How better to attract enormous crowds and dithyrambic media reviews than masses of single red threads stretching from a single point into red clouds floating just under the ceiling? What more likely to attract unruly multitudes than recondite video loops of a 50-something woman from Japan crawling around in dirt among tree roots or shivering under the mud plopping from her shower head? Or, better, what is more likely to invite murmurs of wonder than video clips of said lady’s sets for Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas? And, of course, what more attractive than said lady's showing off her prize collection of scales old window frames? And doll-house bric à brac picked up at an ex-East Berlin flea market?
Well, I don’t know if I’d recommend the approach to artist friends, but it does work: the crowds pour in and lookers do genuinely seem to love what the find. Also, from looking myself, I do know that the said 50-something from Japan, the artist Chiharu Shiota, definitely does know something about art and from knowing about art, knowing about appealing to people. The Soul Trembles, her exhibition, the first for the work-in-progress re-opening of the Grand Palais, is a top-of-the-line artistic achievement. “Tremble” here has the sense of “quickening, as ‘a leaf in the wind’” not of “quaking in fear, as ‘a betrayed soldier’".
Shiota’s stated artistic intention is to “enable anybody from anywhere to find an echo of their own emotion in her work”. Her approach to the big wide theme of “presence in absence” in The Soul Trembles seems to anchor less on works presented and more on personal reflection on and personal experience of the vision underpinning the visual experience of the works presented.
This rather complex distancing and refocusing – visual experience of the work, experience of visual experience, personal reflection, vision to visual experience – has an unexpected effect. A body feels that Shiota just sort of nestles up snug with the looker, shares her bulging photo album; she giggles and mugs, points sublime details with her stubby fingers. There are studies of Shiota's own hands, for example, or videos of short performances such as the mud shower mentioned earlier, whose esthetic value is in the experience they represent for her and through her for the looker, rather than visual esthetic of the physical thing. I expect you can call her approach “meta-art.”
A looker winds up considering or feeling Shiota's take on the work presented as much as on the work or the work's concept just as it is. Also, her works very often take the shape of a simple personal concern: the strands of red yarn represent/are blood in the body, not the symbolism of blood or even the biology of blood, but blood's simple, bloody existence, for instance. Or a work may have the shape of personal experience, for instance, a burnt piano to which a wave of surreal dismay at the fire that destroyed it somehow remains clinging after all these years. Often, a piece is shared common-personal experience: who hasn’t already seen the peeling window frames she’s put on display? The window frames are positioned within the exhibition in a way to remind the looker that a view is, above all, framed.
Shiota’s meta-art resonates with the public; lookers above all seem to enter into a friendly dialogue with her. As they might with a neighbor grubbing out a back garden, they compliment her efforts, comment to each other on her particular visualizations and visions and those she shares with everybody else. “So, Chiharu”, they seem to say, pointing to a photo, “Ouf, golly, You stretched out all those red threads into a red cloud? Just so we can speak about blood: relations, biology, symbology”? Or, with her at the looker's elbow: “Chiharu? You made the set for emotionally gigantic operas like Gotterdammerung and Siegfried? I see Brunhilde. I see Siegfried. Was it you made the fringe of the curtains or what? It’s hard to tell from this opera video; is your work in itself or part of something else"? And with a smile of contentment, "That puzzle is the point."
When packing the emergency exile bag, don’t forget to make a note of Shiota’s exhibition but also of pianist Keiichiro Shibuya’s March 14 Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost). The cancelled concert ticket will get you in for a night-visit, the last visit, to The Soul Trembles.
The Miroir fantôme concert themes around voice, which is re-imagined as a ghost of the real thing: synthesized sounds and voices in a phantasmagoric ambiance. “The piano of Keiichiro Shibuya, the single human presence in the concert”, the programmers write, “Is a metaphor for a humanity confronted with the feeling of impending apocalypse”.
Sounds like just the thing!
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I visited Chiharu Shiota’s installation “The Soul Trembles” in company with my partner Karine at the Grand Palais on 6 February 2025. Keiichiro Shibuya’s “Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost)” takes place Friday 14 March 2025 at 21h. The entrance to both concert and exhibition is at Entrée Clarence Dillon, Galeries 10.1. “The Soul Trembles” will be open for post-concert visiting from 22h to 23h30.
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