Après

What is my favorite work of French music, art or literature and why?
After nearly a month of museums, parks, architecture, gardens, and sculpture, this question is near-impossible to answer. However, the particular works of art that will stay with me are Van Gogh's Nuit Étoilée and Haussman's symmetric and beautiful city plan.

Nuit Étoilée, Vincent Van Gogh (1888)
Source: (link)

Looking back through the pictures on this blog, the one that still best grabs my interest is Nuit Étoilée, by Vincent Van Gogh. I still admire his broad use of color, and the way his brushstrokes added texture to the night sky by the way the contours of the paint shaped the image. He captured the essence of the night he observed, while simultaneously showing it as only he could perceive it. This work, named "Starry Night" in English, also features an aspect of the night sky rarely seen in large cities like Minneapolis or Paris. Thinking back to the image of Nuit Étoilée, I know that Van Gogh was looking at a deep black sky with the same texture and richness one might find far from a city today. Thinking about this sky as he painted it brings it closer and reminds me what I love about astronomy - the sense of wonder that anyone can find anywhere on Earth just by looking at the sky.

As I mentioned in the previous two blog posts, I admire symmetry and geometrical perfection in any form, and the city of Paris as seen from any high point exudes these fundamental features. The similar heights and colors of buildings give the city a unified aspect and clearly demarcate the network of avenues and alleyways that tie the city together. From above, the city is a unified mass, with familiar landmarks extending above the skyline in all directions to give orientation. From the street, every building offers new features to inspect and admire - in a city this large, it is surprisingly difficult to find two buildings that look the same. And one of the things that speaks to my intellect when I see this city is the knowledge that all this was established back when Milwaukee and Minneapolis were little more than populous trading posts! The sense that 150 years is recent, the feel of a connected web within the city, and the endlessly changing facade that kept my head on a swivel for four weeks were what really made this trip unique for me.

What was Paris like? How did it differ from what I had imagined?

In Paris, one of the subtle features I appreciated most was the constant need to focus on incoming voices, and to be prepared to respond in one of two languages. The potential need to respond in French or English, or even to overhear a conversation held in a foreign language, led to a much richer texture to the sound around me. Having spent my life surrounded by English, I took the sounds and context of our language for granted, as part of the way the world works. But living in a society where speaking and listening are an active task made me pay attention to my world and kept my mind active anytime I was outside my dorm room. Going back to America is like leaving the room of blue fog I described in my previous post - after a while you forget the strange experience because normality is just so expected and uniform that nothing else could make sense... I'm hoping to hold onto this experience of diverse languages through French-speaking friends and student groups, but that experience is hard to replicate.

On May 21, I did not expect to become familiar with Paris to the point that major landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame didn't automatically draw my gaze. Instead, by the night of the river cruise (Thursday the 13th), the spectacular sights along the Seine had become expected and comfortable, rather than novel and fascinating. My perspective on the city had changed. From my excursions and experiences, the city of Paris felt like a place I could navigate as easily as speaking French - I might need some help from time to time, but in general I could run on instinct and emerge where I expected to. That being said, spending three weeks in Paris also underlined how little I truly saw of the city; after all, how much could I have absorbed with only one day per arrondissement even if I had spent double the time I did exploring and experimenting in the city? At least next time I visit I will have a better sense of what the city has to offer, and how best to unravel its paths.

What has Paris taught/shown/inspired in me? What did I expect it to inspire, but found lacking?

On Monday morning, while riding the train from Pontorson to Rennes and having a conversation with two French travellers, I decided/determined/realized that I was fluent at French. This was a startling moment for me because despite my proficiency with the language, I have always hesitated to call myself fluent because there was so much I didn't know yet about the language. But on the third day when nearly every voice I heard was French, and I understood and responded to them with clarity (and a fair bit of gesturing) I began to accept that maybe "fluent" was an adjective that could apply to me. I realized that fluency isn't a matter of having a 10000 word functional vocabulary or an instinctive command of the genders of nouns and adjectives; it's about hearing people speak and gaining meaning from it without having to stop and think about their words. I will certainly need to stay in practice to keep up this fluency, but for now I am happy to have passed this key marker.

