3 observations on landscape (iii)

observation (iii) is putting into words the experience that was so eagerly anticipated:

3. bethan huws's il est comme un saint dans sa niche, il ne bouge pas, kestner gesellschaft.

the first piece of her i saw - or rather: read about - was the lake writing or lake piece (1991). [with a review and an installation shot here]

it was shown to me by someone who had fallen in love with text, words and the discursive possibilities of art. and it was shown to me at a time when i was glad to revel in the immediacy of artistic practice after turning away from word-laden or -leaden (?) academia.

and nonetheless: i think i pretty well caught the same falling movement (happiness drip, drapping downwards as rilke wondered and twombly installed here) and wanted to see, read, know and understand more.

singing to the sea was the first actual experience of huws's work.

and now a show that was enframed by huws statement that she 'does Duchamp like she does crosswords'; and the exhibition spaces itself announcing at its start: 'why do we keep creating more artworks if we don't understand the ones we've got'. the show gives insight (as well as positing so many more questions) into huws's approach towards duchamp's work, the search for meaning-making in art and language. the ambiguity of translation processes from her native welsh, english and french figure throughout - in various ready-mades, the films 'fountain' and 'the chocolate bar'.

the most expansive (if only in terms of physical space) of her works in the hanover show is the marriage (marier quc a quc: also, to unite two separate objects) of her installation space the forest (made up of many, many bottle driers, another ready-made of Duchamp) with the wedding video she screened originally inside a woodland (a marriage in the king's forrest).

much of her art seems pared down, stripped back to some key questions of meaning-making and the relation this quest establishes between subjects and objects (though agent and receptor isn't clear-cut here). there is something in her work that seems to me very dateable: it reflects a pre-occupation with text and discursiveness i know from my own academic work.  there is something in this that, in an academic context, i would refute: notably her attempt to make everything transparent by ever more circles of reflective practice. it's a practice which is necessary but remains, in my mind, futile: not everything of who i is can be rendered discursive and transparent.

there are many openings towards academic work practice and artistic possibilities in this. textual art works is something of an unknown to me. almost deliberately i stayed away from text because it was too closely tagged to academic work. i think that division can no longer be upheld.

but this is really about an observation on landscape. it's a tentative one and takes us back to nature and the opening of different media required. it is glimpsed at in the forest marriage of bottle driers and a rather ordinary wedding video: of how meaning-making takes mundane forms and combines diverse media. and the attentiveness and searching nature of huws artistic practice provides inspiration.

so, that's the observation (iii) on landscape.

her lake piece may prove a good walking companion for this.

3 observations in landscape (ii)

bums... i made the mistake of writing post iii before post ii and inbetween the two i fell into the night stars, morning mist and a chestnut bud and thus disappeared momentarily.

but stars, mist and buds were all on queue for short and sweet observation on landscape (ii).

it concerns james turrell's minimalism of light and perception (as discussed in more length in an earlier post). two quotes stick in my mind from my web trawl even if the source didn't (sorry!).

quote 1 paraphrases as james turrell is one of the great romantics in his search for light in the (american) landscape.

quote 2 paraphrases as james turrell with his skyscapes and installations does want to take us back to the stone age.

out of this my observation (ii) arises:

a minimalism of form is required. only with this, the limitations of landscape can be transcended. such minimalism - if it works with light (and shade) and our perception of this - will be contemporary, as in the here and now (as indeed Turrell's work is). nature and our experience of this is one of presence not tradition.

is this romantic? is working with light and perception romantic? i wonder....

3 observations on landscape (i)

with all the work on portfolios it seems ages that i spent some time in landscape. assembling the material for the portfolios, demonstrating and providing a statement around these was very useful in surveying my 'fieldwork' as i indeed called the statement [reminder to self: rewrite and post this].

it however also made obvious that i am moving along something less painterly and more conceptual and 'other materially' than paint. some of my reservation about the genre of landscapism remain, remain and remain and need addressing in other means.

the three exhibitions i saw over the past week will serve as initial markers.

