Since the mid 90s, Takeshi Kitano is known in the Western world as a successful crtically-acclaimed filmmaker. But his activities as a television show host star and producer in Japan are still a mystery. How can the subtle director commit himself in those trash TV things? Invited by the Fondation Cartier to settle an exhibition, Kitano opens up the doors of his universe -not as schizophrenic as one could think.

Conceived as a playground for kids and families, the exhibition gathers all the activities of Kitano except cinema. First of all, it’s the very first real exhibition of Kitano’s paintings as he always refused all the invitations from museums. There are gathered the paintings he made after his accident in 1994, which can be seen in Hana-Bi, and 24 new pieces painted during the last two years. Under the apparent colorful naivety lies a real sense of composition and a strange universe mixing beasts and people. But the exhibition is also the opportunity for Kitano to play with ready-made ideas about Japan. He directed two videos about the way Japan is seen in foreign countries especially for this exhibition and he also plays with the clichés about his own career. In a closed room, almost presented as an atrocity exhibition, Kitano shows extracts of his infamous TV shows, involving many different types of exploding vehicles or people fighting with crocodiles. Upon the door to the room you can read “There is the real work of Takeshi Kitano”. A comical provocation that shows the real point of this surprising and often hilarious exhibition: an invitation to enter and share Kitano’s universe, his taste for science and childhood magic, and a desire to show him as he really is. There is no such thing as Kitano earning his life with stupid TV shows to be able to make his films. His work is a whole and this exhibition is the best way to embrace it fully for the first time.

Francis Chérasse

Read Kitano’s last film Achille and the Turtle review

Paris Palais de Tokyo, hosted in june an exhibition of Aleister Crowley’s paintings recently discovered near Cefalu in Italy where he founded his Abbaye of Thelema. Though Crowley the occultist is quite well known, we hardly know about Crowley’s work as a painter or a poet. On the occasion of this exceptional exhibition, the Palais de Tokyo welcomed cult American film director Kenneth Anger to have him introducing the exhibition and present there the film he directed in 2002 about Crowley on the last exhibition of his works in London The Man We Want to Hang. Kenneth Anger was largely nourished by Crowley’s work and no doubt that, even if he was a good friend of Anton Lavey who founded The Church of Satan, films like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (directly inspired by Crowley’s rituals), Invocation of my Demon Brother or Lucifer Rising owes more to Crowley’s Thelema than to LaVey’s vision of a Satanism taken metaphorically. No Nitzschean vision of a man with no God nor Master but a strong link with the symbols and fetishes of Crowley’s magical system which grew on middle east and Egyptian antique cultures. The works of and Anger and Crowley as a painter also share a certain number of artistic characteristics : flaming colors, the use of symbols without being symbolic at all and the huge influence they had of popular culture. Kenneth Anger defines himself as a magician and tells we are not supposed to believe him, the vision of his films dissipates all doubts about it.

Click here to see the video of Kenneth Anger at the Palais de Tokyo.

Mainly known for her musician career as one of the leaders of the New York seventies scene and unforgettable anthems such as Gloria, Because the Night co-written with Bruce Springsteen or People Have the Power, Patti Smith expressed herself in many different arts. The ongoing exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris gives the opportunity to discover a work that goes beyond its mediums of expression and deserve to be discovered in its totality.

Born in Chicago, Patti Smith moved to New York where she met and lived with Robert Mapplethorpe. Together they linked with major writers such as Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs. Fascinated by poetry since her childhood, and particularly by Arthur Rimbaud, Patti Smith first appeared on stage reading poems put in music. She started very early to take pictures and she initiated Robert Mapplethorpe to this art. In 1975, the cover of her debut album Horses -a picture of her in an androgynous style taken by Mapplethorpe- struck a whole generation. In 1978, a year after a tragic stage accident, her drawings were shown for the first time in the Robert Miller Gallery in New York.

The exhibition which just opened at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (until June 22) relates forty years of the artistic journey of an artist who always considered singing as only one of her ways to express a creativity largely fed on European culture. The hundreds of photos sum up her encounters and emotions, her trips, and open the doors to the influences that marked her work. A few portraits, a not so technical work, the photos of Patti Smith are essentially a work of impressions, a way to capture the moment, a saving of memories, memories of the places she went to, the people she met, and most of all the memory of people she admires : a picture of Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, the tomb of Arthur Rimbaud. This idea is also in the exhibition of objects as relics of the authors that nourished her : original manuscripts, a stone Patti Smith took on the bank of the river where Virginia Woolf drown, Pope Benoit XV’s slippers. We can see on different places this attraction to Catholic religion : an installation about La Cène, a Christ and a crown of thorns, and many photos of religious statues. This impressionist art of photography is also in her work as a painter, an art close to calligraphy, an art of sketches which goes with words that often surround the drawings. The films shown there are based on a similar approach, a capture of impressions and poetry to go with it. That is the real nerve of Patti Smith’s art: poetry. Patti Smith could be thought about as a singer who loves photography, drawings or films, she is in fact a poet and the mediums she chooses to express herself are only different entrances to her striking art of poetry, which is beautifully illustrated in this exhibition.

Francis Chérasse.

From January 22 to March 30, do not miss Ahtila’s first French retrospective. A major figure of contemporary video art, Ahtila breaks the image of a self-sufficient art for art’s sake by inventing new forms of tales and storytellings.

