Barb�s, Paris, France.
David Bellos
Behind the “Gare
du Nord”, north railway station you go up to the « Place du Tertre
», at Montmartre, which is for painters, musicians, and visual artists
a beloved hill shelter. Django Reinhart and many other jazz musicians used to
play in tiny cafés in the forties and the fifties and they tamed the
brand new jazz tunes coming to Europe by blending in gypsy melodies.
Next option, you go down to Barbès district nearby. For a century it
has been crowded and growing. It was built at the time when people (mainly workers)
started to come by train to north Paris. It has the highest population density
in the city. There we find workers, travellers, struggling people, human suffering.
I met you, even loved you from time to time.
You the artist, the worker, the traveller. You, also a teenage character of
my teenage years. You who are that other who is not me, but so close to me.
Then you were so real but still unreal for that other. They call you an immigrant
child, you call yourself a survivor. The survivor in the tempest. You go through
life as you go into painting until you are through with it. You grab wood or
a drum percussion to make sculpture or music. Searching this artistic feeling,
you spend hours polishing beef bones to create prehistoric rings, bracelets,
“torques.” Inventing art to survive. The teenagers are still doing
the same now. They run through life until they run into a wall, but they paint
it and continue to run. Creating — poien — something new, or ceasing
to be human.
In Ancient Greece “Creating”, poiein, meant “making” until
that “making” started to be called poetry. Art as creation is the
central criterion of humanity. In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus says that Prometheus
stole fire: pantechnou purgos selas, the polytechnical fire’s flame, and
he gave it to mankind. And in such a way grew humanity, tracking the path of
art. Now, when I walk or just stand in Barbès, the vision of streets
overcrowded by flowing human traffic brings me close to the idea of humanity
as whole.
I stayed thirty years in the Barbès district and I still have the same
feeling there when I just stand and gaze around me. Street art and artefact
are alive in everyday life, here in Barbès. People come and leave. Modern
nomads are coming there from so many countries. You hang around in Barbès
and you travel around the world!
Nowadays, you have to create, to be an artist, in order to deal with everyday
life. I walk into the small Barbès streets filled with shops and I think
art is a link between the self and the other person. You, famous or unknown
artist, so unknown that you don’t even know yourself, how much you are
an artist and at the same time a distant Prometheus’ daughter and son.
