This is not only the very last Mystery Location contest, but also a run-off for the winner! Only people who've won a previous contest may compete in this final round.
Mystery Location #6: Where's Karl?
Clue #1: This photo was not taken in any of the parks or gardens you may have purposefully visited. But sooner or later, you will probably have to pass through the location (broadly speaking), whether you want to or not.
Rules! 1. The final winner will be the semi-finalist who first comments, on the blog, by email, or on Facebook, with a correct identification of the location. 2. You are on your honor not to plug the photo itself into a Google Image search, but you may use Google to work through the clues.
We have another winner! Mystery Location #5: Where's Karl?
Answer: the dining room of the Napoleon III apartments at the Louvre
Winner: Bobinou69. Bobinou69, who are you?
This picture to the right was taken in the Louvre's Napoleon III apartments,
which, not coincidentally, Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon I) had fixed
up.
It was a big surprise to Le Prof and La Potiche to find these rooms
in the Louvre; despite a number of previous visits, we'd had no idea
they were here. Maybe we were busy chasing after more important works such as l'Objet plat et circulaire.
left: Tabriz. On table: various Moebius and Ring, by Delvoye
In 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, as he was known back then, was doing his stint as first titular president of the
Republic of France, living at the Palais de l'Élysée, where the French
presidents still live. He invited the architect Louis Tullius Visconti to present some plans
for linking the Louvre and Tuileries palaces and generally furbishing up
the Louvre. Later that same year, Louis-Napoléon pulled a coup d'état,
and ascended the throne as Emperor Napoleon III--the last monarch of France.
Mughal Jail, Kashan, and Mashed, Delvoye
That was when he
gave Visconti the green light to go ahead with renovations. But Visconti
died of apoplexy and was replaced by Hector Martin Lefuel, who, among other things, pulled together the state apartments shown here between 1856 and 1861. It is probably not a coincidence that Napoleon III wanted them done up in Louis XIV style. To learn more about the building project, check out this totally fun article on Napoleon.org. Because Napoleon.org is the kind of web site you need to know about.
Deux Bacchantes (clockwise), Delvoye
After we'd made our
eighteenth visit to the Louvre in five months, we were a little Louvred out,
though we didn't want to admit it. We broke things up a little by taking
a promenade in a 136-acre postmodern garden, 136-acre postmodern gardens being the kind of thing they build here for kicks. Plus a trip to Burgundy (thanks, Anna and Eileen!).
Refreshed and sunburnt, we returned for our nineteenth visit, including a second peek at the appartements (having realized that we'd forgotten to take more pictures for our
contest), only to
find that the Louvre crew had anticipated our mood and decided to SHAKE
THINGS UP!!!!!
The Louvre had invited the artist Wim Delvoye to do an installation in the
Objets
d'art section of the museum, which includes the Napoleon III
apartments. None of the works identified here in the photo captions were present during our first trip through. Why, hello there, corkscrewed bacchantes and piggies!
Twisted Dump Truck, Delvoye
This visit was like a scavenger hunt: there were monumental works
right out in the open, and little ones in casements hidden among the 19th-century
bric-a-brac. Big steel sculptures like twisted versions of marble
sculptures in the collection, big cathedral-like sculptures of steel
cut like lace, big "tapisdermied" pig sculptures, dainty porcelain things, and new stained glass windows installed in inconspicuous places.
L'Esprit d'escalier, Morellet
Speaking of inconspicuous windows, on our way toward the Renaissance Objets d'art, we walked through a stairwell we'd traversed before, but with an eye, this time, for
unexpected interventions. That was when we noticed
François Morellet's L'Esprit d'escalier, one part of which you can see
here. In 2010, the Louvre invited Morellet to redo the windows in the
Lefuel staircase, and he did, subtly shifting and skewing them. They are a delight!
It's
wonderful to be able to spend enough time in the Louvre to visit
and revisit rooms and artworks enough times to get completely familiar with them. It's also wonderful to get our perspective skewed and
refreshed by the contemporary works, the performances, and the other
exciting projects the Louvre crew puts together.
Our very first visits
to the Louvre, back in February, coincided with the nighttime festival
Amour à Mort that juxtaposed musicians, dancers, acrobats, and performance artists
with works that inspired/provoked them. We chased through the museum, night
after night, in pursuit of a piano and operatic soprano heard in the
Galerie Médicis, or a dude covering Bonnie Tyler while surrounded by
Poussin's Les Quatre Saisons, or a scritchety-scratchety babble
of vaudeville exhortations accompanying the acrobats leaping onto each other's
shoulders in imitation of the sculptures in the Cour Puget, or the
silent,
Why, hello, unauthorized swallows' nest!
uncomfortable crowd watching a group of dancers doing really
graceful but painful-looking things up and down the hard marble steps of
the Cour Marly (interacting more with the architecture than with the
sculptures) to the accompaniment of a string quartet.
