KEY POINTS:
From images of Christ to spidery self-portraits, the films, drawings and photographs spanning 30 years of Patti Smith's life are a treat for fans - though nothing matches the raw singularity of her voice. I arrive at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where Patti Smith, Land 250 is showing, to find Smith there in person, surrounded by cameras, microphones and a crowd of adoring French media representatives.
"We would like this room to be a centre of activity," she says. "A place for people to sit, talk, dream, write poetry and do as they wish."
She introduces her son, Jackson. He holds a microphone while his mother sings a song called Grateful, which she says sums up the way she feels about being asked to exhibit her work at the Cartier, running until June 22. It fills the gallery with meaning. Then she leaves and the work stands alone.
This major show - she has never exhibited on this scale in Europe before - spans the years 1967 to 2007, and consists of short Super-8 films, photographs, drawings, notebooks, installations, recordings and personal objects that possess a talismanic quality for Smith.
I spent an hour-and-a-half wandering around the exhibits and left feeling oddly unsatisfied. The underlying problem is: would these strange childlike drawings and rather mundane photographs be on these walls if they were not made by Patti Smith?
The show's title refers to the Polaroid camera Smith has used since 2002: a vintage Land 250. A sizeable selection of her small, black-and-white Polaroid photographs punctuate the exhibition, arranged unframed in glass display cases seemingly at random. No dates or locations are given.
There are photographs of statues, guitars, objects, people, landscapes. Some are starkly beautiful in their technical simplicity; many are only interesting insofar as they were taken by Smith. There is a great grainy photograph of a grey-white horse in a grey-white landscape, potentially a great cover for what is still her most important work, 1975's Horses, had the late Robert Mapplethorpe not adorned the sleeve with that stark portrait of the young, androgynous Smith, a relative unknown already convinced of her iconic power.
Smith remains an artist devotedly in thrall to her formative influences: Rimbaud, Morrison, Brian Jones, Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman are all lauded to varying degrees here, but it is Mapplethorpe, her friend, lover and creative mentor from the late 60s and early 70s, who is most evident.
The main body of the work is in one large room, where films are projected on the walls above the drawings and photographs, and on screens above display cases containing totemic objects, like a death mask of Rimbaud and a stone taken from the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself.
Many of the objects and images here clearly have a huge personal resonance for Smith but, as images themselves, they do not possess the power to engage the viewer who may not be familiar with Smith's work or, more pertinently, the visionary landscape she has created for herself, and works out of.
What draws your attention, though, is Smith's voice, which is the strongest presence in the room. It emanates from a curtained-off centrepiece, a film and sound installation, in which a mysterious seascape is projected on two screens, one vertical, the other horizontal, while a recording of her intoning her long poem, The Coral Sea, washes around the viewer.
That voice remains Smith's signature. It can still stop you in your tracks with its urgency, its insistence on the primacy and power of words. Yet the show as a whole disappoints. There is too much that relies on the fame of its maker for meaning.
- OBSERVER