My stay in Paris gave me an opportunity to view myself in isolation, without my usual distractions or friends or activities to cloud the path that I take independently. This showed some aspects of my character that I appreciated, and some that I did not enjoy. I was proud of how confident I felt in jetting off alone to explore Paris for a day, by myself. I wandered through neighborhoods, found food, asked for directions, and explored independently and felt safe throughout the entire experience. I was also proud that my studies brought me to the point where I could function reliably as an interpreter for the group at restaurants and in museums. Furthermore, I was proud of the mindset that often encouraged me to try new things - the notion of "It's a cultural experience - give it a shot!" I don't have this mindset enough in my everyday life, often preferring to stick with old habits rather than trying for something new and unique. With luck, the notion of "cultural experience" will extend now that I am home - the Twin Cities have a culture, too, and I can experience it just as well.

From a perspective relating more to my personal vision, this trip gave me many new perspectives on how best to leverage my science and engineering skills for the good of all. From the optical tricks in the Dynamo exhibition to the "magic" of the Eiffel Tower, I realized throughout this trip that one of my main questions on seeing this sort of artwork is not about symbolism, but about structure - how was this device created, and how does it do what it does? If I can answer these questions, others will look on in awe, and I will feel that I have created something truly unique.

Travelling with so many talented people, through galleries of the greatest artwork in the world made me recognize how many of my own skills have gathered dust in the past two to four years - I enjoyed tae kwon do and viola, but they have both been on a shelf for so long. Now would be a great time to shake off the cobwebs and see what I can achieve if I return my focus to these skills.

...

I do not know if or when I will get the chance to explore a new city for a full month, and certainly know that unless physicists start getting larger salaries it will not happen more than a handful of times in my life. Spending this trip with people whose interests and passions cover such a wide variety of perspectives was the perfect way to see the city. I've learned about history, art, language, culture, and myself in my time in Paris, and I will never forget the time I spent exploring this fascinating, ancient place.

Apres - Coming Soon!

I am still working through all my experiences from this trip to build a meaningful response to the question posed. While I have written paragraphs on how Paris has influenced me, I have not yet set them in an order that makes sense.

Given that 23.5 hours ago, I woke up 1/4 of the world away from here, I am going to bed and will finish this blog tomorrow morning. Bonne nuit a tous.

Centre Georges Pompidou

The paintings, sculptures, and other artworks displayed at the Pompidou Center span the first two-thirds of the 20th century, including not only well-known painters like Picasso and sculptors like Brancusi, but also painters I hadn't heard of like František Kupka. What follows is a sampling of my favorite paintings in the exhibit, and an account of my experience exploring the Centre.

In my eyes, the most interesting piece in the exhibition was a statue by the sculptor Brancusi. Without reading the title, answer this question: Which animal is shown in the image below?

Le Phoque, Brancusi, 1914

I'm not sure how well this property translates through a 2D image, but when I asked three classmates this question in the exhibit, their answers were "seal," "otter," and "seal." And yet, if the eye is not told to look for an animal in the design, or if the rock was not poised just so, this could be a scaled-up version of a shiny rock found by any riverbed in the world. The simple design of this sculpture is pretty without the observer knowing what they are seeing - adding the knowledge that it is a statue gives it depth and meaning.

Here's a fun thought: What if I had asked you to associate the sculpture with a person? With one of the four elements? With a nation? Like Monet's Impression, Soleil Levant, the title changes the way a viewer perceives the same piece of matter, and whether or not it is called "art."

