the landscape from the studio: my text for an exhibition of new work by joão salema, rooster gallery, new york

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click here to read the full text

bringing the outside in

Not had very much time lately for blog, or studio or photo work - too busy writing and preparing for exhibition in Lisbon that I'm curating, will post notice here, but meanwhile, this is a review of two exhibitions currently on in London, but also dealing with the current fashion for outsider art. 

Bringing the Outside In

Shoichi Koga

Daisuke Kibushe

arrival

present tense

'Stefan Zweig, a young writer from Vienna, sat in the audience at a movie theatre in Tours, France, watching a newsreel. It was spring 1914.

An image of Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany, came on screen for a moment. At once the theater was in an uproar. "Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally insulted," Zweig wrote. "The good-natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant." '

Nicolson Baker, Human Smoke. 

on impending loss, foretold

[...] How could I turn and say: but this is him.
How could I say: he bounded when he walked. 
How could I say: when he came home at night,
A gust of snowy air around his coat,
I drew him closer, holding his lapels;
He caught me by the wrists and closed his eyes. 

How could I say I tried to memorize
The truthful face, his smile a truthful blaze
Untrammeled still. I tried to learn by heart
The light-brouwn gaze: unguarded chrysolite
From such another world that heaven made.
Left iris, with a comet-fleck of gold.
How could I memorize his gentle ways.
The way he mingled friendliness with passion,
Plain dealing, open-handed, unafraid. 
The swift, reflexive generosity. 

His striking conversation, magic ease
In seeking what the other could, then more,
In understanding, warmly understood; 
A quest for truth but not certainty.

And the integrity I idolized:
Another's mystery never trifled with.
No one was belittled in those eyes.

[...]

I found a phone booth, place to bawl unheard,
And sank beneath its automatic light.
The phone book hanging from a broken chain -
I drew it to my lap, a sprawling weight
Of paper pulp from long-forgotten trees
Snuffed-out and boiled down and pressed in sheets
Of ashen paper, faintly blue and gray,
A book unreadable and authorless,
A mystical directory of the living, 
Each page a random sample of Creation
And changing version of the Book of Life;
I ran my glove over the listings: throngs;
And found his name, still listed with the living,
Whose stories vanish, leaving only names
Recycled and reused. This faring on
And on, O mendicants. And overheard.

A page that can't be turned. He can't survive.
But let him live. My gloves pressing my eyes,
A thousand stars rotating inwardly
A millimeter past the streamered dark,
And nameless comet-phosphenes streking by.
With an alter, death. Without a place.

[...]

Gjertud Schnackenberg, from 'Venus Velvet no. 2,' in Heavenly Questions

creatureliness

The last time I looked, the dog was lying
on the freshly cut grass
but now she has moved under the picnic table.

I wonder what causes her to shift
from one place to another,
to get up for no apparent reason from her spot

by the stove, scratch one ear,
then relocate, slumping down
on the other side of the room by the big window,

or I will see her hop onto the couch to nap
then later find her down
on the Turkish carpet, her nose in the fringe.

The moon rolls across the night sky
and stops to peer down on the earth,
and the dog rolls through these rooms

and onto the lawn, pausing here and there
to sleep or to stare up at me, head in her paws,
to consider the scentless pen in my hand

or the open book on my lap.
And because her eyes always follow me,
she must wonder, too, why

I shift from place to place,
from the couch to the sink
or the pencil sharpener on the wall –

two creatures bound by the wonderment
though unlike her, I have never once worried
after letting her out the back door

that she would take off in the car
and leave me to die
behind the solid locked doors of this house.

Billy Collins, 'Two Creatures'

on staying at home

[...] Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

[...]

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?"

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"

Elizabeth Bishop, from 'Questions of Travel,' 1956 (in Brazil)

ostranenie

With the continued lack of a camera, and with the dis-spiritedness of the sketchbook, words.

'I would catch myself, red-handed, in the act of living; alone, without an audience of any kind, I would cease from performing and simply be. And what would be my register of being if not things, the more commonplace the better? Yet almost immediately I found myself settling down in these once familiar sourroudings and letting them be so again, with all my plans and pledges forgotten. Even the first sight of my old room had affected me hardly at all; what makes for presence if not absence?  –  I mean the presence of oneself as a remembered other– and I might as well never have gone away, so little of me was there, to be pondered on or grasped. Making strange, people hereabouts say when a child wails at the sudden appearance of a visitor; how was I to make strange now, and not stop making strange? How was I to fight the deadening force of custom? In a month, in a week, I told myself, the old delusion of belonging would have re-established itself irremediably.'

