The Act of Looking

I went to Paris for a week this month.

It’s been 20 years since my last trip, the story of which is integral to the memoir manuscript I’m working on, and I both wanted a bookend trip for that chapter, and to see the gigantic Rothko show that’s been running at the Fondation Louis Vuitton since October.

So I rented a little flat over in Belleville, one of the last neighborhoods that seems to still be a neighborhood, one with regular people who have jobs and kids and who aren’t wealthy. It’s gotten kind of foodie, as places do where rents are low enough that ambitious young people can find a space and start experimenting, but it also has plenty of plain cafés, the kind where a woman who did not realize quite how not-young she is anymore, or more specifically, who did not realize how not-young her bad feet and ankles are, can limp into and order a coffee, or a beer, or a little dinner at a slightly odd hour because she forgot to eat lunch and her circadian clock is still off.

It’s been tricky to find a way into this particular piece because of the ways that Paris signifies. Ooh, I’ve had people say, you went to Paris.

Yes, I went to Paris to see some art. I burned up several years worth of fossil fuel. I spent fifteen hours in airplanes, and I went to a fancy city to see art, and to write, and to walk around and look at things and think.

But I didn’t “go to Paris” to tick off some consumerist tourism box. I didn’t “go to Paris” to see the Eiffel Tower or ride the Bateaux Mouches or to race down that long gallery in the Louvre, ignoring the amazing art on the walls, just so I could say I’ve seen the Mona Lisa.
In part, to be fair, it’s because I did those things decades ago.

I’m lucky enough to have been visiting Paris at odd intervals since I was a kid, but even then, I was kind of freaked out by the tourism stuff. People who aren’t interested in the place, they’re interested in documenting that they’ve been to the place, as a marker of status.

I live in one of those places now, and that kind of tourism still freaks me out. The weirdos taking selfies in front of one of our ghost signs downtown, the creepy girls doing yoga poses on the railings at Mammoth while their boyfriends take pictures to put on Instagram. Who are these people?

In the 20 years since I was last there, like most places, like the place where I live, the tourism pressure has ramped up exponentially. Saint Germain has been utterly sanitized and seems like an upscale shopping mall with a few holdouts, clinging like hermit crabs to the tiny spaces they can still afford to rent. The terrible but romantic hotel where I stayed in the 80s with my first real boyfriend, the one on the rue St. Andre des Arts, where we shared a saggy bed with a neon sign outside our window and a bathroom down the hall, it’s now a fancy bistro with expensive flats above.

I spent a lot of time watching people have their varied Paris experiences. There were packs of wealthy American college students whose year abroad seemed dedicated to being seen at either the Instagram spots, or simply by their wealthy peers. There were a lot of signifiers flying around — designer handbags and shoes, hip restaurant plates, being seen in a pack with the right kind of people. There were also the regular tourists, including the adorable American tween in the red beret and stripey shirt, with braces on her teeth in the nail polish remover aisle at the Monoprix who asked me en Français if I spoke English, and the two American women from Mississippi, a little older than me, who simply spoke very Southern English at everyone around them — the waiter, the Spanish family at the next table. As far as they seemed to be concerned, France was not a foreign country at all, it was just the place where their children, who were married to one another, had inexplicably settled.

It’s a problem I think about a lot. The problem of “backdrop.” It happens when people visit a place that they fundamentally don’t believe is real. When they visit a place that only exists for them as background to their vacation experience, or in the case of the two American grandmothers, the experience of visiting their children. You see it here with people walking off the boardwalks in Yellowstone, onto the thermal features, or getting tossed by the bison they don’t really believe are real.
It’s hardly a new problem. Henry James wrote about it. So did Forster.

For me, Paris has never been a place I go to be seen, but to see. To look. I go to see art. I go to walk through streets where so much history has happened and to peer at people’s windows, wanting to see how they live here now. I go to sit at a cafe table, scribbling in a notebook, nursing a coffee or a beer, watching people go past. I go to remember my friend Michael, who I stayed with that summer in the 80s, when we were the annoying American college students. Michael who figured out he was gay that summer, and who got infected with the AIDs that killed him. I go to imagine what my life might have been if I’d taken that little bit of money my dad gave me when I graduated college and used it to go back to Paris, instead of moving to New York. I go to remember being a kid, with my brother Patrick, running from patisserie to patisserie, buying Religiuse pastries in every one, because sometimes they had crème patisserie in both the top and bottom cream puffs. I go to remember writing in cafés in those years after my novel came out, when I was trying to figure out how to write another one while holding down a real job, and to remember wandering in such a haze that last trip, 20 years ago, on the first anniversary of Patrick’s death.