Every night, as we exit through the courtyards, we hear cellists and countertenors
busking, invisibly, under the arches. And sometimes, we see evidence
that other unauthorized individuals are hard at work, making their own
little changes to the Louvre, as in the photo to the right. It all reminds us to look at the
old and familiar with a fresh eye, and makes it possible, when wanting
to look freshly isn't quite enough to make it happen spontaneously.
Not really a cathedral. Chapelle, Delvoye
It also makes us wistful (well, completely sick to our stomachs) to think of leaving, because it's not
true that we can always come back in the future to finish up, as it
were. We will miss the Louvre's special exhibitions, rooms opening and
closing, performances, temporary installations, and works
coming in and out on loan. Even such a big whale of an institution of the Louvre is always in flux.
It goes without saying that we're also in despair about everything
we'll be missing at the dozens of other museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces
we've enjoyed in Paris, the monuments and churches, and the parks and
gardens. We
don't even dare think about the sixty-odd other museums and sights I
put on our Must-See list but didn't even get to.
I like to think that we'll be going back to New York with sharpened
faculties, to better appreciate our home city. Art galleries of Manhattan and Brooklyn, get ready to see us every other week again. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, you better dust up the study wing. Brooklyn Museum, you
will have two visitors at your inexplicably deserted Friday night
soirees. Queens....we will learn something about your museums, for once. Justin Waldstein, you're on our calendar for August. And all
you other art makers and art venues in New York, beware, because we are emboldened and desperate for more!
Some of you have noticed that the blog has been pretty quiet lately, apart from a contest or two (though we've got another one coming up!). We've been busy with writing, reading, meeting deadlines, and having bouts of the flu. We also enjoyed a long visit from friends, with whom we went on a mini-vacation. Yes! Because sometimes, when you're living in Paris and getting spoiled by the good life, you start fantasizing about taking vacations to other awesome places.
"I want to go on vacation somewhere they've got lush green river valleys with roughly a thousand little castles perched on the cliffs."
"I want to go to a major wine region where they cook everything in duck fat."
column to write about, Souillac
"I want to go someplace that Henri II and Eleanor of Aquitaine squabbled over."
"I want to go someplace where you can drive an hour to a little village that's got a church that's got a carved stone column that I'm thinking of writing an article about sometime," says Le Prof.
La Potiche says, "I think we can manage that." For in southwest central France, in Aquitaine, in the départements of Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne, you can find all of these things and more! Including...the largest museum of automates in Europe! We don't stop till we get enough!
It was such a perfect vacation wonderland that it hardly even mattered that it rained every day but one, that our river cruise was impossible because the Dordogne was in flood and had washed out the docks, and that our 4-hour trip from Paris turned into a 7-hour trip because, with no warning whatsoever, the entire regional train line got shut down and we were stuck on a local bus instead. We loved it; THAT is how perfect the Dordogne is. There are forests, poppy-strewn fields, hilltop fortresses, little restaurants on the rivers, and so many medieval villages that they don't even bother to put them on the heritage trail maps. On our one sunny day, we headed out to Lot, where, unbeknownst to us, you can spend two hours driving up and down the sides of ravines stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, on dizzying little cliff-side roads, through rock tunnels and swooping up over the peaks and down into the river valleys, deafening yourselves the whole way with screams of wonder over how gorgeous, how astonishing, how unbelievably spectacular the countryside is and WHOA! that was a hairpin turn! I'd like to include a special word of appreciation for Prof. D's masterly handling of our stickshift rental car, which he drove up, down, and around incredible terrains unmarred by a single warning sign, with nary an accident. We saw a single guardrail--smashed off the side of a cliff, where a car had plowed into it.
But the real reason we went to the Dordogne was articulated by Prof. H: a lifelong, burning desire in her heart to gaze upon 25,000-year-old cave paintings of woolly mammoths and spotty horses, a desire that was much newer, but no less compelling, for Le Prof and La Potiche. Sometime in spring 2011, Le Prof and La Potiche went to see Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet Cave in southern France.
La Potiche, who is an innocent, had no suspicions that a desire to look at cave paintings could be kindled in her, or that it was already a-burning in Le Prof; all she wanted was to wear 3-D glasses and work on her Herzog impression, which becomes more uncannily lifelike with each iteration. But then she saw the movie, which is not perfect by any stretch, but which does give the audience the gift of seeing Chauvet at all. La Potiche sat there with her 3-D glasses perched over her everyday glasses and her mouth stuffed full of popcorn she felt too breathless to chew and stretched her tiny hands toward the bulging, glistening, painted rocks--they were so close, yet so far away! The movie was a tease, a taunt, a provocation! She would never see Chauvet Cave in person, because Chauvet is closed to the public; it's even closed to scientists, except for a few days of intensive study each year. La Potiche felt a hole shaped like a prehistoric rhino-like megafauna in her heart.
