If I'm not Edvard, I'll never be Edvard

When I was 7, I made my mother a clay frog for her birthday, in art class. It had five roughly leg like protrusions. I could have passed one off as a tail but the vaguely recognisable webbed feet gave me no wiggle room for anatomical interpretation, artistic or otherwise.  It had no real face and even when I had realised, post roast in the kiln, my attempts to rectify this with glaze were confused at best. Mother stubbed a cigar out on it and broke off two of the legs before sending me into town with a twenty pound note in order to buy her a proper present, which was a bottle of gin. This, thankfully, is why I never pursued a career in art. Unfortunately, many of the day-glow neon children of liberals, all named after varieties of soya or breeds of earwig, seem to attract praise for the sensuous lines of their pasta portraits and the way the delicate splattering of their urine on the hemp carpet is reminiscent of early Pollock. This leads to them being modern artists and, consequently, to me spending 2 hours in confused irritation at Paris’ capital of modern art; the Pompousdo.

I believe the Pompousdo is a waterpark that has been abandoned and left to dry out, grubby and unwanted with a vast expanse of concrete in front, no longer the home to happy splashing and the rare bathing of French youth. The flumes still hang haphazardly to the side and the turbines of the wave machine stick uselessly out of the ground, sombre and forgotten periscopes. You’d think that emptying it of screaming children and poor people on their annual day out would be an improvement but life is full of surprises.


The large foyer is helpfully lacking in signs and so I wandered around. The first installation asked me for my ticket so I, never afraid to meet an artist on his own terms, fully immersed in the work by giving it some money at which point it moved on to other awaiting viewers. The second work was a piece on the difficulties of bi-dimensional transit, being as it was as a set of moving stairs that conveniently took me up to the 1st floor without having to waste energy walking; and who said art serves no real purpose? This was unfortunately not wholly reinforced by what I discovered there.

Yayoi Kusama clearly has some issues and although I’m all for giving her some potato shapes and water based paint, letting her loose on this scale seems to be the kind of happy-clappy indulgence that has slowly eaten away at standards and gave rise to many of today’s Radio 1 djs. Her style is apparently called Art Brut because, like the cologne, it’s the kind of twaddle only your weird spinster aunt would give you and it stinks like merry hell. Aside from some of her afore mentioned potato paintings, her main focus seems to be on filling rooms with mirrors and tiny spots, possibly to demonstrate to everyone, once and for all, that she’s completely dotty. If there was an underlying message to Kusama’s work, it was don’t leave her unattended with scissors.

After revisiting the work of bi-dimensional transit (shown in opposition) I came to an exhibition of German buffoon Edvard Munch, designer of the mask from the movie Scream and namesake of the popular crisp; Monster Munch (of which he designed the packet – not the actual crisp shape itself though, that was  after his time). If not quite as crackers as the Japanese lass, he was certainly a few colours short of a spectrum. Half the display was the same paintings done 3 or 4 times and then abandoned as he clearly was clearly getting nowhere. He’d have been better off cutting back on the fruit loops and concentrating on the crisps as you really feel that the monsters he portrays there are enjoying a quite terrific snack. In comparison, I find the little Italian fellow on Pringles distinctly lacking in bite.