A Glimpse at the Marché aux Puces

Nestled in the heart of one of northern Paris' least-savory neighborhoods, Clignancourt, in the 18th arrondissement-- known mainly for its seedy, dilapidated storefronts and relentless, Canal Street-esque vendors hawking fake watches and chintzy Eiffel tower keychains (Clignancourt is also, incidentally, the home of the least popular of La Sorbonne's many campuses)-- is the otherworldly oasis of the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen; a world-renowned flea market which offers everything from antique furniture to vintage clothing to 19th-century doll parts. In the Vernaison section, one can find a pair of 1950's Louboutin pumps, a crystal perfume decanter, a lamp made from an old horse trough, realistic baby-doll eyes complete with lashes and blinking lids (uncanny, to say the least), ancient yards of yellowing, painstakingly hand-crafted lace, gilt-framed Baroque mirrors, old postcards written in sprawling manuscript, record players in all shapes and sizes, and even miniscule sex-doll keychains (I purchased one for a friend back home, of course). A born-and-raised Parisienne and good friend of mine, Kelly Ajuelos Hansen, took me to the Marché aux Puces in May, and I must say it beats out the Melrose Trading Post and the PCC by a landslide. Below are a few photographs I took at the Marché... just a small idea of the kind of things you can find there:

Kelly, modeling the aforementioned baby-doll eyes

A vendor's dog. French bulldog, naturally.

a hanging light fixture

antique chairs

quite a unique place to hang your hat...

The Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen occurs every Saturday to Monday from 9am-6pm on Rue des Rosiers, 75018 Paris (Métro: Porte de Clignancourt). http://www.marchesauxpuces.fr/

Midnight City

While we're on the subject of French dream-pop bands (I promise I'll stop posting about French things so much... maybe)... The gorgeous first track from M83's much-anticipated new album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (the follow up to 2008's Saturdays = Youth), produced by Beck and Nine Inch Nails bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and slated for release on October 18, 2011. I personally am counting down the days...

Plus a weird Star Wars-ish monster thing for the album art!!

Midnight City by M83

A Taste of Open Space & Stars

Just a taste from the shoot I did of the amazing French dream-pop band Open Space & Stars this past May at MAD Agency (a French artists' collective founded by Paul Armand-Delille, Hugues Armand-Delille and Anatole Maggiar) headquarters just outside of Paris... stay tuned for the full article and interview, which will appear in Autre Quarterly, the print version of Pas Un Autre, later this month!

OSS' debut album, Pop Prophecy, came out in December and is available on iTunes. Take a listen here.

Paul Armand-Delille and Nina Lili J of Open Space & Stars on the rooftop of La SIRA in Asnières

Anatole Maggiar, president and co-founder of MAD Agency

skateboarding is the best way to get around at La SIRA...

look out for Nina's solo album, currently in the works

Nina and Anatole

Paul and Nina

MAD Agency

La SIRA- inspired artwork

Paul and Nina

Open Space & Stars

For a taste of the beginning stages of Nina's solo project, check out her original video and cover of 10cc's "I'm Not In Love":

...and one of the most unique takes on Timbaland/OneRepublic's "Apologize" I've ever seen:

Can't wait to see what each and every one of these fantastic, creative spirits have planned for the future!

All images shot by Annabel Graham on location in Asnières-sur-Seine, France.

Des Belles Personnes

Though I've been told by a reliable source that comparisons are odious, French actress Léa Seydoux (Midnight in Paris, La Belle Personne), pictured above, bears an uncanny resemblance to Godard's infamous Danish muse and queen of New Wave cinema, Anna Karina, pictured below. Maybe it's the bangs, or the signature half-smirk... or just that French je ne sais quoi...

Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #3

Spring is just around the corner (in fact, according to the so-called Groundhog, it already is spring... but I've never believed him), and for those of us in school, so are midterms. What better way to procrastinate from beginning that daunting 8-page Lacan paper than a new playlist? None that I can think of. Except for attempt to untangle your jewelry (see above), or maybe what I did last night, which was see Des Hommes et Des Dieux (English title: Of Gods and Men), Xavier Beauvois' startlingly gorgeous (and horrifically depressing) film about French missionaries holding their ground against brutal Islamic extremists in Algeria during the mid-90's. Yes, it's sad, slow-moving and long, but I highly recommend it-- the stunning visuals alone are worth the time you may not have spent studying for that Physics test (ha, Physics... who am I kidding?). Oh, and it includes the most adorable little old man I've ever seen in my life, Jacques Herlin (pictured below), who plays Frère Amédée. Anyway, here it is, kids:

Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #3

Exquisite Corpses: Mugler F/W '11

Notorious for his outlandish, highly structured, anatomical pieces that both accentuate and toy with accepted notions of the human form, Strasbourg-born French designer Thierry Mugler has been an influential and utterly unique figure on the fashion scene since his breakout in the 70's. Mugler shows are designed as spectacles in and of themselves, and this year's men's fall/winter '11 showcase during New York Fashion Week was no exception. Mugler draped models in ethereal layers of transparent vinyl for a characteristically macabre, albeit slightly more poetic look. A few snapshots below from Jak + Jil:

A New Feminism: Annette Messager, Artist/Messenger

"I asked myself, Who am I? I am nothing. So I asked what people said about women. I appropriated the identity of others.”

-Annette Messager

As promised, here's a follow-up on Annette Messager, one of my favorite contemporary artists, who I mentioned briefly in my last post. Messager is best known for her installation art, which incorporates an array of media from photography, prints and drawings to knitting, embroidery, found objects and even taxidermy. Stepping onto the Parisian art scene in the early 1970s, Messager has produced prolific amounts of installation art over the years, becoming, along with her partner, Christian Boltanski, a force to be reckoned with within the contemporary art sphere. Her oeuvre deals with the themes of corporeal fragmentation, sexuality, physicality, femininity, childhood, abuse, innocence and sin, utilizing the motifs of fragmentation and repetition to express her views on particular psychological, cultural and sociological phenomena. In her installation pieces, a distinct and sometimes macabre nostalgia meets a resolute sense of femininity and a questioning of roles within society.

From Ma Collection de Proverbes, 1974

Messager initially gained widespread recognition within the art world for her series Ma Collection de Proverbes (1974), a minimalistic sequence of misogynistic sentences which she hand-embroidered on white cotton handkerchiefs and individually framed. The most notorious of the Proverbes, reading “Je pense, donc je suce,” (I think, therefore I give head) garnered a great deal of critical attention, both negative and positive.

(Apologies for the terrible quality of the above photograph.. it was the only one I could find)

Much of her art adheres to a strong feminine identity, investigating in depth what it means to be a woman—and the myths and stigmas that surround that role. In Mes Jalousies (1972) for example, she presents a series of photographic portraits of young, beautiful women upon which she has scribbled in black ink—creating wrinkles, crows’ feet and blemishes on their faces, causing them to appear cross-eyed, blacking out individual teeth.

Mes Jalousies, 1972

Les enfants aux yeux rayés, 1972

In another highly controversial piece, Les enfants aux yeux rayés (1972), she comments on the constant pressure placed upon the modern woman by society to procreate, presenting a group of newspaper photographs of anonymous young children with their eyes scratched out in pen.

The way in which Messager utilizes the medium of photography throughout her oeuvre is incredibly unique—in most cases, she creates a dualism between the photographs themselves and the larger installation piece that often contains them. In Mes Voeux (1988-91), for example, she compiles hundreds of small close-up black-and-white photographs of different parts of the human body—ears, mouths, noses, breasts, genitals, feet, limbs and hands—to form a large circle. The photographs, each in separate frames, hang from individual pieces of thread, partially overlapping and obscuring one another in their construction of a large circle. The body parts in the photographs range from male to female, old to young, attractive to unsightly, ordinary to titillating.

