PARIS, March 28, 2008 - Deep leather armchairs, carpets and a guitar.
Step into Patti Smith's living-room at a Paris art show opening this week for
a rare glimpse into the 1970s punk rock diva's inner world over four decades.
   "Since 1967 I've been drawing, painting, taking photographs, writing
poetry," the long-haired 61-year-old Chicago-born "godmother of punk" said at
a news conference hursday on the eve of the opening of her first big
exhibition.
   "This exhibition gives me an opportunity to share the work I've been doing
in another way than in music," she said.
   "In rock'n'roll I speak out on human rights, or against war. In other
fields of art I express my own inner world which is not political."
   Smith, perhaps best known for numbers such as "Horses", "Gloria" or
"Because The Night" will also perform at the Fondation Cartier arthouse over the next couple of weeks along with cohorts such as cult 1970s New York
underground figure Tom Verlaine, as well as Fred Frith and Ted Milton.
   Other days, Smith's tall son Jackson plans to hang out on the leather sofa
"just like the one at home" to play guitar or talk music with visitors.
   Her daughter Jesse will also be at the Paris show, playing piano when her mother gives a reading of Virginia Woolf.
   "It's the beginning of a dialogue between me and the people to show the
diversity of my world," said Smith, wearing her habitual jeans, white shirt
and waistcoat, before picking up a guitar and breaking into song.
   But the inner world unveiled at the expo stands in stark and silent
contrast to the noise and movement of performance rock and roll.
   Entitled "Land 250" after a vintage Polaroid Land 250 camera that Patti
Smith began using in 1995, a hard year in which her husband and brother died,
the show features a selection of her drawings, bric-a-brac, films, and dozens
of Polaroid pics.
   "I felt so weary in 1995, emotionally unable to express myself, and taking
Polaroid pictures was simple and immediate," she said. "It helped restore my
confidence at a difficult period."
   The tiny black-and-white Polaroid pics highlight a fascination for cemetery
stones, sculptures, cloudy skies and windy streets.
   Others symbolically focus on Virginia Woolf's bed, writer Herman Hesse's
typewriter, poet Arthur Rimbaud's cutlery or slippers that once belonged to her friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
   "I find graves a place of beauty" she said. "I do not find them sad. They
are a resting place, a meeting point for the meditation of the living."
   Unlike many other rock stars she said she had never been tempted by the path of self-destruction.
   "I decided at a young age that I wanted to live," she said. "What attracted
me to (Jim) Morrison or (Arthur) Rimbaud was not their lifestyle but their
work. To be able to work you have to be healthy."
   Pictures and souvenirs of Paris, which she visited for the first time aged
20 in 1969, also feature throughout.
   Talking of her love of the city and of French intellectuals from Rimbaud
through to film-maker Jacques Rivette or actress Jeanne Moreau, Patti Smith
surprisingly said she also liked French fashion house Dior, as well as
pancakes, or "crepes".

AFP