David LaChapelle at La Monnaie de Paris: Size Matters

One of the delights about experiencing art in Paris  is doing it after hours.  Several of the City of Light’s museums and visiting exhibitions host late night openings that can transform a just-another-dinner-and-a-movie Friday night into a visual feast at the buffet table.  One of the hottest dishes on Paris’s late night art menu is the surrealist provocateur David LaChapelle’s photography exhibition at La Monnaie de Paris, an 18th century behemoth of a structure built under Louis XV that towers over the left bank of the Seine.

Louis and LaChapelle.  Dinner is served. 

I adore the daring humour, subversive absurdity, spectrum-defying colors and the cult of celebrity images in the controversial and award-winning hyper-visualist’s photographs and attended his Parisian banquet with the highest hopes of stuffing my starved belly to the hilt this past Friday night.  Given the extraordinary size of the venue, the massive duo of Amanda Lepore banners swaying across La Monnaie’s grand façade heralding the gems within, and the fantastic breadth of LaChapelle’s work I expected absolute grandiosity within.  I was not disappointed – at least not entirely.

After purchasing my 10 euro ticket and ascending the sweeping staircase to the first floor I was a bit vexed by the traffic-jam causing placement of two of LaChapelle’s most famously audacious photos - Courtney Love's "Pieta" to my left (a personal favorite) and the crowned-by-thorns Kanye West as Christ to my right - facing each other on recessed walls in the entry way.  I fought a league of viewers (most notably a tragically spikey blond coiffed woman in a tattered peacock-motifed floor length coat bearing a sense of entitlement that only Love and West themselves could match) to read the accompanying annotation (excellent explanations for all of the photo groupings, by the way) before crossing the threshold into the next room, a stark white-walled and high-ceilinged space as big as a ballroom where LaChapelle’s fantastic “Deluge” was blown up to mesmerizing proportions.  Ah - now this is what I came to see.  A truly brilliant commencement, I thought, until I began to ponder the disconcerting mystery of the ten feet tall 3D cutouts of crushed and California-plated car grills lurking about the rest of the walls.  Okay, I admit I skimmed through the OT but surely this reformed Catholic would know if Noah was out repoing hotrods.  I turned to the two "making of" the exhibition videos at either side of the room for salvation but sadly they were surrounded by people and cramped in cubby holes smaller than Carrie Bradshaw’s closet when La Monnaie is probably big enough to accommodate an IMAX screen.

Unfortunately this sense of claustrophobia pervades the exhibiton.  I’ve been in confessionals bigger than the shoe box where LaChapelle’s “Awakenings” series hangs and, like the collection's subjects, felt as if I was being forced to hold my breath underwater.  I couldn’t help but notice that not only were LaChapelle’s gloriously white trash Americana photos from Heaven and Hell done a total injustice by the tic-tac sized inlet where they were displayed but also that given the hundreds of photographs LaChapelle and the organizers had to choose from these in particular were remarkably out of touch with the gawking Parisians, let alone this American, in a post-Bush (hallelujah!) era.  Upon arriving at the last of the rooms housing the group entitled “Accumulations,” I sarcastically quipped to my boyfriend that the collection was aptly named because the bungled placement of the explanatory text at the entry forced patrons to accumulate and cock-block the entrance.  Once I pardonnez-moi’d loud and ungraciously enough for Peacock Coat (she was stalking me, I'm sure of it) and the rest of the cock-blockers to grant me access, I was shocked to see a disorderly tour guide and her minions sucking up the center space in a room that wasn’t big enough to accommodate Paris Hilton’s cameltoe in “Hi Bitch, Bye Bitch,” let alone the hordes of people clamoring to spy the vacuous celebrity-without-a-cause’s smiling purple slit.

But, despite the undynamic-at-times placement of the photographs, the thin Friday night crowd that was somehow still too bloated for the venue and the baffling misuse of what could have been an extraordinary viewing space, the exhibition was definitely not without compelling moments.  The relevancy and socio-religious implications of photographs like “The Deluge” and “Holy War” were hauntingly profound when compounded by their larger-than-life scale and exhibition in the broader context of other theologistic LaChapelle spoofs such as the “Jesus is My Homey” series.  Beautiful and lucid celebrity eye candy portraits abound as well as those that touch with humorus irony on culture and consumerism.

LaChapelle lovers should not miss this show, although personally I left craving the midnight snack of the LaChapelle on my coffee table since the impact of many of the Guernica-sized pictures suffer from the limited space of the viewing rooms and the ceaseless rubbing up against the ass of my fellow exhibition goers frustration was a bit much to bear.  And unfortunately the TMI about your neighbor is even worse in the tiny gift shop, although the selection of posters and postcards is fab.

If you are reading this Monsieur LaChapelle: B-R-A-V-O.  But please take note that size does matter.

David LaChapelle

February 6 - May 31, 2009

Le Monnaie de Paris 11, Quai de Conti 75006 Paris

10:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m. daily; Late Opening Monday and Friday until 10 p.m.

http://www.monnaiedeparis.fr/images/expo/pdf/DP%20LaChapelle.pdf