Film Short of Anish Kapoor, Shooting into the Corner, Mixed media, installed at the Royal Academy, 2009.

Anish Kapoor provides ‘a succession of physical and psychological experiences to draw us into his search for a poetic sculptural language that seems to reach beyond the object’. As Kapoor himself explains: ‘I have often said that I have nothing to say as an artist. Having something to say implies that one is struggling with meaning. The role of the artist is in fact that we don’t know what to say, and it is that not knowing that leads to the work’.

We ended up on the phone again, not talking in that way we do. I suppose I wanted to take you on a virtual tour of the Anish Kapoor exhibition, but I was doubly prevented. Firstly, of course, I’d end up with the kind of ’struggle with meaning’ that Kapoor quietly displaces. It is not about what can be said. His work is all experience, all corporeal. Secondly, and I did trip this wire eventually, there was the gulf between our days, which meant it was unfair of me (or just untraceable?) to give you something of my day. So I too said I had nothing to say, though I hardly think I gave it the kind of positive spin that Kapoor suggests. …but what if we don’t know what to say, and if that not knowing actually leads to us?

Kapoor all began for me when I stuck my head in this pigment filled piece of sandstone, around the time he won the Turner Prize (in 1991). You might want to play on the metaphor of me sticking my head in the sand. But I’d claim it one of the most formative experiences of my life. All alone and all at once I learnt something about voids, pleasure and untapped beliefs. If I stuck my head in the sand back then, it was to detach it and wo/ander in my body framed by this delicately (un)touching aperture. (Is this what I’ve recently recovered, or am in the process of recovering?)

And it all came flooding back as I walked with the springing step of a child at the Royal Academy…

It was like someone’s birthday before even getting through the doors…

A room overflowing with potential… (If the other pieces are Kapoor painting, this is him drawing; a sculptor’s sketch pad)

Pity this one is called ‘Slug‘ – I know how you hate them so…

Almost imperceptible to the eye, this ‘train’ of wax was making its way into the room (funny at the time I didn’t make any association with my recent loss of hearing).

A liberation of pigment…. ‘The drama of Shooting into the Corner takes place in a space set apart, rather like a boxing ring, a ritual arena in which a symbolic act of violence is allowed to occur’.

Yellow: ‘It is as though colour exists as a state of being’

This is when I missed you the most, though I probably could never say why… The piece ‘hints at a future development: this is an object in the state of becoming. We can trace the shape as it grows out of the wall and then, as we stand directly in front of it, it is no longer there; the wall has turned white to light. “The apparent ambiguity that this object presents is central to one of the themes of the show, in which there are various instances of sculptural form that seem fully grounded and yet remain elusive.”‘

So… do we have nothing to say, by way of leading to exactly what we are all about?

[But then, as I write this, you send me someone else's words: 'Because it is very practical, writing becomes a substitute for actually doing' (Monty Don, 25 Oct 2002, The Ivington Diaries), which continues, ' For the past few months it is as though I have been on a dream journey, visiting my own garden at every stage but never actually being there.' ...I can't help thinking how today has been a set of role reversals, complete with your use of referencing. About all I could do for now was mention how I had spotted that (magnificent looking) tome beside your (on your side of the) bed. I remark it's not really a storybook (again the reversal). ...and how strangely, I thought, you didn't seem to agree that perhaps it's best for me NOT to write... ...though, I think there is validity in undoing any divide between writing and life, which is as much a construction as writing itself... and I'm accidentally listening to the Pet Shop Boys' 'Love etc' and, whilst its not the track I was listening to on heavy rotation that time, just their sound transports me back to our proper time in London (and still it comes back to that time for me and yet why - other than for the little body breathing beside me - am I here in London alone again?)... 'When the sun doesn't shine and a boy needs a girl / It’s about getting out of a rut, you need luck / But you’re stuck and you don’t know how, oh.... / You need more / Than the Gerhard Richter hangin’ on your wall...]

Margareta Kern's Julka (Banjica, Bosnia and Herzegovina), 2007 from Clothes for Death.

Visited the Margareta Kern ‘Clothes for Living and Dying’ exhibition today with C. at the Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition is of two halves, with photographs documenting two ‘rites of passage’: the graduation and the funeral. It is an obvious point, but somehow before really engaging with the images, I looked about the gallery and was struck with the sense that this genre of ‘documentary art’ bears all sorts of dilemmas. I’m not sure who may have written about such a genre (which would include, for example, the work of Nan Goldin, and there are countless others). It is certainly prevalent and very much a product of postmodernity. Perhaps it was a series of simple fly-on-wall videos playing in the corner of the exhibition that showed the making of some of the graduation dresses exhibited, but I couldn’t help thinking instead of a series of photographs in a gallery what would really have been interesting would have been a TV documentary (the sort of thing Channel 4 would show!).

Kern is a London-based artist, and a graduate of Goldsmiths, but the pictures are all taken in her homeland of Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina. On one side of the gallery were ‘Clothes for Death’, a series of images of elderly women displaying the clothes they wish to be buried in. On hearing from her mother of the custom among Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian women to prepare clothes for this purpose, Kern sought to meet and photograph these women in their homes with their chosen clothes laid out on display. As the exhibition literature suggests, ‘[h]er photographs offer an insight into the lives of women whose identities have been shaped by turbulent historical, political and cultural currents’. And the work has attracted a range of good reviews (see, for example, ‘Dress Rehearsal: Margareta Kern’s Clothes for Living & Dying‘, Selvedge Magazine, March/April ‘09).