1. the return of landscape. akademie der kuenste, hanseatenweg, berlin

it draws knowingly on the romantics' constructions of landscape and the rich and varied and problematic nature (!) of germany's cultural history and its basis for geopolitics (be it it with prussia's colonisation of the east; or ns blood and soil politics and economics).

however, the main part of the exhibition is a juxtaposition of two cities (venice and las vegas) and their dependence on nature - water. so: landscape becomes the domain of landscape planners to struggle with issues over sustainability amongst capitalist thirst for land and expansion. the imagery that dominates are those of aerial photography of landscape patterns - nature/cultivation/destruction, the main slide show made up of images by alex s maclean. a third part of the exhibition shows various landscape projects, their master plans and details to manage sustainability.

in this, the exhibition is limited: it's limited to the act of planning for sustainability and the belief that a plan will solve a problem. though my own professional background has always been situated in close proximity to the 'belief in a plan', i find this increasingly tiresome and mis-placed. mis-placed also if we consider the power of aerial photography without social practice, without people. to assume that patterns from high above reveal the groundwork. - the photography of bernd and hilla becher marks the precendent of a rich tradition of photography of human activity and the outcome of these with the agents being absent. rich by absence and stillness. photography always freezes activity in stillness. and nonetheless, it's probably one of its biggest problems.

the piece that really caught me, was - possibly unsurprisingly - a video by the canadian documentary film maker peter mettler. his documentary on the destruction by open pit oil production, petropolis (canada, 2009, 43min), visit the site for the film here.

again: it's aerial imagery. yet, this destruction through the tar sands is narrated by mettler. he tells the viewer how his requests to visit the fields was refused again and again so that flying over the fields was the only way of getting access and of being able to document; he talks about the first experiments of flying and much more. thus he makes an imagery thoroughly part of this world and the relations that make petropolis possible.

mettler's film is one of three shown on the side of a large field of illuminated boxes which show quotes concerned with landscape from throughout (German-speaking) history.

landscape text panels, illuminated, wiederkehr der landschaft, adk, berlin

two I noted down.

ich hatte einst ein schönes vaterland
so sang der flüchtling heine,
das seine stand am rheine,
das meine auf dem märkischen sand.
wir alle hatten einst ein (siehe oben).
das fraß die pest, das ist im sturz zerstoben.
o rößlein auf der heide
dich brach die kraftdurchfreude. (mascha kaleko, 1907-1975)

i once had a beautiful fatherland
so sung the refugee heine
his stood next to the rhine
mine on the markian sands.
we all once had one (see above).
it got devoured by pestulence, it broke apart in its fall.
oh little rose on the heath
you were broken by strengththroughjoy.

allmählich entdeckte sie neue linien im gesicht der landschaft. ackerflächen, deren grenzen in einem anderen winkel zum horizont verliefen als die uralten grabenrunzeln der erde früherer zeit. so schnell prägten die neuen züge sich nicht in die gesichter der erde. (christa wolf, *1929)

slowly she discovered new lines in the face of the landscape. fields whose boundaries were running in different angles to the horizon than the ancient furrow marks of the earth of previous times. it wouldn't be that quick for the new contours to settle in the faces of the earth.

thus, my first observation:
 
while nature is never outside from what people experience and engage with (i.e., nature cannot be external to people... unspoilt or otherwise), considering nature outside of landscape is a necessary opening to get beyond the landscape genre and its conventions.

this is likely to require radically different means to the framed picture plane and conventions of landscape compositions in painting.

it's probably not by chance that these reconsiderations of nature hit me as i'm about to engulf myself in a week of facilitation training inspired by deep ecology and sustainability. it's a reconsideration that i avoided for a decade or more. so, i think it's high time. hello dartmoor, hello permaculture.

Personality crisis

A bit of proto punk to start...

I actually had collected a second song from the radio alongside this, as antidote, but can't think of it what it was... too bad.

I've still been circling around Matisse's condensation of sensation that seeks harmony and balance. And whether 'getting to a fleeting impression/sensation' is what I actually do with pastel sea sketches like these. I think it's not the intensification, the boiling down, getting to the essentials (if not essence) that I object - no, 'object' is the wrong word - to but the oneness, the balance and harmony.*

And, all the while, I'm back in California. A heavy thunderstorm clears the air - just as it does right now outside my Berlin window - , Ate tries out the various setting on the fabulous dSLR, I end up with some very nice portraits of myself in trashy camping van setting with a plastic palm tree in the background, and I read her from Matisse's Notes of a painter.

Read her pretty much the passage of my last post - the thriving for a true, thickened and authentic representation of who the artist is on the canvas he paints on.

