Any other business

The Palais de Tokyo has no air-conditioning, and some of its galleries have glass roofs, so in the summer the place can get very hot. I well remember, during Prince.sse.s des Villes , the sprawling summer exhibition of 2019, it was stifling. It has, however, an abundance of labyrinthine, relatively rarely-used underground spaces in bare concrete. The drop from the avenue in front of the Palais to the streets at the back, at river level, is considerable. (The long flights of stairs are familiar to me from visits to the Iranian embassy's visa department.) I've no idea how many buried levels the building actually has. Anyway, this year, the curators have had the clever idea of going down nearly as deep as possible, creating a new pathway starting at least two floors below street level, where it's dark and cool. Exhibition halls on the main and upper floors aren't used at all; only the ticket offices, shop and restaurant are still open. Guards and visitors can all be gratef...

Still in June, I was intrigued to find out, I no longer remember how ( Instagram probably), that there was a contemporary ceramics exhibition involving Josèfa Ntjam going on in a space I didn't even know existed, not all that far from my flat: the Espace Monte Cristo .  It turned out to be an interesting show in a lovely place. The Espace Monte Cristo, which opened in 2018 but was presumably soon suspended by the lockdown,  is a beautifully renovated former industrial space; not a single, hangar-type workshop, but an old shop-front with two storeys of rooms in the deep house behind, arranged around two or three small patios, where, it seems, packaging was stored. To how outdoor pieces, including a small fountain, the patios had been turned into gardens for the duration of the exhibition. 'Josèfa's room' also included, at the far end, a work I liked (pictured above) by a US artist, Erin Jane Nelson, I'd never heard of. That isn't surprising as (a) there are so m...

Since Mamali Shafahi installed his Hereditary Fountain at 3537 in the Marais , I've been to a number of exhibitions, big and small, that I thought I'd better record, briefly, before I get on to the Palais de Tokyo's new summer show. That 3537 group exhibition was one example, on a bigger-than-usual scale, of fashion and contemporary art somehow coming together. During what I believe was yet another men's fashion week, there were various relatively brief art events, one of which, organised by Manifesto and GOAT (don't ask, because I don't know), took place at the French Communist Party's famous HQ, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. As one of the artists was Jon Rafman, and as I'd never set foot in the building before, I went. I spent quite a long time sitting in the squidgy seats Rafman had characteristically installed to watch his videos, and in fact chatted with him briefly when he turned up for lunch. But I was also very taken by an installation, in an under...