(The character Alex Cleave) John Banville, Eclipse.  

documenta 13: political agenda

Still thinking about the curatorship of documenta and why it got under my skin, so to speak. Or perhaps 'up my nose' would be a better corporeal metaphor. Caroline Christov Bakargiev is anxious to focus on Kabul and Cairo/Alexandria - Afghanistan and Egypt. (Banff in Canada was the third external venue, but there seemed no further mention of it in the show). 'Egypt' of course stands in for the political hopes invested in the Arab Spring, but it is really Kabul that has the strongest presence at Documenta and events organised in that city as part of what one might call 'Documenta outreach' were much publicised. This is great for those residents of Kabul who have time and energy to entertain the notion of art (and not surprisingly, it is all politically motivated, socially engaged art), but is Bakargiev suggesting that schlepping to Kabul for the full Documenta experience might be of interest to anyone else? She argues that Kabul now must be a little like Kassel was after the end of World War II (untrue on all significant counts, not least because the outrages against human rights are not over in Kabul). We're perhaps invited to surmise that Kabul is the Kassel of the future (and always will be!)

The staging of Documenta in Kassel - a city that was largely bombed in the war - was part of a symbolic redressing undertaken by Germany (and not by some foreign curator in Germany) ten years after the end of the war, and for historical reasons, it makes sense that Kassel should continue to host this important event. Bakargiev acknowledges the historical role of Documenta by including one work from each of the previous twelve Documentas in 'her' show. Because it takes place only once every five years, the individual curators invited to co-ordinate this prestigious event have seen Documenta as a barometer not only for artistic transformation, but also for social and political change, and it is of course fair enough - indeed, desirable - that these should be reflected in the show. 

But Bakargiev is so anxious to fawn all over the Arab and Muslim worlds that in the curatorial voice - and I mean in the curatorial voice, and not in the exhibition per se – there is a sticky attitude of obsequiousness to certain cultures, and to very particular cultural forms and voices. Her approach is anything but inclusive, and answers to a disavowed political agenda. This happens at the expense of a more rounded and balanced historical contextualisation or exploration of the themes that, despite their declared absence, are very much on show. 

The Hauptbahnhof  in Kassel - once the main railway station - is one of the primary venues used for the exhibition, and in the current Documenta, it hosts some of the most exceptional works on show, by artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, William Kentridge, Lara Favaretto, Susan Philipz, Istvá Csákány and Haegue Yang. (Other artists whose work stands out at Documenta are Nalini Malani, Goshka Macuga, Song Dong, and - with the more traditional mediums of painting and collage - Julie Mehretu and Simryn Gill.) The same Hauptbahnhof  saw the deportation of Jews from that city during World War II. From the Jewish Virtual Library, the following details:

'On November 7, 1938, two days before the start of Kristallnacht, the main synagogue was set on fire, but the local firemen extinguished the blaze, something that they were explicitly instructed not to do on Kristallnacht. Two days later, the Liberal synagogue was burned down and the Orthodox synagogue destroyed, and a completed manuscript of the second volume of the history of the Jews in Kassel, prepared under community auspices, was destroyed, as later were all records on emigration and deportation. Three hundred Jews including the rabbi were sent to Buchenwald and 560 Jews emigrated over the next year. As to the remaining Jews, 470 were deported to Riga in 1941, 99 to Majdanek in 1942, and 323 to Theresienstadt that year. In 1945–46, 200 Jews (mainly Displaced Persons) lived in Kassel, 102 in 1955, 73 in 1959, and 106 in 1970. With municipal aid a synagogue with a community center was built in 1965. The Jewish community numbered about 1,220 in 2004 after the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Since the synagogue became too small it was pulled down and the architect Alfred Jacoby designed a new one with a community center, which was consecrated in 2000. It was financed by the Jewish community of Kassel, the Association of Jewish Communities in Hesse, the Federal state (Land) of Hesse, and the city of Kassel.'

In a Documenta that seems to explore geo-political and historical contexts, migrations, multiple cultures, collective memory and the idea of memorialisation, it is more than surprising that there is no curatorial mention of this aspect of Kassel's history. 

In every respect, the best artists on show bypass the curatorial remit and explore their own themes. Two works at the Hauptbahnhof hauntingly address this aspect of Kassel's past. Susan Philipz's sound work is mapped onto  the longest track at the station, Track 12. You're alone in the loneliest part where the building gives way to an industrial hinterland, and suddenly, the scratchy soundtrack brings you plangent, elegiac strings. Through seven speakers installed in a half-circle above the empty tracks, what we hear is a composition based on Czech composer Pavel Haas's Study for Strings (1943). He wrote this piece while incarcerated at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. It was performed by the Terezin String Orchestra before an audience of prisoners; this performance was filmed and incorporated into the now famous propaganda film Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem judischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezin: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area), 1944. The absence of any  form of materiality in this work immerses the expectant 'viewer' in sensation, history, memory.

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller also staged a heart-stopping work at Documenta. At a kiosk in the Hauptbahnhof, you receive an iPod and headphones and, plugging into the iPod, you get taken by the artists for a walk through the station, where your senses are gradually confounded between what you actually see before your eyes in the present, and what you are shown on the small screen of the device, and hear as though convincingly 'present' on the headphones. I found myself continually removing the headphones to clarify whether what I was hearing was the soundtrack of their walk then, or the actual sounds of my walk now. During this walk - an immersion in real time in which the viewer/participant engages with architecture, history and performance art - Cardiff and Bures Miller lead us to a small vitrine in a corner of the main atrium, just before it branches off into the separate tracks. Here, in the glass box,  stones (reminiscent of those traditionally left on Jewish graves) and handwritten notes serve as a discreet memorial to this unhappy aspect of the city's history. 

