Arles Diary, part 2

Day two of the Rencontres d'Arles: Bourdieu's art world as organized religion, fleeing the vernissages, William Klein and the Steichen flowers — and Arles as a date with an ex.

This is supposed to be the hottest day of the Festival. In the Afternoon, when the mistral picks up slightly, it feels like you're sitting in a blast furnace. I sit in one of the last Café/Tabac, I drink watery Café au Lait and the woman at the table next to me brings a bag full of greasy hot pick up food from McDonald's, starts chatting away with the patron, the temperature is hovering around 39°...

In his book "Manet - A Symbolic Revolution", the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu compares the Art World with organized religion: There are High Priests and heretics, a strong sense of inside and outside, rituals of passage to let you into the inner circles, punishments for straying from the true faith as it is laid down by the ruling caste. In the "Académie des Beaux-Arts" with their Master Classes, their Professeurs, their Salon and their Medals this was on full display: Manet and the impressionists, their "Salons des Refusés", which was part revolutionary posturing, part economic necessity created an alternative religion.

And then there is the light, that tells the different story: There is nothing sociological about art.

I am not a Vernissage person: I usually flee the festival when the sun goes down and the art-people start gathering with drinks in front of the galleries. I am bad at connection making and chit chatting and striking up a conversation out of nothing: I met David Campany on crutches though in front of the Vernissage for Hard Copies - I did not learn anything about the pictures, but I learned that he had the same surgeon for his leg as Jude Bellingham, so I guess he will be fine eventually and so will England. Hard Copies does what it says: It pins Xeroxed images to the wall and tries to reinvigorate the makeshift and punk style of the early zines of the 70s... it was way too crowded to see if that worked out, but here is 2026 for you, instead of revolutions and heretics at least we get quotes of heresy and rosé wine...

I was hesitant to go to Arles: I have never been, and being at a weird place, having been madly in love for so long and having fallen out of it so hard in recent months, this is almost like going on a date with your ex: You still get this tugging on your heartstrings from loving her so bad, but you also notice the things that made you break up. Almost immediately after sitting down and taking the first sip of your first beer, you get into an argument and it feels like an argument of old and that you did not even stop in between and just continue where you left.

"How to make it in the Art world" is a book that should be written by the rejects, the failures, the ones that knocked on all the doors and were never let in. Unfortunately, it always gets written by successful people and their stories take on a backward turn, where everything gets a kind of logic that starts from the end. Eventually it gets pedagogical, failures become learning experiences, harsh words become turning points, a road less travelled is paved into a highway... It is always important to remember the sober origin of Beckett's quote from "Worstward Ho": "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." It somehow made it onto motivational posters, but the important thing is, that there is no revelation, no reached goal, no success at the end of the "fail better", his world is a world of no transcendence of the struggle that will eventually always end in failure and the tiny conjecture at the end of it is the thing to strive for...

And William Klein was radiating, the flower pictures of Edward Steichen have a calm about them, that make you understand, that he meant well with the "Family of Man" and how it distorted the canon of photography for the better part of the 20th century and infused a naïveté into it that photography never has really shaken off. And the Animal pictures, that is hands down the best curated piece I have seen, just banger after banger, surprises but so many pictures that have engraved themselves into my retina and still had never seen them hanging on the wall. Go see Rinko Kawauchi & Tokuko Ushioda: Not because of Rinko Kawauchi (silent!, tender!, poetic!, yuck!), but because of the sombre black and white images of Ushioda: When it is about falling in and out of love with photography, her pictures of her fridge remind me of what got me here...

I have yet to find something at the off-festival (DM me when I have missed something!). A lot of it is pay-per-view, pay a curator, pay a venue, pay someone to frame and hang, so your point of view onto the world is already skewed by money. When off is the out with the regular program the Salon: There is not a lot of symbolic revolution there, but a mimicry of the rules of the established artworks of the Salon and a quiet desperation to be let in by atoning to the high priests...

To complete the cliché, I had some fish and rosé in a tiny bistro looking at the arena: They had gladiators and Christians eaten by lions there once and bulls still die in there on a regular basis. The heat is breaking and the temperature is almost approaching something bearable...