C. and I talked at some length about the images, which relate so closely to her work on memory and cloth. Yet, we felt somewhat disappointed about the images themselves. For me, in terms of content, they echoed something of the work by John Berger and Jean Mohr, yet without any of the contextual processes they attempted. As photographs I found them rather flat, which further created distance, holding back the stories these women surely must hold. Given these were images full of trust and faith, it was such a pity not to feel a greater sense of community and narrative. For C. it was the near absence of the clothes themselves that disappointed. It was true, whilst one might almost want to see these women wear the clothes (to model them?!), which was hardly appropriate, the clothes lacked real presence. Their ‘touching’ stories untold. Instead, these were photographs of women and their bedrooms, not their clothes. C. wondered what the pictures might be like without the subjects, just their possessions. We shall never know.

Kern's Ana (Jennifer Lopez dress), 2006 from Graduation Dresses

Our lives are of course full of promise, often poignantly captured with the moment of graduation. Across on the other side of the gallery were images of graduation dresses ‘designed’ by Kern’s mother, who set up a made-to-measure dress-making business following the civil war. The clients – unlike those women Kern photographs approaching death – are all wealthy and style conscious, all young women recently graduated from secondary schools in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Crucially the designs are based on dresses worn by celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez (see above) and Keira Knightly, and all produced based on images found in fashion magazines (such as Cosmopolitan, see below) and on the internet, which the young women would bring to Kern’s mother.

Inevitably, given the voyeuristic nature of Kern’s work, there was something uncomfortable about looking at these images. What kind of ‘offer’ were these women making by offering to have their photograph taken and displayed – or rather what kind of transaction does Kern create by transforming these photographs into gallery exhibits (is it so different to internet pornography)? It is easy to suggest Kern, in deliberating making a choice to photograph women from ‘wore-torn’ Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina (rather than say her domicile London), is pasing comment on an aspirant class outside of the wealthy EU nations. But what I found most uncomfortable about these images was the fact that I see them all too often, in the flesh as it were as a norm of our culture. In fact, as I stood in the gallery I had a moment of deja vu – my attempt to be thoughtful in front of these images echoed an embarrassing moment I had recently when I happened to head to my office late one night to complete the writing of an article (woefully overdue). Dressed so clearly for work – a heavy coat despite the warm night and clutching a satchel – I inadvertently walked in on the graduation ball. Desperately trying to find my way pass security to get to my office, I was confronted by a host of beautifully dressed women, all ‘celebrities’ for the night. I heard my name called, some had recognised me. Pretending I hadn’t really been spotted, I wished them an enjoyable evening but they all just smiled knowingly at my being out of place. And I suppose that is it: it is not the photographs in the gallery, nor those at the graduation ball that we need to question, it is me – my place in it all!

…fitting perhaps with a philosophy of life, living life, over in the other gallery space was ‘Born in Bradford’, an exhibition concerned with the social welfare of babies born in Bradford and in particular with the relationship of fathers to babies. The photographer, Ian Beesley, having searched through the photographic archives of the National Media Museum (across the road) was struck by two things: (1) the preponderance of romantic, idealised portraits of mother and child (heavily influenced by Christian iconography); and (2) the lack of representation of fathers in early childcare. Beesley asks: ‘Has the sheer weight of religious representation suffocated the development of an alternative or is it because the majority of painters/photographers were/are men’? Though he notes too, ‘[e]ven when I researched portraits of babies by women photographers this stereotypical/traditional depiction of mother and child was reinforced’.

Bradford has one of the highest rates of single mothers and absentee fathers in the UK. Working with the Bradford Royal Infirmary (with many of the images on display there), Beesley has sought to produce a ’series of portraits of just fathers with their newborn children. Partly as a reflection of changing practices in child care within a 21st century multicultural society … but also to provide positive images of fathering for display within the maternity units of the BRI’. Here again was the documentary art mode – to hang pictures upon the wall that document something and here even seek change. In the end, however, these are simply pictures of new fathers, their newborn child in their hands. It is undoubtedly a happy moment, but it says nothing of the complexity of lives that follow. Laudable though they are, these images are more like mirrors hanging up in the BRI, rather than challenging portraits. In the end it seemed to me both Kern and Beesley’s work lacked a subtle engagement with the preciousness of life and death – though interestingly Kern’s portraits of the reproduction of celebrity spectacle held a wild spectacle all of their own. We’re back where we started: postmodern art.

(…and R. – just before leaving I happened to spot in the gallery bookshop a slim attractive volume, Once More, With Feeling; a catalogue of a prior Impressions Gallery and Photographers’ Gallery exhibition of contemporary Colombian photographers; perhaps the trail has not quite run cold… )

The recreation of Robert Morris’ 1971 Bodyspacemotionthings at Tate Modern certainly didn’t disappoint. But inevitably it throws up questions about authenticity and/or recontextualisation. Arguably, it is easy to see how, as a review in The Telegraph put it, ‘the radical art of the 1970s has became innocuous family entertainment’. Nevertheless, there is some opportunity to see the work in its historical context, which in itself is a valuable thing.

On arrival to the Tate’s Turbine Hall there was the sound of a deep, distant thunder, which turned out to be the echoing of one of the wooden sculptures thumping to the ground from the weight of those on top. It was the kind of sound that really entered one’s body from the ground up, and so immediately on entry to the gallery the body was made a site of enquiry. Although one’s eyes are immediately drawn to the ‘fun’ on offer.  So, with the aid of a little investigator (highly recommended), I walked and climbed, rolled and wobbled, as I made my way about each plywood ‘apparatus’. From the very start, from within a rolling tube, the blood in my head swelled and the laughter rang out with each physical feat, large and small. This was one of those now increasingly ‘festive’ moments in a gallery.  As The Telegraph review puts it: ‘The idea that art may involve a degree of participation no longer surprises. Crowds queued at Tate Modern to whizz down Carsten Holler’s gleaming slides or to lie staring up at Olafur Eliasson’s artificially generated sunset.’

