on travel, drifting, and between
Datum: 04.09.2002
insomnia notes:
autorIn:neil matheson
++++++++++
waking in the darkness of a strange and airless room - 5.02 am on the digital display of the alarm clock - opening the window to let in air...
... outside, the soft, rhythmic whooshing of car-tyres of the early-morning traffic, endlessly circling the périphérique, near the edges of the old city, within that strange zone photographed by Atget nearly a century ago, a city-within-a-city of rag-pickers, wooden shacks and fortifications ... he found the sound of the traffic re-assuring, recalling the background hum of London, the identifying pulse of the city, and was able to sleep again ... he recalled waking to momentary panic one morning in a photographic darkroom - deprived of sensory coordinates, floating there in the total darkness - our basic need for spatial markers, the mapping of the body onto space ...
before sleeping he had been reading Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, and thought of Sebald's predilection for the edges, the margins, walking the eastern coast of England to Lowestoft, the furthest point east .. he considered the coincidence of his having also visited the Sailors' Reading Room just along the coast at Southwold, as described by Sebald, with its collection of maritime log-books and faded prints ... he thought of his own fear of water, of ships adrift in unknown waters, of their problems in identifying their precise location, both in time as well as in space ... he thought too of the curious case of the "Sympathy Powder", a mysterious powder which was to function on the analogy of the sympathy long believed to exist between a weapon and the wound that it inflicts, such that a touch from that weapon would be sufficient to cure the wound ... hence the scheme whereby dogs wounded by a single dagger would be kept on board ships sailing across the globe ... at mid-day Greenwich Mean Time, the dagger would be plunged into a bowl of Sympathy Powder, at which signal all the traumatised dogs would howl as one, notifying the captain of the correct time ... again, this returned him to Sebald, who describes staying one night in some god-forsaken quarter of The Hague, turning a corner only to be almost bowled over by a terrified man who ran past him, leaving Sebald in the path of his pursuer, a chef or kitchen porter in an apron, who suddenly appeared waving a long kitchen knife ... the flashing knife triggers his own memory of sitting in a park, writing postcards, in the dead mid-day heat of Seville, when his camera bag suddenly began to disappear from sight, of grabbing one of the handles, and of an absurd struggle in slow-motion with another man, each tugging on a handle, and of the lunges of a knife at his legs ...
this question of the city, boundaries, and of the "in-between" ... two approaches immediately suggest themselves: the first is that of the quintessentially American artist Jason Rhoades, while the second would be found across the border, in Mexico, or more accurately on the border itself, in the work of Francis Al˙s ... Rhoades, finding himself spending long periods driving in traffic, began to use his car as an extension of the artist's studio ... later, spending more time in Europe, he decided to build on this with his Impala Project (International Museum Project About Leaving and Arriving) which proposed an "in-between museum in a car", a modern car which he brought over from America - "What I want is this big American space. Something comfortable and elegant. ... Primarily it relates to Picabia - he supposedly owned about 160 cars" ... we know that Picabia too brought a car over from America - a Mercer - whose journey he jealously followed by telegram and that when it finally arrived in Paris, he caressed the car lovingly for hours, murmuring "it's the most beautiful car you could ever see ..." ... so that for Rhoades, the car - essentially private space - becomes a museum, its glove compartment containing a sculpture by Sylvie Fleury - "you must have Chanel 44", she tells him, "as its the only perfume Chanel do in the United States ..." ... in the photograph they sit together in the front seats of the car, smiling at the photographer
in the airless room, the humming of the refrigerator, struggling against the heat to maintain a small island of coolness ... he fell asleep again and remembered arriving in some grim, dirt-poor Mexican town, foolishly taking a taxi to the centre - one of those old, beat-up American cars - and the driver suddenly pulling some long, evil-looking machete from the glove compartment, which he then waved around the car, laughing ...