One other piece I found near the start of the gallery is a very realist (by the painter's standards) portrait, shown below:

Arlequin, Picasso 1923

This obviously incomplete painting talked to me in metaphor about the absurdity of creating a portrait. When painting someone's likeness, a talented painter will try to capture some aspect that defines that person's life - something like the expressions of the faces graven on Mount Rushmore. But by definition, when a person is sitting for a portrait, their life is incomplete, so how should the painter know what must be painted? By painting only the head and shoulder of this harlequin figure and leaving the remainder a sketch in a rough background, Picasso shows that he can go no further. The portrait reflects the life of the subject - you can tell where he's been, and where he might be going, but the details haven't yet all been filled in, and the conclusion is a mystery. As someone just starting out with his own life, this is a helpful message - I still don't know yet what vision my life will pursue, but if a painting by Picasso confirms that everyone has a right to feel unfinished, that is a strong sign that I'm on a right path.

First, a brief word regarding Kupka - his paintings involved geometric patterns of colored dots on canvas, which appealed to the side of me that has always loved mathematical order. I don't have anything particularly deep to say about them, just that I'm a fan of the precision and symmetry in his work.

Finally, I'll say two words about the path I took through the museum. Inside, the museum is divided into fifty small, adjoining galleries on each floor, and it's easy to get caught up looking at each one if you enter without a plan. After spending more than an hour working my way through the first half of the galleries on the first level I was exhausted. While taking a pause from the increasingly weird artwork, I happened to look out a window and catch a glimpse of the western half of Paris at sunset. This was a more interesting sight than the paintings, in my estimation, so I decided to leave and spend time watching the sun set on Paris. Once I went downstairs to leave, I felt bad missing out on half the pieces in the museum, so I set off at a quick walk through the central corridor. These more modern pieces were more my style - there was much more geometry in their design than I had seen in the abstract figures and surreal scenes above. I wish I'd spent more time in this section of the museum, but the city did beckon. As with so many places in Paris, it was impossible to see everything in one visit, and that just leaves something interesting for next time I visit.

Dynamo Exhibit at the Grand Palais

What made the exhibition at the Grand Palais special was the fact that many of the inventions displayed there were things that relied on geometry, electricity, optics, or perspective – all topics that relate to my studies and interests. As with many other museums, I spent much of my visit attempting to discern how the pieces were constructed, or how the artist had achieved a particular effect. More so here than with other museums, at the Grand Palais my skill set and education worked to my benefit in seeing the underlying geometry that supported many of the pieces. At the museum, I found inspiration for the passions that drive me to work with student groups, a piece that I puzzled over and found a solution for, and one that gave me a new appreciation for my perspective.

In the College of Science and Engineering at UMN, I am an officer of two student groups in particular that work to mix science with outside disciplines, among them art. For example, members have built a flashy winter light show timed to music and are building animatronic, singing busts of President Kaler in Tesla Works, and the emerging CSE Carnival seeks to showcase science to middle school students using all the flash and dazzle at our disposal. The exhibits at this museum in particular got me thinking of ideas for future projects in Tesla Works, a group oriented toward the purpose of bringing ideas to reality. One such idea would be to use the notion of prime numbers in the construction of some machine or program, with multiple patterns cycling with relatively prime frequencies oriented around a common clock. Using only the prime numbers up to 20, if the pattern changed once per second, the same pattern would not recur for over three months! Whether musical, mechanical, or visual, this is a pattern that might be very fun to build. To those of you reading this blog, remind me of this goal - I want to make this happen!

One exhibit that especially made me stop and think involved two fans and a length of film. The fans faced each other approximately two meters from a wall, and on that wall a loop of film three meters across wavered, floating in the air. In Dadaist art, the artist takes ordinary objects and they become art because he says so; in this display, the fans and film could be purchased in a store, but their placement created a trompe l’oeil and made the viewer wonder what he was seeing. I appreciated knowing that the artists who built this exhibit are responsible for the design of the work more than for its execution, because that means that their art is reproducible from design – this means I can test my guess as to how the film was suspended. I may need to work with the properties of film in practice, but my current guess from this exhibit is that the fans were spinning in the same direction, creating an upward current of air at the wall that supported the thin film. My speculation is just a hypothesis, but the point is that unlike with the Mona Lisa or Penseur, I have the means to build the piece and see if I can replicate the experience. That was my favorite feature of this exhibit – while in the Louvre, every piece is unique, in the Dynamo exhibit, there was a sense that the observer could partake in the creative experience given the right tools.

