La Nuit Blanche

The first Saturday I was in Paris was a night called La Nuit Blanche. Once a year, from seven pm to seven am most museums are open and are free!! There is also tons of performance pieces and installation art all over the city. I met up with Painton and we went to the Louvre first. My previous experience at the Louvre was six years ago and horrible. Granted I was walking through the hall that has the Mona Lisa, but I hated how crowded and noisy it was. (A little plug, because I can't say enough good things about it, go to the Yale University Art Gallery. It's everything a museum experience should be.)

Anyway, Painton and I chose a different hall and as we walked around the first few rooms of tapestries and other decorative arts, we did not see a single person. It was amazing. Neither of us have a particular interest in tapestries so we wandered towards some paintings. The names of the artists we saw now escape me (I think it was mostly 17th and 18th century works), but the pieces were beautiful and Painton had lots of stories and histories to add.

A highlight was that Painton is an expert on stained glass and rose windows, like those found at Chartres Catheral and as we walked though certain exhibits, he explained certain pieces and he taught me about the history of stained glass. It was really interesting.

As we were leaving we heard noise echoing through the museum and came upon a large hall where two women were doing an interpretative dance around some sculptures while a man was drumming (above). It was so strange to hear such a racket in a place usually so reserved and quiet. The women were dressed in slacks, button up shirts and ties, which looked like a guard's uniform. They would dance in sync, sometimes going through the crowd- it was funny to watch people's reactions as they came closer. It was so odd- I don't quite know what else to say.

While Painton and I grabbed a bite to eat, an interactive light and sound display started up outside the restaurant. There were three large screens, maybe about ten feet tall, five feet wide. People could walk, run, dance, skip, whatever, in front of them and the display would correspond to the movements.




The actual "scene" would change- sometimes it was a line, sometimes it was white noise, sometimes a solid color. The colors of the screens and the type of noise would change as well (Left and above). Is it art? I'm not sure but it was mesmerizing.

The next piece I had seen the beginnings of while walking through the Tuileries the day before. I was intrigued by these strange steel sculptures all through the garden. It turned out that a group had made them in order to create 2000 points of fire. What I had seen ended up being a small "fence" (for lack of a better word.) If you imagine the small, low, chain barriers that keep you off the grass at a park, and then at every post there was a flower pot. And instead of plants in each, there was fire.

These flower pots were also used in these "fire orbs" (right). There were dozens of them on the main path of the Tuileries. You can sort of see them behind the one in the front of the picture. It was really amazing to see so much fire. Painton joked that only in France would you have children running around so much open flame without barriers. It was a bit unnerving- if you weren't looking, you might walk into one of those flowerpot fences if you weren't looking where you were going.

























The picture to the right is one of the many moving pieces. There was a fire in the pot at the bottom and the man on the right could turn a wheel to bring the pot closer or further away from the pipe. That would then affect the fire coming out of the top. It might stop coming out of the top and then the man would turn the wheel and fire would shoot out.














The sculpture on the right is a metal mesh pipe filled with coals. There was a pair every twenty feet of so and some had just been lit but some had been burning for a while, like the one on the left. People would blow on them or the wind would blow and sparks would go flying.