the trajectory of Rhoades' car is somehow already determined - "it'll probably become a sculpture" he tells us - destined to become one more object for some museum ... there are maybe more interesting precedents, from Warhol's Car Crash series from 1963, to Bertrand Lavier's sculpture comprising a horribly smashed-up car, its roof crushed in and the steering-wheel pushed back into the driver's seat, where you're drawn to peer voyeuristically at the upholstery for blood-stains or to try to imagine the position of the driver in the resulting mess of crumpled steel, splintered plastic and shattered glass ... more interesting still is the work of Gabriel Orozco, whose La DS (1993) consists of a Citroën DS, split down the middle, with a large portion of the centre of the car removed and the remaining sections re-stitched together to form a disturbingly slimmed-down model, an absurd sleek monopod ... that Orozco should effect this assault upon the body of this déesse, this fetishised classic of French postwar car design, already points to a questioning of the cult of the automobile, this need to slim down an increasingly obese, commodity-driven culture - this violence of the cut, the evacuation of the in-between - and this cut is also a line, a line which cuts and crosses, becomes a political line, so that the DS, Orozco insists, is also a drawing ...
waking again in another darkened room, no longer that oppressive heat and he knew that the summer would soon be over ... outside, the constant hum of London traffic, unvarying throughout the night ... he thought that every city must have its own pulse, its characteristic rhythm, its constitution ... to walk its streets is to become enmeshed within its urban flesh, within the Soft City of Jonathan Raban, "a city built around the physical and psychological terrains mapped out by its inhabitants ..." ... where to walk, to spin a web, is to generate that city ... Orozco speaks of sculpture in terms of a need to "activate the space between the sign and the spectator", arguing that it is within that space that the sculpture happens, in this interaction between the object and the viewer ... so that, for Orozco, sculpture essentially involves social space and its aim is to transform the way in which the viewer perceives reality
he thought of the urban strolls or paseos of the Belgian artist Francis Al˙s, performances recorded in photographs of figures viewed from behind, endlessly pacing anonymous city streets ... of Al˙s dragging a metallic dog through the streets of Mexico City in 1991, attracting every piece of metallic detritus in his path ... for Al˙s Mexico city is "the pure present" - no room for nostalgia - where to walk its streets entails "taking part in a constant realignment of forces, accepting a particular code of conduct" ... or again, wandering through Havana in 1994 wearing absurd magnetic shoes, like some urban spaceman invoking the power of magnetism to hold him onto the earth, to prevent him floating off into the air and drifting away ... that mysterious power of magnets which we could trace back to Mesmer and his animal magnetism, curing the neurasthenic elite of European society with his celebrated tubs of magnetised water and iron filings ... Al˙s' work courts the aleatory, the transient, the overlooked encounter within the tangle of urban networks ... in The Loop (1997) he travelled across the Mexico-US border from Tijuanana to San Diego, but in a wild diversion which took him around the world ... it is work, too, which functions through narrative, the need to tell a story, an anecdote, in the simplest manner possible ... and where the anecdote functions as the fundamental unit in the tangle of threads which constitute our social existence, where the anecdotal is always denigrated by institutional power, so that the resulting work is necessarily both social and political ...
waking again he thought of the deserted nightime streets of Paris, of the surrealists' nocturnal walks and of the situationist dérive, strolling against the grain of the city, finding one's way using the map of a different city, becoming lost ... in the loser/the winner (1998) Al˙s traces a path across Stockholm wearing a sweater which progressively unravels, leaving behind a material trace of his trajectory, recalling that of Theseus who follows Ariadne's thread in order to escape from the labyrinth of the Minotaur ... in two small paintings forming part of the resulting installation, a tall figure in a blue sweater strolls through a dark forest ... while on the accompanying postcard documenting Al˙s' journey, the typed inscription reads: "Here is a fairy tale for you, Which is just as good as true, What unfolds will give you passion, Castles on hills and also treason, How, from his cape a fatal thread, To her window the villains led" ... so that we are returned once more to the level of children fearful of the dark, like Hansel and Gretel lost in a wood, anxious that we should again find our way home, spinning out a thread of breadcrumbs, a line which - without our knowing it - is continually erased by the following birds ...
Paris-London, August 2002.
Notes:
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, London: Harvill Press, 1998.
"Jason Rhoades talks about his Impala Project", Artforum International, September 1998.
Gabriel Orozco (exh. cat.), Kunsthalle Zürich/ICA London, 1996.
Gabriel Orozco, Clinton is Innocent (exh. cat.), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1998.
David Torres, Francis Al˙s, simple passant', Art Press (France) no.263, December 2000.
Carlos Basualdo, "Head to toes: Francis Al˙s's paths to resistance", Artforum International, April 1999.
|
 |
hier kannst du Kommentare zum artikel abgeben
 |
 |
musik |
 |
literatur |
 |
film |
 |
theater |
 |
neue medien |
|
 |
|
|
|
top
