Part One: The Public Sphere

In visiting Paris last year in pursuit of art I had two specific objectives: an exhibition and a gig., But as I outlined in my walking blog, the journey would be nothing without the unexpected. I thought I’d offer a more focussed look at what art I found, beginning with the art of the street, the public arena where commissioned sculpture, modern and historic, competes with graffiti, architecture, and gardens, to create an admixture, a many-voiced public conversation we call ‘the city’.

Elegy & Memorial

Angel Bear

More memorials of Paris

Pasted on a pillar, letter by letter, one Zebodj Mohamed ‘killed by the police’ remembered alongside a graffiti artist’s memorial to 17 Octobre 1961, the Paris massacre; the Fontaine Molière, a memorial in the 1st arrondisment to the playwright with whose name the French language is sometimes associated, is the work of two sculptors directed by an architect; and tucked away in a park lies a small but powerful memorial to the Shoa survivor, writer and activist Elie Wiesel.

Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to public office, and assasinated a year later is memorialised with a Place name, while a street memorial commemorates some of France’s colonial history, the inscription reading ‘A Nos Morts (‘to our dead’) INDOCHINE ALGIERS,

Attraction Touristique

And then there are those big public statements of Paris architecture. My wanderings led me to my first view of the Eiffel Tower, icon of modernity, foreground traffic between us. An outdoor exhibition attracted me from afar, with its colour and shapes, to the Louvre, where I became fascinated by the people, their identities framed against the scene.