LUMA Arles, and not an old church

This afternoon, I spent most of my time at LUMA Arles. I then tried, and, as at Eglise Notre-Dame-la-Major d’Arles yesterday, failed to get into a different old church today.

That’s all I did because, as I related in my morning post, I lingered over lunch under the warm provençal sun at an outdoor table at a restaurant near LUMA. I didn’t leave the restaurant until about 2:30 in the afternoon. Joie de vivre won out for a while over sightseeing.

Consequently, I expect this entry to be one of my shorter ones. If you stick around to the end, you’ll probably be done in no time. If you don’t stick around to the end, you’ll be done even sooner. That’s just how these sorts of things work.

Then again, I tend to babble endlessly over trivialities sometimes, so maybe this won’t end up being short after all. We’ll see how it goes.

LUMA Arles

LUMA is always capitalized on the signage and in the literature, but I couldn’t find what LUMA stands for. Then again, I didn’t look very hard.

Work on LUMA Arles began in 2013 as a project of the LUMA Foundation. The LUMA Foundation was founded in 2004 by Maja Hoffman in Zurich, Switzerland, as an institution to support the arts.

LUMA Arles is a short walk from the old part of Arles, but its most dominant feature is thoroughly modern. Rising near the front of LUMA is a building designed by the late starchitect, Frank Gehry. To my eyes, it looks from the front like a craggy, pointy-topped, shiny stainless steel mountain rising atop a circular plateau.

I’ve seen at least one Frank Guerry building that I didn’t like. This isn’t it. I found it very attractive.

The back of the LUMA tower is plainer. It’s a wide, flat spine that’s a monochrome tan colour.

In the lobby of the tower, there’s a double, intertwined, three-storey, curvy slide. I didn’t see anyone slide down either slide while I was there, but I think anyone is free to do so.

On the top of the tower, the ninth floor (10th floor in North American floor-numbering), there’s an outdoor observation deck on one side of the building. Entry is free.

I went up there. The panoramic view is spectacular. In the direction I could see from the deck, sweeping my view from left to right, I saw the old part of the city, a newer section with the Rhône River behind it, more of the new city with pasture land behind it and mountains behind the pasture.

Vincent van Gogh obviously didn’t have the advantage of the view from the LUMA tower, but getting the full span of the panorama, I can see why he found Arles and the surrounding landscapes so visually appealing.

LUMA Arles isn’t just the tower. It also encompasses a park, Parc des Ateliers, that used to be an industrial site. Today, it’s a beautifully landscaped park with an attractive, large pond.

They placed some artworks on the grounds. One of them is a giant, mishappen pink pretzel. Or maybe it’s a giant set of mishappen, interconnected pink chain links. I don’t know. I doubt either of those descriptions is what the artist, Franz West, had in mind for his piece, “Krauses Gekröse.”

Damn. I just looked up “Krauses Gekröse” on Google Translate. It tells me it’s German for “pink entrails.” I wish I hadn’t been so curious

Scattered around the park are a few spiffed-up buildings that look like they were industrial at one time. They didn’t house anything that was open to the public today. Nor was there any signage suggesting that would change imminently.

One of the buildings was a restaurant, with a sign saying so. But there was also a sign saying it was closed. A look inside through the glass door told me it wasn’t just closed until mealtime. It was empty of all furniture.

Large lettering in a straight, no-nonsense, all-caps font adorned the front of the erstwhile restaurant. It was in French on the left side of the front wall and English on the right.

The French said, “LA PEUR DEVORE L’ÂME.” The English translated that to “FEAR EATS THE SOUL.” Huh. I wondered what happened to my soul. It never stood a chance. I fear a great many things. Ironically, considering the warning on the wall, having my soul devoured was never one of my fears. Until now.

As part of its mission, LUMA Arles mounts rotating artistic shows of various media. I saw from a poster at the entrance that there were four on now.

In the LUMA tower, I took the elevator up to the observation deck and then walked down because the person at the information desk told me entry to the intervening floors was also free. I thought the shows were there.

As I walked down the stairs, I tried the door on each level. The eighth floor contained another observation level, and I went in there and took a look. Below that, the doors on most of the levels were locked.

One exception was the third-level, which contained something called “The Library is on Fire.” The library wasn’t on fire. It was another art installation, but not one advertised on the poster, at least not that I noticed. It’s a room with tables with books on them, video screens, and I forgot what else.

Not seeing the shows in the tower, I figured they were in the buildings in the park. When I discerned that they weren’t there, I gave up.

The park is lower than the street level, where the main entrance to the LUMA tower is. When I gave up and walked back in the direction of the tower, preparing to leave, I saw a large poster for one of the shows. It was in the lower level of the LUMA tower, below the lobby. When I was in the lobby, I hadn’t noticed the double-helix Gehry staircase down to the lower level.

