Famous Art, Not So Famous Faces

I’ve been noticing a trend recently which I think is worth mentioning. It started at the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Tate last year. Outside the the Tate Modern there were lots of people queing up to have their photos taken with one of the large spider sculptures.

Then at the Centre Pompidou this March I saw more people again taking pictures of themselves with Bourgeois giant spiders. Of course not wanting to miss out on the fun I had to have a picture taken too!

Going around this month’s Gi festival in Glasgow I’ve noticed lots of people doing the same particularly at the Jim Lambie show at GOMA. This fascinates me, Its as though people are treating the art like celebrity.

I want to start collecting these pictures. Although I haven’t managed to get a shot of other people doing it without them noticing… watch this space!

Cinema du Reel – Pompidou Centre, Paris

Yesterday I went to a screening of archive footage from the collection of the Archives of French Film and the National Centre of Cinematography at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The screening was made up of 4 filmes ranging in age from 1908 to 1928 with the theme of tourism and was part of The Cinema du Reel documentary film festival .  Most fascinating was the final film Chez les mangeurs d’hommes 1928.  This silent film was shot as though it was a documentary by two french explorers visiting the New Hebridies and documenting their meetings with the cannibals who lived there. The film was obviously as staged as a Richard and Judy phone in but what was interesting is that in order to prove the films voracity  they included lots of shots of the cameras (the film showed three different types of camera) filming as the action happened.  In contemporary cinema we interpret shots like these as showing the construction of the moving image and in doing so undermining the spectacle and mystic of cinema. Yet here these shots seemed to perform completely the opossite role to try and prove that the fantastical events unfolding on screen were in fact true.  It was interesting to see a familiar visual device used in such a different way. Picture from wikipedia