What La Potiche did not know then, and wouldn't learn till after she and Le Prof had decided not to go see the Great Barrier Reef or the Guangxi paddies which will probably also disappear in the next hundred years, but to go to France instead, was that southern France is chock-full of prehistoric sites that are still open to the public. There are at least a hundred, perhaps hundreds, and most of them aren't even mentioned in your guidebook. Some of them are run by prehistoric men who hang handwritten signs up on the side of the road with their cell phone numbers, telling you when they're available for a prehistoric rendez-vous. Some of them allow only 95 visitors a day and are booked weeks in advance. Some of them are totally deserted, at the end of winding one-lane mountain roads, and when you go inside they have you board a little train--a train!--with a French family, and they take you for a train ride down into the cavern to see the paintings. Is there anything more awesome than a little train that whisks you down a two-kilometer-long hole to see a rock ceiling decorated with more than sixty paintings of prehistoric animals? NO. THERE ISN'T. IT IS THE COOLEST THING IN THE WORLD. Except, perhaps, for the sunset-colored glittering stalactites at Pech-Merle with freaking SPOTTY HORSES and NEGATIVE HANDS all over the place!!!!!!!! LES MAINS NEGATIFS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You are totally not allowed to take pictures in the caves, so we have no pictures of our own to share. You should look for online pictures of Pech-Merle and Grotte de Rouffignac, which we saw, or just watch the Herzog movie for a closer idea of the actual experience. You can't touch anything. And you feel guilty if you cough or breathe too much or stand there with your mouth open in astonishment, because every visitor brings in body heat and mold and mildew and germs and things that can destroy the caves. The caves are monitored with all sorts of temperature and humidity and air quality equipment, and if the scientists ever discover that the art is being damaged, they will shut up the caves entirely, and no visitors will ever be allowed in again. But in the meantime, if you are lucky enough to see them, and walk around seeing the graceful, gorgeous paintings and etchings and sculptures popping out of the darkness, you feel a great bursting feeling of wonder that's kind of like the feeling you get in the Orangerie in the Les Nymphéas rooms, but maybe more like the feeling when Gandalf illuminated his staff in the Mines of Moria, Laaa, la-la-la-la La Laaaa! and you were, err, 27 again and wondering why you had to be born in this stupid time and place and not in, like, the time of Dáin, King Under the Mountain.
Grotte du Roc de Cazelle: no cave paintings. Lots of mannequins. Pictures totally allowed.
One of the things I enjoyed about the tours at the five prehistoric sites we visited was the resistance to explaining the art. The guides told us that some scholars believe the art has ritual/religious purposes, or pedagogical purposes, or whatever, but that there is insufficient evidence to decide which, if any, of these interpretations are correct. I like this resistance to jumping to conclusions, especially because those conclusions are generally utilitarian, unitary, and reductive. Why not suppose that the art was made as art, for the millions of reasons, of which ritual and pedagogy are only two, why artists make art? (Which is, by the way, my objection to the Herzog film: his insistence on the paintings as the passive replication of a "dream"--which is why some people make art, but sure as hell not all of them.) Just because a cave contains buffalo paintings but no signs of domestic life doesn't mean the cave must have been a holy site: there are lots of places besides holy sites where we don't cook supper, wash our hair, or dump our bedding; for example, art galleries.
Till the scholars figure out a grand unifying theory that explains why prehistoric people made their art, I'm happy to think of the caves as galleries, museums, and theaters, where people could enjoy the art, coming to it with as many feelings and motives as the artists themselves had in making it. This is not to say that ritual and education aren't multi-faceted too, but to me, the important thing is to foreground what we do know about these works, which is that they are ART, and to think of prehistoric art the way we think about other arts. Your cave painter paints that row of horses to express herself (whatever that means), or show off what he can do, or to enjoy having a secret, or to share a secret, or to crawl on her hands and knees up a 200-meter tunnel to dabble on the wall because that's what kids do when they've got time on their hands. Or to prove to himself that he can do it. Or to satisfy some inner longing that she can only express with a rash of red dots on the wall. Or because it's a job, and there are cavelings to feed. Or because there's a satisfaction in touching clay and fat and water, or a satisfaction in looking at lions and horses and bison. And the crowds come with their torches to look at the paintings, to feel spiritual, to learn what a mating bison looks like, to be entertained and to admire. Or, to be part of the supportive crowd at a friend's opening, or to heckle. Or to learn something about technique before they crawl up into their own holes. Or because their tour group has two hours to fill before they hit the Hard Rock Cafe. Or because they have a blog post to write.
