H.A. Anil Kumar takes us down an artsy road as he inspects the cultural face of Paris with the Louvre protecting the famous Monalisa and the Eiffel tower standing tall offering a romanticized view at dusk.
I was bargaining the prize of Eiffel Tower, yet to buy it. It was in the form of a memento of what stood just in front of me in reality. Something happened at that moment. My vendor shrunk together the huge shawl containing several such mementos, bundled it and ran away from the police when the latter arrived on the spot. A dozen of such vendors followed suit. “The police run fast like a lover towards the spouse, while the thief is running away faster from the spouse, like a married person” said an old Russian woman to her tourist friend, in a tone which could have been a taboo in a decent social gathering. The memento remained in my hand, but I hadn’t paid the vendor, knew that he would be around and would come back to pick up his due, no matter how many policemen and women chase him. It was spectacular to see those immigrants, selling mementos of Eiffel Tower near its own original self. I could not decipher as to what was illegal, their immigration or the product they were selling. Later I realized that the same memento sold for one Euro over there was five times cheaper than the ones sold in the shops. The shop owners could not stomach the low priced Eiffel mementos. That could have been the reason behind this chase. Those salesmen-immigrants who were caught would be packed back to the countries from wherein they came, since they lacked appropriate visa and passport documents.
Travelling in Paris in 2010, I had the chance to keep a rendezvous with two tall monuments, one by choice and the other one as an inevitable entity. The former was a presence while the latter, a monument. Obviously the second one has been literally and triangularly ‘shaping’ the character of the city since last eleven decades. No matter how many tall structures rose around it, this Tower’s shadow has been demeaning the structures’ appearances between East and West, everyday, round the clock.
When a French writer wanted to escape its overwhelming presence — narrates another writer, much later – the only way he could do so was by taking refuge in the café inside the Tower! Eiffel Tower, which was initially designed to be a temporary monument for six months, in 1900, commemorating industrializations, has over stayed for rather too long, despite the criticism by many including its own contemporaries like Rabindranath Tagore!
The second of the city’s two overwhelming monuments was more abstract, a feel. She has been a foreigner to the French, like those immigrants-selling-mementos who ran for their life, from the police, with a bedsheet full of Eiffel’s mementos. Yet she – without eyebrows — was very welcome in Paris and the Parisians in turn have been welcoming visitors because of several reasons that compulsorily don’t exclude her! This foreigner has been bringing in a lot of economic profit to the French. The foreigner’s (Italian ‘Monalisa’) presence had been constantly pronounced at the airport, the bookshops, café and tourist pamphlets about the city. How many countries do use a singular foreign cultural entity to profit, like the French do?
Like everyone else who came in did, even I did enquire about her, while being inside a palace-once-upon-a-time, the Louvre museum. Rushing towards her also meant overlooking others portraits and was also an insult to all those represented men and women, whom I passed through. I even failed to notice that the Greek ‘Nike of Samothrace’ actually stood on a carved stone ship larger than her overall gliding figure. She has been separated from her ship in most of the art history books that have reproduced her in photographic formats. The fact that I had ignored to notice it came to my realization, while returning back, after keeping a rendezvous with ‘Monalisa’!
Eiffel Tower gives no concession. A ticket priced nine dollars to go up half way through and thirteen dollars to the tip, comes without any concession. Eiffel gave me a concession half way through, in the sense, I felt like going the full length of the height and so I purchased my online journey ticket from half way through midair! As if to compensate the cost or the costliness of traversing the tower, it can be and has been picturized through aerial shots in feature films, unlike Monalisa. This special Woman occupies almost all of the cover pages of the publication at the Louvre, giving an impression that all books are the same, or, that there are too many Monalisas inside the museum! When I produced my identity card as an art history teacher, from India, they not only let me get into the museum for free, but I could also skip the human queue consisting of at least a five hundred people on a holiday, to gain an entry to Louvre. And I could revisit Louvre, again and again, several times, day after day, for the same price of free entry! During one such visit, I realized that I had left my identity card in my hotel room after returning. The gatekeeper had recognized me as the regular visitor; the Indian with the art historian’s ID and let me in without asking for my card, during this occasion!
