telling stories

Women at the Ndebele Cultural Village, Loopspruit, Gauteng, South Africa 1999

I was looking for a picture of handprints used as decoration around the doorway of a mud brick house somewhere in Africa, stuccoed and painted by women.  Clear in my mind, can't find the image anywhere.  

On the way, found plenty of information on Ndebele house painting. This is a case of cultural coding that describes family values and histories passed down matrilineally (as the women did the house painting) that was completely opaque to the colonists.  It is like having great billboards for resistance movements in a covert language that is, in the meantime, very decorative and so considered harmless.   Also probably considered benign as it was smiling women doing it.

So many forms of cultural expression were banned in the colonial era if there was a hint of subversion to them or if they simply were not understood: the outlawing of the Salish potlach – something threatening about power and property there, the outlawing of sati – undue sacrifice of Hindu women to their husbands, outlawing of Blackfoot initiation dances – violent and frightening.  Many of these things go underground and reappear as entertainments, living on often as performances for tourists but still speaking, under the radar, to those who understand what they really mean.

hand prints

Bridal mehndi

The fingerprint, the handprint, somehow we feel they make us unique.  However, nothing is like the henna designs on hands, arms and feet found at a Muslim wedding.  I think the picture above is a traditional Pakistani design, a tradition that has exploded across cultures, subject to fashion trends, co-opted by all and sundry as a kind of temporary tattoo.  Arabic designs look to me more like Victorian lace fingerless mittens.  Modern fashions seem to tilt towards floral sprays scrolling away over the body. 

There are zillions of mehndi sites.  The one the picture comes from (above) gives us a look at the extreme decorativeness of Pakistani, Indian and Arabian wedding jewellery, saris and mehndi: ornate, elaborate, fanciful, arduous to produce, signs of great attention and no doubt wealth.

It is all about the hand, our interface with the world, the holder of our fortunes.  The good luck khamsa of Morroco, below, is at once a handprint, a mehndi hand and a hand held up to warn off misfortune.

Morrocan khamsa charm

more identity

Yves St Laurent. Fingerprint necklace, 2011.

Well, what have we got here? 
Issues of identity are in the air. 

civic identity

Michel Lambeth. Kensington Market 1955

Susan Crean's project on Toronto, research for a book, starts with this statement:  I’m looking for the city that is part of all our lives. Not just the one that exists at City Hall, or in books at the TPL, but the city we carry around in our heads.

In the context of the current issue of On Site: identity, it occurs to me that the gap between what we know and feel as individuals and what we are told is important to know about a place – its brand, its economy, its heroics – is a huge crevasse, a significant alienation.  My instinct is that this gap should be bridged in some way, but the official city reading is shooting off at such a speed that I don't think we can catch up.  Where does this leave us?  Looking at the details, despairing at the 'big picture' and eventually realising that we don't live in the big picture.  Physically, perhaps.  Intellectually, maybe.  Emotionally, no.  The tendernesses in Susan Crean's Toronto are in the past, brought forward to the present by telling the stories.

On Site recently had an article about a large community garden, kitchen and market in a Toronto park, where the sun appeared to continually shine, children were fulfilled, adults wore interesting shoes and glowed with a green organic fervour.  This is the potential of Toronto, to have such a park. The woeful miscalculation of the ascendence of the right wing of the Liberal party with Ignatieff at the helm is also the potential of Toronto.  I am incapable of reconciling these two things as they play out on the civic terrain of the city.  They are narratives that never meet.  

The language of each narrative – the vocabulary, the syntax – is almost unintelligible so freighted are both with ideology, righteousness and history.  Is there a Toronto, or a city anywhere, whose meta-narrative can encompass all fractions and factions?  This is the task of city administrations, supported by media and marketing.  Susan Crean's project pierces the ambiguities and lacunae of official histories by asking for personal considerations of what Toronto is, and it seems this is a story that can only be told in details. 

things of beauty

Pistoxenos painter. Aphrodite on a swan, 460 BC. Found in a tomb in Kameiros on Rhodes.

wood

Margate

Snøhetta. Turner Contemporary, Margate UK. competition entry, 2001

In 2009 Snøhetta paid £6 million to Kent County Council over the failure to keep the Turner Contemporary costs under control.  The project, won by competition in 2001 had been estimated at £7.4 million but had gone up to £25 million by 2006 when the project was cancelled. 
It was a lovely project: a great wooden shell on the water: like all Snøhetta work, visionary, conceptual and sculptural.  We published it in On Site 4, 2001 and at the time I thought that if Margate, a disconsolate seaside town with a sad pier notwithstanding J W Turner painting there in the 19th century and thus the Turner gallery project, if Margate could choose such a brave path why couldn't the rest of us.  Architecture can be anything, why not make it romantic and beautiful.