The picture wall, graphite in A4 Moleskine

And we're playing time warp - trying to bridge about a hundred years of identity politics, psychology, feminism and subject formation. Try to relate Matisse's sense of self, his belief in his own skills, ability and worth to our visit in California, to Ate, Justin, Kerstin and Fynn and their drag performances between glamour model, business woman and Texan cowboy (a link to Ate's films? Try here), and my own fumblings about person-making by abstract landscape paintings.

And it is at that point that I begin to appreciate the ability of different media - other than a paintbrush, pen, paper, paint - to get to what I may be after with my persistently growing tag 'person-making'.

My 'getting to what matters' may happen through life drawing/painting or even photography. But, honestly, I think I need to delve deeper first into more of theory_politics_practice of stuff I know, I've learned and experienced. And with these, I will always end up with some far more complicated than harmony if I seek to condense sensations and experiences. Sorry... there are one hundred years between us... so much happened, unhappened, got lost and won. It does not translate.

As you may guess, I am actually pretty pleased with myself over this. For all the stuff that I am concluding at the moment, this is a great point to have arrived at - beginning to set more explicit into relation the art I am doing to the theory and practice of knowledge production that I have engaged in up to this point. The myriad of interconnections are becoming clearer and I am also quite happy by now to talk about them. Put them into relation to each other, to write them into one cv.

Good, that has been one of the points I've been aiming at. And I also think this the conclusion of California - certainly not of Matisse - there's more to the White Room, but that will probably have to wait until I'll be on holidays - finally and long overdue - Among the Fields, from Friday onwards.

So: Bye, Bye California... I'm looking forward to seeing you on a video loop soon. But have some slides of my photos, complete with campingsite ambience first:

* and, if need be, I can add at least 5-10 pages on the relevance of internal relations, dialectics and all that stuff that is being kept continually in motion, sets itself into relation to itself and others, doesn't stand still and moves, moves, moves, often with plenty of friction, and thereby is always in the process of becoming. - But I better didn't

Notes to future self

Ryuichi Hirokawa, Al Ram checkpoint, West Bank, 2002
Guardian, g2, p. 25, 30/4/2009

... really for in five years, but maybe also already in two?

I gave a research seminar on Wednesday and was talking about youth policing, workfare and the making of criminalised selves. Much of what I was initially interested in with my academic work revolved around questions of social control, discipline and importantly the practices, policies and experiences that make a responsible and disciplined citizen. Much of these original questions had gotten a bit submerged in the interim with a much stronger focus on policy and governance but after the seminar I ended up talking to two colleagues who have, though in different fields, maintained a keen interest on such disciplines of the self.

...

Longwinded, half-baked... it links up with some of the abstractions I am intrigued by, again and again, and which require a much fuller set of art skills, techniques, and experiences that I currently have. - Questions over person-making, the stuff that happens inbetween, outside, elsewhere or in the middle. Well: the stuff that matters.

When I was talking to my two colleagues about what art I do and would love to do, I for the first time made those links between academia, knowledge production and painting quite explicit. Well: I do tell people at university that I love the kinds of questions and problems a piece of art poses in its production, and how it is necessary to let it provide its own answers - that no will of my own can make that canvas into something finished.

And I do enjoy the way in which this undoes what so much academics perceive the individual ingenuity of the lonely, fabulous, young academic who raises, on the basis of his own achievements to intellectual and professional heights. - well: remember the snake fights?

But, the discussions with M. and E. took me back to Foucault's Discipline and Punish; they also provided links to some more recent work on the making of entrepreneurial selves in thoroughly flexibilised and casualised labour markets.

On the way home, I saw this in the paper, took it with me, scanned it and it's here now as a reminder. That look, locking the police officer in its stare, defiantly. Now: I love that kind of photography, holding, maintaining a moment which radiates outwards, captures stuff (incidentally or purposefully) beyond its immediate reach. For whatever I'll do in two or five years? We'll see. I doubt that it will be photography, and I doubt it will be figurative, but: who knows?

Still concerned... about landscapes

I've been trying to work through some of the mess of the previous post: too much jumbled together, and answering to Steph's comment, some of that became a bit clearer.

Study Plains 3_1
15x10cm, Gouache on Board

Landscape paintings: Does it matter where YOU stand? As observer, onlooker, artist, master of the painting to be? Because, eventually, you don't stand anywhere yet everywhere: all that anyone looking at the painting can see is the vista constructed by you, but you being left outside the frame (literally so).