Morris’ original intention for the exhibition, back in 1971, was for ‘people to involve themselves with the work, become aware of their own bodies, gravity, effort, fatigue, their bodies under different conditions’ (Morris, Tate Modern Information Panel). The original exhibition was actually closed after just 4 days, due to what the Director at the time, Norman Reid, described as the ‘exuberant and overexcited behaviour’ of gallery visitors.

It was May 1971, and the opening of an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London; the sort of thing that one might expect to be quiet, dignified and staid – but, as it turned out, all hell broke loose.

Men started picking up some of the exhibits – weights suspended on chains – and swinging them around their heads. First aiders were occupied picking splinters out of the rear ends of the miniskirted young women hurt on wooden slides. (The Guardian)

There was nothing so ‘radical’ for this recreation of the exhibtion, which can be seen as a defeat for art:

It’s difficult to reflect on your body’s response to the experience of trying to balance on a plywood square mounted on a hemisphere, as Morris intended, when there’s a crowd of people watching, all desperate for you to get off and give them a go.

While the sight of these raw plywood structures must have seemed challenging amid the neo-classical grandeur of the old Tate, here in the Turbine Hall’s post-industrial vastness, it appeared just one side-show among many, the radical art of another era revisited as innocuous family entertainment. (The Telegraph)

But, I found pushing a huge ball in a Sisyphean circle and climbing up narrow confines to have been a true experience, however described. And on leaving, I took a moment to look at the video screens, showing footage from the original works in the 70s. My little investigator (not yet 5 years old) was delighted to see a women’s bottom come closer and closer, finally to fill the entire screen, as she rolled the very ball we both had rolled ourselves in the exhibition. This is a moment I think we will remember – it was funny, thought-provoking (at least regarding the recent history of art) and quite beautiful.

See also The Guardian’s Picture Gallery

Martin and I got to the Turner Prize just a few days before Mark Leckey was announced the winner. Leckey has been ’[d]escribed as a “modern-day dandy” and is known for exhibitions combining sculpture, film and performance, many referencing pop culture icons such as the Simpsons and Felix the Cat’ (The Guardian). Interestingly, whilst based in London, he is a part-time film studies professor at Frankfurt’s Staedelschule. Having won the prize and received the £25,000 cheque, he said because of the credit crunch he would hide the money somewhere safe and hoped a TV channel would enlist him to make his own variety programme, ‘like the Two Ronnies. But with art’. That would be something.

A perspex sculpture, ‘curated’ by Goshka Macuga.

But, by the time I got to the room of Leckey’s work a certain fatigue had set in. The openning room is of Goshka Macuga’s work – or rather other artists’ work which she then ‘curates’. On the Tate’s website she is described as merging ‘the roles of collector, curator and artist, creating carefully staged, mixed-media installations which draw on the conventions of the historical archive and exhibition making’ (Turner Prize). There was something satisfying about the room - an air of calm and intelligence. The art of curating has been on my mind recently – including ‘A Thousand Words’, curated by Tracy Chevalier at the York Art Gallery, which includes a blackboard-style border running around the whole gallery, inviting visitors to write down their own thoughts and ideas with chalk. The idea of making existing artworks ‘do’ something and to generate an exhibition out of an idea, rather than simply the work itself is intriguing.  [Watch this space]

The next room had a work by Cathy Wilkes. I found myself reading the wall text before even looking into the room. It read very well, something like the following on the Tate’s website: ‘Cathy Wilkes’s installations of objects, readymades and paintings are formally precise and contemplative. Their essentially diaristic and self-reflective forms are composed using a complex and liberated visual language. Her work, whilst in many ways uncompromisingly introspective, is characterized by direct, almost diagrammatic invocations of daily human experience’ (Turner Prize). Martin and I then turned slowly to see the room and then turned slowly to look at each other. Then the uncontrollable laughter. Ill-conditioned shop mannequins were perched upon redundant supermarket checkouts and scattered about the place were bits and pieces of  just stuff – various junk items piled here and there. It was dreary and lacked any of the verve of the written text. It was no better than the sort of stuff I see at a graduation show – in fact, given the spotlight it was worse!

Be The First To see What You see As You see It (Runa Islam, 2004).

We then moved on to film and video artist Runa Islam. As we entered this darkened area we moved into an alcove to read the wall text (which was bathed in a warm light). As we moved into this space a phone was ringing. Without us realising, a woman moved in front of use to take a call. Suddenly we were all bunched up in the alcove, a spotlight upon us and an uncomfortable feeling that we were deep inside this women’s private world! We quickly retreated and tried desparately to contain the laughter (Martin had initally thought it all part of the work!). Finally we settled to watch the three video works by Islam.