Three of the four shows were down there. The fourth was upstairs, off to the side of the lobby. The sign for the show was discreet, and I missed it when I was in the lobby before.

It’s beyond embarrassing how often that sort of thing happens to me.

The shows weren’t free, but there was a single ticket for all of them. I bought a ticket and took in all four.

Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities

The first show I went into was a video installation by Liu Chuang. It was titled, “Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities.” That was the title, in that language. All of the signage provided the title in only English, but there was descriptive text in both French and English.

Liu Chuang is a filmmaker and sculptor who lives in Shanghai, China.

His installation used a split screen, with three side-by-side synchronized videos projected onto the large front wall. The three were very much a part of a single integrated film.

I walked into the theatre just as the closing credits were running. The credits were in Chinese and English. I stayed through them and waited for the presentation to start again. That happened almost immediately.

There were no on-screen speaking parts in the film, but a narrator with a female voice spoke through most of the film. She spoke in Chinese. There were French and English subtitles.

The film was not as incongruous as you might think from the title.

It started off with a bunch of old photos from China. During this sequence, the narrator started telling the story of a telegraph operator who developed a serious repetitive stress injury that caused him to lose the use of his fingers. Then, as he tried hitting the telegraph key with other parts of his hand, he lost the use of those, too.

After telling that story, the narrator moved on to say that Apple bought a company that had a gesture-recognition technology, which became the basis for iPhone gesture recognition, which didn’t cause repetitive stress injuries.

My recollection after that is a little fuzzy. I’ll forget some of the narrative and jumble other parts. But at one point, she started talking about electricity generation and how the reservoirs created by hydroelectric dams displace a lot of remote minorities. Then she introduced how much power bitcoin miners require, and how that increases as the calculations they have to solve to mine bitcoins get harder, to restrain the bitcoin supply.

It then tied back into minorities and the threat to and the integrations of their cultures by new technologies. As she spoke, appropriate images flowed on the screen.

It was a little weird, but I kind of got it. Sort of.

David Armstrong 

The next show I went to was an exhibition of portrait photographs by American photographer David Armstrong (1954-2014). The majority of the photographs, and there were a lot of them, were in black and white. But there was a room off to the side that cycled through some of his colour photographs on a few video screens.

Evocative pictures. Next.

Maria Lassnig

I then went to an exhibition of works by an Austrian painter, drawer (a person who draws, not a, say, desk drawer, but you probably guessed that), and animated film-maker, Maria Lassnig (1919–2014), drawn from the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives.

Lassnig’s paintings were quite modern, kind of primitive, but most of what she painted was vaguely recognizable as what she was trying to represent.

There was also one of her films playing. It had her singing a tune that sounded like a children’s song. The subtitled lyrics suggested the same thing. She was singing live action on the screen with animations happening around her. I don’t think she earned her living singing. That was kind of primitive, too.

Danny / No More Reality

The last show I went to was the one upstairs. Don’t ask me what the heck it was about. It was allegedly two presentations in a single show, “Danny” and “No More Reality.” I didn’t know where one began and the other ended, or if I even saw both.

The pamphlet I had that described the four shows at LUMA Arles said that it was in two spaces inside one. I don’t know if I saw the whole thing. It looked like one big space, and I couldn’t see a dividing line between them. Nor could I see a door leading to another space.

In the middle of the room, there were some very cushy benches. A contraption suspended from the ceiling was spinning and moving on rails. There was some weird soundtrack playing that defies description. I read somewhere that it’s supposed to draw its inspiration from sensors on a large contraption in the park.

During the show, I learned that the cushy benches were mounted on a turntable. It started turning and directing the attention of the entire audience (just me) toward a grand piano off to the side of the room. Piano music started coming from the piano, and weird-shaped light tubes above the piano lit up.

At one point, some black and white dots on the screen at the front of the room went into motion.

I don’t know where in the sequence of the show I left, but I did. And with that, I left LUMA Arles.

Summary: I loved Frank Gehry’s tower and the park. I liked the video. Maria Lassnig’s paintings were okay. The other two shows? Not so much.

Not Église Sainte-Anne d’Arles

After leaving Luma Arles, I walked to another church I wanted to see, Église Sainte-Anne d’Arles. It’s beside Place de la Républic, kitty-corner to the City Hall and across from Saint Trophime Cathedral. It was built in the 12th century and became a seminary in the 17th century.

It has since been deconsecrated, but now serves as a venue for rotating art and archaeology shows. Google Maps assured me it was open until 6:00 p.m. today. It was locked up solid when I got there, with no signage as to opening hours.

I walked back to my hotel to end another day on this adventure.