I'm transposing social science arguments on reflexivity, standpoint and a critique of the all-knowing scientist onto my paintings. And I'm struck by the actual process in which in particular that God trick as Donna Haraway talked about it is at play when I paint - only what I see and regard as important makes it into the painting and yet I am not there.

Well, I am there only by proxy: sloppy brushwork, poor composition, shades in the wrong places etc.

Which probably takes me onto the next point to consider: with the God trick, the artist is simultaneously elevated into this creative, perceptive, tortured (?), expressive individual that does all these great/rubbish pieces of art. Person-making and individuality probably struggle to find more receptive recipients than artists - and also academics and politicians? Strangely enough, I landed squarely in the middle of two of these fields. ... But that is for another post.

But back to the God trick: this ties back to the critique of the construction of landscapes as 'naturally there', well, that's nature, what you see, what is, stupid! - nope, they are not, they are made - by onlookers, often powerful ones, to turn rural poverty in pitoresque pastoral scenes; or construct Williams' knowable communities as those which consist of the right people living sort of nearby.

This leaves two further items to examine:

- nature without people? nature v people? naturepeople? As something about subject matter. [discussed in this post here]

- something much more mundane: how to translate a 'not-framing' into composition? Into composition of landscapes in particular - rather than action painting a la abstract expressionism or similar (that is clearly one answer, though, isn't/wasn't it?); and to explore how paintings without background could counter such framing? But then there are lots of more questions:

• Would that not merely mean that the middleground becomes the background?
• How does dis/orientation work between different planes?
• What role does perspective have in this?
• Viewpoints? Angles? Distortions?
• etc

There you go,... that should keep me busy...

Hero and Leandro

aka... Cy Twombly is Painting Loss (Part 1)

Ok - I've been carrying this one around with me for a good while, so I reckon it's time to put it on paper. There were two rooms - or rather two series - in the Twombly exhibition that didn 't leave me.

For this first one, I briefly contemplated filing it under my Paintings I like tag. But that doesn't capture it. It doesn't get to it at all. There is something terribly wrong with LIKE in this context. It's far more complicated than LIKING implicates. Liking is niceness; prettiness; oh, that is kinda cutesy.

Well, there is something really aesthetically appealling about the series of four paintings - or rather: pieces of art - that constitute Hero and Leandro. Just looking at them from a distance. A wave, viridian and a dark magenta crimson, rising up on the left...... calming, calming further until it is white nothingness - thick textured off-whites layered atop of each other to the far right of the three pieces in oil. Large paintings they are. Intricately layered in oil with the white and the wave and the green and the dark red. Violent calm it seems to shoutwhisper.

Then. Tucked on as an afterthought a small piece of paper with a scrawled line:

"He's gone, up bubbles all his amorous breath"

- a line from Christopher Marlowe's poem which gave the inspiration.

That's the art.

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, 1981-84
Part 1 168,x200cm,
Part 2 156x205cm
Part 3 156x205cm
Oil, crayon and graphite on canvas
Part 4 42x30cm
Graphite on graph paper
Cy Twombly Gallery, The Menil Collection Houston

The concept? It's so obvious that it sticks; unsticks the beauty of the piece wholeheartedly. Leandro - the lover of Hero - crosses the sea to visit his loved one. One night he drowns. In despair over his death, Hero drowns herself in sorrow and the sea. Do you get it? He dies in a bloody, green wave of powerful mediterranean water. She in contrast simply vanishes into white nothingness, demurely, obediently, the nothingness engulfs her sorrow. I kind of see Kate Blanchet in all her white Lord of the Ring otherworldliness walking into a calm lake, all glowy and sacrificial.

A painting I like? No. Nobody drowns in waves of blood, unless you've been hit over the head beforehand. Your lungs just fill with water, no blood, just no air. And then a body is washed ashore within a couple of hours and not only in three weeks, if one's lucky. I know that bit, and I wish I wouldn't. But that isn't the point. How boringly does he think he can go and construct gender? Yawn... active/ passive, red blood/ white sorrow... C'mon Cy! I'm sure you could have done something a bit better on this one! It's not even an old piece, you did this in the early 1980s! No?!

It's just a shame that it's an awfully attractive - beautiful - series of paintings. Liking? ... far too nice for it.

On buoancy

... and some more on Twombly and his favoured poems. Thinking about it, it's probably unsurprising that there'll be plenty of Rilke thrown into the paintings of sea, shores, water, seasons, love and loss.