Unfortunately for my architecture of possibility, this project came to grief.  But what is worse is that the Council did not go back to the other 5 short-listed projects from the original competition, but instead launched a second competition and chose David Chipperfield.  His £17.5 million project recently opened and is something of a shock, not for its beauty but for its extreme dullness.  It is like very cheap Meier: utilitarian, conventional white galleries – a warehouse no doubt technically proficient, but as a serious building for contemporary art, a real default position. 

The architecture of the new Turner Contemporary proposes that art is a curious phenomenon that the building must avoid while going through the palaver of keeping it temperature-controlled.  Snøhetta's original project proposed that Margate had a maritime history, that contemporary art was interdisciplinary and collaborative and would collaborate with the architecture, and that space has a presence rather than an absence. 

It is terrible that the choice is between an architecture that is emotional and brave and one that is technocratic and bleak.  This isn't modernism, it is utility and budget control masquerading as modernism.  

David Chipperfield Architects. Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK. 2011

redemption

Bob Marley, live in Dortmund, 1980.

Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington. Still from Restropo, 2010.Tim Hetherington was a British news photographer who made a career covering conflict for news organisations and for Human Rights Watch.  He was not a removed observer behind the camera, but an engaged humanitarian who intervened either directly or through a sustained commitment to struggles such as the Liberian civil war, and the current Libyan war in Misrata, where he was killed on April 20.

Current estimates put the death toll in Libya between February 16 and April 21 as two and a half thousand opposition and eight hundred Gaddafi loyalists.  It is an ugly war with executions, lynchings, rapes, mercenaries, untrained troops, betrayals, lies and human shields.  The death estimates indicate the asymmetry of this war.

Restropo, from which the above still is taken, was a 2010 film about US forces in Afghanistan, in the Korengal Valley.  The image could have been from many or any war: dugouts, trenches, blasted landscapes, small indications of soldiers trying to stay human. Photo-journalists, such as Hetherington and Chris Hondros, also killed on April 20 in Misrata, or Rory Peck killed in Moscow in 1993, reporters such as Orla Guerin – they are witnesses, for us, at great personal sacrifice. 

Schatten, 1960

Hansjürgen Pohland. Schatten, 1960Another quite wonderful Pohland film shot just before the wall went up. 

It looks at the city without looking at it.  It is all ephemera which, curiously enough, is timeless.

architecture and identity

T E Lawrence. Cloud's Hill, from a BBC Documentary, One Foot in the Past. 1997

Identity is the theme of the current issue of On Site review – very slippery, very mutable, it starts with a question: do you fit where you live?

A couple of days ago I mentioned T E Lawrence's house in Dorset, Cloud's Hill.  Here is a clip from a BBC program, quite a while ago if Ralph Fiennes' lovely youthfulness is anything to go by.  It isn't embedded, as that has been disabled, but the image is linked to the video. 

Cloud's Hill was, to Lawrence, part of himself: it was him.  It was like him, he made it, it corresponded directly with his values and his identity.  It is not often that can be said of where we live. 

rooms with a view

Virginia Woolf's writing lodge, Monk's House, Sussex, 1921-1941Virginia Woolf's writing room at Monk's House in Sussex.  Originally a tool shed, evidently it was full of garden distractions in the summer, cold and damp in the winter.  But it was hers.  And her £500 a year income was inherited from her aunt.

She wrote in A Room of One's Own, 'Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time'.

Like the vote, we have so many of the material things that people around the world are dying to achieve. and we do so little with them.

Cloud's Hill, Dorset

Cloud's Hill, T E Lawrence's cottage, photographed after his death in 1935

Thinking about T E Lawrence, buried in Moreton, Dorset, about the great European carve-up of the Middle East that he and Gertrude Bell were part of in the 1920s, and his cottage, near Bovington Camp, that he renovated while serving out his last few years in the RAF in the early-1930s.  He had finally got it right, installing a porthole from HMS Tiger in what he called a slip of a roomlet, not having a bedroom, when he was killed, in 1935, in a hit and run motorcycle accident.