Runa Islam is fascinated by the ability of film to capture something existing beyond physical space. Her film installations explore the content and apparatus of film, exposing its technical processes to reveal the inherently illusory nature of the medium, yet preserving its magic. They assert that the internal and external codes of cinema cannot be separated. Location, action, shot and installation, apparatus and dialogue with the viewer are all agents in the production of light and illusion. She carefully choreographs these elements in open ended, counter narrative frameworks and composed installations that are conceptually based but at the same time emotionally charged. Whilst visually lyrical, underwritten by their conceptual foundations they are an investigation into the technology of film and the possibilities of representation. (Turner Prize)  

For once the text seemed to match with the visuals. Islam’s work is both analytical and captivating. I think I’d like to have seen her win, but somehow I knew she wouldn’t. Especially when, in a slight daze from the darkened rooms of Islam’s work, I emerged into the final room with Leckey’s work. It was a bit like entering into a moment of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. There was the same sense of playfulness, maverick invention and basic silliness. Given that the prize has been considered ‘dull’ this year (and generally left unreported), it seemed obvious to me that Leckey would win. He was the closest they had to a Turner Prize winner. But, I had had my filled by then. I watched some of the video playing of Leckey giving a ‘lecture’ on art, and it was good (his ‘material’ use of language is great), but essentially it was predictable.

We then went to see paintings by Turner (which I haven’t seen for years). We didn’t take in much as we were beginning to talk about all sorts of things. But, on the way we saw some wonderful drawings, all part of an exhibit, Drawn from the Collection (400 years of British drawing). In the bookshop was a fairly recent book about drawing by John Berger (including some correspondence with James Elkins). I wished I’d bought it now.

For an informed and patient view of the Turner Prize 2008, see Nick Hackworth’s two Tate Shots films (and then perhaps cast your vote below!)…

Tate Shots: Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes

Tate Shots: Runa Islam and Mark Leckey

I bundled everything into my bag and soon it was heavy again. As ever it was a race against the clock. I checked to see I had picked up everything (the usual feeling, in such a hurry, of having forgotten something crucial lingered). But, I had all the bits and pieces I needed to read in preparation for teaching and of course Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (the title set by R. in preparation for my trip to Bogota, the page quotas by our reading group of two!)… There was just enough time, I thought, to get to the library to get that book about blogging (again for teaching), which I’d not been able to get last week because of such early closing times.

I hurried up to the first floor and headed straight to the shelf location 301.231. I spotted it finally down on the bottom shelf and swiftly plucked it from its position. I was all but away again when I noticed a title along the thin tall spine of a neighbouring book: The Digital Film Event. Interesting, I thought and shifted the weight of my bag slightly to be on my way again. Yet, no I couldn’t quite leave it there for a ‘next time’ (and so allow it to be lost to those spaces of lost volumes that ever haunt me). I let my bag down to the floor to free myself to collect up this second book. The pages are glossy I thought. Pictures, some in colour. And what is this, a filmscript in the middle? Could not compute. I was definitely intrigued. Could be a red herring, maybe a little self indulgent (though who am I to talk!). But the back cover did it, ever aware of the ticking clock, my eyes skated over the top few lines:
 

FILM / VISUAL STUDIES / POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Endless travel in cyberspace, virtual reality, and the dream of limitless speed: technology changes our sense of self. In her new book, Trinh Minh-ha explores the way technology transforms our perception of reality. 

Yes the word travel appeared I thought, a good omen and cyberspace, which would seem to help knit together our wandering plans and the insistence with which I write this blog. Suddenly the book became such precious cargo. Still with little sense of what it actually contained (and what does it really matter when set against the inspiration it offered), I hurried down to the library desk as if someone might reach out of the shadows and take it from me before I had the chance to have it issued to my name… As I ran the book’s barcode through the machine I became aware of a whole host of new possibilities (if only I could write them down here as quickly as I thought of them). Only yesterday as I half described the plans (or at least their moods/modes) R. and I have dreamt up for my visit, you said to me (as you sat perfectly, cross-legged upon that massive bed) ‘…and you could do more films’. The suggestion startled me for a moment (but that is hardly new) and I think I gave a non-commital reply, but it went quick and direct to my other mind (the one that can’t function in real-time).

R. … I think we have been thinking too small. Let’s not just look to the films and books of Robinsonesque adventures (and other associated Species of Spaces), let’s make our own. In our ever best attempts to refashion Bovard and Pecuchet for the 21st Century, I think we ought to turn our hand to being media artists. We’ll go the whole hog and invent a globalised installation.

I have been writing this, trying to archive my thoughts, as I travel back on the train. As I step off at the station and enter the usual commotion of commuters, I sense all the connections in my head dissipate (a desparate feeling under the circumstances). Still, I hang on to these words saved. It could be a real turning point. I really sense it could be a turning point (something we must discuss during our next skype call). Of course in previous literatures, this remark, which issues as if literally ensconced in the hurlyburly of modern life, might seem to reveal a contrived attempt, or re-presentation, of the transient. Yet, since I am able to type and transmit these words upon my mobile phone, we can’t so easily judge one’s verisimilitude.

…and this simply all feeds into the ideas of the author of The Digital Film Event, Trinh T. Minh-ha. As the backpage blurb continues:

“We are all engaged in social rituals in our daily activities,” she writes, ” and by remaining unaware of their artistic ritutal propensity, we remain ‘in conformity.’” Her goal, as a thinker and an artist, is to transform our understanding of technology and speed so that we are able to “turn an instrument into a creative tool and to step out of the one dimensional, technologically servile mind.”

The paradoz that “stillness contains speed within it” is central to Trinh’s concept of the digital apparatus. With her signature amalgam of feminism, postcolonial theory, Eastern philosophy, and practical understanding of filmmaking, Trinh Minh-ha presents a much-needed advance in our understanding of the real in a technological age.

