PALIMPSEST

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain's solo show at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 
installation view of 'Palimpsest' video series, each continously looped, 2008.

'Once we acknowledge the constitutive gap between reality and its representation in language or image, we must in principle be open to many different possibilities of representing the real and its memories. This is not to say that anything goes. The question of quality remains one to be decided case by case. But the semiotic gap cannot be closed by any orthodoxy of correct representation.'
-Andreas Huyssen in Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory

YOU DWELLER IN THE DARK CABIN


Thomas Demand, Clearing,

Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion


You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon,
Of the two dreams, night and day,
What lover, what dreamer, would choose   
The one obscured by sleep?

Here is the plantain by your door   
And the best cock of red feather   
That crew before the clocks.

A feme may come, leaf-green,   
Whose coming may give revel   
Beyond revelries of sleep,

Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,   
So that the sun may speckle,   
While it creaks hail.

You dweller in the dark cabin,   
Rise, since rising will not waken,   
And hail, cry hail, cry hail.





-Wallace Stevens

CARBON DATER

'Time is the water that we exist in like fish. You might say it's oxygen, but I think time really is our element.' - Bill Viola 
“Carbon Dater is a black diamond-tipped carbon pen for writing and illustrating directly into glass… for carbon dating. Specifically – A .30 carat black diamond set in milled brass claw, fixed to a hand-tooled lazer-engraved inanimate carbon rod, presented in an inked 247-piece hinged cardboard box.”Images and text courtesy Sruli Recht

THREE BATHS


Ether, 1990. 
Valley
Bath 3

'I made three bath pieces altogether. The first one was called 'Ether' and it had a plughole in it which I drilled out so that there was a hole going through the work. The second one was called 'Valley'. It had glass on top of it, where I wanted to make a space for a body, so the whole thing was like a sarcophagus. I wanted to tap the space so that it felt claustrophobic. The third one, which also had glass on it, had two holes in the glass the two  holes in the plaster, so there was a sense of breathing. I wanted it to have some kind of relief. I remember seeing a documentary about the crypt at Christ Church Spitalfields. They were clearing out lead coffins that were completely sealed, the bodies inside them had deteriorated so much that there was just this lumpy liquid sloshing about inside. And there was one big scare about unleashing the plague and other dreadful diseases. That was something I was thinking about whilst I was making these pieces. I wanted an open one, a sealed one, and one that could breathe." 

- Rachel Whiteread, interview published in William Furlong's Speaking of Art.

STUDIO CONSTRUCTS

Studio Construct 15, 2007, Archival pigment print, 43.75x53.75 in
Studio Construct 8, 2007, Archival pigment print, 43.75x53.75 in


Studio Construct 17, 2007

"The process of capturing an image through a camera lens requires “an object.” This body of work addresses the representational value of that object. By photographing a transparent plane, and its shadow, familiar association with life experience is eliminated. The result is a “concrete photographic” abstract image." - Barbara Kasten


Regarding her recent solo exhibition, Abstracting…Light, held at the wonderful Almine rech Gallery in France in May-June 2010, Karsten wrote that:
The occurrence of light hitting a plane is distinctive from the recording of the same light thru the lens of a camera. A unique vision occurs through the optical prism that can be captured and ultimately printed, yet cannot be seen by the naked eye. As I directed light on various parts of transparent planes and studied it in the back of a view camera, multicolored abrasions activating the surface appeared. The scratches become a color field of drawing over a normally invisible sheet of plastic. The perception of a ‘thing’, a recordable reality of representation, is basic to the photographic process. In the series “Incidence”, the rendering of light becomes abstract interpretation of surface and form. However, I do not think of the photograph’s construction in terms of abstraction but as an event. Many abstract notions are conjured up as we view this unique recording of materiality. The synthesis of abstract form and our imagination presents a means of seeing the process of lighting. This phenomenon is the subject of my new work and exhibit ‘abstracting…light’.

Barbara Kasten's Construct's are currently on show at London's Carl Freedman Gallery alongside the work of Alexanda Leykauf and at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in The Edge of Vision Exhibition. The Studio Constructs are perhaps her most muted works - concerned more with the transparency and fleeting physicality of the space as compared with the colour of her earlier work. This depicts a clear turning point for Karsten, from the Moholy-Nagy/Bauhaus influence towards the use of light a la James Turrell. Other artists using similar methods of constructed environments and photography include Eileen Quinlan (whose work I also adore) and Sara VanderBeek. 

IT TREMBLES TO CARESS THE LIGHT

James Casebere: La Alberca, 2005/2006

Photo: courtesy Goetz Collection 
Epilogue 


Those blessed structures plot and rhyme-
why are they no help to me now
i want to make
something imagined not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens 
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything i write
With the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot 
lurid rapid garish grouped 
heightened from life 
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts.
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

-robert Lowell

The painter's vision is not a lens except, in the case of James Casebere, when it is. At the same time, it is relatively easy to say that his images are heightened from life/yet paralysed by fact. His images trounce the real, they are contaminated by fiction. Is it photo, is it painting? The illumination characteristic of his work is at its most ambiguous in La Alberca. Here, the combination of the abstract, shallow reflective pool of water melts all solidity, returning the physical to its liquid state. The source of illumination is not clear - we are contained in the gestural space.