Yet, when I arrived in the room where this special women resided behind the bullet proof glass, all I could do was to imitate the ritual of everyone else’s attempt to ‘be there’ rather than ‘see her’. Monalisa is a blind man’s spot. She was just in front of us but all of could not see her. My sight failed to pierce through the glasses I was wearing and through the double layer of bullet proof glasses that lay between me and her. We were mutually not only separated by time and geography, but also by blindness of communication. I for one, who loves fantasy, could not bring myself together to consider it as an original. Buddha’s tooth has been similarly displayed in Candy (Srilanka) which you can only sense and believe only from a distance. Monalisa, in this sense, is the first simulated art of the western world. She is approachable only through her reproductions, like the simulated prehistoric rock paintings in Lascaux.
Monalisa is older to Eiffel tower by three and a half century. The one who can see her at close range, into her intricate details, is the one who would be assigned to restore her, time and again! Monalisa, unlike Eiffel, has become an object-of-myth and not an object-of-Art! Monalisa resembles the Konark Sun temple in Orissa in another sense. Both engross the audience to not what they were initially intended to mean, but to observe how both their initial schemes and meanings have been toppled over, owing to their popularity.
Like most visitors, I felt the empathy of ‘being’ with her in the same room, rather than ‘see’ her. Literally nobody could see her in the eyes! And now we speak so much about the visual brilliance hidden within the ‘sfumato’ technique, inherent within her and expressed by her creator, as it is written in the books. We subject ourselves to her gaze, an artwork rejoices watching the viewer’s dilemma of being in front of what they can’t see! On the other hand, while being at its permitted tip, Eiffel tower neither is part of the city nor hides us from itself. Instead, it vertically splits itself into its actual self, containing us and its own shadow, which clads the city’s buildings like a skin-tight-transparent-brown-sheet.
After spending a few days at Paris, I remembered a peculiar similarity between Eiffel Tower and Monalisa, as well. For me, dusk was the best period to be on top of the tower, for, I could watch the day turning into night, while it is in the dusk that the act of the tower which cuts itself from its shadow, ends, as artificial lights lit the tower as well as the city.
Even while travelling through the city’s roads, I could see parts of the tower, never complete when not close to it. On the other hand the famous lady was also familiar to all, irrespective of the scholarly and the mundane. Nobody in Paris resembled her, in the sense that she is a foreigner and international figure.
The one thing we do while visiting Indian temples not as tourists but as devotees is that we rest for a while, after the ritual offering. Both the tower and the women at Paris demanded this from me. The silhouette of Eiffel in the dark poses a weird question: what is it we are going through, in order to watch what? – addresses one and the same tower. Hence the tower doesn’t have walls but only gaps to pass through. To see it is to be physically away from it. To see Monalisa, on the other hand, is to yield ourselves to the sight of what we initially intended to see!
While seated outside the Louvre in the darkness, after hours of watching the museum throughout the day, the first thing that occurred to me was that it was not the eyes but the legs that got tired watching Monalisa. Similarly Eiffel Tower became a comical silhouette in the dark. Thinking about Monalisa outside the Louvre, Eiffel tower is not visible from there. The Louvre building format, with three sides, is so flat that it needs a central glass pyramid to let us go in as well as lit up the ambience. This flatness and literal depth contrasts with the towering height of the Eiffel. Thus the distances, both empathic and emotional ones, ambiguously pronounces that sight wants to colonize the viewer rather than yield.
Paris is an unusual city wherein language is no barrier. You can easily instruct the cab driver by pointing your fingers to the towering height or the cover page of a cultural book; and he will be able to take you to both the places, to Eiffel and then to Louvre.
