The poetics of space

Tagged along this weekend on one of Paul Carey-Kent’s art walks – which are always exhaustive and exhausting (but in a good way) – on this occasion around some of the West End galleries. Paul’s encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary art and his personal Baedeker of London galleries ensure that his walks are full of surprises; there are always new artists to discover and secret galleries, often hole-in-the-wall locations without a sign or a window to the street, like the speakeasies of old.

I especially want to talk about two shows we visited which are currently on at Hauser & Wirth’s two London outposts, and which focus (very differently) on space. As readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I am a huge fan of Gaston Bachelard, whose theories of how to consider space in poetry, how to “read” a room, both emotionally and contextually, have influenced my ideas of how a poem should occupy the space of the page. I am currently working on a sequence of ‘concrete’ poems to accompany a new sequence of woodcuts by Linda Karshan; it’s the first time I have consciously tried to work the poem into a predetermined shape (which has been dictated by the size and scale of the woodcuts) so this issue is very much in my mind at the moment.

Phyllida Barlow’s sculptures occupy the whole of H&W’s Piccadilly site. I should mention that the building is one of my favourite art spaces in London because it was once the headquarters for a bank, and so it retains the ornate wood panelling, the elaborate plaster ceilings, and in the basement, the actual vault. It follows Bachelard’s theory that certain spaces retain their past, a “geometry of echoes”, as he puts it. There is something austere and old-fashioned about the space that effects the work that is shown there. When you walk through the door of the gallery, you are immediately confronted by a series of tall structures: styrofoam blocks covered with colourful fabrics, which give the impression of square flags, teetering on wooden stilts sunk into blobs of concrete. Strange totemic towers, which are formal (and therefore match the formality of their setting) yet appear to be constructed from junk (Barlow is famous for recycling her materials, using bits of other sculptures she has scrapped to make new ones). They look like objects which might have had some function or meaning, now lost in the passage of time. I found these structures moving; perhaps because they appear handmade, a bit precarious, as if they might topple any minute. I felt small surrounded by them; they crowded me, it was hard to navigate around them. Barlow talks about ‘sensations of physicality’, an effort to capture the urban experience ‘like something wild or feral.’ And all contained in that slightly stuffy , officious space. The other piece that really made an impression on me was in the (scary) basement, a grouping of plywood and cement hoops, like a crowd huddled in the doorway. Barlow’s sculptures are like three-dimensional versions of Prunella Clough’s paintings (full of the detritus of urban life). There is something poignant and intimate about all of us (city dwellers, that is) squeezed together into these man-made spaces.

Down the road at Hauser & Wirth’s Saville Row site, a huge pristine cube of a space, were Roni Horn’s new sculptures, ten discs of “solid cast glass with as-cast surfaces on all sides (fire-polished top)”. The media is a poem in itself. They are beautiful, inscrutable structures, like rounded blocks of ice, cold and perfect, apart from the scarred sides, which show the viewer the cast of their making. They are isolated, distanced from each other in the enormous empty room. Their glassy tops are pools, circles of nothing, still and impassive. Bending over one to find myself reflected in its surface, I was reminded of the Sylvia Plath poem ‘Mirror’:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful –

The eye of a little god …

But there is another literary association attached to the work which had us puzzled. Although the piece is untitled, its ‘subtitle’ is an excerpt from a letter (which may be from Anne?) relating the story of a “nasty-looking” comb that belonged to Emily Brontë. The comb accidently fell into the fire the moment Emily died and was retrieved by Charlotte: “There it is to this day, a bit burnt. One of the most horrible things I ever saw”. So how does this emotional, dramatic account relate to these cool, controlled sculptures? I’m still puzzled, but what strikes me is how those glass discs are ‘sealed’, solid, as if they are preserving something inside that we can’t see (only the reflection of ourselves on the surface). So maybe both the letter and the sculptures themselves tell us something about the act of preservation. I’m still trying to work through it.

One thing I do know is that both Barlow and Horn have a deep connection to poetry. Barlow is married to the poet Fabian Peake (their daughter Clover is also a poet). Horn is a fan of Dickinson and Stevens; both poets have been referenced in her work. A connection between them, and back, once again, to Bachelard.

Paul Carey-Kent's blog: http://paulsartworld.blogspot.com/)

Hauser and Wirth: http://www.hauserwirth.com/

Rain, steam and speed

For those of you who have been following Invective since the beginning, you may be surprised by my choice of image today. Yes, I’ve given you Peter Lanyon and Prunella Clough, who, although they are very different painters, both represent a particularly British way of looking at landscape – which is at once modern and complex, and driven by internal as well as external forces. Both of them wanted to celebrate the landscapes they loved: for Lanyon, the West Penwith coast; for Clough, the brown field sights of South London and Essex. But neither one of them could have painted the way they did without Turner. Not to say that Turner was a direct influence, but it was Turner whose ground-breaking style (if that’s not too much of a pun when talking about landscape painting) gave them permission. Rain, Steam and Speed is one of Turner’s most extraordinary images, and for me it represents the moment when the industrial meets the pastoral (like in Hardy’s novels, or Wordworth’s poems). Andrew Graham-Dixon says of this picture: 

The train was not just a contraption which moved Turner from place to place more quickly than ever before. It moved him emotionally. It made him see the world as never before. He put this into the very style of his picture, conjuring up effects of blur and rush to celebrate a new speeded up vision. Turner had looked the future full in the face. He had found it beautiful. He had found it exhilarating.