Flooded Hallway 1999 - Casebere

Discussing La Alberca in terms of Lowell's Epilogue points to a perceived correlation between Vermeer and Casebere. It is notable that Vermeer's work nearly always contains a window - an explicit announcement of the how and why light enters. Casebere, conversely, is not concerned with the entry of light, but with the what the illumination allows. However, this distinction is not as clear as it might appear. Both artists are obsessed with how light returns the eye to reality - both artists tremble to caress the light. For Vermeer, painting the incredibly everyday Milkmaid was a subject of both stark reality and highly institutionalised myth. His illumination works to bring together these two isolated views. For Casebere the same is true - light folds together the reality of space and the myth that physical material alone is form giving.

MINI-CITY

Having seen these tilt-shift photos by Ed McGowan a week or so ago, I was inspired to try my hand at tilt-shifting Wellington. Though I didn't have much time, or really know what I was doing, I was quite excited by the results of my five-minute snap on a rare sunny-and-still(ish) day. The images tend to be more believable as 'miniatures' when taken from above, so I'll have to find more high spots. I'm quite in love with how the water shots turned out.

SEASONS


Ygdrasil, Autumn in Auvergne

Anselm Kiefer, “Ygdrasil, Herbst in Der Auvergne,” 2010, Gouache on Photographic Paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. 

Summer in Barjac - The reknowned Orders of Night
Anselm Kiefer, “Sommer in Barjac — Die berühmten Orden der Nacht” 2010, gouache on 

photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.


"Snow melt in the Odenwald. Goodbye, winter, parting hurts but your departure makes my heart cheer. Gladly I forget thee, may you always be far away. Goodbye, winter, parting hurts."

Anselm Kiefer, “Snow Melt in the Odenwald,” 2010, gouache on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Work on the book has recently had me engaging in discussion of Heidegger, and I have once again been seeing the world with a tint of Anslem Kiefer to it. The relationship between the two men - and their philosophies - is intriguing in many ways. See here, and of course Michael Biro. I've been musing on it a lot lately, and will continue this blog when I've found the right words. In any case, this book is on my must-acquire list. You can see some of the blood-freezingly-beautiful photography here,I couldn't bring myself to re-post. For now, Kiefer has the most interesting thing to say: 

"There is a special border, the border between art and life that
often shifts deceptively. Yet, without this border, there is no art.
In the process of being produced, art borrows material from life,
and the traces of life still shine through the completed work of art.
But, at the same time, the distance from life is the essence, the
substance of art. And, yet, life has still left its traces. The more
scarred the work of art is by the battles waged on the borders
between art and life, the more interesting it becomes."
~ Anselm Kiefer


In looking for all-things-Kiefer, I also stumbled across this amazing resource at the University of Minnesota (why have I not heard of robert Stackhouse before!?) and this film by Sophie Fiennes.

SKETCHY


Today I've been dreaming about drawing again - a common dream, and for some reason, one that I never have the right paper or pencils around to begin enacting at the specific moment I dream it. Here's some more from faunesque's sketch book above - what my sketchbook would most definitely look like if I did.

 These ones, by Denise Nestor, I find even more stunning. Mostly they are flickr copyrighted, but this one I just had to share. Fair enough, with talent like this!

PLACE AS A PAUSE

Untitled, Untitled and Untitled, from the "Place as a Pause" series, by Marika Asatiani.




'Place as a Pause' reminds me of a book I stumbled across on google books the other day: 'The Small Space of a Pause: Susan Howe's Poetry and the Spaces Between.' I'm hoping to get around to reading the majority of the work at some point. The author, Elizabeth Joyce, unwraps the 'space' of the poetry in such a lucid manner. The poem she has included on the opening page of her introduction is Untitled, 1976, and was previously unpublished. I am at odds as to why she has removed the dashes characteristic of Howe's work (and, for those who are familiar, extremely resonant of Emily Dickinson's punctuation). 



The small space
Of a pause

A haze
Blink into aching lost
Only words remain
If the print is available
The green of a city
A tumble of omens
In a western direction
Narrowing from side to side
Space as emptiness...

Is her theme
The whole page
Not just one part
Positive and negative space
Where?
Or sailed away
In the small space
Of endless possibility


I am also enjoying one of Elisabeth W. Joyce's other works - Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde. More work by Marika after the break.

Re mote Control, Tbilisi, Georgia

TRAVELS


This article at UrbanTick describes this Parisian time lapse by Luke Shepard, entitled 'Le Flaneur' as Debordian, or Situationist.  However,  Le Flaneur, the original, is of course Baudelairean (I have included the poem, A une passante, in French and English after the page break), and embodies quite a different perspective and way of engaging with the city. There is a very interesting article here about the flaneur as it moves into Benjaminian terms. Also, though I like the xx, I prefer the film without sound, without climax, with the images alone telling the tale of how time passes and shifts and speeds to the eye, rather than the images conforming to the rhythms and climaxes of the external song. 

In other armchair travels, I have discovered the newly released Google Art Project and am, as many others, utterly enamoured. 



À une passanteLa rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur 
majestueuse, 
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse 


Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. 
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant, 
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan, 
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.


Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté 
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! 
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, 
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
— Charles Baudelaire

To a Passer-ByThe street about me roared with a deafening 
sound. Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
 A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her 
skirt; Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's. 
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests 
germinate, The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure 
that kills.A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty 
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?
Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never 
perhaps! For I know not where you fled, you know not 
where I go,O you whom I would have loved, O you who 
knew it!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954