Until the 27th of March, the Palais de Tokyo is showing Cantilever, the work of German conceptualist artist Karsten Födinger. And as the title suggests, Födinger slips, phantom-like into the shadows – very much in the style of influential sculptor Richard Serra. Innovative and daring, Födinger constructs his work from the idea of collapse and deterioration – such as fragments of plaster and slabs of concrete randomly thrown on the floor.

He contrasts the material with the empty, forming a duality which also reflects creativity and the artists struggle to reach his goal: the finished art work. The use of basic materials – industrial debris such as nuts and bolts, cement, leading, and various construction odds and ends, which sum up the transience of objects; the effects of time and how decay renders them obsolete.

Födinger’s work conveys a sense of the unfinished, confronting the spectator with ideas of reality and imagination. The materials he uses are imprinted with the personal, social and historical signs of modernity, and an aesthetic that links to the large scale construction of public buildings and monuments, and their use of raw, crude materials.

Like Serra, Födinger examines the relationship between energy and balance that exists in the space surrounding the artworks. This is what Candilever expresses – it’s a work that appears as a kind of road under construction. Heavy iron plaques are supported by weak metal legs, giving the impression of being suspended and precarious unbalanced. Objects litter the floor, and on the walls hang small canvases. The work immediately evokes a poetic illusion of weakness and strength, and power and reality.

Födinger is an interesting conceptualist whose work shows us that the idea behind a piece is just as important as the piece itself, and the settings he uses forces an interaction from the viewer. Ignoring the constraints placed by museum and exhibition spaces, he creates constructions which spark an urban architectural dialogue, and which re-imagine the space altogether, placing a tension between structure and design.

This exciting young German artist has started to take up more ambitious projects, and his show at the Palais de Tokyo is an example of this. Critics are already calling him a Richard Serra for the noughties, catapulting him into the big leagues of conceptual sculpture.

For more information http://www.palaisdetokyo.com/fo3/low/programme/

Nancy Guzman

If you love Paris in the spring, this is a good excuse to visit the city of love and art, and stop by conceptual and provocative show Candilever. For love, nothing beats renting apartments in Paris

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Translated by: Poppy
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Nestled in the heart of the city, overlooking the Seine, the Hotel du Quai Voltaire in Paris, enjoys a particularly superior status thanks to its left bank location. It boasts not only history, charm and impeccable taste, but also rooms with some of the best views of the French capital.

Perhaps this is why Oscar Wilde picked the hotel as residence for what you might call his first Parisian season – January-May 1883 – even if he denied having given the matter any thought. For Wilde, unlike the older cousin of Lucy Honeychurch, a room with a view was just an excuse for the hotel owners to charge more. A gentleman, he asserted, never looked out the window.

It was a prosperous time. The recent successful tour of the States, in which he eloquently spread the aesthetic ideals of the new English renaissance, recalling the work and conversations of Ruskin, Morris, Whistler, Godwin y Pater, had brought Wilde a tidy sum – along with the contract he signed with Hamilton Griffin, manager of actress Mary Anderson, to write a play in which she would star.

This play would be The Duchess of Padua and it was with the goal of finishing it (even though it would later be deemed not good enough for the actress) that Wilde took up residence in Paris, gradually exhausting his funds with his extravagant, dandy lifestyle. When he invited his friends to dine in the most exclusive restaurants of the city, he usually accompanied it with the phrase “Tonight we are dining with the duchess.” After supper, Wilde liked to stroll through the ruins of the Tuileries palace, which had been burnt during the Paris Commune – oftening commenting that each of the old stones were like a chapter in the library of democracy.

Richard Ellmann speaks of this time as the moment when Wilde’s aesthetics, immersed in the French intellectual environment, became influenced by the idea of decadence. This transformation was accompanied by a dramatic change of style, and he started to wear an overcoat, leather gloves, wearing the cuffs of his sleeves folded out of his jacket – a gesture that Jean Cocteau was to emulate decades later. For a new hair cut, he took to his hairdresser to the Louvre and showed him an Antinoo bust so that he could use it as a model

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Paul Oilzum

It was all down to a bust in Villa Adriana (s.II) – when you rent apartments in Paris you can see it for yourself, and spare a thought for Wilde himself.

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The English group Jamiroquai is playing on March 23 at the Bercy in Paris.

Jamiroquai one of the major groups of electronic dance music of the late 90′s and early new century with a light, lively content that made a place in the musical panorama through deep contents in few years.

Of English origin, the band was formed in 1992 under the leadership of Jason ”Jay” Kay, who until today is the only original remaining member.

The original band was formed in addition to Kay, by keyboardist Toby Smith, Stuart Zender on bass, Nick Van Gelder on drums and Wallis Buchanan in the mysterious instrument from Australia, the didgeridoo.

The style of this magnificent group ranges from the Acid Jazz, whose movement has been pioneer, to the Disco and Electronics, passing through warm rhythms of Jazz Funk.

Undisputed leaders of the new 90’s funk, they have also been spokesmen for many environmental and ecological campaigns that were very present in the lyrics and videos in their first stage.

The name ”Jamiroquai” comes from the union of the name of the North American tribe of the Iroquois, with whom the leader of the band has always felt very identified, and “jamming” what means a musical jam session.

The beginnings of the band are dated from 1989 when the first single “When You Gonna Learn?” was recorded, which would be released in 1992.

From the success of this album, the band members signed a contract with record label Sony BMG Music Entertainment to record 8 albums.