R. … welcome to The Letters in Red 2.0…

In those loving postcards once sent from the Bodleian, the philosopher Jacques Derrida notes it is necessary we demonstrate a letter always, and therefore ought not ever arrive at its destination, ‘it is not a misfortune, that’s life, living life’…

I sit in bed writing this, a couple of weeks on from the visit. It is raining outside and looks cold. Because ‘you’ were not there with me then, I put this jumble of jottings down, as much as possible a kind of private viewing of the Cy Twombly exhibition at Tate Modern. In particular, I draw attention to the penultimate room:

This room brings together Twombly’s two versions of the Quattro Stagioni, or Four Seasons, which were painted when he was approaching his mid-sixties. They loosely follow a tradition in which each season also represents a different stage in life: spring is young and vital, summer sensual, autumn idle, while winter sees death encroaching. (Tate Modern)

The paintings are large canvases, over 3 x 2 metres. The two sets show a draft version and then a final version (amazing to see the initial ’sketch’ on such a large scale). It is fascinating to see how the fluid, even random movement of paint is in fact carefully thought through. The eariler versions show a very conscious design, yet are not nearly as a vital as the final set. The Seasons offer a centerpoint to the exhibition, which is subtitled as ‘Cycles and Seasons’. I looked up in turn at these massive canvases. The Summer has now passed and Autumn is here (it is getting colder as was said only the other day) and soon it will be Winter when everything must hibernate, before Spring comes round again when it all begins (or at least began)…

Quattro Stagioni, I: Primavera (1993-5)

“I dedicate” has no meaning other than the actual gesture by which I present what I have made (my work) to someone I love or admire. This is just what Twombly does: bearing only the dedication’s inscription, the canvas “vanishes”: all that is given is the action of giving … These are limit-canvases, not in that they involve no painting … but because the way the notion of oeuvre is suppressed – but not the painter’s relation to somone he loves (Roland Barthes)

In anticipation of the Cy Twombly exhibition I always had in mind to write something. His work fits with…

Quattro Stagioni, II: Estate (1993-5)

…my interests to take semiotics apart, to explore a certain ‘adventure’ of a so-called sub-semiotic.

Before anything else, there occur … paper, canvas, pencil, crayon, oil paint. Twombly imposes his materials not as something which will serve some purpose but as an absolute substance (Roland Barthes)

But like the marks upon the canvas, the ‘facts’ as Barthes suggests, I can’t get past the fact I was with ‘you’ as I walked over Millennium Bridge and saw the advertisement upon the former power station façade, shouting out the coming exhibition. Going away with only an umbrella that day, there was hope for a return visit.

Quattro Stagioni, III: Autunno (1993-5)

Twombly’s art consists in making things seen – not the things he represents … but those he manipulates. [...] We might think that in order to express the pencil’s character it would have to be pressed hard, emphasized … Twombly thinks the opposite: by withholding the pressure of substance, by letting it come to rest quite causally, so that its texture is somewhat scattered, matter will reveal its essence … this is pencil. …we might say that the being of things is not their heaviness but in their lightness (Roland Barthes)

Given I had arrived into London alone I had tentatively invited my Dad to meet me at the exhibition, but as I suggested it his voice trailed off on the phone …I could only think of that moment in Proust’s The Guermantes Way when the narrator is awaiting a telephone call from his grandmother. In this case the whole apparatus of the telephone is of course much less embedded in everyday life; the call must be taken at the local post office. Being reminded of the novelty of the phone helps remind us of the strangeness and preciousness of another’s voice:

The dear one, the voice of the dear one speaking, are with us. But how far away they are! …I could feel more acutely how illusory the effect of such intimate proximity was, and at what a distance we can be from those we love at a moment when it seems we have only to stretch out our hand to retain them. A real presence, the voice that seems so close – but is in fact miles away! But it is also a foreglimpse of an eternal separation! Many times, as I listened in this way without seeing the woman who spoke to me from so far, I have felt that the voice was crying out to me from depths from which it would never emerge again, and I have experienced the anxiety which was one day to take hold of me when a voice would return like this (alone and no longer part of a body which I was never to see again) to murmur in my ear words I would dearly like to have kissed as they passed from lips forever turned to dust (Proust)

 [For a note on the specific translation used here see my subsequent post At my R.eader's Request]

Quattro Stagioni, IV: Inverno (1993-5)

‘Modern’ art, he had said (other than works such as Salvador Dali’s and Picasso’s), was not really his thing – not when it resembled the painting of a child!

…words occur readily enough (“drawing”, “graphism”, “scratching”, “clumsy”, “childish”), immediately followed by an embarrassment of language… (Roland Barthes)

But there is a radical honesty in the ‘childish’ marks and it says (to me) the frisson between people should never be constrained:

To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation of release … and by crisis it should by no means be limited to a morbid state, but could just as well be one ecstatic impulse (Cy Twombly)

Twombly’s art … does not want to take anything; it hangs together, it floats, it drifts between desire… (Roland Barthes)

In amongst that drift, in that crisis, I will always know what I want. You don’t need to hide things much to end up burying it all so soon… that is why I relished the opportunity to stand before the marks and swirls of Cy Twombly (and why your absence there holds such presence). Like dreamscapes of automatic writing, which are not tethered by the constraints of language and society, the vitality of these painting stood over, no less loomed over, the sadness of ‘our’ defeat and retreat…

(1) Make-believe (and its paper trail): As I made my way into Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Arts I couldn’t miss the huge foil-like structure lurking outside, playing tricks with the surrounding architecure. A shimmering leaflet (which I thought far more beautiful and alluring than the sculpture itself) explained how the artist, Kimihiko Okada, ‘experiments to change the ways people perceive space with the materials he uses in his art works aside from his work as an architect’.  

