citizens and make them want to come and see you as a truthful friend, or a generous grandfather or a lover one looks in the eyes just like on the first date. I would love them to taste your peace and your madness, sans barriers, sans taboos, sans limits, sans everything.
*Rodin on Art and Artists, Paul Gsell, The Philosophical Library, NYC
** Thoughts, Blaise Pascal, Éditions de Port-Royal : Chap. XXV-Faiblesse de l’homme : 1669 et janv. 1670 p. 190 / 1678 n° 3 p. 186