That I go to Paris haunted by ghosts, in large part to visit with those ghosts, and to be in a place where sitting at tables reading or writing is entirely normal, doesn’t make me any better than the tourist-tourists (though I’d like to think I have better manners than the ladies speaking English). I’m looking for a different experience than they are. Like I said, I spent a lot of time watching people having their Paris experiences, including the Parisians who live there.

This trip, I went for the art.
I went for the Rothko show, a show I went to twice.
I flew for fifteen hours, on two airplanes to Paris, because the great joy of Rothko is that he is un-photographable.
Rothko’s paintings are all aura.

Aura is that quality in a work of art that renders it entirely itself. It was Walter Benjamin in 1936 who argued in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
He called this quality the ‘aura’ of a piece of work.

Rothko’s works, monumental, mysterious, pushing the boundaries of what color and depth and darkness can do in a work of painting, are great works because of their aura. For me at least, they hum. They are deeply alive.
“Painting is not about an experience,” he told LIFE magazine in 1959. “It is an experience.”
You go to a show like that not to look at the paintings, but to experience them, to be with them.

When I was very depressed in graduate school, my friend Matt would hire me to come to LA and dog sit his beloved Groucho when he’d go back east to visit his family. And I’d go see art, especially at LACMA, a museum I love. That was my first Rothko, an artist who didn’t mean much to me until I came around a gallery corner, and came face to face with White Center.
It took my breath away.

I stayed and hung out with that painting for a long time. I was so ill during those years, with a low grade fever I couldn’t shake, with sores that broke out all over the inside of my mouth. I was trying to write a novel that none of my professors cared about and get through a PhD program in which I had no real mentor. All my friends were normal. They were married and buying houses and having babies and I was still broke broke broke and sleeping on a futon on a platform built out of wood scraps I scavenged in the alley.

And here was this painting. A painting that seemed to live and breathe and offered no false consolations, but rather, seemed to offer company. A fellow traveler.
For years, every time I was in LA, I found an afternoon to go visit that painting.

I didn’t make time to go see the painting, I made time to go visit it.
Seeing is the backdrop problem.
You see something over there, separate from you, you visit something with which you have a relationship.

There was a moment, in gallery 9, facing the gigantic No. 14, the painting on the cover of the catalogue and the promotional materials, facing that enormous field of red and blue over burgundy, in a room full of other paintings from that era, paintings where you can see him working out how he wants to work with these forms, with these colors, there was a moment there when I didn’t know whether I was going to cry, or burst into laughter, or both, from the sheer emotion of the space. From the sheer audacity of the work. From amazement that he’d pulled it off, he’d made these seemingly simple paintings that had such power, and tenderness, and that radiated emotion.

One great thing about Paris is that even if you’ve spent weeks planning your trip online, marking good restaurants on your google map, searching to see what other exhibitions are on in the city, you really only find out from the posters in the métro when you get there. Thanks to the métro, I went to the Orangerie to see the Robert Ryman show. Ryman is not an artist I knew, but the big white painting on the posters looked interesting, and he seemed to be working with some of the same ideas about painting as Rothko did.

Ryman took the top of my head right off. My hair was on fire by the time I got through the exhibition. I had to go upstairs, have a coffee, then go downstairs again to see if what I’d seen was what I thought it was.

Ryman worked only in white. Like Rothko, by whom he was influenced some, Ryman’s paintings are unphotographable. You have to be standing there. In person. Some of the white paintings are three dimensional with paint, paint sort of scrunched up into these patterns, these tactile, delicious, interesting splodges. His paintings are also square. Some are big, some are small, and some of the late paintings have color behind the white. There was a series of big, square white paintings that were all about the horizontal brush strokes. They were mesmerizing.
The book I bought in the shop, The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman by Jean Frémon and translated by Brian Evenson notes that:

“Ryman makes images. Imageless images, certainly, but images nevertheless. But it isn’t possible to reproduce them. One can look at a Ryman painting in person but not in reproduction. What is reproduced has nothing in common with what is. This is no doubt true of any painting but it is more so of a Ryman painting. The reproduction undoes that intense presence.”

