Sleep-drunk I dance

Well, you have surprised me! Not only no. 1, but leading by a country-mile! Not bad for someone who may run out of steps before she gets to the garden. Thank you.

Can’t quite wrap my head around the score. I had no idea that my need to deeply engage with The Beginning of History, to explore and process the relationships between the pieces, was of such interest to you. In fact I kept wondering how I could pull people in, how to make the show come alive for you who hadn’t seen it. And now this. The relative distance between my worriful fantasies (what I’m doing just isn’t good enough) and ‘this’ is so big that it seems non-sensical, but the thing is that I came back from G. to find the comments box empty. Well, now all I can do is bow to your very good judgement and say thank you thank you thank you. And please keep coming back, and maybe even leave a wee word or two while you’re at it.

Good to have had a break. Good to be back. Strange to be back. Strange to be talking to you again. You must exist as every now and then I find my blog on a-n‘s top ten list, but I can’t name more than a few of you who put me up on that lofty height (thank you, by the way), and am wondering about how better to initiate dialogues/trialogues/multilogues.

Last weekend I had an unspeakable day, 24 hours really, beside myself and utterly inside myself with fatigue and pain, to the point that I couldn’t speak. Even my voice was unhinged, that last door. Everything was suspended; nothing hung in the balance. The earth turned in its normal unhurried way, temperatures dropped somewhere, war raged somewhere else. And I lay on bed like a question mark drawn by an arthritic hand, all angles and edges. Now I glance at this day from an unsafe distance and grope for entirely inadequate words.

It is easier to talk about partial pains. Take my hands, for instance. M.E. has strange effects on how I perceive them: One day they seem rammed into gloves that are much too tight, extra skins made of an unstretchy material that readily steadily releases pain-inducing toxins; another time they are just pulsing fields of pain; sore as if trod on in rubber boots (I am strangely clear on this: not leather soles, no stamping, but an adult’s foot!); fingers no more than brittle twigs, waiting to break; both middle fingers symmetrically hurting down to their roots; tips sharply pressured as if about to shoot off. I could go on. A friend to whom I had written asked if a different person had addressed the envelope, as the handwriting looked large and expansive. It was my hand, but early one goodish morning, before energies had seeped out of me as they had the night before when I was writing with cramped and painful paws. A hand is a hand is a hand – when they don’t hurt my hands don’t seem any less strange nowadays, just passing through one of many possible states. My crochet hook spells c-a-r-p-e d-i-e-m when much else fails.

An image stayed with me from a Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performance at Sadler’s Wells many years ago, an image that got its power from the widening gap between opposites. A dancer in a red dress stood centre-stage, alone, unmoving, while Aram Khatchaturian’s Waltz played at high pitch. The longer the dancer remained motionless, the more the waltz seemed heated, hectic, hysterical even. The longer the waltz played, the more the dancer’s perfect stillness was enhanced, and puzzling, as the viewer’s/listener’s limbs were lashed into (suppressed) motion, the audience like one huge twitching muscle.

Even longer ago, while still at college, I made a video-installation called Perpetual Present. I filmed the faces of several students in close-up for eight to ten minutes, having asked them to look straight at the camera and move as little as possible. In the editing-suite I cut out all the blinks and put the footage on loops. I hung three monitors from the ceiling, screens upwards. Three pairs of eyes returned the viewer’s gaze with their extended, unrelenting stares. The work hovered somewhere between an animated photograph and an arrested film to the point that for instants you couldn’t be sure whether you where looking at a still or a moving image, visible movements (breathing, swallowing) so minute that you could miss them if you blinked. The drama of these small ‘events’ unfolded only if you stayed and engaged beyond the first determining glances. But the last strangeness, of an uninterrupted stare, was harder to perceive.

Stillness is an in-between: not fixed, not moving. It isn’t complete, total. It breathes, is alive. The production of this moving image had at its base the loss of other images, those blinks, those moments of darkness that make seeing possible.

Could my unspeakable days, which I tend to consider lost, be instants of darkness that allow me to perceive something which I couldn’t otherwise?

Perpetual Present (1997)
Video-installation with three 14″ monitors; 3×1 hour loops, silent

The Beginning of History – a view from inside

This exhibition stays alive in me, and every time I mentally step inside new layers of beauty and meaning beckon. Pain too, and challenge.

First thing you encounter is Ben Cove‘s Big Bopper – gorgeous, mysterious sentinel, with wool of many hues painstakingly wound around a tall, slightly curved plywood structure, on wheels. It looks sturdy and unstable, imposing and transitory. There’s a sense of impending motion (a ten-legged stagger) or unfolding (umbrella-like), although both are impossible. The wool stripes around its upper half seem pleasantly familiar, like those on deckchairs or a favourite sweater. The Big Bopper is unlike anything I’ve seen, so I’m clambering about for cues. I’ll have another look later.

