Goudemalion Show at the Musee Des Arts Decoratifs, Paris

LIZSAYS: In our ongoing attempts to escape the wet, grey mighty short days of Paris winter, we set out for one of my favorite museums, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. I love the permanent collection with its, to die for, art nouveau staged rooms. But it almost always has innovative, fab and fun shows.
Goudemalion left me breathless. The show is currently running through March 12th. If you can get there, go. If you can’t go, I’ll try my best to give you a very small glimpse of the dazzling fun factory that is the exhibition.
It is a self assembled retrospective by Jean Paul Goude. He has had a forty year career (so far) as a self described “Manipulator of images, artist cum precursor.” Even if you have never heard of him, he has affected your life. He is a total media god. He’s an artist in the commercial world, but he is an innovator, in terms of visual ideas. He literally stretches reality, creating long tall, powerful images of men and women achieving, accelerating and celebrating life.
He also turned race into just another element in the picture in a way I have not seen before. One of his most familiar muses was Grace Jones. He reveled in her combination of edgy femininity and masculine edge. Yes, I know there are two edges and I think he does too.
If you live in Paris, you see his ads all over the place, in fact there was even a subway room, in the show, that had his ads in the subway stations and the train speeding through the various videos. Our subway stop was represented, yeah, art where I live!
He was hired to do the French Revolution’s bi-centennial, those images were spectacular, to say the least. He had sketches of women with birthday cake hats that looked more like wedding cakes with candles aglow. As it turns out, they were to expensive to execute. But, bringing his locomotive on an oriental rug into the main room of the Musee? It happened. 
He did cut ups of photos, drawings, sculpture, mixed media, video  large photos and there was one live performance. It began with an empty chair with a mic in front of a frame. At one point a thoroughly bejeweled blonde woman in white sat in the chair with her back to us. She  played with the baubles in her hand when suddenly the frame revealed a mirror  which reflected her with a flame atop her heand and a flame in her hand. She spoke for awhile in what sounded like Russian to my ears. Then, she got up and went into the locomotive room where she walked and floated effortlessly (something Mr. Goude has perfected or invented allows the model to literally glide along the floor as if she has invisible roller skates on her feet.) She chatted, posed for pictures, inspected the other photos as if it were her first time seeing them and occasionally went back to gliding.
Goodie Goude celebrates all of humanity with humor and thrills. I hope you like the 30 odd photos I narrowed it down to, which was far too few to represent the show. But, hey, if it was up to me, I’d bring the show to you!