Now for a change of pace: “Notre Dame de Video,” a leetle sumzeeng I made for the arts fest TROIS SOIRS PARMI long ago in très gai Paris. Thought you might get a tsk-tsk out of a few video stills.
NDdV ran on a bill with Jochen Gerz’s very sober conceptual piece, “La Salle et sa représentation,” on March 16, 1972. Location: 19 Quai Bourbon on Ile Saint-Louis, a stone’s throw from the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris on Ile de la Cité. Thus the title of the video.
Other artists in the festival, besides Jochen Gerz and me, were Bernard Heidsieck and Françoise Janicot (the organizers); Paul-Armand Gette, Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Jan Nordahl and Pedro Morais.
I played the video on a 2-inch monitor. It sat shoulder high on a pedestal in the middle of a room as vast as a Louvre gallery. Word buzzed through the crowd. (“Yum, that’s quoit noice!”) In fact, the best thing about NDdV was the Peeping Tom effect.
As people gathered to lay eyes on Our Lady, some jockeyed for position. Rowdies cut in line to grab a peek. Fist fights broke out. What a spectacle that was.
Just kidding about the fist fights. The jockeying was very polite, and there were no rowdies.