The structure we are told is made with a ‘complex and ambiguous geometry, and the object employs a thin, integrated metal membrane’.  The purpose is ‘to reflect rain, wind, and other atmospheric conditions, as well as the movement of the sun, color of the sky, and other quiet changes in the environment’. Laudable aims no doubt, but the harsh light that bounced off the work didn’t really seem to capture necessarily ‘quiet changes’, if anything the crumpled surface seemed only to pull its surroundings into the body of the piece, whilst emitting only white light in exchange. I wouldn’t want to be facetious and ask where the baking tray had got to, but of course the remark hangs there…

I pressed on to the exhibition I’d come to see: Studio Ghibli Layout Designs: Understanding the Secrets of Takahata/Miyazaki Animation. The layout or ‘blueprint’ design was something Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki introduced to the production process of animation films in 1974, when working at the time on the TV animated series Heidi a Girl of the Alps. Unlike actual animation cells, the layout or blueprint is more a schematic of a series of shots and how they will be achieved. Each individual piece of paper gives the relevant informtion of a scene. Against backdrop sketches the key animated elements, particularly characters, tend to be drawn faintly in red. Also written onto the sheets are details of relative positions of elements, direction on actions, indictations on whether or not there will be camera movement and effects etc. Thus, the purpose of the blueprint is to provide an overview of a sequence and crucially is used to ensure a greater sense of unity for a given production. Indeed, the introduction of the blueprint was a direct response to the ever more specialised and divided process of production.

The exhibition presented some 1,300 blueprints for Studio Ghibli films ranging from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to their latest release Pnyo on the Cliff by the Sea (which had opened just at the time I attended the museum). I was half-expecting the sheer overload of images from the films – indeed that was what I got. Room after room with rows and rows of thin pieces of paper on display. Whilst a mixed audience, many were true fans - their faces lighting up as they recognised the films from the drawings on display. There were also a number of young couples. Seemingly it was a place for a date! I can’t say I am a ‘fan’ of anime as such, though I have certainly enjoyed watching the films I have seen. I would be keen to follow up a few lines of interest to do with hybridity as a form of representation and also a link I can’t quite yet articulate but would like to pursue between pictures of ‘floating world’ woodblock prints and the visual array and movement of anime, particularly in Miyazaki’s work. My problem, of course, is that I can’t face having to wade through the existing body of literature; for me it is a ’body’ and not a ’field’ of study, the latter would be too open and fluid a description. I left the exhibition feeling a little empty-handed. Nonetheless, from such close scrutiny I marvelled at the ability to conjure up faces, expressions and the flow of clothing from only very simple and few lines. A wonderful art. I also couldn’t help thinking it staggering, not only the sheer number of sheets of drawings (as mere pre-cusors to the films), but also the amount of beautiful detail of the drawings, which were after all only ‘blueprints’. All this paperwork that goes into making an unbelievable world believable!

(2) ‘the price we pay’: I made my way on to Ginza. In particular I wanted to visit Maison Hermès, a building that is clad entirely of glass blocks . R. had taken me there when we had been together in Tokyo, part of the informal – and at times accidental – architectural trail he took me along. Across the street, a number of floors up R. had spotted the scene of a plush, red cafe. We went up there and he took a photograph. This time, however, it was not there, it had been refurbished and made into something far less inviting and certainly not engulfing.

On the top floor of Hermès is their gallery, Le Forum (a tangible manifestation of corporate social responsibility). As I made my way up I saw a lovely wallet on sale. It took me a little while to convert from Japanese yen (I couldn’t quite believe it for a while). The simple, thin wallet was on sale for around £1000, which took my breath away (there would be nothing left to put in it I thought!). I then reached the gallery – doubly out of breath – to encounter an installation ironically titled Leftovers.

The piece was made up of a long line of bamboo leaves, upon which a repeated sequence of food had been laid out. And next to each of the leaves was a sheet of paper with the print of someone’s feet. Whilst all very similar, each ‘place-setting’ was unique, both the footprints and the state of the food. In some cases the food had been spilled and mixed up, but mostly it remained barely touched. A leaflet showed a diagram of each of the food stuffs as representing different things: beauty, culture, hunger, choice, history, future, identity, taste, ‘…..’ and space. Presumably the manner in which the foods had been touched related to thoughts about these different elements. I didn’t read the leaflet until I had left the building, but even if I had, for me the leaves conjured up a sense of rural living, with connotations of limited food supply, yet all counterbalanced by an uncomfortable sense of food having been wasted, as it lay discarded, half-eaten. We are brought to believe/see what we don’t necessarily want to believe/see.

(3) Religious belief: I love subways. I love the mix of life forms (and the way the advertisements are really large, yet seem to just jostle with the to and fro of everything around).