For Nick Kaplony‘s Asleep Somewhere a pair of artificial eyelashes is projected on the wall in a rectangle of light, their perfect out-sized arcs childlike as well as theatrical. Going close you see how they are constructed, with cross-hatched webbing where the lashes are rooted. Little hovering smiles. The light a stage light on a star in a silent movie. A person is summoned, a memory; a dream of femininity and glamour. Desire drawn in failing light. Who’ll come across the threshold – a mother or a boy in drag? We will those eyes to open, look back at us, make us.

Right opposite a domestic scene is set, for a woman of a different generation, a different class, to put her face on with care and deliberation. Kate Murdoch‘s Here Today a summon too, through material things: a powder puff (even the word by-gone?) and make-up case placed on a bedside table painted in the same antique rose tone. A kind of stillness, suspension here, like in a room kept unchanged after a loved one died, only every time I come something has changed, as the artist unobtrusively intervenes, adds, arranges. The tone remains affectionate, tender; away from the lime-light, Kate’s nana is conjured in the daily effort of making herself beautiful. There’s a sense of warmth and respectability, of pride and aspiration. Skin English rose, with a hint of Scottish heather.

Now a half turn, drawn by the flicker of a film where a small rectangle has been cut out of an old head-board. Three people, a woman, a man, a woman, black, are ascending a staircase sidebyside, squashed together in an uncomfortable but mesmerising choreography, until they reach a bedroom where a drama quietly unfolds of complicated constellations, relations… Printed leaflets are fanned out on a small round table nearby, telling the story behind Shelley Rae‘s The Griot, of …, a slave, who married and was forcibly separated from his wife when sold on. How hard to write this, how easy. He married again and after the Civil War, now a free man, went with his new wife to find the wife he had to leave behind. They made a life together. A story you could see in a film and suspend belief, a story handed down in a family, domestic and public, where notions of race and gender are negotiated in pre-scribed prohibited spaces. A silent movie, until he/the man starts playing a mournful tune on a mouth organ, stretched out on the bed where earlier the women had lain, head next to toes, braced in a pledge of shared affections, but safe too in this world of three. No turning back now: pink skin is charged too, grandmothers firmly pulled into history.

Next to The Griot is Shelley‘s Exodus, a light box on which lie two pages of a letter, yellow with age, written in pencil in the 30s, here enlarged and printed. A letter written sister to sister by a great aunt of Shelley’s, descendants of The Griot, still struggling to make a life, a bare life, in circumstances still and ever reduced and restrained. That letter could be written today, the way things are going, with its worries about relatives out of work, a husband going astray, maybe homeless, and no New Deal in sight. The care of women is offered, of relatives, communities, inspite, against, with.

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But, this is where I catch my breath, on its left hangs This is a room I’ve never lived in, the piece that brought the return of the repressed Hitler salute in my work, dare I write it, a small outfit where a child’s upper body becomes a huge outstretched arm. A black sleeve crocheted from wool that stained my hands, with a pink and white cuff or is it a collar – little crochet pillar in underpants, incongruous and ordinary, pathetic really, but its verticality bold, almost brazen now, and I go still at the curator’s choice of placing these pieces together.

On its other side Charlotte Brown‘s etchings, Necklace I and II, coils of pearls starkly black against white paper, like ink transferred from fingertips. There are undercurrents: of value and violence, beauty and stricture, pearls (presented by husband to wife, their lustre a sign of wealth, status) burning into skin like acid into zinc. The sooty colour renders something precious punishing – those are the pearls that were his eyes – Blaubart’s maybe? And placed next to This is a room I think of the dark stains I imagined on my hands. And then they take on yet another sinister hue – think of all the valuables taken off Jewish men and women on arrival at a concentration camp.

Connections keep shifting. Nick Kaplony, curator laid out the exhibition by shared formal aspects, small details, colours, shapes, thus allowing for surprising juxtapositions. Moving through the show, even mentally as I lie here, is a vertiginous endeavor, where, as I start to ‘see’ the pieces, relationships emerge, and with them new meanting.

On to Nick’s Memento Mori / Aide-Mémoire, two small photographs of some of his parents’ professional tools, shown oversized. A denture’s grimace; eye-shadow with an almost atomic tint, crimsonish purple, now you see me, now you don’t. Together they threaten with the knowledge of transitory beauty, even death and decay, and strive to withhold it, cover it up. How light and hopeful Asleep Somewhere seems now, even if those lashes are tools of the trade too. Although hugely enlarged their delicacy carried on golden light, lure us in, and for an instant we imagine life as a happy song and dance in the rain. The dentures don a trail of history though, of gold teeth broken from mouths, and that black sleeve swings back into view, and a child unaware of what it stretches towards.

I turn to Kate Murdoch‘s Fabric of Life. A series of swatches, treasured heirlooms, fixed in embroidery-loops with edges painted dark grey and hung from threads. They’d move in a breeze: a tiny doll’s dress, part of a patchworked tea-cosy, such pretty fabrics, colours, textures – but then the top of a stocking and its suspender, weirdly creepily flesh-doomed, undercuts these pleasures. A woman’s body, brought down not only by notions but the ways of all flesh. Desire. Inflamer and destroyer of nostalgia.

