My life outside Valenciennes.
Since my last blog I have been filling my head with art. I have been living a rather extravagant lifestyle running around pockets of Europe. I have been to Berlin, Brussels, Lille (this was about my 5th visit) and Paris. The number of exhibitions and artists I have squashed into the last couple of weeks I can not recite. There has been a mixture of shockingly bad art as well as bone-tinglingly amazing work.
My greatest excitement and frustration (which I feel I need to voice) comes from an exhibition I saw today in Paris. I was greatly anticipating seeing an exhibition at Paris de Tokyo entitled "Superdome" encompassing 6 artists: Christoph Buchel, Daniel Firman, Arcangelo Sassolino, Jonathan Monk, Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni. I really admire Christoph Buchel's work and after seeing the "Simply Botiful" exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Coopermill in London, I knew that to fully appreciate the work you must experience the exhibition. Saving Buchel until the end of the exhibition, I stumbled around the other works. The two most impressive pieces were Daniel Firman's "Wursa (A 18000 km de la terre)"; a life size elephant balancing on its trunk, and Arcangelo Sassolino's "Afasia 1" a contraption that fires empty beer bottles at 600km per hour into a wall with the use of compressed nitrogen. Walking around the bend of the large gallery space I was greeted by the entrance to "Dump" (Christoph Buchel's work). Please see picture attached. In my new language of ‘frenlish’ I asked if it was ok to go in. The reply still makes me sad, as I was told that the piece has been closed because of security reasons. All I can say is health and safety strikes again and that I can’t express how much I wanted to go exploring.
Besides my childish sad face, because of the above occurrence, things are going well. I seem to be living on a diet of lots of new inspiring music, which means making work is really enjoyable. I now have 4 full days until the open studio and am still unsure if I will finish everything in time but feel surprisingly calm. I have counted all the pieces I want to put in the studio which seems to total 9 and the large structure outside means there will be 10 in all. A rather scary amount considering that according to my drawing (a very helpful counting system) I have been here for 68 days.
The construction of "tout le monde voit le vent souffler" is going well and the bit that I was fearing, of drilling 1850 holes, has now been completed. The 25 arcs have been made and tomorrow is the day for some tests on site. Hopefully, there will not be too many extra adjustments, although I know that because the floor of the site is not completely level complications are likely to arise.