Get me out of here

Email from Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of this year's Documenta 13, in the 'logbook' that tracks the her thinking around the idea of Documenta... so many mushed and tangled ideas together you wonder there is any syntax here at all. 

"To contact a self-help group in NYC that tries to help people get out of the addiction of making art. Getting out of the 'high' of creative ideas all the time in cognitive capitalism. Like a rehab centre."

Are the worlds of contemporary music and contemporary literature filled with this kind of disingenuous gobbledygook, uttered in such bad faith?

Here's another of her emails, see if you can get the hang of this one:

"Yesterday Bifo agreed to do the notebook, as an essay with notes, on the question of how a sense of failure of political activism is pushing more and more people into becoming artists, or entering the artworld, because there they can feel part of a 'community' without needing to be successful in terms of direct political agency [nail on the head there]. Furthermore, there is in the artworld a basic paradox: on the one hand we are the essence and prototypes of the future cognitive precarious labourer (typical of the alienated labour forces of the 21st century) and on the other we are also the space of a potential of resistance to the atomized, singularized, and disconnected and non-collective subjectivity of the 21st century due to the intense aggregation of our rituals.

Nice, eh?"

Nice??? Somebody get me out of here! Does this mean anything?

Fortunately, the exhibition has some fabulous works that don't bear any relation to this nonsense, and its 'heart', a small exhibition in the rotunda of the Fridericianum in Kassel, is terrifically interesting.

sleeping, dreaming

'... when we sleep, severed from the world, straying into the deep introversion, on a return journey into ourselves, we can see clearly through our closed eyelids, because thoughts are kindled in us by internal tapers and smoulder erratically. This is how total regressions occur, retreats into self, journeys to the roots. This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depth we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories.'

Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

I know a man

I know a man

who photographed the view he saw

from the window of the room where he made love 

and not the face of the woman he loved there.

                                               Yehuda Amichai

upheavals of thought

 'One misses in a primitive way what held one and gave one comfort: even when one fastens on particular details, [...]  they are complex eudaimonistic symbols of comfort and support. This suggests that it is more because the need for comfort and support fades that the sensory memory fades, rather than that the memory simply fades out on its own, causing thereby a diminution in the need for comfort and support [...]

Martha Nussbaum, 'Upheavals of Thought'

Ana Vidigal's House of Secrets

Really sad I cannot be in Lisbon for the launch on 23 March... Ana's fabulous installation at the Instituto Superior Técnico, for which I wrote the catalogue text, published in Portuguese and in English. 

Reading Powell

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time,  Book 2. 

The solace of objects

The theme of my last visit to London was the solace of objects, which is the title of the exhibition curated by artist Felicity Powell at the wonderful Wellcome Collection. The subject of THINGS/ STUFF and how we use them/it is dear to my heart. The exceptional and inspirational exhibition curated by Grayson Perry at the British Museum could also be described as exploring this theme. This sketchbook is small.

Pencil, watercolour pencil, and brush markers in small Cornellison & Son sketchbook.

My version of Gutai (or: Abstract Expressionism in the Age of Digital Reproduction)

Towards the grand finale

Proust in the Scott-Moncrieff translation

Passing by, stopping, walking on: Urban Sketching in Context

Just back from the wonderful Urban Sketchers symposium in Lisbon; I didn't draw as much as I'd hoped (too staggered by the many fantastic drawings I saw and interested in the various interventions and teaching methodologies... as well as taken up by the strangeness of visiting Lisbon as a tourist, rather than a resident!). Here is a copy of the paper I presented: I think it was a bit too dense for the occasion, so for those of you who asked me if they could read it, here goes:  

In March 2010, shortly after starting to post sketchbook pages online, I glued four small scribbles I’d made of my dog Possum into a Moleskine sketchbook. The drawings of Possum were made on scraps of paper on the day of the post, and the page on which they were stuck contained a list of starter shrubs from two years earlier. In response to these, avid sketcher Manuel San Payo quipped: ‘hey - collage??? That’s odd...!’  read more here

One thing after another

Brush markers and gouache in Windsor and Newton sketchbook.

I spilt some gouache on the page in my studio and tried to turn it to my advantage by roughly colouring the whole page and then drawing on top of this ground. There is always something disinhibiting about a ground that is already messy, where the pristine page can sometimes be daunting.

I am always intrigued, in looking at other people's sketchbooks, at signs of continuity or discontinuity, how one page follows another. Often, there will be something akin to an evolution, where a certain approach or material is used for a stretch of time and produces certain stylistic and technical results, then giving way to another. My sketchbooks never seem to record a continuous line of progress. I find myself chopping and changing a lot. If I've been working with brush markers for a few days, I want to go back to ink pen or to pencil crayon, or pencil and watercolour; more careful, delicate drawings follow rougher, more expressionistic or scribbly ones. For me, the sketchbook is as much about material experimentation as it is about observational drawing.