As I waited on a platform for my train – listening to ‘Heart’s Filthy Lesson‘ by David Bowie (aptly a line rings out ‘I think I’ve lost my way’) – I was accosted by a band of merry Christians from the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, who told me they were here on a ‘short mission‘ to convert the already converted 1% of Christians in Japan (well that can’t be right, but that was how it sounded). Ironically, it seemed to be the fact that I was not from Japan that prompted them to say hello. “From England, wow!” …on having to admit I was not a Christian (at least not that I know of, and despite its ideology underpinning much of the culture I know), I was asked: ”Are you Jewish?” – accompanied with a light pat on my shoulder as if it might be equally difficult to admit; or perhaps, had I been, an acknowledgement of some kind of respect. It was difficult to tell. As we all climbed aboard the incoming train, I felt the best course of action was to say (truthfully, though lacking in all knowledge) that I was ‘interested’ in Buddhism and Shintoism. “…oh okay… I know they have a concept of Nothingness. It makes me think of flat-lining on a heartrate monitor!’. I did my best to explain (but where my ideas come from I do not know) that the concept really refers to an all inclusive interconnectedness (which is not easily translated across to the Ego-based religious concepts typical of the West). The person who had been the one to initiate the ‘hello’ then told me about a wonderful film she had been watching prior to her departure to Tokyo: “…it was about the tea ceremony, you know they have a tea ceremony thing here?  …well it turns out it might be related to the fact that a long time ago Christians had to hide – they were not allowed here”. There was some mention of the sign of the cross in relation to the typical tea house design and of grass left to grow through to hide the said sign. All fascinating I thought. Just as the train was arriving at my stop, I asked after the film title so I could see it for myself, but she couldn’t quite remember. She quickly tried to get her husband’s attention, who was further up the train carriage. He shouted out some director’s name, but I couldn’t quite catch it and then it was time for me to step out. As the automatic doors were about to close the woman grasped the air and said she’d pray for me. I believe(d) her. I am grateful to meet those who exhibit ‘true’ belief, if only because I wonder what it must feel like.

Slavoj Žižek, in his book On Belief, writes of a debate on the Larry King Show between a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Southern Baptist. Both the rabbi and the priest, he explains, ‘expressed their hope that the unification of religions is feasible since, irrespective of his or her official creed, a thoroughly good person can count on divine grace and redemption’. The Baptist, however, ‘insisted that, according to the letter of the Gospel, only those who “live in Christ” by explicitly recognizing themselves in his address will be redeemed, which is why, as he concluded with a barely discernible contemptuous smile, “a lot of good and honest people will burn in hell”‘. The basic premise of his book ‘is that, cruel as this position may sound, if one is to break the liberal-democratic hegemony and resuscitate an authentic radical position, one has to endorse its materialist version’. It is a refreshing commentary, for surely the need to return to issues of faith and belief vis-a-vis ideological critique is vital. However, it leaves me wondering, is Žižek’s pursuit of a ‘materialist version’ of belief (and his ‘mission’ to overturn today’s Empire) going to have to come down to only one ‘authentic radical position’? The near-missed exchange of a director’s name, which momentarily did genuinely interest me, suggests to me something much more ambiguous.

I am sat drinking green tea in the InterCommuncication Center in the Tokyo Opera City Tower. Except I won’t be there now as I upload this, as I am not able to get an internet connection. Despite the cafe being a wi-fi hotspot, I need a subscription to one of the main mobile phone service providers. So, this Open Space - described as ‘a community space that is free of charge and open througout the year’ – dedicated entirely to new media art and culture, has not afforded me the opportunity to write my blog in situ as I had hoped. As an incident of participant observation, I had thought I’d be able to experiment with the open office, to sit here and write online, to create my own digital works, to realise those creative heights we believe new media technologies offer.

Video and new media technology arts both intrigue and disappoint me. The ICC aims ‘to create an environment where one encounters and engages with the progressive experimental activities dervied from the dialogue between technology and art’. It is perhaps one of the best places to go to be inticed by such art. Typically there is a minimal, functional feel to the gallery. As I climbed to the main gallery space, each step on the stairs issued different, playful sounds. It brought a smile to my face and seemed a good start. However, I found myself moving quickly between the exhibits. Any initial appeal seems to last only nano-seconds with me. I ‘get it’ – how it works at least – and then I’m looking on to the next item. What I never seem to find is anything subtle, engulfing, slow, gentle, loving. Except perhaps some of the more static, visual pieces.

It strikes me there are three generic forms:

(1) Mechanical/Sculptural – 3-dimensional exhibits. They tend to use traditional sculptural materials, combined with electronics to make something, which perhaps moves or glows (either according to its own pattern, or related to the viewer’s actions).

(2) Visual – mainly 2-dimensional exhibits, though also often placed as an installation. These works tend to use electronics to re-engineer the formal picture space, making it glow and animate. Bill Viola’s work is perhaps the best example of this kind of work, which is made using fairly traditional video technology. However, it is also often the case that visual works are made through the use of new technologies, such as imaging softwares. As part of the Open Space exhibit at the ICC I saw some work by Keiko Kimoto which interested me (and a fabulous book entitled Imaginary Numbers).

(3) Interactive – environments within which the particpant can manipulate the work of art. Typically these pieces change according to body movements or simple touch sequences. Often there is a screen that the participant is watching, perhaps seeing themselves in the screen or at least some visual element that is identifiable as reacting to their presence.

Whilst the interactive forms would seem to suggest a more dynamic and interesting kind of work, I tend to find these the most disappointing. They might be fun and/or slightly disorientating, but generally they seem only a glorified pavlovian game – ‘look what happens when I do this’, ‘look I’ll do it again, see it does the same’! At best these works can at be stylish and aesthetically pleasing, but generally they are just gadgets waiting to be disgarded. The mechanical, sculptural items tend to be similar, though they can have a little more grace as an exhibit, since they work more within their own formal terms. For me, however, it is frequently the static, or slower visual pieces that I am attracted to.

