When I was in the Army, I once came to Paris and stood under the dome of the old Sorbonne. When I look around me, I beheld. I uttered something Midwestern, like, Boy! Somebody thinks studying’s something!
I felt the emotion behind that memory the other day when I visited the renewed Grand Palais last June. I mean “renewed” as in “renewing vows or hope”. Chatillon Architectes have managed to conserve and convey the natural light expansiveness in the great glass roof and the elegant flamboyance of the Art Nouveau floral/vegetal iron work. The place must have seemed like science fiction to its first visitors. I get that still.
In early July, I saw Amala Dianor‘s cheerful troupe dance their très energy hip hop ballet Level Up under that Grand Palais glass. Not only, as I was fearing, did they not get lost in the volume, the setting, performance and spectators worked as well as I could have ever wished.*
The Grand Palais was first built to welcome The New & Different; In 1900 a lot of The N&D was around and making big waves in ordinary life: metals as supple as vines, new chemistries, abundant energies, open-ended networks. That’s why Art Brut. Dans l’intimité d’une collection exhibition, which opened with the renewed Grand Palais, seems particularly appropriate.
Art Brut – “Raw Art”, “Primal Art”, if it’s about anything at all, is about The N&D, creativity, imagination. Densely peopled by more than 400 created objects – paint, plaster, jewels, images, objects, signifiers; machines, secular prophecy, murals, future history, old icons in new mindsets, statuary – tucked up at the end of the main foyer, behind the child play zone, the exhibition is a Creativity and Imagination Walkabout Experience.
It reminded me that we – us, you&me, I, you, you all, they, he&she, he, she – are also welcoming waves breaking in on ordinary life: new materials, molecular printing and AI avatars, for instance, graphene, metal parts printers, Grok.
As in 1900, we/them are obliged to think about The N&D, its sources and reasons and applications and the relation of all that to creativity and imagination. If we/them don’t, we/them are sure to wind up worse than poor, worse than living among bombarded ruins, worse than plain wrong: bloody fools.
By using a lot of production from people on the edges of the distribution curve – people severely affected by psychic issues – the exhibition underlines that creativity and imagination are structural. Like a backbone or skin, creativity and imagination are something a human can’t do without. After the walkabout experience, I am not so sure we need The N&D or at least not all of it. As far as I can see, for instance, people in Japan have not lost by choosing against personal firearms.
Most of the Art Brut exhibition’s display seemed to me weighted more toward expressiveness than esthetics. I spent most of my walkabout experience trying to descry the vastness of individual consciousnesses through the evidence of their creative vision and observation.
‘Though the walkabout was a real pleasure, I think it was no mere idling! I’m thinking – let me be a little Sibylline, it was my birthday not long back – that when we/them look up from splashing around with The N&D, we/them will notice something really new: an Individual on the beach that is strikingly more than just an Other to handle. To paraphrase my spiritual father the old fraud the Wizard of Oz, they were there all the time. And to paraphrase Pogo, they will be us and them. Experience with creativity and imagination will pay off then.
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The Grand Palais exhibition properly called “Art Brut. Dans l’intimité d’une collection. La donation Decharme au Centre Pompidou” might be described as a walkabout in a stockroom of creativities and imaginations, reflecting both the different forms of production of and perspectives on “Art Brut”. Art Brut is often misleadingly called or translated as “Outsider Art”. Made up of about 400 pieces generated by amateur creators over better than 150 years, the exhibition is a sample of life-long collector Bruno Decharme‘s some 4000 acquisitions (as well as part of their recent donation to Centre Pompidou). The exhibition, which also features a virtual reality tour of work by Henry Darger, a featured creator, will sponsor a series of conferences, films and performances looking at Art Brut, especially, from the angle of creativity and imagination “at the margins, where the most ingenious creations emerge”.
The events will take place from 18 to 21 September in the Salon Alexandre III and Auditorium Alexandre III at the Grand Palais. I saw “Art Brut. Dans l’intimité d’une collection” and two sibling exhibitions, “Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten” and “Royal tapestries: French craftsmanship and contemporary Danish tapestries” (which closes mid-August) on 19 June 2025. Art Brut and Niki de Saint Phalle run till mid-September 2025. I saw Level Up by Amala Dianor on 8 July 2025 with performers Slate Hemedi Dindangila, Romain Franco, Jordan, John Hope, Enock Kalubi Kadima, Mwendwa, Marchand, Kgotsofalang Joseph Mavundla, Sangram Mukhopadhyay, Tatiana Gueria Nade, Yanis Ramet, Germain Zambi, Asia Zonta and live music by Awir Leon, lighting by Nicolas Tallec and sound by Emmanuel Catty.
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*It’s such an ingrained convention that ‘m blaming no one, but woman toilets at the renewed Grand Palais are, as always and everywhere, inadequate to actual woman sanitary needs. While man toilets stand empty, a woman visitor can expect the usual humiliating wait to relieve themself. Sorry, “humiliating” is the operative word. If not systematically forcing a woman to wait to piss – like a prisoner, like a war captive, like a slave – what but the aim to humiliate explains such ordinary neglect of ordinary need?