Interiors did a photo-essay of Cloud's Hill years ago – it is a National Trust Property and open to visitors.  I remember that the cottage did not have a kitchen, just a wood counter with three beautiful glass cheese bells in a row.  In 1933 he wrote to a friend,  'I have lavished money these last . . . months upon the cottage, adding a water-supply, a bath, a boiler, bookshelves, a bathing pool (a tiny one, but splashable into): all the luxuries of the earth. Also I have thrown out of it the bed, the cooking range: and ignored the lack of drains. Give me the luxuries and I will do without the essentials.'

This seems about right I think.

It was quite small, this cottage: two rooms up and two down, upstairs was opened into one room, the book room, lined with bookshelves.  The downstairs was the music room. He was delighted by its austerity and self -sufficiency: '...books and gramophone records and tools for ever and ever. No food, no bed, no kitchen, no drains, no light or power. Just a two-roomed cottage and five acres of rhododendron scrub. Perfection, I fancy, of its sort.'

Perfection, but also a kind of punishment, but perhaps he had lived too much and needed something elemental out of life and house.  It is curious, one's house should not be one's life, yet it inevitably is.

alabaster

Alabaster windows, San Paolo fuori le Mura
, Rome. 13th Century

Alabaster windows – a search for images has taken me to some very odd tourist sites, but never mind, these windows seem quite wonderful.  This is the tradition from which Sigmar Polke drew, adding colour from stained glass traditions.  Before glass there was alabaster, before church windows as text.  

Laurence Whistler

Laurence Whistler. Engraved windows at St Nicholas Church, Moreton, DorsetLaurence Whistler, 1912-2000, younger brother of the more well-known Rex Whistler, was a glass engraver who, over 30 years, engraved all the windows of St Nicholas Church at Moreton in Dorset.  This church is also more well-known as the place that T E Lawrence was buried in 1935. 

The church itself is delicate, built in 1776 in a Georgian form of Gothic, it was hit when a German bomber jettisoned its load, blowing out all the windows. The engraved windows are equally delicate, like frost patterns.  There is little florid glory in these windows, but much that is elegaic. 

The double readings that one gets through engraved glass renders the world outside the church as the backdrop to all that is held within the Church.  Like Sigmar Polke, who said 'I can accept the power of nature as religious' Whistler, in dreary postwar Britain broke away from the stained glass tradition which screens the world but allows in a redemptive light. After two world wars and the loss of two generations of artists, to pursue the stained-glass tradition redemptive polychromed light must have felt, to Whistler, unreasonably bombastic.  Thus these windows, which ask little of the congregant other than to register a pale, persistent nature-based faith. 

The Whistler windows, ca 1950-80. St Nicholas, Moreton

Sigmar Polke's Agates

Sigmar Polke. Agate Window, Grossmünster Cathedral, Zürich. 2006-2009

Sigmar Polke, who died last June, apprenticed as a stained glass painter before going on to art school and studying under Joseph Beuys.  The work we know him best by is heavily layered, referential work - drawings over drawings so that a dense surface appears to be made of many transparent and translucent screens, all holding different kinds of information. 

Sculpturally he worked with deeply, geologically romantic, translucent materials such as jade, quartz and amber. His last work was a set of windows for the Grossmünster Cathedral in Zurich (2006-2009), five of which are drawn from Old Testament figural descriptions, seven are thinly sliced agate held in place as with traditional stained glass by lead track.
The windows conflate narrative, biblical time and geologic time in a most graceful way, all held within the frame of the 11th century Romanesque stone cathedral.  There is a book about them with a number of essays: Marina Warner et al. Fenster-Windows for the Grossmünster Zürich.  Parkett, 2009.

I think as with most of the art I love and which I have never actually seen, it is the concept of these works which appeals.  I know there would be a phenomenological intensity, and here with the agate windows, a spiritual space that one can only experience by being there.  This is the ongoing problem with art in the age of reproduction, we only get a diagram of what a work is.  It will have to do – for me I'd rather have the diagram than not know about this work at all. 

