While in Paris, I explored the galleries in the Marais situated within the 3rd and 4th arrondissement. After talking to the women working at the Gagosian Gallery, they recommended the Marian Goodman gallery, a favorite gallery within the Paris art industry.

For his solo show, O Sentimental Machine, William Kentridge found inspiration from a piece of found footage of Leon Trotsky, Marxist theorist and Soviet Politician, giving a speech in response to being exiled from Turkey. From this piece of found footage, Kentridge made a five-channel video installation in the basement level of the gallery with accompanying drawings on the ground floor. These drawings in a sense represented Kentridge’s attachment and emotional exile from Paris in relation to Trotsky’s exile from Turkey.

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Over spring break I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit one of my best friends in her place of residence, Paris. While there I dragged her to the many art museums and galleries the city had to offer.

Palais de Tokyo is a museum with a concentration on video art, installation, performance, and mixed-media. If the artist used a medium traditionally represented in art institutions, the artist transcended the form of the medium and used the medium’s base materials to address the formal qualities and assumptions of said medium. Another quality of this museum that I found antithetical to the typical credo of art institutions was an allowance for the viewer to come within close proximity of the piece. Pieces either had lenient boundaries or were constructed around the notion of audience interaction.

The most notable installation at Palais de Tokyo was a video, multi-media, and sculpture installation by Taro Izumi entitled Pan. This installation encompassed three large interlocking rooms. What especially struck me about this installation was how the three rooms interacted with each other both in terms of spatial and temporal relations. Even before walking through the dark entrance to the installation one already hears humans howling. The first thing one sees in the exhibit is a lone television screening a video of a boy standing in front of a white wall howling. He is but one of a chorus of howlers still to be found. Behind the television is a black wall with a projection of a cartoon brick wall flickering in and out.

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