Mourning and a thread left hanging… Kate‘s nana made this, owned this, mending, stitching, hemming in, making her home beautiful. We can’t know how much is masked: a hard life, fraught roles and relationships, domestic and other, work and worries. Now we may look but not touch. Memories are made of this, a shard here, a rip there, for us to ponder over. The artist has chosen and cut to fit, in one gesture tender, restorative and destructive, swatches hanging lightly, with air around them, weighted with loss.

Karen Stripp‘s installation Goodbye to the Genius Loci, speaks of a different loss: a house left behind, a home. Her installation of small colour photos with white edges, showing fragmentary views of the house’s interior, corners, walls, a bed, a fuse box, are arranged to fill a circle on the wall, with gaps between. On its sides hang four larger framed photos in gradations of dark ochre and black, taken at night, haunted by memories that have already become untethered. Last glimpses of life lived there, its patina.
Assembled on the floor as if fallen from a mirror: photos scattered around a large one of a figure laid out from bits of the house’s timber, pieces from age-worn bannisters, shelf brackets, maybe chair legs. The genius loci a partial figure, expired too. The whole set-up like a gravesite. What remains when something falls apart? There’s a sense that this installation could grow indefinitely, spread, and in the end overlay the original house, replace, alter, in/through memory. The act of remembering changes the thing we are trying to remember.

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And now look up, there’s I am a stick, I am a stone, as if the wood from Karen‘s Genius loci were thrown in the air and shift-shaped. The piece, mounted high up on the wall next to the doorway, seems filled with life and motion, and, with a child’s uncurdled exuberance, may be about to hurtle away: ‘I am out of here!’ But hang on, not so fast, history calls, and this work, born in the shadow of a swastika, there, I’ve written the word, falls without a clank, after all it’s been crocheted – soft materials, disarming medium, even in black and white, but falls, is felled, for a moment, before it cartwheels off again, as if nothing ever happened.

Grey stripes re-appear in Ben Cove‘s Head Construct (3), hanging below. Although linked to his other paintings by means of title this one is different as it purports readability. Tension arises between aspects of archetypes and ancient masks on the one hand, and features which make you think of a small child, even if those large eyes are nothing but half-circles daubed on in pink and the faceness emerges from scanty details – grey stripes geometrically forming cheeks, a mouth conjured through placement and not through its red and beige bars overlaying what seems like a burning map. But a face does appear and can’t be denied, a brown face, and those pink marks make eyes that seem caught in a glare, a stare. At what is around them, here, and what is fought over, often enough glossed over? Not only in and between art historical isms, but in ideologies of all hues: the materialization of difference and otherness.

Which makes my mind leap towards Charlotte Brown’s Weaklings, make-up cases cast in sugar and laid out on top of a table on long thin legs, fossil-like but much more temporary, all white bar one in ochre, one out. Close up you can see the imprint of tiny hinges and clasps at the edges. Tools of a daily masquerade, sweet hope. Women of another generation making themselves presentable. I can see handbag and shoes, matching, a suit worn only on Sundays. Putting on airs, putting on faces. Not thinking that they penetrate, seep into the mental states that inspired them in the first place. We do different things now, cut even into skin and flesh. In the fragility of these casts lies unforgotten the notion, the reality, not only of skin shrinking and wrinkling till death do us part, but also of sugar plantations, white skin under parasols, black skin exposed to the burning sun. We can imagine but maybe wouldn’t if we are white.

Across now, to a little shelf bearing Charlotte’s Curse II, a spectacle case cast in lead, and as in her etching Box (pitch black, as if the lightless interior had sucked any tones from the exterior), with precise imprints of hinges and lock almost mocking us. Such different media, both in their own ways conveying weight and finality. Little tombs, severe, sombre, past use, but useful in new ways, as containers of secrets, even though they lack space inside to hold things. In a strange way they are filled with themselves; what isn’t spoken is fused into this dense, impenetrable shape. The spectacle case small yet threatening, a modern Pandora’s box, in which evils are sealed, or our means to discern them. Freighted, toxic heirlooms.

At the other end of the space Ben Cove’s Trans: Lean-to sculpture, graceful, fragile, precarious, with a ceremonial aspect. The almost futuristic painting mounted on the wall seems to stand in for a head. Stately and superior, like a brain that operates without a body. In painting and sculpture Ben’s work hovers between abstraction and figuration, veering this way and that, not declaring itself. Trans too is unlike anything else, collapsing categories: painting? sculpture? 3D? 2D? abstract? figurative? precious? playful? from this earth? alien? As soon as you make up your mind about one thing its opposite spins out at you. Best to give in and admit that it’s not a matter of either/or but of and, and more. Something alive in this construction (for want of a better word) in ways that give a breathing space, if only for a moment or two.

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