The Finished Boxes of Pencil Shavings

We finally divided up the 6B pencil shavings of Takesada Matsutani in small bundles of cellophane bags and fastened with a label with twisted wire to seal them. The labels were rubber stamped with the narrative of the making of the edition and the particular number within it.We had to move sideways and put the parts into bags because not all the boxes had not arrived in time. Nonetheless it made for another part in the ritual of its production, and something for the small audience of onlookers to see and puzzle over, just round the corner in a bookshop in Rue Vieille de Temple. We wore white coats with project badges on the lapel pocket whist we were putting the parts together, to add to the procedure of it all, and Matsutani wrote his name in calligraphy with brush and ink, under the number on the inside of the lid. Of course all this is total distraction from walking the city from porte to porte, but it does show you can get things done somewhere other than your main base, and you can live in other places too. In fact I would recommend wearing a white warehouse coat in the street, shops and cafés of places you visit, to be taken for ordinary and of the place. The residents think you’re the local chemist, butcher, or delivery man and nothing could be more normal! It’s my number one piece of tourist advice, and we must try them elsewhere, as well as maybe finishing the porte-walks in them, as a sort of industrial Gilbert and George. SC

Secret Chalk Mark

Two young men came out a door on the opposite corner just as I was crossing the street. They were Japanese. Or maybe they were Korean. The first one walked briskly up the street while the second one squatted down on one knee. He made a little mark with a piece of white chalk on the pavement just to right of the doorstep. He stood up, pocketed his chalk and hurried to catch up with the other fellow down the block. I looked down at his mark. It looked like a y or an h. There was the remnant of another mark which looked like the same mark but in blue. The blue mark was partly rubbed out and the new white one was written on top of it. I wondered if the guy making the mark needed to find it on the street later to know what building he was staying in. Or if his mark was a sign for someone else who would come later. Maybe he just marked the pavement every time he left any building. These little marks might be all over the city by the end of each day. He might mark everywhere he has been until he runs out of chalk. One day blue. The next day white. I went to the same spot today to see if there was a new mark and a new colour. The white is still there but it is smudged now. The blue is faint but still visible. There has not been a new colour put down today.

EVH

The Best Bit is the Finding

I am always happy to find things in books. I like to find a bus ticket or a train ticket from some far away place. I like to find a card from a restaurant or hotel or a rubber stamp shop. A photograph of a person or a place is especially good. Postcards are lovely to discover. The address reminds me of where I was when the postcard was received as well as who sent it, from where and from what year. A postcard offers a lot of information. Staying in this book-filled apartment offers me the added delight of finding the memories of other people between the pages of their books. It makes me wonder and worry about a future with people reading fewer books. If people are reading on electronic devices and not reading books made of paper they cannot lend their books, nor can they shelve their books and they cannot leave things in the books. There are a lot of things that are not important enough in themselves to keep but are just perfect to use as a bookmark. When a book has been read, the book mark is left behind. Michael Asher did a project in 1991 at the Centre Pompidou where he collected all the bits of paper he found as he went through every single one of the books in the Centre’s psychoanalysis section of the library. I do not know how many books that would have been but he found a lot of things. He made elaborate charts about what had been found in which books, locating them within the shelving system of the library. It all became a kind of playing at analytical scientific classification. I did not see the show. It sounds like it got rather too serious about the pleasure of nosing around. I have seen other exhibitions where artists have culled bits of paper from the volumes in various libraries. There is an intimacy in the finding. A rumour always surfaces of someone finding a slice of bacon in a book. I think that is an urban myth. Anyway, I am most interested in my own finds in my books and in the books of people I know. If someone else finds the left behind paper and presents it to me and or to a larger audience, they deny me the best bit which is the finding. EVH

