You may have heard David Lynch was a director. You may even know he's also a musician (Blue Bob). But did you know he was also a painter?
For the very first time, Lynch decided to show a lot of his work. The exposition is held in Paris (France), it's called The Air is on Fire and you'll be able to see a lot of his work: paintings, photographs, sketches, an installation and, last but not least, a couple of his short movies.
The exposition is held in the Fondation Cartier for contemporary art, situated in the art-loving Raspail area of Paris. A neon sign with the name David Lynch on the outside of the building tells you you've arrived, but not as much as the moment you enter the building. A mix of white noise and the sound of clunking metal is played through the speakers of the museum, immediately bringing you in the right mood to visit the work (and brain) of David Lynch. Throughout the museum you'll find a couple of buttons you can push if you want to add another sound to the mix (clunks, hisses etc.). It's a relatively simple but an ingenious tool.
The exposition is held in three rooms: the glass room (you can see on the second picture of this article) with Lynch's paintings, a darker room with sketches and more paintings and the basement with photographs, more sketches and a small theatre. The theatre is a reconstruction of the little theatre you see in Eraserhead.
The short movies you get to see are an interesting look as to how Lynch has evolved: you'll see a couple of early experimental works (Six Men Getting Sick, The Alphabet and The Grandmother) and more recent experiments. Lynch, as you may've noticed in INLAND EMPIRE, has discovered digital video and occasionally shoots video experiments for his member site. Boat (made in 2007) is a video with a man in a boat trying to drive fast enough to get into the dark. A female voice narrates. The only thing you see is Lynch himself (the man in the boat), the boat, the water, the light and the dark. The Darkened Room is another recent short, one I've already mentioned in my review of INLAND EMPIRE. It is nice (and this was an observation also true for his older works) to see stuff I'd seen before on a much bigger screen.
I hadn't seen Out Yonder before, a funny short with David Lynch and his son. The biggest criticism here is that - please bear in mind Lynch and son are talking in some form of dialect - it's sometimes quite hard to understand what's been said (or "what's be being said" to paraphrase Out Yonder) when there's visitors walking around in the other part of the basement. Especially when there's a guided tour passing.
Which is probably one of the reasons why Out Yonder didn't get as many laughs as Dumbland, Lynch's exercise in crude animation. Both the characters and the animation is far from sophisticated and shows the adventures of a very dumb family. South Park fans should try and get hold of the Dumbland DVD.
I wasn't too fond of two other experiments shown at the theatre: Intervalor Experiments shows what happens if you put a slow motion camera in an area that changes (like a blooming wood, a house where the light shines in for a couple of hours and stairs where you can see shadows). The answer is: it changes. Slowly. Whereas I can see this can be valuable for a director to experiment with cameras, I don't think it's powerful enough to show in a darkened theatre at an exposition for over ten minutes. Speaking of which, Lynch also made a short with computer animation: the idea is that you're staring at some sort of factory and you see and hear the machines working. The result is a symphony with industrial tools. Nice for a couple of minutes, but again, ten minutes of just the same is stretching it too much. Now there's a short that would've worked better on a smaller screen, played in a loop.
The part of the exposition that is called Distorted Nudes (a.k.a. Lynch goes Photoshop on pictures of Victorian nudes) is shielded from young and innocent eyes, which is a bit of a shame as a) I don't know of being exposed to the other work of Lynch is not damaging to the innocent soul of a child and b) that part of the exposition also contains an installation of a small house (a living room) that is not only very Lynchian but also quite nice for a child to walk though. David Lynch based this living room on one of his paintings and recreated it for the exhibition in life-size so the visitor could step into Lynch's world.
Another trip to the brain of David Lynch is the second room, where you'll find the mind of Lynch never seems to stop. Around a set of paintings you see a selection from David Lynch's maps of drawings. Approximately 500 drawings, notes and sketches were taken out of Lynch's binders for the exposition and show the man's mind never stops. It's not just pieces of papers Lynch scribbled/drew on, but also post-it notes, a barf bag from a plane, empty matchbooks and napkins (some, I must say, even look used). Some are just drawings, some contain pieces of dialogues or ideas Lynch's brain is still shaping into something more concrete. Whereas most of these drawings are fascinating, there was 5% where I thought whether this was good or interesting enough to exhibit in a museum. It also made me think I really should keep all my drawings, in case I become famous one day.
While it's true I haven't said much about the paintings themselves (after all, still the heart of the exhibition), it's also true Lynch's work isn't easy to describe. (We've heard the words 'experimental' and 'disturbing' used.) Lynch has a habit of adding text to his paintings. The fun thing is that this makes you come closer to read the text (which Lynch often made - purposely - hard to read) and then you step back to see the full picture and you see other details worked into the canvas. This, combined with the white noise in the rooms, add an extra dimension to the paintings.
The average Lynch fan will gladly go to Paris to see this exhibition, as it offers a unique insight into the mind of David Keith Lynch. If you plan to make the most out of your stay there (watch all the shorts and see the works in detail), you must realize that you'll be spending more than four hours inside the museum. (After a while, the guides started saying hello to me.)
| THE AIR IS ON FIRE was shown in Paris from March 3 to May 27 2007. The catalogue, which also contains 2 CDs with an interview with Lynch, cost you � 50 (and you can order it via Amazon.fr). The exhibition has now moved to Milan, where you can catch it from 9 October 2007 to 13 January 2008. Just follow the link for more details. |
Written by Kurtodrome for Delirium Vault in April 2007, just after our visit to Paris. It's been slightly edited here and repeated because the installation is now being shown in Milan.
Kurtodrome
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