Rainer Maria Rilke. I heard (as mp3s) some of his autumn poems last autumn and then fragments of his work, notably his Letters to a young poet and more poetry came flying from various sides. Part of that was an exploration of how much easier music and visual art is for expressing stuff that otherwise - in written verse - ends up just tediously soppy.

So, joyfully on to the tediously soppy now - thank you, Cy!

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1987
Bronze, painted with white oil-based paint

There were three fragments of poetry that caught my eye in the exhibition. First, there was a line, scrawled on the bottom of a bronze sculpture representing a broomstick and various other bits.

"And we who had always
thought of happiness
climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost
startles when happiness falls".

It falls down the stick, doesn't it? Prosaicly, slowly, drib drab like treacle.

Secondly, another line from Rilke

"and in the pond
broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks
as if standing on
fishes"

It's written across the opening panel of Untitled (A painting in nine parts). "As if standing on fishes." I liked the idea a lot. How comforting, I felt it was. - It was about buoyancy: finding the balancing point of where one would stop sinking any deeper. After all: the fishes would prevent one from sinking. I smiled to myself, went back to read it again towards the end of the exhibition. Bob, bobbing along as you float, halfway in water.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts) Untitled, Part I, 1988 Oil, water-based paint,...., 191x109cm

Then, at home, in the catalogue I would read the German line of it which goes

"Und in den abgebrochenen Tag der
Teiche sinke, wie auf Fischen stehend,
mein Gefühl"

I stumbled, sunk. Deeper and deeper. Was there not going to be any buoancy after all? I talked it through with M., she couldn't see anything buoyant in the English verses at all. So I gathered that I must have optimistically misread it. It's a line from the poem Fortschritt - progress. Progress, kind of turned on its head if you think about happiness drib drabbing rather than moving upward. Funny that.

wieder rauscht mein tiefes Leben lauter, als ob es jetzt in breitern Ufern ginge. Immer verwandter werden mir die Dinge und alle Bilder immer angeschauter. Dem Namenlosen fühl ich mich vertrauter: Mit meinen Sinnen, wie mit Vögeln, reiche ich in die windigen Himmel aus der Eiche, und in den abgebrochnen Tag der Teiche sinkt, wie auf Fischen stehend, mein Gefühl.

And an English version is here:

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
I seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,and in
the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

(translation by Robert Bly)

And, with this I'm sure it's about buoancy, about stretching upwards and downwards. Standing on fishes must be a good thing, I'm sure.

Now, the third fragment? That's for Hero and Leander.

And I'm sure there must be plenty to be said about such elevation of heroic emotion, a single being cast out in the world, their loneliness and abandon to their inner worlds, emotions and all that. Just as well as I'm sure there's plenty of literary criticism, social sciencey stuff and feminism to take it apart.

Rightfully so, I suppose. And still... all the same, I'm looking forward to the next time I'll be standing on fishes... well... if I keep misreading it as something good, that is ;)

Can you see the time?

How it passes, slowly, quickly, a jump here and then it stands still?

My mind's been running circles around a couple of abstractions: concepts and prepositions - too much post-structuralism to deal with relationality. The connections between things. It's still running, mind you. My first venture into it was the idea of island time when I was on Eigg: moving differently, circular not linear, depending on the tides and the ferry.

Yesterday at lunchtime another representation of it occurred to me. I finally had opened all my mail at work from the past six weeks, had decluttered my inbox - less than a hundred seems to be the definition of that, and finally I turned attention to my calendar. It's a daily one with a piece of art for each day. Stubbornly it proclaimed: Gesa, don't worry, it is only 9 July, you're about to go to Eigg, to Berlin and the summer is ahead of you.

The summer on my office floor.

Can you see the time as it passed?

Paul Klee, Die Zeit, 1933
Watercolour, ink, plaster
with gauze and cotton on wood
approx 40x50cm (?)
Museum Berggruen

Catching time, making it stand still while it falls apart was at the centre - see the clock hands - of a collage piece by Paul Klee I saw in July in Berlin. It's definite timing: five minutes to seven o'clock. It sits across jumbled, skewed rectangled shapes of various shades of yellow, red and brown, fabric, plaster and paint. It's an inconspicious piece amongst to many other great pieces in the exhibition.

And still, it nags you persistently: What to do if time stands still at the wrong moment?? At five to seven.