Oh Canada: Stuffed Goats and Napoleon, Too!

Who knew Canada was so hip? Perhaps the Canadians, but they're so modest. And so I was surprised and delighted by my all-too-brief visits to two museums in Montreal while on vacation a week ago.

Particularly impressive were the photography exhibits at Musee d'Art Contemporain, the work of Robert Polidori (a native Montrealer) being especially striking. Polidori uses large format color photographs to document in vivid detail various sites of disasters and decay, e.g., New Orleans (after Katrina), Chernobyl (after the nuclear accident), slums in India, decrepit apartments in lower Manhattan and Old Havana (yes, Cuba). Structurally, they are complex and well worth spending some time with. Perhaps the most visually luscious of these are pictures of the rennovation of the rotting parts of the Versailles Palace; one image of a keyhole popping out of floral wallpaper really engraved itself in my brain. Also enjoyable was the video loop of an interview with Polidori playing in an adjacent room (he speaks alternately in French and English). He is charming and eloquent, and in short, he confesses it is all about morbidity, "la morte." Ah, bien sur. As Wallace Stevens used to say, death is the mother of all beauty, ay?

Also captivating, in a strange, hallucinatory way, is a video playing on the first floor -- and I'm sorry, I must look up the name of the filmmaker(s) for I've forgotten it -- which asks and answers the question, what would happen if the stuffed goat in Rauschenberg's combine "Monogram" became animated, stepped out of its tire and off its painted platform to travel through the space-time continuum into the future? I sat through this video a couple of times in a kind of transfixed state, watching as the goat skidded around various black holes and time warps, trying to maintain its balance while being thrown about in a darkly luminescent ether. While at first I was a bit skeptical (as I am instinctively of all computer generated animations), I found myself utterly sucked in. If you see it you will undoubtedly gain an intimate understanding of what it's like to be a goat on LSD, which is to say, scary as hell.

For further info on these exhibits, the link is http://www.macm.org/ (it's in French, however).


At La Musee des Beaux Artes, on the other hand, (http://www.mmfa.qc.ca/) was a blast from the past though in its own way perhaps just as hallucinatory: an exhibit on Napoleon, containing many original objects from his reign donated from the collection of the Beaux Artes patron Ben Weider.
For those of you fascinated by the Napoleonic Era, by the brilliance, grandiosity, ruthlessness and sheer shortness of the man, this exhibit is a must-see.

First of all, you get to gawk at his actual boots, hat and a pair of his gloves, which I found akin to seeing his ghost. I was particularly taken with the fact that while Napoleon was a few inches shorter than me, we looked to have roughly the same glove and boot size -- zut alors! As you know if you've read War and Peace, Tolstoy does not give a particularly flattering image of the man's physique, making him out to be a bit porcine and thus not quite the fashion plate, but mon dieu! The leather of the boots! The felt of the hat! The French are synonymous with style for a reason, mes amis.

The crafting of all the objets in this exhibit is unbelievable, once you get over the sheer decadence of the neo-Classical grandeur. Check out the gilded court chairs, for instance, or the silver services. The painted portraits in the exhibit are somewhat less interesting as works of art, although the miniatures of Napoleon and his circle are beautiful pieces and, from an archeological point of view, compelling for what they tell you about the interpersonal culture of the time, i.e., the miniature, as the snapshot of the period, being one person's presentation of his/her self to a beloved other. They are very touching.