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Head Clausnitzer’s Paris Berlin Journal

Just before leaving Paris for Berlin we were feted at the home of our new friend Matthew Rose who is sometimes known as Mistah Cough Drop. I did not ask why. Matthew is an arts critic who has the Paris beat for art-themagazine.com. He is himself an innovative art maker as well. Matthew holds-up in the storied Montparnasse area of Paris near the Denfert-Rochereau Metro. The place was a stroller’s dream with no cars and quaint little shops (non tourist) where we walked that evening.

I suppose that many an expatriate finds reasons to stay in places far from point of origin that are more deeply felt than just what might be taken from scenery and food and all. There is history in Paris of course and I believe that Matthew may see himself as part of some continuation - as a man heading into the twenty first century with the rest of us but who is deeply anchored in the arts of, and sensitive to the passions of, times past.

Matthew was a friend of the late Ray Johnson, the mail art maven and practitioner of the exquisite gesture and a founding member of the New York Correspondence School. As I have it, since Ray Johnson’s death by suicide (thought to be that artist’s ultimate gesture and performance), Matthew has carried the torch of correspondence art for his friend, and maybe mentor, into the future in part with his own Paris Correspondence School.

On the way to Matthew’s place we flowed along quickly as American’s seem to do in a town in which the natural pace of life seems only just a bit faster than Mexico City. Paris remains a city where a coffee or a glass of wine can be enjoyed slowly one liquid molecule to one brain cell at a time.

In the metro we passed a be-turbaned fellow street traveler who was definitely not of an Eastern persuasion. He seemed sternly intent upon an errand yet to be finished and like so many people we passed on our way across town he carried a baguette. This is a sure sign that the workday is at an end. The man was muscular and square jawed and he was bald below his turban. He wore a pink faux fur great coat and his thick trois-wrinkled neck flushed down from his turban to a flouncy purple tourniquet of silk that hung to his knees. One thing marked him as someone we might know. His jeans were speckled and swished with many colors of paint - the universal uniform of the painter.

We came up out of the Denfert-Rochereau Metro station into Montparnasse near an entrance to the Paris catacombs that once were the old cities’ ossuaries. An old man stood near the closed darkened entrance trying to reign in his dog, which hunched and barked at the door to the old bone repository. As I had been imagining Parisian ghosts from the start I imagined the dog to be barking at some unhappy spirit.

I had heard that perhaps more satisfied ghosts inhabited the Montparnasse Cemetery. One grave that I wanted to go sit beside was that of the DADA master and impresario Tristan Tzara. As I walked with my friends that evening I wondered really how he might be doing in the land of the dead, whether he was being given any peace. I had seen the famous, perhaps infamous, photograph of him aiming a pistol at the head of a passing priest.

There were other spirits about as well. We passed a strolling couple so closely pulled together as they walked that from afar they seemed one creature. I found my feet instinctively stepping to the left away from them giving them space as we passed by. They were two men in love and slowly going home I supposed to become closer still. If one wishes this, in Paris, any two people (or more) of any sort may walk anywhere like that, in Montparnasse, or out onto the Bastille, down Republique, over through St. Germaine, or through the Place de la Concorde, or along the Champs Elysés and across the kilometers to the tower that Monsieur Eiffel built.

Really I was quite drunk with my reverie there in and upon the City of Light. As we walked a woman approached in what seemed to my magic filled mind a long gown of a shimmering cloth stretched over a framework that made her torso into a glowing multi-storied building with rows of lighted windows. Her chapeau was a luminous red cherry. Her eyes were beams of white light. Then as she passed I barely cognized that she was just a tall woman with a many-buttoned coat and a red beret. If this seems far-fetched, well I say it could have been, there in that moment for me. She smiled as she passed and I knew just then that we were really indeed the only strange sight on the boulevard.

