Author: Dorothea Brooke

We give to things a soul which we cultivate in their absence and expect to recover when once more in their presence. I am tracing my steps of last year. I go looking for the same tea-cups and tea, the same candles and soap. I visit the Boulangerie with dark chocolate tarts. I find the place on the Rue Daguerre with black circles of fromage de chèvre. I am trying to gird up the spirit of Paris. I can’t seem to find it.

Besides, there are signs of neighbourly discord with the birds. On one floor, a woman feeds them at her window—they go right inside; when she is not home, they come flapping at the glass. On the floor above, where the wire is, the birds are most unwelcome. The woman living there—she could be a man, or a man and a woman— is invisible; I see only the wire. Have he and she put it there? Or was it there already on moving in, arranged by the building, since: (i) the birds are a nuisance, and (ii) the birds like the eaves best, and (iii) this is where the eaves are?

(If you don’t like trees, I have bad news. Earlier this year, Dorothea and I made a pact that I’d come up with a tree photograph for every entry she writes. Then came the Arbor exhibition, and now Dorothea sent in the sequel to her coverage of the Biennale in Venice. The upcoming series is from her summer in Paris and Budapest. The trees are from Central Park. Enjoy. JH)

We return to Paris, to the same flat as last year. There is a distinct pleasure of familiar surrounds: the court yard in click-clack yellow, blue and black; the elevator for a maximum of two persons, doors folding inwards (French engineering) which no amount of skill can close quietly or well. Inside, the window-shutters open with a squawk of metal. The birds of last year are roosting again with the neighbours. Only, I don’t remember the wire barbing upwards from the window-sill and downwards from the eaves. Inside, the place is as we left it. Only, there is one photograph more on the bookshelf—a family portrait—and a reading-light less. How to share the remaining one?

While it announces its location (the Biennale gardens) in its title, Steve McQueen’s 40 minute film work, ‘Giardini,’ is disconcertingly filmed in Winter to none of the sun and honey-bush, and to none of the crowds, of the Summer gardens which greet us now. McQueen has banked on our disquiet, and it works. There are images (here), which recur, of doberman dogs trawling the scent of something on the ground, like blood hounds. They could be wild but for their sleek coats and refined bodies. We could be in London, dreary with rain, urban refuse and old columns. The desolation is sinister and McQueen pairs it with the roaring sound of crowds, as of a football match. But the only sign of people here, apart from two liminal figures whose seeming confrontation resolves into an embrace, is the luxury cruise ship that parades past once on the lagoon, as they do daily by the dozen.

But there is also hush as we cut to film versions of ‘still life,’ sometimes paired as diptychs on a split screen: multi-coloured confetti in wet pebbles, a wood-spider on moss, a red insect on a yellow flower. So is borne out McQueen’s stated interest in really looking, and there is an object lesson in what we are here to do in the name of art.