They released their first album, “Emergency on Planet Earth” released in 1993, where recognizable lyrics on social content  to the rhythm  of funk, samba, pop and jazz  chords and of course Acid jazz generated unexpected and immediate success.

In just 3 weeks they made it to the top of the charts throughout the UK and remained in that position for 3 consecutive weeks.

This album featured themes that today are symbolic ones such as the aforementioned ”When You Gonna Learn?”, ”Emergency on Planet Earth” and ”Too Young To Die”, the latter reaching the Top 10 singles in England.

Two years after this overwhelming success, they launched “The Return of the Space Cowboy”, leaving a bit apart of lyrics style and concentrating on the rhythms of Funk and Acid Jazz. One theme of this album, ”Space Cowboy”, was censored in the UK, but its success was so great that they once again made it to the first place in the “U.S. Dance”.

But international fame only came in 1996 with their third album ”Travelling without Moving”, selling over 12 million copies around the world, being one of the best selling Jazz and Funk albums in history.

On October 13, 2010 redesign of their website was issued and announced a new tour for 2011, of which, this presentation in Paris is part of.

For further information: http://www.viagogo.es/Entradas-Conciertos/R+B-Urban-Soul/Jamiroquai-Entradas/E-323631

Nancy Guzman

So if you like the quality of Jamiroquai’s rhythm and are having a good time in apartments in Paris you cannot miss this super concert on March 23.

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Translated by: Maria
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In his brilliant essay, The Method of Sainte-Beuve (1908), Proust eloquently disputes the merits of the then highly prevalent style of French criticism (to which the title refers) – asserting his theory that a writer’s biography is an essential tool for the understanding of their work. Proust didn’t believe, for example, that his acquaintance with Stendhal put him in a better position to examine his work -  suggesting that, on the contrary, friendship can actually prove an obstacle for sound analysis. After all, Saint-Beuve himself had known Stendhal, and all he managed to say about the work by the author who wrote The Red and The Black was that he hated them.

Proust’s dismissal of the Sainte-Beuve method stemmed from his belief that a book is not the product of that part of us which carries out the tasks and activities of daily life, but of a part, which lives inside all of us – a profound, internal identity which creates, and which, Proust believed, represented the true self.

There are few examples of this theory as clear as in the French writer J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907). À Rebours [Against Nature] (1884) is one of the most influential and controversial novels in the history of literature – a true paradigm of decadence, noted not only for its morality, symbolism and surreality, but, through the figure of Jean Floressas des Esseintes, its tortured, aristocratic protagonist perpetually searching for that elusive ideal through pleasure and excess – as a piece of modern literature. Far from being a descendant of old, French nobility, holed up in a turreted mansion, Huysmans was in fact a low-ranking civil servant for the Ministry of Interior, who spent his days writing tedious reports.

Perhaps Oscar Wilde, who had been influenced by À Rebours whilst writing The Picture of Dorian Gray, might have wanted to mention Huysman’s novel, as an object for Dorian’s aesthetic education. In any case, when À Rebours was used as evidence against him in his infamous court case, he declined to make a comment about the morality of the book. To ask this of a writer, he memorably declared, was an impertinence and a vulgarity.

Paul Oilzum

Huysmans is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery, and his coffin is covered in notes and messages. If you rent apartments in Paris you could go and read some of them.

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In his memoirs Inseparable Stories (Singapore, 2001), the writer from Samoa Albert Hanover tells the enigmatic season he happened in Montevideo at the end of the twentieth century apparently working for the secret services of the British government.

Alerted to the possible pregnancy of Francophiles terrorist groups in certain alternative circles within the literary avant-garde and in reliance on the shabby elegance of his marginal aspect in his false identity as author of a book in progress that investigated the traces of Duchamp in poetry and the mechanics of the South American countries, he got to be welcomed in the apartment where the most heated debates had place between the arbitrary monotonous and the analogous, at the time two of the most vibrant literary trends of the Uruguay underground.

Even when, a few weeks later, he had the absolute certainty that no attack was being planned in this apartment, he kept going night after night, partly for fear of having left any loose ends -as he rarely understood what they were saying, he thought that maybe they talked on a secret key taken from a Borges story- and in part because there he was very well treated. His brief and bewildering interventions result only in part of the regular intake of illicit substances, had the dual effect that supporters of both groups unconditionally and immediately considered him one of themselves.

Along with a frame extracted from the film Performance where the head of Borges was reproduced, there was also a poster of Jim Morrison in the living room -the divinity of the Doors was one of the very few things that almost everyone seemed to agree at that house- and another that reproduced the French poster for Stranger Than Paradise, the second and admired feature by Jim Jarmusch. Everyone loved the name of the director of photography, Tom Dicillo, who was commented to have directed a very beautiful and whimsical film with Nick Cave as a supporting actor. One night he saw a whole roller coaster of altered states of consciousness the leader announced that Dicillo only could someday make a decent movie about the Doors. To everyone’s surprise, the monotonous nodded silently.

Maybe it’s the random product of the unconsciousness according to Duchamp. Or maybe some of those individuals he came to work with time in the film industry. But more than 15 years after Tom Dicillo received a phone call in which some producers offered him to direct a documentary they were preparing on the Doors. He accepted without hesitation. It’s called When You Are Strange, and has recently been released in several European countries.

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Paul Oilzum

After watching it, it is difficult to resist the temptation of renting apartments in Paris the city where he met his death Morrison and approaching the Pere Lachaise cemetery to visit his grave and pay him homage. We will not recognize them, but maybe we coincide there with some of the attendees at those fabulous evenings.

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Translated by: Maria
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