The show was at the Orangerie which houses the great, late Monet water lily series, and the show makes a direct connection between the ways that Ryman was using paint, and foregrounding paint itself as the subject of the painting, and the ways Monet used paint. The show ends with three of Monet’s great cathedral paintings, and when you go upstairs again, and enter the great oval galleries where the Monet paintings live, you can see the relation. You can see two artists working their medium, not just to make a representation of something else, but to make a thing that is a thing in and of itself. An image. An image that might not be an image of something but that is an image nonetheless.

Sadly, it was nearly impossible to visit with the Monet paintings because those galleries were filled with people posing in front of the paintings, taking selfies of themselves, instead of looking at the art. They were not ready to engage with the work, or willing, or perhaps even very interested. Again, this is a thing as old as tourism itself …

One of the reasons I’m interested in materiality is that it is the stuff from which our lives are built. Paint and canvas. This is what I found so thrilling in both of these shows. I went back to see the Rothko a second time, and it was much more crowded. I had a ticket time later in the day, and the galleries were clogged with people who were, inexplicably, taking phone photos of the unphotographable art. I think there is a large swathe of the population who now only really experience the world through their phones, through those viewfinders. I was gobsmacked, and often annoyed when I was trying to actually see a painting, but I tried to be zen about it.
Other people are other people.

The second visit, I skipped to the galleries I really wanted to see again, mostly Gallerie 9, the big room and the smaller gallery, the last in the show, where the Black and Grey series were hanging. I found them just as thrilling as the first visit, perhaps more so. There’s something so profoundly touching about the work, about the scope of the ambition, about how spectacularly it was achieved. I visited with them for a long time. I don’t think any of us will ever be able to see them all hung together like that again, in conversation with one another, as Rothko wanted.

I am not an art historian, but I am a writer who is profoundly interested in what the world means, and how we come to understand that meaning. It’s why materiality fascinates me. I went to the Bibliothéque Nationale with my seatmate from the flight over, and we saw an amazing exhibition of Renaissance books, including a lot of works by Petrarch and Dante. I was as fascinated by the fabrication of the books, by the illuminations, by their handmade nature as I was by looking at the plexiglass cradles the curators had devised to display them. I like things, and I like seeing how things work. That Petrarch and Dante actually, physically wrote those words on those pages in those books on display was as fascinating to me as the literary and philosophical impact of those works.

The promise of the digital transformation was that everything would be available to everyone all the time, and what we’ve found is that while yes, you can access vast swathes of information, what we can’t access through our computer screens is the material existence of things. You cannot in any way understand a Rothko painting from seeing a photograph of it in your laptop. Robert Ryman makes no sense unless you’re standing in front of him. The sheer accomplishment of making books from highly-decorated sheets of vellum (to say nothing of making vellum in the first place) is not something you’re going to be able to access online.

Nor can you experience the vastness of the Paradise Valley, or the strange coiled energy in that placid-looking bison over there, or the thrill of watching several hundred elk come up out of the “soccer field” hanging valley below the cabin, cross the yard, and head up Emigrant peak.

These things are all connected, even if I haven’t yet entirely figured out how to express those connections. The things of the world are important. The thing-ness of the world is important.
Sometimes, you have to get on airplanes, and fly half way across the world, if you’re lucky enough to be able to do that (and thanks to my cousin, who gifted me the ticket for my birthday). Sometimes you need to go to a different place, where the food and the language and the customs are different and ride busses and walk around until your feet are ruined, and eat food you wouldn’t eat at home and think about what it would be like to have had a totally different life, in a different place, in a different language.

And then come home, where your person who you love is there to meet you, and your animals missed you, and you remember what you love about the life you have, the life you worked so hard to put together, a life made up of material joys, like the cat on your lap, the perennial onions pushing up through your garden, and coffee in the mornings with your beloved, looking up at Emigrant peak through the skylight over the bed.

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