PARIS MOTS D’EMPLOI
Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson
BOIS DE VINCENNES Francis Ponge
Let’s start somewhere in the middle of last summer at the foot of Charles Fourier’s monument, Place de Clichy (XVIII) which doesn’t actually exist, just a stone plinth with a barred rickety metal stairway courtesy of Ryan Air surplus (if that weren’t a contradiction in terms) up to a place no one can occupy, though the empty glass phone booth where the statue would normally be that would make an ideal auto-asphyxiation chamber for government ministers.
Why are we thinking about this now in April, in the Bois de Vincennes (V.) where it’s taken us a full three months to locate the site of the old Paris 8 University (bulldozed away in one night in 1980 at the end of a ten year lease to sow seeds of subversion and self-implosion), all because of a wrong-turn that led to a chance meeting with a mysterious cat-eyed woman who at the age of 16, in the wake of the Mai 68 flight to never-never land, ran off to enrol at Vincennes because her skirt was too short for school, and who now couldn’t remember where the university was or why she kept coming back here to walk her dog?
It’s curious to think that cinema’s phantom screen whose projections once fed the dreams of collective imaginary emancipation has become a pixellated data matrix on which isolated singularities zoom in, blow-up, pan-and-scan and play join-the-dots with the luminous puncta of obscurely held desires
Something to do with a paradoxical border between invisibility and disappearance, the fact that what was invisible, once it becomes visible, is apt to disappear. Whereas what was always visible will find ways to make itself even more so. And here we find ourselves, after the Bois, heading back to our unlikely abode at the foot of the Eiffel tower (VII), that quaintly monstrous apparition of iron-souled modernity which looms up at the end of our street like the dark ship in Hitchcock’s Marnie. Even without a map we can trace the route back by the gradual dwindling of vital signs, shocked and awed into submission by the inhuman scale of the Haussmannian scheme (VIII-I-IX), wondering how many Landrover Discoverys you would have to overturn – and where you would find the help – to construct a decent barricade.
With May on the horizon, the phantoms of revolt flit briefly across the city’s attention grid. Even Fnac has its obligatory dazibao of 68 knick-knacks: «la révolution est la passage actif de la rêve à la réalité» reads one poster that would sit equally well as copy for the (instantly obsolete) new generation i-phone in the next window.
We wander on, dazed, disconsolate flâneurs for whom the dream bird, boredom, has been consigned to what seems like a battery farm of cultural overproduction. Yet the vast well of international cinema, special screenings, experimental music concerts, semi-improvised art happenings and cheaply accessible public archives such as the Cinématheque and Beaubourg with their excellent retrospectives, the numerous pockets of dark into which one can disappear for an afternoon – les jours où je n’existe pas – form a kind of dispersed utopia in negative, a consoling black star constellation offering strange, uneasy refuge from endless gaudy vistas of luxury commodity display, mirrored by the Disney-gothic amusement-park gigantism of the new French art at Palais de Tokyo.
It’s curious to think that cinema’s phantom screen whose projections once fed the dreams of collective imaginary emancipation has become a pixellated data matrix on which isolated singularities zoom in, blow-up, pan-and-scan and play join-the-dots with the luminous puncta of obscurely held desires, so that say a polka-dot dress glimpsed in a thriftstore window, with its echoes of the bomb and Kubrick’s Lolita might lead via Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis to a grandiose Minelli-esque vision of choreographed public op art. Or the Eiffel Tower be recast in a new version of Warhol’s Empire, at once pre-echo and diminished xerox copy of a dead future’s unending monologue. «The more I look at a thing the more it empties of meaning and the better and emptier I feel.