The Rotunda

Claude Nicolas Ledoux’s Rotunda, finished in 1788 and now marooned between the overhead metro, the boulevard and high-rises at Paris Stalingrad, has been restored in recent years. It is a very elegant neo-classical building of utopic pretension. There is a curious two-thirds scale about it, and at the same time almost all exterior, with inside, a deeply internal squat column of a space, which is now a cafe. The circular column leads upwards to the flat lantern of light that illuminates it. From the piazza in front of it, there is that silence of newly-arrived architecture, only just implanted in its space, that you feel in paintings by de Chirico. SC

Porte de Versailles

rolled and bound carpet fragment used to baffle water-flow whilst cleaning the streets

The direct way from the Porte de Versailles back into the centre of Paris is one of the most satisfying of routes. It is nearly as complete as the directness of purpose of the route from the Porte de Charenton, which follows its eponymous street from the edge all the way to the Bastille.Here the journey follows the Rue de Vaugirard almost from the péripherique past the Porte itself and the lumbering Parc des Expositions, until eventually past Montparnasse it turns a corner at the Jardins de Luxembourg, and meets Boulevard Saint Michel. The street is an archetype of Paris : the tall narrow buildings meeting in the middle as if they were leaning together, creating a funnel that you walk into, as far as the eye can see. This, below is not Rue de Vaugirard, but Rue Popincourt in the 11th, on of my favourite streets doing that very thing I describe, and of an older unchanged Paris than that walked back from Porte de Versailles.SC

Source: Porte de Versailles

Starting from Porte de Sevres

We set off from the Porte de Sevres in cold bright sunshine. Walking at a good pace was essential because the wind was so sharp. Hats and gloves were also essential. The neighbourhood made for a peculiar start. We were surrounded by the huge complex of buildings belonging to the Ministry of the Defense. It seemed to be mostly involved with the Armée de l’Air. We did not investigate. We passed a bus stop with a shoebox sitting at one end of the bench. It was a small shoebox and it was open. Inside the box was a brand new pair of children’s shoes. Whoever bought the shoes must have been admiring them or showing them to someone else when the bus arrived. Off they went on the bus and the new shoes got left behind. I wondered if they had just been left or if they had been waiting there all morning. I worried whether anyone would come back looking for them. I worried about them off and on for the rest of the day. On a less sad note, I was happy to once again pass the Cultural Center for Blind People and Their Friends.

EVH

Source: Starting from Porte de Sevres

Birdsong

The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, just round the corner from here, has a wonderful collection of apparatus for the mechanical imitation of bird-song, the Cabinet des Appeaux. So much so that many of the hand-made polished and finished wood, metal and glass objects suggest their own fantasy well beyond the mere reproduction of birdsong. The glass cylinder and funnel with flask and tube is for the melodious recreation of the sound of the linnet. Various rattles and wind-blown items cover a wide field of sounds. But as we know from John Bevis’s wonderful A-Z of Birdsong, and the label shown here from one of the cases, the linguistic notation and representation of birdsong is constantly changing. The museum is slightly too crazily knowing about itself, slightly too aware of its own quirkiness to be a place of real discovery, slightly too undusty. Maybe it suffers from too conscious a reading of le Douanier to Breton for its own good, when all you really want is for the place to be falling to pieces. It also has thistles on the seats of its chairs, which we had seen at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, and which seems to have become generally a more gentle negation of purpose, without ropes and cords tied around the arms. SC

Source: Birdsong

Cotton and Cardboard

The preparation for Matsutani’s edition of collected pencil shavings has taken us to new places in the city. Yesterday we went to rue Monsieur le Prince and visited a shop which sells uniforms and outfits to nurses and lab workers. I have seen these shops in many cities but I have not been inside one. It was a shop full of all kinds of things which I have never needed. There was a large selection of special rubber shoes and clogs which are made for easy cleaning. They can be put into dishwashers and sterilizing machines. There were tops and trousers in matching sporty colours and there were a lot of white ensembles with coloured edging on pockets or sleeves. There were short sleeves and long sleeves. There were a lot of things in plain white. The whites of the various uniforms varied a lot. There were bright whites and whites which looked greenish in the light. We chose five knee-length lab coats in white cotton. We did not want anything sporty. We wanted the whitest white at the cheapest price. We certainly did not want the white which looked greenish in the light.

