Today I went to look at an empty room, and it has been in my head ever since.
The north Marais in the morning is all shutters and delivery vans. Half the street is galleries, the other half shops being fitted out, and you cannot tell which is which.
One piece of paper taped inside the glass. No opening date, no explanation, just the name and a drawing. It takes a certain confidence to leave a window like that for a month.
Then the one I had actually come for. There is a storefront in rue du Perche you can hire, thirty square metres, and this morning I got to stand inside it.
Look at it. Grey boards, white walls, one track of black lights, three steps at the back and a handrail somebody has taken off and left leaning. Nothing in there at all. And I stood in the middle and did the thing every artist does, which is measure the walls by eye and count how many pieces would go up.
Eighteen. Maybe twenty two hung tight, the way the Petit Palais did yesterday.
Then you do the other sum, what a fortnight in that room costs against what eighteen drawings would have to sell for, and the room goes very quiet. I have been asking galleries all over Europe whether they look at new work. This is the version where you stop asking and pay for the wall yourself. Most honest option, most frightening one. I photographed it from four angles like a woman talking herself into something.
Walked it off through the Archives.
Six storeys of it, up the whole gable end. Thick black outline, flat colour, a figure at a drawing board with the work spilling into the clouds. Somebody paints a mural the size of a building about the act of drawing, and the neighbourhood walks past it to get bread.
Down at Les Halles a giant sandstone head lies on its side by Saint-Eustache, seventy tonnes, carved by Henri de Miller in 1986 and set straight on the ground with no plinth so people can climb into the hand. My one photo has two strangers across the front of it, so you get words instead. It is called Ecoute, and the ear is the size of a door.
Then the Bourse de Commerce, which I had not planned for today at all.
Out the front, Giuseppe Penone’s bronze tree with river stones sitting in the forks, as if it grew up around them and kept going. And the moon was out at half eleven in the morning, top corner, which I did not arrange and could not have. Some days the sky hands you the composition.
Inside, they have filled the rotunda with fog.
Fujiko Nakaya made that cloud for this room. Above it a nineteenth century frieze of ships and cargo and empire runs all the way round under the glass, and below it the floor has simply gone. People wade out and disappear from the waist down. Best lesson in edges I have had on this trip. Every hard line in that building stops where the fog reaches it, and none of it looks unfinished.
Round the corner from the lift, this.
A tiny animatronic mouse in a hole chewed through the gallery wall, dust heaped underneath, and it talks. Ryan Gander gave it his daughter’s voice and a stutter. It starts a sentence, loses it, tries again, gives up and admits it does not know what to say. Then it does the whole thing again, forever. I laughed out loud in a silent room and did not care.
And then Polke. Nine enormous panels standing free in steel frames, so you walk between them and see the next one through the last. He named them for the Axial Age, the stretch from about 800 to 200 BC when Confucius and Buddha and Plato were all thinking at once. What I took from that room has nothing to do with philosophy. He let the material do most of it, and then knew when to stop.
Last thing, by a window upstairs. A battered aluminium case, open, a wooden figure inside cut in half. Legs one side, body the other, packed like an instrument, airline tags still on the handle. No label I could read, so I will not guess who made it. But I have been living out of a case since the second of July with a portfolio in it, and I stood there a long time.
The list said Fondation Louis Vuitton today. The list did not get its way. Open studios at the Cite Internationale des Arts tonight, if I make it. I am still thinking about eighteen drawings on a white wall in rue du Perche.
Monday’s list said Butte aux Cailles, so naturally I went Sunday. A stencilled rat guarding a doorway, and Aydar’s flowering women watching the street from two walls of the thirteenth. All of it in black and white, which is to say, my language.
A postcard collage in a Popincourt gallery, a wall of painted cats, and then the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the man who wrote Les Miserables turns out to have drawn moonlit castles in brown ink better than most of us ever will.
For a few minutes around eight the sun sits inside the Arc de Triomphe and the whole avenue turns to brass. Then home through the metro, where the Picasso museum has hung its rooster over the escalators.
