Different cultural disciplines may share audiences, yet art, theater, movies, music, dance and literature rarely commune directly with one another. More often, it seems, they are self-referential, defining their own vocabularies, speaking their own languages.
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 Prize in Literature, to lead a "conversation" among the arts around a theme of her choice. A 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 Gericault's painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819), which shows distraught survivors struggling to stay afloat after a shipwreck. For her, it's 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 hardly new, but it is certainly topical. "Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now than 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 into bloated cities, Mexicans crossing into the US, or Arabs and Africans heading for Europe, what most intrigues her is what happens when they reach their destination, how they adjust, how they are received. "The theme requires us to come to terms with being, fearing, or accepting the stranger," she explained.
To turn this into a "conversation," she is participating directly through lectures, debates, and readings, but her main role has been that of a catalyst for others, artists and curators, 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 Melpomene 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: thus a dance inspired by a drawing became 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, pairs drawings by Gericault, Charles le Brun, Seurat, and Degas with film and videos, again with the body as the main focus.
For instance, Film, a 1965 short written by Samuel Beckett, in which Buster Keaton plays 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, depicting 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, alienated, 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, Greek ceramics from the fifth century BC illustrate the inferior status of women in Athenian society. Eight Egyptian works focus on hostility toward foreigners, while Assyrian reliefs show how conquests caused mass deportations.
Literature picked up the subject of displacement and language through a debate on Saturday between Morrison and three writers: Edwige Danticat, who now lives in the US 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 Wolof mother tongue.
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. Some popular rappers participated in a poetry slam in front of Gericault's Medusa as part of this program.
In tapping her own African-American culture, Morrison is eager to credit "foreigners" with enriching the 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 films and recordings featuring black American voices like Paul Robeson, Grace Bumbry, Marian Anderson, and Nina Simone. A live concert by the Malian musician Toumani Diabate will close the program on Wednesday.
So does all this represent a "conversation" among 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, Henri Loyrette, the president of the Louvre, said that the project demonstrated that living artists had a place in a museum whose collection ends in 1850. And, just 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."
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