Memento 4
Catherine Parayre: Observational / Stream of consciousness
27 October 2023
Good morning, Derek.
yesterday afternoon i spent some time writing in the Museum in the Hallway, as it was getting darker. Below is what happened.
All best, Catherine
A student, close by, playing his guitar, practicing (i ask him) Bach's Lute Suite in E Major 1006a - a virtuoso flânerie. I cannot write. The music is arresting. Arresting me in my thoughts. Arresting the movement of my hand on the paper. I faintly hear people talking in the lobby. A student walks by, says "sorry”; i answer "please, not to worry." I like it when people walk by. The guitarist around the corner continues to play, stopping at times - this is practice. I see a bland painted face on one screen. The guitarist likes to practice around the corner, by the theatre. He says this is the best acoustics in the building. I have noted down his name, as he will give a concert in Winter - the piece he is playing right now will be on the program. I see the interior of a cathedral, a yellow neon, an old Madonna, a sculpture against a red background. The Milano cathedral, outside. A last word Rudder. Bach echoes throughout the building. I hear the guitarist exchange with another student. Knights emerge from the ground on their wooden-like horses. Toy-like. “I will not make any more boring art”, says a banner. It's all true against the Mediterranean sky and under glossy blue lights. A bus drives by in the video. I lean against my chair, watching water spew out from a tank by a pond. Oversized red tulips - glossy - tear up the sky. Splash. The guitarist is gone; i stop writing.
3 November 2023
The mechanical hum of the airflow in the hallway is constant. I hear a cart rolling on the shiny floor of the lobby, someone quietly singing. Sitting on a bench, in red and pink, people by a pile of debris and dross with a blue sky in the background, on a street lined by brilliant green trees. Above a building, a mesh of wire frolics. I think of the war – the wars. A museum – a safe place, should we think, a boîte-en-valise even more so. The crowds – several – are made of intent observers. The viewers’ scrutinizing alertness, their being conscious of surroundings, their self-consciousness whether in blue or orange rooms: moving surveillance mechanisms, trained to perceive. They make me think of statues planted in the sand on beaches that are washed in, washed out on the predictable schedule of the tide. More crowds: they feel safe, know what the water knows and remember the land. They clutter and stand in ecstasy, go up stairs, raise their heads, look above, wear light clothes. The torn-apart cars in an installation mesmerize, bury danger under expert convolutions of lines and shapes and the bright colours of speed. I prefer the regular windows of long buildings without any adornments, and vegetation as long as it is not Winter.
10 November 2023
As I write, I notice I miss many English words and how much this affects my writing. Sometimes I write down the German term that comes to mind – or the French one – so that I can look up the translation in a dictionary when I am back in the apartment. More often, i am resigned to not being able to name the English word. When I don’t have a word ready, my mind jumps to the next image on the screen to see if I can “say” it. Lacking words is similar, I think, to perceiving too many details in a photograph. Paradoxically, it becomes the stuff of life – our saturated lives. I know my writing is a translation from one into another world. It is good so. Now what? Jesus pisses down from his shiny altar in a place of many dreams. At the end of the street, where the roofs come closer to one another, a stately building looms down upon us. Dark profiles against screaming blue screens do not wave, but the lounge chairs like colour cubes on a roof do. More columns, more statues, more slim pillars, rose windows, square doors along more hallways; here, a man in an orange t-shirt who addresses a woman sitting under a table; there, blue, grey and red spectators face a large grisaille on a crimson wall. A man stands in a cage. Another one steps out; he looks like a businessman leaving work at the end of the day. A company of things sparkle in incandescent palaces. Myriads of visitors tell us that art is not boring and that ancient monoliths are humanlike. Metallic and wooden constructions, striped in all colours clinging to the urban scenery, make the streets appear naked; they point, however, to where they could break apart, except that, in these pictures, they are sealed to expansive supports and stronger architectures. On the screen, things are lashed together, assembled, solidly set up – paintings, statues, buildings, even the frames through which the photos were conceived for us to admire. Alone the sea and the sky play rookie. Pink lava at the end of a corridor – a tunnel, why not – and periwinkle shadows tell us that the world is alright, so do the men in large jackets conversing next to a sculpted body or the two women looking at each other at a safe distance in an orange fantasy.
15 November 2023
An upside-down silhouette surrounded by childlike yellow and childlike blue vibrates by two golden vats that may be rusty for some, Corten for others or yet indefinitely wooden. We are in a long gallery: a long glass wall makes it merge – or, maybe irremediably, separates it – from the orchard outside. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner – how I was treated today in an administrative office although I showed my Canadian passport. America is hard to see. I wish I could retreat into a house wrapped in sheets of translucent plastic. Art buildings are anchored in careful grounds. The more I watch the screens, the more I become sensitive to how safe art is. A structured oblivion, loci amoeni, enclosed Cockaignes, reveries across the land and its cities. From the spiraling stairs, we can see a man in a checkered shirt, neon lights piled up on the floor, a loose installation of coloured rectangles, perfect strips of paint, shiny panels on a wall – they make me think of oranges, canaries, and candy. A cow erupts from an imagined lake and moves confidently towards us and an unused plinth nearby. A low building, with a roof as large as that of a museum, glares and invites us to dream up a leisurely life where nature is gracious and photos elegantly framed. Here, a multitude of yellow cars; there, a petrified library next to dark lilac seats for the summer months. Visitors wading through luminous surfaces; blue and red, orange, yellow recur from floor to ceiling; the earth is blue like an egg yolk. All-green Mao smiles quizzingly out of large chamois dots, over a medieval bridge in V-form. Names are engraved on a slab laid on the ground, a crowd merges onto a narrow gangway. I can see one fragile-looking assemblage of rooms one upon the other. We observe principles and form serious mosaics – nothing is left unthought. The world pendulates without a risk.