Holidays and modern art collages

If Madonna were French, she wouldn't have had to spend the 1980s longing for a holiday and singing about it. Nearly every Friday in May is a national holiday. Today is Labour Day (fete du travail) in France and it is celebrated by a day of vacation and a big parade/protest (?) by various labour unions declaring their commitment to workers' rights. People also sell snow drops, those little white flowers, and sometimes lilacs and there are somehow symbols of May 1st. If someone gives you snowdrops on this day, it means you'll have good luck and loads of people carry around their little white flowers. I was no exception-- I was kindly presented with a small bouquet this afternoon which are now on the table in front of me, no doubt changing my luck as I write.

My snowdrops, a friend and I all went to the Marche d'art contemporain at Bastille. This is a bi-annual art fair with hundreds of different stands, each belonging to a different contemporary French artist hoping to gain publicity and sell some work. For us, the public, we get to see a ton of great art and talk to the artists who are all there hosting small aperatif parties and ready to answer our questions in the hopes of selling us an 800 euro canvas. The friend of mine who came with my snowdrops and me knew a scultptor exhibiting there, so we chatted with him for awhile about the event and his work (animal sculptures in bronze)-- and thanked him profusely for our invitations to the event which saved us each 8 euros. The marche d'art was actually a lot like the Salon du Vin that I attended last year, just with paintings, sculptures and artists' statements at each booth, instead of wine and marketing materials about the superior grapes from that particular region of France.

There were artists' booths both inside and outside, on either side of the Seine and one of the bridges reserved as the path to more art that day. The weather was beautiful and the artists outside were all having picnics next to their booths. While we looked at art along the river, we could hear shouting and chanting from the workers' rights rally outside at Place de la Bastille and an accordian softly played La Vie en Rose from the other side of the river.

I thought to myself that the protest, the art and the accordian, all combined at that very moment, defined to an extent my image of Paris, its creativity, political engagement against a conservative future and nostalgia for the romanticism of the past all rolled into one on a particularly lazy holiday afternoon. A lot of the modern art on display showed Paris cityscapes-- it seemed like everyone was shaping their image of this city, through art or political protest, all at the same time. I tried to fix it in my mind like some kind of modern art collage, like some I'd seen that day, with snapshots of artists, musicians and protestors, newspaper clippings about all the many recent workers' strikes and protests, springtime sunshine, snowdrops to bring good luck and some fragments of sheet music to La vie en Rose.