Earlier we went to a small factory on the rue de Charonne called Cartonnages Laramée. They are makers of cardboard boxes which are then usually covered with paper or cloth with a name printed on the top. There were boxes for very fancy shops and exclusive products and there were simple rough boxes with the printing right on the cardboard. The whole time we were looking there was a background sound of big cutters whacking down on piles of thick cardboard. It was a dull heavy Thunk. We had the throbbing Thunk in our ears for the whole time that we examined box options. There were so many types and styles and thicknesses. There were many questions to ask and a lot of possibilities to explore. We went through hundreds of boxes on tables and shelves. The men in charge were a little confused by us because maybe they are accustomed to designer sort of people who arrive with a distinct plan or a particular product and then ask for a box in one colour and shape. They were not used to four people with so many questions among themselves. Our questions were in English and French and Japanese. The men could only respond to the questions in French. Maybe they are used to these kind of discussions. Maybe everyone who arrives is just as finicky. We did not know exactly what we wanted but we knew we would know it when we saw it. One man went back to his desk and the other man hung around to answer our questions. A column nearby was coated with thousands of pieces of paper. Maybe these were order forms. It was some kind of colour-coded filing system and I loved it.

I did not go to the glass man nor to the wood suppliers. I went along to visit the man with the shop full of things made of wood. He has the boxes we finally agreed upon but we need more than he had in stock. He has had our order and a deposit for three weeks now but he has yet to contact the factory to order the extra boxes. We are beginning to feel nervous as we know that eleven wooden boxes are not enough boxes for the pencil shavings in Matsutani’s buckets.

EVH

Source: Cotton and Cardboard

The Pencil Shavings

The assembly of the parts of the edition of the shavings continues at a slow pace, not aided by the box-maker who didn’t order the boxes, the post office who lost the invitation cards in transit, the white coat hire that has to be a purchase, one rubber stamp for the box-lid being too small. Shall I go on. Just the usual procrastinations in yet another place where the manufacturing base of light industry has disappeared in favour of consumer goods and tourism as a product. We will get there, by the 9th of March, and replicate the mechanics of a laboratory, with scales, white gloves, polished glass, and the sliding lids will be closed once and for all on part of the debris from Matsutani’s studio in Rue Faidherbe. SC

Source: The Pencil Shavings

From the Porte de Vanves

The route from the Porte de Vanves down in the south west corner of the city begins by following the tracks out of Montparnasse station, as they go first south, and then west towards the heartlands, and on even further west to the pounded rocks of the Atlantic in Brittany. As soon as you leave the exit you come upon an oversized pigionnier, that just about rescues the birds from the electrical paraphernalia of the tracks. Turning into Rue de l’Ouest, you can see the tower at Montparnasse from the uncomfortable angle of edge-on, and once again you realise how small and compact the city is. We join the Avenue de Maine and cut through the bus station, to visit a purveyor of brocante at the end of Rue Vaugirard just off the boulevard.It’s a straight line for home almost, through St Germain and Place St Michel, past Notre Dame and the surrounding bridges, across Rue de Rivoli and into the Marais. But not without calling to see, on an annual visit, Un Regard Moderne, the tiny bookshop at No.10 Rue Git le Coeur run by the lifer Jacques Noel. The street was made famous by the fairytale hotel lived in by Ginsburg, Corso and Burroughs in the late fifties and early sixties, as everybody knows.We caught Jacques reading on the doorstep, where there was just about enough light to see. More than can be said for the interior of the shop, which appears now to be homogenously solid with the stratification of books that can only be extracted with a shovel. It’s really a Merzbau, less to do with reading than with accretion. Jacques may have his own private supply of discrete volumes, which he secretly keeps under the counter for moments like this when he’s forced to the edge. Books will finally bury you if you live with them like he does. SC

Source: From the Porte de Vanves