I have stood in front of this painting many times and felt moved, not just by the sensation of speed Turner is able to evoke, but moved emotionally. It’s an odd feeling to be moved by a painting, and it is difficult to say why. Something about a particular arrangement of shape and colour and line. The same way a poem affects you when you don’t always understand its meaning, but the language and imagery strike something subconscious.

The poem that follows (which was published in my last collection, Fetch) is directly inspired by not only Turner’s painting, but the experience of standing in front of it in the National Gallery and being moved, and then watching other people standing in front of it perhaps experiencing the same transformation. I’m a fan of Andreas Gursky’s large-scale photographs observing crowds of people in galleries, and I wanted to capture something of that collective experience of looking at art in a public place (while undergoing some private emotion).

I’m off to Tate Britain in a little while, and although I am not going for the Turners, I feel I will have to call in on them while I’m there, just to say hello.

Portrait of a Couple Looking at a Turner Landscape

They stand, not quite touching,

before a world after storm.

There are drops of moisture in her hair,

in his scarf

                 the colour of a gentler sea, his eyes,

while trains depart every minute, steaming

into the future, where the hills

unroll themselves,

vast plains of emerald and gold

            (she undressed for him, slowly,

             her skin like cloud under dark layers)

after rooms of Rubens and Fragonard, flesh dead

against old brocade

                                (their flesh alive in the white sheets).

There are trains departing.

                                        When they part

it will be night, outside a theatre, near the station,

        and the sky will be blown with stars,

too dim to see in the glare of neon.

They will stand on concrete and asphalt,

                                    the innocent shining sands

lost. The world tilts to meet her face,

he holds her face close

           and something closes in on them,

the weight of silence in the street,

the winter horizon, bright, huge,

the moment before

                                 the sky opens and it pours.

Prunella Clough, part two

Here is a poem about Prunella Clough’s work. The title is a phrase from an article by Margaret Drabble which appeared recently in Tate Magazine. It perfectly describes the emotional tone of the paintings.

The Sadness of the Scrapyard

A plastic arm, tiny fingers grasping
nothing. One shoe, the other
long missing. No attachments

in this corrugated space,
this ochre mound of loss
where things shed their colours.

To love the scraggy ends
is to love everything;
our heaven’s a slab of ruin,

broken glass and scrap
piercing skin, heralding
rusty blood, cloudy courage.

What is hard we’ll soften
with our shapes, what we see
indefinable in the heap

but still something gleams
even when all around us
is asleep.

Prunella Clough, the poet's painter?

I’ve been wondering why Prunella Clough isn’t more famous, or at least as famous as some of her male contemporaries, such as John Piper and Frank Auerbach. Is it because she was a woman? Her subject matter was anything but ‘feminine’: dockyards and quarries, building sites and scrap yards. Like Auerbach, she painted the post-war industrial wastelands of Britain and was fascinated by their by-products: corrugated metal, concrete, tangled wire. But these were never figurative representations like the American murals of the WPA artists a generation before. David Sylvester wrote of her work: 'the subjects are those of a social realist; the paintings are private and abstract.’ It’s as if these disused spaces became a way of expressing something internal; although many of the late landscapes were emptied of people, they were always places where human industry had once occurred. And although she had a life-long attraction to East Anglia, she was essentially an urban painter, a London painter, trawling unloved corners of Battersea and Wandsworth for inspiration. She was interested in patterns and forms, grids and blocks, which were almost always man-made, but also accidental in the wearing down or tearing up of things.

This interest in pattern and form is what should attract poets to her. There are certain painters who are beloved of poets, such as Bonnard and Hopper and Rothko. Perhaps Clough’s work is too spiky, too mysterious in comparison, not beautiful enough? But I would argue that she is able to transform the drab and common into something miraculous (isn’t that what poets do too?). She is attempting to get us to look more closely, to observe with our eyes and minds. And she often recorded the experience of 'looking’ initially in words rather than sketches before embarking on a painting; she made notes on all her paintings, right down to colour combinations and ideas for what she wished to achieve. She did write poetry – I have no idea if any of her poems are in print – but I can imagine they are small but full of intricate detail.

Frances Spalding’s book on Clough is due to be published early next year. Can’t wait …