Video of the fans and film

One stark exception to this rule was the room filled with blue light and opaque, odorless fog, titled Daylight blue, sky blue, medium blue, yellow, by Ann Veronica Janssens. In this space, people and walls became visible just before they came within arm’s reach, and walking with a hand outstretched to avoid walls and people was a necessity. As I try to recall the strange sensation of being in that space and the habits I developed just to keep my orientation amid the blindness, I am led to remember the sensation I had upon leaving the room and adjusting to being able to see as far as ten or twenty feet! This afternoon, flying 24000 feet above Minnesota I remembered how much I take my vision for granted, and how different my life would be without it.

My hand inside the fog.

Musée du Louvre - Update

In my first post about the Louvre, I forgot to mention the two paintings that my classmates preferred in the exhibition. The day we visited the great museum, Alicia and Patrick shared their paintings with me, and I have posted the images below, along with what I remember of their reactions:

La Déluge (The Deluge)
Source: http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/2/15595.jpg

Alicia's favorite painting was this one, for which I cannot currently find a painter or date. I particularly recall that she was particularly struck by the artist's bold use of orange in the woman's robes. From my perspective, the mixture of light and dark in this painting seems to highlight the struggle of the central figures against the elements, and makes clear that they are losing. However, I would like to better understand the story behind this painting (something as obvious as Noah's Flood and the Ark?) to gain better context for what the creator was trying to portray. (Note, this question is only relevant because the painting is in the realist style, and appears mythic.) I'm also curious about why this degree of nudity is necessary - couldn't the artist show that his subjects are suffering, and simultaneously clothe them? It seems that mythology seems to equate to nudity in art, but I've never understood why. Could the artist be appealing to times closer to fabled Eden when morality was less complicated? It's something to explore.

The Ghosts of Paulo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/1835_Ary_Scheffer_-_The_Ghosts_of_Paolo_and_Francesca_Appear_to_Dante_and_Virgil.jpg

Francesca and Paolo are the subjects of Patrick's favorite painting. He was particularly impressed by the clear distinction between the damned lovers and their surroundings, as well as the facial expression of every character. What follows is my expansion on the points he brought about.

The bright white off the couple's skin starkly contrasts the dark mire of the background and forces the eye to linger on their figures. Similarly, Dante and Virgil's dull costumes blend well with the background, making them seem like a part of the scenery rather than part of the story. This echoes the context of Dante's Inferno, where Dante plays the role of narrator rather than protagonist. Further, Patrick called attention to their expressions - much like in Rodin's The Kiss, Francesca's expression is much more passionate than Paolo's, showing the difference in the way they perceive their relationship. Francesca clings tightly to Paolo, who shows emotion toward her, but also shows a focus on his own suffering. As with their shading, Dante and Virgil's expressions make clear that they are no more than observers in this scene.

Shakespeare in Paris

A brief reflection on seeing a Shakespeare play in French:

High points: From the dialog and having seen the Wishbone episode, I was able to follow the plot in general. I knew the majority of the characters' names, and even thought a bit about what the play had to say about power relationships (king and vassal, master and servant, etc.). Further, after two solid hours of people speaking at me in French I wasn't burned out trying to understand - I was still leaning forward trying to pluck meaning from the air.

Not-so high point: Jokes. Shakespeare puts a lot of humor into his plays, and this play has three drunken fools staggering along together through at least three scenes. This is always nice, because it can be a welcome distraction from the continuous dialog and serious dramatic plot that form the heart of the play, but while watching the play in French, I often heard the crowd laugh and had to wait a few seconds to figure out why. Apparently, though I can parse French in real-time, the part of my brain that deals with humor isn't quick enough with these sorts of phrases to catch the wit quickly enough for me to laugh. It was nice that I chuckled when Miranda told the male protagonist that she would hold his log, but simple gags like that aren't what I'm really hoping my French will catch. And humor isn't the sort of thing you learn at University classes, but I hope that this trip has added some flavor and naturality to my mode of speech.