After buying cheese and wine we arrived at Matthew’s door. A beautiful friend and helpmeet of Matthew’s greeted us at the top of the stairs. As each of us entered in our turn she took our hands that we had extended to her American style and pulled each of us to her and kissed us saying with a sort of conviction of fraternité, this is France you can kiss!

The party was comprised of mostly expatriates. We reconnected there with Suzanne Hollands and Whitey Flagg whom we had met earlier in the week at their gallery in the rue Keller near the Bastille. They called the gallery Ivy/ Paris. The two of them together are a powerhouse of curatorial energy. Suzanne is from Scotland and Whitey from the U.S. Suzanne is Paris based where she oversees a Meet-up group also called Ivy/ Paris. Whitey moves about the world organizing shows under their name, most recently doing an exchange of Paris based artists with a gallery in L.A.

As we arrived Whitey was in conversation with two older men whom I found out later were also from the U.S. Now Paris based theater people they were just then full of stories about the good old days in the theater and music business in San Francisco. They told story after story about the genesis of that far away scene. One was how the Family Dog (a music promo group in S.F., as the city had been called back then - maybe still?) arranged concerts in a roller rink at the beach with the likes of Janis Joplin and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Q M Services’ sidekick Dino Valenti and the group, The Young Bloods, had penned the hip rock anthem that ended with something like, Come on people, now, smile on your brother… learn to love one another, right now!”

In a quiet corner of the party occupying a loveseat and looking very beat on that Friday night were the husband and wife collaborative art critics from New York Lisa Liebmann and Brooks Adams who were just in the process of setting up house in Paris. They were definitely tired out with that, as anyone would be, however in their case all was exacerbated by the fact that they were raising a six-year-old boy who sounded like he might be a handful. Something in their demean (I am a parent, also) brought me down just there where I stayed put, at first as quiet as they were. Lisa was quite the odd sight sporting a large butterfly bandage smack between her eyebrows. She seemed not to notice that I had noticed this fact, which seemed to give me permission to move beyond it as I began to get to know them.

After a bit, Lisa became more animated and really held forth quite nicely about the state of the arts in Paris. Distilled down it seems that even though art is all around in the city, in the museums and on the streets, along the Seine and on Montmartre and Montparnasse, and with this a very large and active ground level scene spread out across town and into the burbs, there is a lack of the kind of attention that one might expect from the critical forum. The gallery scene in Paris (which the forum everywhere tends to cater too) can be a bit bookish and ingrown in a way that tends to firmly, but politely, reject influences from the outside. As Matthew pointed out, to have a show in Paris is good, as it goes. However, it sounds better from the outside looking in. But, to be an artist from Paris, well (and with a flourish of his hand) that is another story. There is instant respect! One wonders.

Following the artist Mark Kostabi’s admonition to always carry pictures and as I had finished matting some of my work in Kit’s studio earlier that day I had carted my largest black case to the party. With general approval all around I hauled out the new work and laid it on the floor for Brooks and Lisa and everyone else to see. Some of the things I showed that evening were erotic works that I carry along with other things for just these sorts of occasions. Matthew took these admiringly to the large table at the end of the room where he and Suzanne looked them over occasionally holding one or another up for all to see. It was very gratifying for this artist. A Paris salon is a salon is a salon!

The work I showed to Lisa and Brooks was to go onto the wall in Berlin. The theme, if you will, of the series I showed them was an (abstract) eurhythmy on the French artist Rossilon’s, Bibendum Man (which we know in the U.S. as the Michelin Man. He was the first anthropomorphized product logo.) I coupled snippets of the Bibendum Man image with a photograph of the Bibendum Chair. The chair had been designed in Paris as a tongue in cheek takeoff itself of the Bibendum Man by the American expatriate artist Eileen Gray about seventy five years ago.

Of course, I was going to Berlin. I promised myself however, that I would get back to Paris one day with this work under my arm. I would be a one-man icebreaker with work in this theme. However it was time to take my cheek out of town, finally to Berlin.

End Part Two

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