All Aboard The Art Bus

28 February 2005 by Catherine Viette    574  
All Aboard The Art Bus
What does an abandoned exotic dance club, the Place Vendome, the gallery Console, the home of Muriel Colin-Barrand, Le Train Bleu restaurant, a former office space, and the Galerie Frédéric Giroux have in common with one another?  They were all stops on the most recent art bus tour of the contemporary art scene in Paris. Art Process, the brainchild of founder Eric Mézan, aims to educate the interested about the latest and greatest in contemporary European art.  That means visiting only the best galleries, artists’ studios, private shows and installations around town. In Paris, the tours leave every third Saturday of the month and they are sell-outs, so reservations are a must. Looking for something new and a bit off the beaten path, I leapt at the chance to join the Saturday art bus tour, certain that I would have an eye-opening experience.  The starting point for the tour is directly in front of the Opera Bastille and you can’t miss the big tour bus.  But the bus is the only similarity Art Process has to the standard tours circling the city.  This is a tour like no other.  The guide begins the tour by passing out an itinerary with a short description of all the stops, including a bit of background on the current exhibitions.  Mr. Mézan acts as the tour guide, offering information and answering questions.  But he is more like that really cool art history professor who challenges and questions, as well as informs than he is like a typical tour guide.  The staff at Art Process culls through all the exhibition listings and picks only those that are most representative of what’s new and noteworthy in the contemporary art world of Paris. Mr. Mézan has been running Art Process for over 6 years and he is an old pro at organizing exhibitions as well as running a collectors’ group.  He hopes that the Art Process participants take away from his tours a newfound appreciation for the plethora of ways there are to make art today and hopefully a new way of looking at and relating to contemporary art.  Mézan changes the art bus itinerary for each tour to follow the ever-changing nature of contemporary art, and he is especially attentive to varying the galleries visited.  And the stops on our tour were indeed varied.  Our first visit was to the famed Le Train Bleu restaurant in the Gare de Lyon.  We were there not to ogle the elegant interior of the restaurant but to meet the artist Niko and view his sculptures which were displayed against the backdrop of the restaurant.  A French-Benin sculptor, Niko carves his  figures from tree trunks and mounts them on platforms with wheels.  When speaking to the group, he told us that his goal with his pieces is to portray the experiences of traveling and to explore the emotions and dreams of the traveler. It was certainly an eye-opener to see Niko’s very elongated, ultra-modern, life-size figures interspersed throughout the distinguished gilt and rococo style dining room, but the travel theme of his work beautifully united these two disparate styles. The next stop came in two parts.  Two separate galleries were showing works by the same group of artists in an exhibition called “Serendipity ou la productivité du Hasard,” roughly translated as “Serendipity or the Productivity of Chance”  The first gallery, Console, is actually part of the home of the curator, Muriel Colin-Barrand.  What made this stop so unique was the opportunity to view the art in the context of a home, a personal space.  Suddenly you could envision how some of these pieces might actually look chez vous.  I absolutely loved the murals adorning the walls and the series of reading glasses by Lionel Sabatte placed, seemingly by chance, on the bookshelves.  We followed this stop with a visit to Galerie Frédéric Giroux to see the rest of the exhibition in what I would consider to be a more standard style for a gallery space – spartan, modern, and chic. As this is a daylong tour, a stop for lunch is part of the itinerary.  I had the pleasure of meeting some of my fellow art fans over lunch at the L’Auberge du Clou, a restaurant in the 9th arrondissement.  I discovered that this tour attracts many repeat customers and indeed two of my lunch companions were making their third trip on the art bus.  I asked them what kept bringing them back and their answers were similar.  They are both fans of contemporary art and neither one has the time or the patience to sift through all the gallery listings.  For them, the art bus is simply the easiest and best way to keep a finger on what’s cutting edge in the art world.  Like the galleries, the restaurant is different for every tour and is chosen for its proximity to one of the artists’ spaces.  After lunch we walked up to the Pigalle quartier where we visited Joy’Squat.  This very avant-garde artist collective is housed in a former strip-club and true to the club’s former origins, the stage and dance poles are still intact.  Reclaimed and renamed La Maison Républicaine by a trio of artists, Titi, Geraldine and Corinne, the aim is to showcase the collaborative spirit of art and support the strength of freedom of expression.  I found this to be an intriguing idea, that of repossessing an abandoned peep-show locale and rededicating it to the pursuit and display of artistic endeavors.  Then again, some may argue that what went on at the old club was also just another form of art. From the avant-garde to more traditional modern works, our next stop was the Place Vendome, home of The Ritz and some of the most exclusive and expensive shops in Paris.  Here, nestled at the base of Napoleon’s column, we were treated to the sight of 12 tall, tower-like, marble…
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By Catherine Viette