Messager combines these disparate physiological identities to form a whole, placing them in arbitrary relation to one another and creating a variety of conceptual, psychological and sexual associations through their placement. She turns the viewer’s ordinary association with each body part on its head, questioning the connotations and stigmas we ordinarily draw from such images when we view them alone—and, above all, she fragments the human body, asking us to consider each fragment on its own—a theme which appears repeatedly throughout her work.

In the series My Trophies (1987), Messager combines photography with drawing and painting in a series of large-scale, black-and-white photographs of body parts over which she has sketched and painted whimsical symbols in pastel, acrylic paint and charcoal. According to Messager, the drawings were inspired by French author Madeleine de Scudéry’s “maps of tenderness,” a group of maps of imaginary cities bearing the names of Tenderness, Constant Friendship and Inequality. Messager scrawls delicate renderings of dreamlike landscapes across the enlarged photographs, indicating both cultural references and aspects of her own personal life while imbuing the body parts with symbolic meaning.

From My Trophies, 1987

In this diptych, part of the My Trophies series, Messager pays homage to Surrealism with the drawings on the left foot (a pair of scissors, a key, a clothespin, several unidentifiable animals and patterns, all of which appear to be melting at the edges and strung together by a fragile black line) while alluding to her own childhood with the drawings on the right (a cluster of rowboats and sailboats floating on a flat bay, seabirds in the foreground).

In many of her installation pieces, Messager uses the motif of the veil or net to soften or in some way obscure what may be viewed as cruel or harsh within her work—and this lends a certain eeriness and mystery to those pieces. In Untitled (1993), she presents a group of taxidermied animals arranged in a circle around another, smaller animal, as though closing in on it or attacking it. A soft, transparent mosquito net is draped over the scene, disguising in part its peculiar connotations and creating the false appearance of a sheltered space. Upon closer inspection, though, we are met with the uncanny undertones of the piece. The transparent veil becomes at once a shrouding and revealing intermediary that serves to both envelop and expose the scene within. The viewer is separated by it from the animals’ gathering—be it friendly or hostile— and confronted by the illusory quality of appearance.

Untitled, 1993

In Les Piques (1992-3), which was recently featured in this fall's exhibit “Elles” (2010) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (which I was lucky enough to attend several times), she uses women’s black stockings, stuffing them with unidentifiable soft objects, stretching them at odd angles over framed photographs and found objects, ripping them, and ultimately toying with their transparency, their sexual connotations and their function.

Les Piques, 1992-3

Of Les Piques, Messager relates, “I started using transparent things… I had bought fishnet stockings, but they had too much of a sexual connotation that I no longer desired. I wanted an opacity which conveyed terror, such as the masks that criminals pull over their faces, or policemen… It was at this point that I started looking for nets.” In this piece, we are forced to consider the stockings in a completely different environment than the one generally accept them in— they have been displaced from the comfortable space we generally associate them with—on women’s legs, or in department stores, and relocated within a confused, dreamlike and almost sinister venue. Here again, Messager questions the stereotypical “role” of the woman within society.

Messager's current work consists mainly of large-scale installation pieces, focusing on the theme of movement and expanding upon that of corporeal fragmentation. A few examples below, in which she tends towards the tactile with hints of the sinister.

From the series Articulés-Désarticulés, 2002

Her 2007 installation in the entranceway of the Pompidou, La Ballade de Pinocchio à Beaubourg, featured large body parts crafted from red and black leather, bundled in black nets and hung from the ceiling beams.

La Ballade de Pinocchio à Beaubourg, Centre Pompidou, 2007

Messager herself peering through one of her installation pieces at the Hayward Gallery in London

Using the simple materials and images of daily life steeped in a tongue-in-cheek satire, Messager attempts, through her art, to free women from the rigid roles assigned to them by a male-dominated society—and to free objects themselves from the roles assigned to them by human beings. She imbues her art with a heavy symbolism, using everyday objects to connote deeper psychological implications and affirming through each work that any item—be it a stuffed toy or a mere word—can be transformed through a new perspective or an innovative utilization into an object of powerful expression.

Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #2

Monument Odessa, 1991

"We are all so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit. We pass very quickly from one stage to the next. It's very bizarre. It will happen to all of us, and fairly soon too. We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone."

-Christian Boltanski

New year, new mixtape-- plus one of French contemporary artist Christian Boltanski's haunting "missing children" photography installations. I was lucky enough to see Boltanski's installation pieces in the basement galleries of the Musée d'Art Moderne-- which included one room completely lined in slightly-blurred newspaper-quality photographs of anonymous missing children, one room nearly filled with stacked articles of clothing, and one filled with weathered phone books and Yellow Pages from each and every nation--during my stay in Paris. Boltanski handles the concepts of loss, death, memory and nostalgia with a eerily delicate transcendence. His work is definitely worth looking into-- as well as that of his partner, Annette Messager (more on her to come)!

Some of what I've been listening to lately:

Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #2

À une passante & photography by S.S.

Au revoir, Paris...

A few photos by Sebastian Spader that will remind me of my time living here, plus my favorite Baudelaire poem of all time-- which, in my opinion, perfectly epitomizes the phrase le coup de foudre (double meaning: lightning bolt/love at first sight).

All photos shot on 35mm with a Canon AE-1 Program.

À Une Passante

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

To A Passerby (English Translation)

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.

A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?

Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!

Hungarian Artist- Roommates, Chez Serge & Murakami at Versailles

For the past month, I've been lucky enough to share a gorgeous apartment in the 7th arrondissement on Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue du Bac (belonging to an American businessman-turned-artist, Giorgio, whose lovely paintings, photographs and sketches adorn every wall) with Ariel, a friend from childhood also studying here in Paris at La Sorbonne, and a Hungarian painter/photographer, Lili Kisteleki. I thought I'd take a moment to appreciate the randomness of our colocation and also the beauty and depth of her artwork (not to mention her incredible cooking skills!!). Lili had two friends, also Hungarian artists, staying with us a few weeks, Babos Bertalan Szili and Lena Kùt. Szili creates incredibly detailed, colorful drawings and paintings, mainly of faces juxtaposed with other objects, while Lena's specialty is performance art (at their exhibition at Place des Vosges, which we attended a few weeks back, she unveiled a video piece of herself being splashed repeatedly with different colors of paint, in slow motion, against a bleak desert landscape). A few of Lili's pieces:

this piece, which is actually gigantic in real life, is ironically leaned against the wall across from me as I type:

And two pieces that Lili and Szili collaborated on, which currently live in the apartment as well:

It's been great getting to know Lili, Szili and Lena, and being in such close proximity with their artwork. Check out Szili's work on his website: http://zsili.tv/

I've also discovered that I'm living right around the corner from late Parisian musical genius Serge Gainsbourg's old house on the Rue de Verneuil. (Side note: literally every time I wear my lace-up patent leather Repetto jazz shoes, at least one French boy compliments me on them, then reminds me that Serge used to wear them). Much like Oscar Wilde's grave, the house is covered in graffiti of the most loving kind-- which changes daily-- sketches of Serge and Jane Birkin, lipstick marks, song lyrics, lovers' initials.

Lastly, yesterday I paid a visit to the Château de Versailles with a few friends to see the Takashi Murakami installation. I've always had slightly mixed feelings about Murakami's work-- his colorful plastic animé sculptures hinge on kitsch and, in my opinion, don't offer a great deal of originality-- but it was interesting to see such utterly contemporary works set against the sweeping bay windows, marble statues, ancient ceiling tableaus, chandeliers and gold filigree of the Galerie des Glaces. You can see what I mean in the following pictures:

though most of the pieces in the exhibit explored the bounds of irony and juxtaposition, this piece worked a little better in my opinion, as Murakami completely outfitted the entire room in his (slightly creepy) grinning-rainbow-flower motif (notice the carpet?)

closeup on the lantern from the last shot

Suffice it to say that even though the weather has been absolutely horrendous for the past two weeks (nonstop pouring rain and wind), having all of this incredible art at my fingertips has lessened that concern!