Home »

Entr'acte: At Louvre, a discussion on the nature of exile

Paris: Different cultural disciplines may share audiences, yet rarely do art, theater, movies, music, dance and literature commune directly with each other. More often, it seems, they are self-referential, defining their own vocabulary, speaking their own language.

The Louvre has now set out to prove that this need not be so.

It has invited Toni Morrison, the most recent American to win the Nobel literature prize, to host a "conversation" between the arts around a theme of her choice. The result is "The Foreigner's Home," a multidisciplinary program focused on the pain - and rewards - of displacement, immigration and exile.

Morrison's starting point is Géricault's 1819 oil, "The Raft of the Medusa," which shows distraught sailors struggling to stay afloat after a shipwreck. For her, this image is the perfect metaphor for those millions set adrift in search of new homes, wandering, as she put it, "like nomads between despair and hope, breath and death."

The phenomenon is, of course, hardly new, but it is certainly topical. "Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now that it ever has been," Morrison said in her opening lecture, listing workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants and armies among those affected.

Yet, whether it is Chinese peasants moving to bloated cities, Mexicans crossing into the United States or Arabs and Africans entering Europe, what most intrigues her is what happens when they reach their destination, how they adjust, how they are received. "The theme therefore requires us to come to terms with being, fearing or accepting the stranger," she said.

To turn this into a "conversation," she is participating directly through lectures, debates and readings, but her main role has been that of catalyst for others to explore her theme in their areas of expertise. And if many of the expressions are figurative, it is because the body - enslaved, estranged, displaced, liberated - is effectively the storyteller.

"It seemed to me inevitable that if we could get a choreographer as one of our disciplines, it would be a triumph," Morrison told a gathering of reporters, "because in that field you have the body in motion and you have the obligation of seeing the body as the real and final home."

From this was born "Foreign Bodies," an installation in the Louvre's Melpomène Gallery in which the American choreographer William Forsythe and the German sculptor and video artist Peter Welz have revisited Francis Bacon's last - unfinished - portrait.

Guided by this portrait, Forsythe, whose dance vocabulary often echoes Bacon's contorted forms, performed a solo dance on a large sheet of white paper with graphite attached to his hands and feet. In this way, a dance inspired by a drawing becomes itself a drawing. The display includes Bacon's portrait, Forsythe's danced "sketch" and three screens showing the dancer in action.

A related exhibit in the Mollien galleries, developed with curators from the Louvre, twins drawings by Géricault, Charles Le Brun, Seurat and Degas with film and videos, again with the body as the main focus.

For instance, Samuel Beckett's 1961 short, "Film," with Buster Keaton as a fleeing man determined not to show his face, is contrasted with Seurat drawings in a section called "Erasures." Bruce Nauman's video, "Bouncing in the Corner," which depicts a repeatedly falling body, is linked to Le Brun's drawings of writhing naked bodies.

Perhaps the most disturbing is Sonia Andrade's untitled self-portrait filmed in 1977 during Brazil's military regime. Accompanied by Degas drawings of medieval warfare and Greek wrestlers, the film shows Andrade slowly wrapping her head with a nylon wire until it is distorted almost beyond recognition.

The eternal quality of Morrison's theme is presented through three "routes" highlighting objects in the museum's Antiquities department. In one, 5th-century B.C. Greek ceramics illustrate the inferior status of women in Athenian society. Eight Egyptian works focus on hostility toward foreigners, while Assyrian reliefs show how conquests brought mass deportations of populations.

Literature picks up the theme of displacement and language through a debate between Morrison and three writers: Edwige Danticat, who now lives in the United States and writes in English about her native Haiti; Michael Ondaatje, who was born in Sri Lanka, educated in Britain and lives in Canada; and Boubacar Boris Diop, a Senegalese novelist who writes in French and in his mother tongue, Wolof.

France is an example of a country where foreigners are altering the language of their new home. This can be heard in the slang used by urban youths, many of African and Arab extraction, and in the poetry of rap music. Some popular rappers participated in a poetry slam in front of Géricault's "Medusa" as part of this program.

In tapping her own African-American culture, Morrison is also eager to credit "foreigners" with enriching countries where they settle. "After the 'please, please, please let us in,'" she said, "comes the other thing, the creative energy that is carried inside them."

As evidence, she has sponsored a retrospective of movies by the African-American director Charles Burnett as well as music on film focusing on black American voices like Paul Robeson, Grace Bumbry, Marian Anderson and Nina Simone. A live concert by the Malian musician Toumani Diabaté will close the program on Nov. 29.

So does all this comprise a "conversation" between the arts? "Foreign Bodies," the Forsythe-Welz-Bacon experiment, certainly does. In other cases, different disciplines have illustrated a common theme without enormous interaction.

Still, Henry Loyrette, the president of the Louvre, believes the project has demonstrated that living artists have a place in a museum whose collection ends in 1850. And as important, the experiment has offered an unconventional reading of art history, a chance "to go outside a single voice," as he put it. "And in the case of Toni Morrison," he added, "her very work serves as a meeting point for reflection."