In Paris, the Jeu de Paume gallery is organizing the first French retrospective of the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Born in 1959, she immediately specialized in video art as a student in Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. But this category is still to identify. From its birth in the 60s, video art referred to -and against- the model of television. Its language was absolutely different from cinema: made of images considered in terms of flow and not in length, no longer edited horizontally but vertically, as a foliage. Wolf Vostell’s “Décollages” (meaning take-off and stripping at the same time) have shown that each video image could overlap an infinity of others and Nam June Paik’s do-it-yourself synthesizers made the most of the possibility of an unstoppable flux of self-generated images. The creation of video art was contemporary of the invention of new technics and of the democratization of its tools –Sony’s Portapak, which equipped many families, but also Fluxus ironic artists or wild Viennese Actionnists. It was the time for an art to identify itself, a very theoretical era where theory was meant to sharp art.

The era is not the same. Ahtila’s video works strikes by their neatness, not to say their typically Scandinavian coldness. Same bluish veil on frozen images. Of course, Ahtila’s work borrows to the fields of documentary, television, advertising and cinema : but it’s mostly because today we can’t distinguish those images anymore. Era has changed: cinema does not prevail anymore over other types of images and television supremacy is contested by other networks not as easy to control. And museum doesn’t prevail as a critical art: art has given up modernism self-sufficiency for images of the outside world and new forms of documentaries.

Ahtila’s videos always come in a multi-screening form (even if they can appear on one screen only on DVDs): the fact that the same subtitles run on each image allows the spectator to follow more than once the same screening, and to see each time a different film. Sometimes screens show each side of a room and surround the spectator, giving him at the same time the possibility to mentally edit the film on his own (as in Where is where, 2008, produced by the Jeu de Paume) ; sometimes the artist organizes the images on different screens, organizing one of them for storytelling and another for details, as in Consolation Service (1999). The films can relate a break-up or a mourning, themes we can recognize as the modern ones in cinema (Antonioni, Akerman, Garrel…): each time death comes home and disrupts realistic representations, as much as it moves deeply the characters who are depicted. Art invents new way of storytelling by mixing up different types of temporalities (testimonies, reconstitutions, myths…) : by disposing them side by side as in The Hour of Prayer, as if it was the same image running from one to another, and showing not a particular time, but a particular foliage of times and spaces.

Bastien Hader

This summer, for the French moviegoer in search of a little heat, Delirious was a possible destination. The diehard independent filmmaker Tom DiCillo recounts the meeting between a small-time paparazzi (Steve Buscemi) and a homeless youth who becomes his assistant (Michael Pitt). To teach him the trade, he simply opens the trunk of his car with pride and shows him where he stores all the equipment and accessories necessary for his next scoop.

The Photomobile

Has this existed since the dawn of time? No, only since the time of Weegee, an American photographer who was born in Eastern Europe in 1899 and died in Manhattan in 1968, and to whom the Musée Maillol has dedicated a retrospective from June 20 to October 15 of vintage prints gathered with passion and patience by the collector Hendrik Berinson. Weegee made two self-portraits: one in 1941 in a grungy darkroom that he renamed “my headquarters”, and the other the following year, sitting on a stool in front of the open trunk of a Chevy Coupe fitted out as a photomobile. “My car became my home. (…) I kept everything in there, an extra camera, cases of flash bulbs, extra-loaded holders, a typewriter, firemen’s boots, boxes of cigars, salami, infra-red films for shooting in the dark, uniforms, disguises, a change of underwear, and extra shoes and socks. I was no longer tied to the teletype machine at police headquarters. I had my wings. I no longer had to wait for crime to come to me; I could go after it. The police radio was my life line. My camera… my life and my love… was my Aladdin’s lamp.” (Lire la suite…)

Mistrusted and attacked since the beginning by puritanical and conservative society, rock’n’roll makes its way today into the world of museums with a splendid exhibition that opened on June 22 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Spanning the most significant years of a musical and social movement that was to change the face of America and the world, the exhibition is as much the portrait of a handful of musical geniuses as it is that of a society in the midst of fundamental change. From the 1940s, which posed the musical foundation of the movement, to the golden years at the end of the 1950s, the exhibition invites you on a broad tour through America.

From the first rooms with their iconic imagery – an impressive collection of vintage juke boxes, mikes, guitars, turntables, the reconstruction of a period recording studio, and even a Cadillac – to the large mural fresco retracing the history of a society in upheaval and laying out the infamous lives of certain emblematic figures, the rock ’n’ roll exhibition puts into perspective this singular musical current by placing it in its historical context: first, within the history of music, revealing the origins of the movement from gospel to rhythm and blues, but more importantly, its place within a broader history, with the beginnings of the struggle for civil rights, and a search for awareness and self-empowerment by the youth, leading to the ideals and struggles of the 1960s and 70s.

With its rare and fascinating images, including numerous posters of concerts from the era and the incredible series of photos made of King Elvis in 1956 by Alfred Wertheimer, most of which have never been published, the abundant and impressive documentation alone justifies this trip to the heart of the 1950s. For beyond the major importance of the upheaval that this musical movement engendered, its imagery was also to mark Western collective imagination forever with its esthetic canons and the fate of the most outstanding figures, from Buddy Holly to Elvis Presley, “the King”, who is at the heart of the exhibition and for whom we “celebrate” this year the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

By Olivier Gonord.