Final notes about the trip: Ivry definitely has a different feel than Paris proper - newer buildings, for one, as well as a different feel from the population. I'm trying to decide whether, if I didn't know I was in Paris, I would recognize Ivry as a French city but it's hard to decide. Certainly, it showed me a different flavor of the city for one afternoon.

Normandy Day-Trip

The next few days will be rather packed, so I wanted to make a blog post while I still have a clear memory of last weekend (which started on Friday).

On Friday, four friends and I took a bus trip to Normandy to view sites and artifacts created during the 1944 D-Day invasion. After a long, early-morning bus ride, our bus arrived at a museum that walked the viewer through a history of pre-war Europe, and then showed relics from the brief French defense and eventual German Occupation and French Resistance. This is a period in history that I have never learned much about, so many artifacts in the museum showed me new facets of the war. For example, I had always had a simple story about the Occupation that showed Nazis being bluntly oppressive (as per the Huns in old U.S. propaganda), but this is false. They tried to rally French support for their campaign in the USSR with posters like the one below:

"They give their blood; give your labor
to save Europe from Bolshevism."

Propaganda like this make me have the obvious and chilling realization that America was fighting a nation every bit as industrial and strategic as we were during this war. Our victory was not guaranteed, and our enemy cannily played on the fears of the continent to build a force in their own defense. I've also been impressed by what I learned about the French Resistance, which used coded messages to undermine German war efforts in France and retain French national morale. That's a topic I'll be looking into much more in future.

The startling impression of competence from the Germans was redoubled when we moved to the cliffs of Normandy, in particular at Pointe du Hoc. American Rangers scaled this peninsula 100 feet above the ocean the night before D-Day, hoping to seize the six large artillery pieces  there, which could have attacked Allied forces on two adjacent beaches. At this site, every hundred yards contained one broken bunker and three holes that were the result of sustained shelling. Pictures below:

Destroyed German Bunker

Crater from a bomb that fell during the Invasion
(At least 12 feet deep, 30 feet across)

From my reading background, I have an ingrained notion that people I side with are invariably more competent than their opposite numbers, and World War II is a clear example where that is not the case. The pattern of bunkers and cannon on the north coast of France looks pretty dang intelligent to me, and I am impressed at the courage and planning that allowed us to break a hole through it and enter France. I'm also taken aback at the scale of damage at this battlefield, for even at Gettysburg the scars of war have healed. Having seen the traces of bombs that were dropped seventy years ago, I am frightened to think of what might happen if two modern armies decided to duke it out. Thankfully, this possibility is waning with time, but sites like this battlefield must be preserved to help people remember how much damage was done in a war that would pale by modern standards.

The impression of magnitude I received at Pointe du Hoc was doubled at the American Cemetery. There, the graves of 9000 soldiers lay in a wide green field by the sea. I'm a science major, so 9000 is usually just another number to me. But look at this picture, and I'll tell you what I saw instead of a field covered in marble crosses and stars:

Each of these graves is a soldier who would still be alive if not for the battles of this war. Walking among them, I made sure to hold the image of a field of men standing at arms in my mind as I passed the graves, and it was not an easy time. It didn't help matters when I pictured instead the old men that they would have grown to be standing instead by their graves. A park ranger at the site asked us to say the names of the soldiers as we advanced through the site, to be sure they are remembered. I took pictures of a dozen stones or so, and will post them later so that their names can be repeated by anyone visiting this site.

This grave site was the segment of the day-trip that made the greatest impression on me, especially this last story: At the monument to the fallen, a French park ranger described how his family's village had been defended by a lone American soldier during the invasion of Normandy, protecting his grandparents. After sharing this story, he asked a group of strangers at the monument to turn away from him and face the flags while the speakers played "The Star-Spangled Banner" behind us. The group quickly started to sing along, and the moment of singing the national anthem on foreign soil to honor fallen soldiers is among the most memorable moments of this trip so far. If you ever travel to Normandy, the experience is well worth the distance.