For more than two decades, Hamilton-born artist Mark Lewis has been on a paradoxical quest: making short films that take stillness and explore it in motion. Many of these films have been shot in London, where he has lived since 1997 as a professor of fine art at Central Saint Martins. These films have documented his encounters with everyday locations rendered strange through deep seeing: a boarded-up public lavatory on a street in Smithfield; a concrete path through a housing estate in Elephant and Castle; a swinging tire suspended from a rope in a quiet courtyard in Churchyard Row. Another early film explored a long, low, time-weathered stone wall in Northumberland, its one, long continuous take a kind of structuralist blague on the sequential nature of time-based art. Through his lens, such restricted subjects become dilated, and we are made to pause and consider what we might normally walk right by, hypnotized by the languid lens and its fluid, disembodied glide.
More recently, Lewis has brought us increasingly into the mix of urban life – the Minhocao overpass in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for example, or a jumble of apartments, hotels and small businesses in Beirut. Here, stillness and movement intertwine in a dance of subject and viewer; people mill about in these ever-more curious-seeming spaces as the camera performs its serpentine movements.
What better place to explore such phenomena, of course, than in a museum, where people gather in the most peculiar way: to see, and to see one another, to wander together in collective aimlessness amid the static eternals of art history. Lewis has made work in museums before – most notably in the National Gallery, London, where he reckoned with the Old Masters galleries – and was invited by the Louvre in Paris to make work in the great Paris museum as well.
His current exhibition gathers the results: four short films – between 4.4 and 24 minutes in length – that prompt the viewer to their own kindred acts of exploration and even re-enactment. Through his lens, we receive a kind of private tour of the Louvre: the hall of Greek antiquities (seen at night as if lit by flickering torchlight, in the viewing tradition of the 19th-century night galleries); the European painting galleries (including a remarkable looping aerial encounter with the Winged Victory of Samothrace, created through his digital stitchery of thousands of still photographs); down to the subterranean spaces created by I.M. Pei’s signature pyramid renovation of the museum’s entrance; and into the warp and weft of Chardin’s Child with a Spinning Top, the quintessential still rendering of movement and fleeting life, observed elbow-to-elbow with Chardin’s painting of a dead hare in a contrapuntal memento mori.
Not surprisingly, one finds oneself wanting to retrace his camera’s movements, comparing the artist’s version of the Louvre with one’s own. First stop, for me, was the Winged Victory of Samothrace, long installed as a magisterial preamble to all that is Europe amid the vaulting archways of the Louvre’s grand staircase. An epic sculpture of the goddess Nike from second-century-BC Greece, she towers over visitors, leaning forward from her parapet of stone, wings outspread to command the space around her.
The Victory is the star of Lewis’s In Search of the Blessed Ranieri, the longest of his four works on display, which starts with a view of a young girl in the galleries who is engrossed by il Sassetta’s little Quattrocento masterpiece of the same name. Here is a moment of pause before the camera takes flight. Sassetta’s painting, too, is about flying: Ranieri frees the poor from their incarceration in a Florentine jail, and Sassetta has depicted his haloed protagonist hovering above the fleeing prisoners, his lower body rendered as a blurred flame of white. Likewise Lewis, with his digital remastering of the real, delivers us from the restrictions of embodiment.
The film suggests another train of thought as well, touching down on landmark moments in the male artists’ attempts to grapple with the power of the life-creating female body, or to imagine its subversion. In its wild digital ride, Lewis’s stream of images reveal to us the muscular heft of the Victory, her thighs and torso expressing a monstrous force, before countering this with a glimpse of the delicate flesh-parfait of Girodet de Roussy-Trioson’s Pygmalion and Galatea, where comely marble is seen to bloom into rose-tinted life beneath the sculptor’s hand (in this mythic fantasy, it is man who creates life), or the luminous curves of Ingres’s Grand Odalisque, her satin-pillowy skin flushed with the warmth of invitation.
Meanwhile, Lewis is also capturing the experience of being in those galleries, his roving camera glancing past the Mona Lisa, behind her prophylactic bulletproof glass and double crowd barriers. (I’m with him here; why even bother trying?) In these interstitial moments, his camera swims through the throng of visitors like an upstreaming salmon, recording his interactions with the crowd – some onlookers curious and meeting his camera’s gaze, even playing to it; others conscientiously making way; and some oblivious, such as the young man he encounters at the film’s end, cellphone in hand and mind elsewhere, body and mind split by the technological intervention. The place is packed with them.
In the end, In Search of the Blessed Ranieri makes you wonder about the museum itself as a machine for seeing, as a lens that can focus our attention. This surely is the point of Lewis’s descent in Pyramid, through the Louvre’s famous I.M. Pei glass monument to the marble floor below via a circular, open, lens-like elevator, its platform gliding down through the volumetric core of the circular staircase like a well-oiled telephoto. At one point in its descent, Lewis’s camera captures a metal handrail whose contour bisects the curve of the staircase like a sleepy eyelid.
Chasing Lewis’s epiphanies, I found my own: a crust of bread immortalized by the 18th-century Spanish artist Luis Melendez (a new name for me); Goya’s bloody mess of a sheep’s head, its lifeless eye meeting our own across the centuries. At other times, though, fate conspired against me. The gliding circular elevator was, it turned out, closed for repairs on the day of my visit, its temporary indisposition declared by a makeshift sign. My search for The Blessed Ranieri, too, was thwarted by an officious museum attendant who told me, a full half-hour before closing, that the painting – though positioned merely 20 feet from where we stood and plainly visible at that near distance – was in a gallery that had already been cleared of visitors, in preparation for the museum’s great lemming-like evacuation. No amount of supplication would sway her resolve, and I was instructed to return tomorrow, her gaze abruptly flittering heavenward, just above my line of vision, in contemptuous restraint. Would that one could muster Lewis’s powers of flight. Sometimes art is better in art than in life.
Mark Lewis: Invention at the Louvre continues in Paris, at the Musée du Louvre, until Jan. 5 (louvre.fr).