Music to Her Eyes

She may be an icon of rock and roll and the godmother of punk, but today Patti Smith is in a mellow mood. Sitting by the window in a fifth-floor, all-glass office at the Cartier Foundation for Con temporary Art in Paris, she's pondering how it all came about. Back in May 1969, when she first set foot in Paris with her sis ter Linda, her camera, her art supplies and little else, she lived in a small apartment around the corner. The impressive glass- and-steel building that houses Cartier didn't even exist. "We met a filmmaker and a couple of street singers, and they lived in this small flat," recalls Smith, 61. "We slept on the floor. I would stick my paper on the wall and draw. I used to tell my sister, 'I'm going to be a great artist. I'm going to have a big show in Paris,' and—even though we didn't have enough money to eat—'Some day we'll be eating caviar!' " Smith smiles sagely. "I was so arrogant then."

Others might call it prescient. Several of those works now feature in the deeply intimate Cartier Foundation show "Land 250" (through June 22), Smith's first Euro pean art exhibition. The show is dominat ed by some 200 black-and-white photo graphs that Smith took with the vintage Polaroid Land 250 camera that never leaves her side. But it also includes sketch es, artifacts, installations, video footage and documentaries chronicling her career as performer, painter, photographer and poet from 1967 to 2007, luring viewers into her fascinating inner universe.

Smith shaped musical history, redefin ing the role of women in the industry and heralding New York's 1970s punk-rock movement with seminal albums like "Horses" (1975). But for her, music and visual art are really two sides of the same coin. "Art ranges from the most precious, spiritual and intellectual experience to re ally animating some creative moment pri marily to serve the people," she says. "Rock and roll, after all, is really the people's art."

And yet rock and roll is not the focal point of this exhibit. Purposely lacking a chronology, it lets viewers wind their way through a maze of rooms that pay tribute to the various influences in Smith's life. The Coral Sea room is named after the prose elegy she wrote for longtime friend and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe when he died in 1989. Its walls are lined with a series of black-and-white photo graphs of items that have great personal significance to her: Mapplethorpe's slip pers, Virginia Woolf's bed and Hermann Hesse's typewriter.

One bare room is dedicated to poetry. Visitors sit on a mat and watch a feature film Smith made in tribute to the French poet René Daumal, in which she depicts his death in a fantastical, dream-like manner. Viewers are then invited to write their own poetry on the empty walls. Smith's admiration of Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French Symbolist poet, is evident in a moving sequence from the 2008 Sundance prize-winning documen tary "Dream of Life"' on view. In it, she is seen making a pilgrimage to his birthplace in Charleville. As a young woman in the late '60s, Smith was working on an assem bly line in New Jersey to make ends meet when she discovered Rimbaud's work after shoplifting a copy of his 1875 book "Illu minations."' This marked the start of her lifelong passion for poetry.

The epicenter of the exhibit is an instal lation reproducing Smith's own current living room, complete with couches, Berber rugs, amplifiers and notebooks for visitors' use. Throughout the show's run, Smith plans to visit and participate in ad hoc poetry readings, photography and jam sessions. "I really want people to have a sense that for a while they can live in this room," she says. "It's a living room." It evokes a subtle reference to Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," which championed personal and artistic liberty for women.

"Land 250" lets viewers actively partake in Smith's vision of the world: it is a space meant to be used for their reflection and creation. "[Artists] bear their wounds; it's just part of the blessing and curse of being an artist," says Smith with a smile. "Even if it took 40 years, I kept my promise to my sister. That's the magical subtext of this whole experience." Magical for artist and viewer alike.

© 2008