Ceal Floyer 2

Ceal Floyer. Overhead Projection, 2006. Incandescent light bulb and overhead projector

Ceal Floyer

Ceal Floyer. Things, 2009. CDs, CD-player, speakers, cables, woodCeal Floyer, born in Pakistan, studied at Goldsmith's in London, lives and works in Berlin and currently has an exhibition that fills the four floors and annex of DHC/ART in Montreal.

This work could not be more minimal, more delicate, more gentle in its humour.  Like Duchamp, there is a visual pun and then an unspoken onslaught of art history, contemporary theory and pop culture.  It is as metaphorical as all get out; it is also as simple as can be.  Whatever references are stirred by each piece, it is all to be found in the mind of the viewer – previous knowledge we bring to the work, rather than written on the surface of the work itself.

There is quite a fierce clamp on the images, so cannot show here Door (1995) which brings tears to the eyes.  An existing steel door in a dim corner has a projector on the floor in front of it, humming away, projecting a bright bar of light at the very bottom of the door  One registers the mechanics of the piece, as I just did, and then in a flash it becomes magical: there is a sunlit room beyond this too-short door, inaccessible to us, but clearly so brilliant, so hopeful, so illuminated. It is like being ill, as a child, in a dim room, aware of the bright strip of light at the bottom of the blind telling you that the world outside continues on without you, an elysian field. 

Things (2009) is a gallery of 30 white plinths about 5' high with a white speaker grill inset in the top.  The plinths are more or less evenly spaced but not gridded: a field of posts.  Each speaker erupts with the word 'thing' cut from a wide range of pop songs at irregular and unsequenced intervals.  There is nothing else but these blasts of things that never continue.  It is very funny, not just because the wall of sound in most pop music is so absurd when you only get a split-second of it, but because the set up is so immaculate, so formal, so white-wall gallery, the modern gallery itself is so very gently mocked. Then, again in a flash, the deep connection between all the galleries one has ever been in, all the installations, all the music that ever accompanied your life are concentrated in a single moment, in a room full of white posts. 

Deceptively simple, again, is Working Title (Digging) (1995) which is set in the opening of a small bay: you hear the sound of a shovel hitting a pile of gravel from one speaker,  and then farther into the bay from another speaker you hear the gravel landing.  Having done a lot of shovelling in my time, the speakers are too far apart, the gravel would land sooner than the tape tells us it does: the landing is delayed, so somewhere in the bay and in the time within the bay is a suspension, an interregnum unaccounted for. The space between the speakers – a physical distance on the floor – is paradoxically stretched by the space registered by the sounds coming from the speakers. 

I haven't seen such beautiful work for many a year, nor a show that restored my sense of humour, sorely tried recently.  

saturday

broken ice on the St Lawrence, March 26 2011ferry on the Salish Sea, March 26, 2011

Vivienne Koorland

Vivienne Koorland. Close Your Little Eyes, 2010. Oil on stitched canvas 31" x 27" inches (79 x 68 cm) Collection the artist

Vivienne Koorland works in New York, is currently showing in London at East Central Gallery and grew up in South Africa, leaving it before the end of apartheid.  Her mother was a hidden and smuggled child in Poland during WWII, ending up in a Jewish orphans home in South Africa in 1948.
 
Koorland's work is characteristically complex where everything from the kind of marks made, the material they are made with, the canvas or burlap or bookcovers they are made upon is heavy with historical memory, from her own conflicted childhood in Africa to her mother's loss of childhood and family to her own exile and homesickness for an impossible childhood that cannot be revisited.  
It is not just Germany, or just the holocaust, or just apartheid, or just the unfairness, or just the loss of material goods, or talents, or love; it is all these things, constantly jostling on the crowded historical surfaces of her work.  Letters, writing, ledgers, sheet music, popular songs, maps – they all lie together.  

Her working method reuses her own rejected drawings and paintings, burlap rice bags are stitched together to make a full canvas, their printed labels worked into the content.  Her work is constantly being remade and re-referenced.  
Although nominally about the past, it is the present that is often discussed: a magnificent gold map of Africa is so simple, yet so complex in reference to gold mining, to a shimmering beautiful potential and a hateful process of extraction.  This is work that sinks in complexity rather than skimming on a too easily grasped surface. 

Vivienne Koorland. Gold Africa, 2010. oil and pigment on stitched burlap. 68.5 x 61 inches (27 x 24 cm) Private Collection, London