By Maryanna Gabriel
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| Palais Des Papes |
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| The Stairway Was Covered With These |
I love to go to art galleries and modern art galleries in particular. I
feel I can sense the mood of the people, the temperature of the culture, and
more particularly I am curious how the modern French express themselves. I
walked into a show called “Les Papesses” set in the Palais Des Papes (Palace Of The Popes). Five female artists were expressing their
thoughts on the historic papacy, a particularly strong bastion of patriarchy, in
vivid visual iconography. The papacy moved their headquarters to Avignon for a
period. The Palais Des Papes was where they lived. Pope
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| Larger Than Life |
Joan was a feature of the show and why
the show was given the name. (It is told that Pope John VIII was a man dressed as
a woman. Her gig was up when she gave birth while parading the streets on a
horse. The story goes the mob killed her. The Vatican denies this story but
there are discrepancies in the historical record, there is a missing pope in
the numerical sequence. Proof enough for me. I digress.) I wandered through the palace with my jaw dropping at the glorious expression of femininity, at times not so pretty. Next to the sarcophagus of dead cardinals, for example, was art so shocking
it verged on sacrilegious yet in today’s culture the art show was all very
respectable. I had to grin at the shifting sands of what is culturally
sanctioned.
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| Enormous Metal Spider In The Nave |