However, concentrating on the pieces in themselves is perhaps the wrong thing to do. One of the strengths of new media arts is its history, the on-going attempts to bring such an art form to fruition. On entering the gallery there is a lovely timeline exhibit. Glass panels on the floor in the centre of the main gallery space (with the decades listed along the side) hold all sorts of items, books, tapes, gadgets etc, that have accrued – in the name of new media arts – since the early 20th Century. This intrigues me, and the same happens in the bookshop downstairs. All sorts of obscure and usually beautifully designed publications are on the shelves, along with DVDs and magazines. There is a whole intellectual, creative community behind these works and the aspirations they represent. But who are these people and how do you get to meet them!? I was drawn to two books. One, mentioned above, was Keiko Kimoto’s Imaginary Numbers (a beautiful book full simply of freely drawn lines on black and on white) and the other, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s LIFE – Fluid, invisible, inaudible. Just the titles tell of the subtle sensitivies at stake, but also these books bring out for me the obvious importance of process and immersion. It is more about experimenting and enaging with new technologies, being with them, which is why it is perhaps so difficult to exhibit the works. Perhaps there need not be such a thing as new media art works, just new media art work…

As I made my way to the gallery, full of expectation, I made a few little film pieces with my phone. They are pitiful in the face of the works I then went on to view, but for me they are meaningful – they are, for me, full of the hopes I had ‘before’ seeing the exhibits, before anything was formalised, before I could write this…

Micro-Shorts Gallery

ICC #1

ICC #2

ICC #3

ICC #4

ICC #5

Series of red squares… (sadly I was not with the one person who would have appreciated this series). Interestingly my visit to see the Helio Oitcica exhibition was due entirely to the fact that I had dinner at the Tate Modern as part of a conference on e-learning. Earlier in the day, during a ‘live-blogging’ seminar I had been quite distracted by some rather nice red shoes… these then entered into the ‘debate’ that the session supposedly sought to engender… for the full details visit the designs on elearning Inter@ct blog.

(Following a visit on Thursday 6 July 2006)

The Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield, situated at the top of the building of the city’s central public library, is perhaps typical of such municipal facilities. There is nothing on the walls of tremendous merit, but nonetheless, the gilt-edged frames and hard wood fixture and fittings give a hint of grandeur otherwise lacking in the commercial spaces beyond.

I went the wrong way as I entered and so traversed the entire gallery collection before finally coming across what I wanted to see. In the final room, on the deep-red walls, there were five ‘popular’ works by 16th Century Old Masters such as Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Luis Morales, taken from the Sheffield City Collections. However, the real focal point of the room, like a star pulling all around it by the force of gravity, was a single plasma screen. Unusually for a TV screen perhaps it was set on the wall vertically, which gave it a rather pleasing image. Playing on this screen was the work of one of the world’s most renowned and respected contemporary film and video artists, Bill Viola. Some years ago R.V. had given me a VHS copy of Hatsu-Yume, but I had not given it much notice, not least because I found it difficult to know how, or in what mood to watch it. This then was my first proper chance to experience Viola’s work.

The work showing at Graves Art Gallery was taken from Bill Viola’s Passions series, Observance (2002). In the Passions series, Viola investigates how the Old Masters depicted emotional extremes in their art. His video work in turn seeks to elicit a powerful emotional response from the viewer. Observance, for example, is based on two panel paintings entitled Four Apostles by Albrecht Durer and concerns itself with the depiction of an intense and shared grief. Viola asked the cast of actors he assembled to step towards “something they’d rather not see, to say goodbye to someone who’d left them”. As they approach the unseen moment before them, each register individual expressions of grief, bewilderment, shock and disbelief. All of which is played in slow-motion, making for a rather revealing study of gestures, emotion and community. You find yourself watching, for example, not just the faces, but the hands – with each person lightly caressing the next in line, as if to comfort and yet equally to negotiate their movement to the front of the line. In its intensity of mood, resonance of colour and tone and orchestration of the ‘players’ in Viola’s drama pay tribute to the compositions of the Old Masters. (See: Bill Viola – The Passions, ed. John Walsh, Getty Publications, 2003).

I am a little bit late on this one (Bill Viola’s installation of Five Angels for the Millennium at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 2001 is said to have attracted some 40,000 visitors in just a couple of months). However, I am beginning to understand something of the enormous appetite for his work, and perhaps even I can begin to find a time/place/mood to watch Hatsu-Yume (in fact I had it on in my office a few days before visiting the exhibit in Sheffield. This distracted viewing maybe about right). In one of the books strewn upon a small table in the exhibition (presumably to give you something to do whilst watching the screen!), I came across an observation: what is intriguing, the author suggested, ‘is the extent to which Viola’s work both resists and … doesn’t necessarily need, the kind of explanation that art institutions feel obliged to provide’. Far from suggesting Viola’s work as simplistic in any way, we can understand the works to ‘connect with their audience in ways that are as much visceral or emotional as they are intellectual [...] Viola’s art, if it is anything, is an art of affect’ (Chris Townsend, The Art of Bill Viola, Thames & Hudson, 2004, p.8).

A number of responses in the visitor’s book perhaps bear out this observation rather well:

‘Viola makes me believe that video art has a purpose. I usually turn around and walk out when I see the flicker of a screen (this from a contemporary artist too .. not one of those Daily Mail readers) … The sensibility of this and the Tom Hanks [also showing at the Graves Art Gallery] made me both worry and celebrate the human race’ (Dave Chessie)

‘Viola absolutely appalling as ever. He should learn to paint. Second rate Mel Gibson stuff. No wonder he is so reviled by early collaborators … Forester et al. at Caltech and Buffalo. Expensive kit, full-on investment – Ugh!’ (Adam Sylvester)

‘What’s the plasma about?’ (Ellie)

‘One interpretation or explanation does not necessarily exclude or preclude another. There are layers of meaning to these things which we would prefer not to see’ (Christine Smith)