The Art of Looking
Paris, Rothko, Ryman and materiality ...
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.
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