“No phone calls, no loud noises, no selfies”: Monumenta 2014 Installation Fills the Grand Palais with Strange City
Most art aims to be powerful. It wants to get under your skin and shake you and wake you. For many viewers, and for much art, that’s never really acheived. Monumenta: The Strange City, however, goes far beyond that. It carries you away, softly awakens your senses, and breathes fresh life into your rushing Paris mindset.
The entire conceptual city and journey through it is a similar experience to reading a half sci-fi, half philosophical novel. There’s a story, a life, different players, unexpected scenes. It’s almost a meditation of sorts: when you’re there, your entire body and mind are within the space. It brings the viewer inextricably into the present moment.
After walking around the tall white “city walls,” at the entrance of which it proclaims “no phone calls, no loud noise, no selfies”, the viewer is met with the enormous Dome, that, using the synesthetic system where colors and sounds correspond, sheds changing lights and music over the entire city. It acts a multi-colored sun, juxtaposing the otherwise monochromatic étrange cité. Based on artist Richard Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, meaning a “total work of art” including every artistic practice from poetry to music to sculpture, the Dome sets the scene for not only a total work of art, but on the viewers end, a total experience of the art.
Moving into the core of the installation, there are five main “rooms”, each brilliantly themed and deeply meaningful. They explore art, the senses, spirituality, technology, progress and digression. “The Empty Museum”, “How to Meet an Angel”, and “The Center of Cosmic Energy”, three of the five main rooms in the installation, all grow from the seed of what is sensed and not seen. They are to be discovered in the space, in the moment, in the rush of it all. Their immense power is derived from the sum of the parts of the entire installation.
The final stage of the work are two chapels: the white chapel and the dark chapel. Within them the walls are painted, like frescoes in chuches, containing the most “traditional” form of art in the entire installation. This is no coincidence. They act as the final word of a large undercurrent in the work as a whole: where is spirituality situated today amongst the largely fallen religious establishments?
Take the time to lose your sense of time in Monumenta. It bridges a great gap between contemporary art and those who have a hard time finding such installations to be art. The narrative is universal, visual and emotional, sensual and raw. You’ll “get it”, and “it” will powerful.
Monumenta 2014 : Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Grand Palais Nave and South East Gallery
Winston Churchill Entrance, avenue Winston Churchill, Paris 8ème
3, avenue du Général Eisenhower
75008 Paris
May 10- June 22, 2014
Hours: 10 am – 7 pm ( Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays)
10 am – Midnight (Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays)
http://www.grandpalais.fr/en/event/monumenta-2014-ilya-emilia-kabakov
Article: Amanda Hinton
