Baselines

As a poet, I am always interested in what artists do with text, and how, once fixed in a piece, if that text retains / contains meaning, or if meaning is obscured in some way, or lost completely. At Basel this year (my first outing to the annual art fair), there were a number of artists playing with notions of found text / collage. In the first of a series of posts on the fair, I want to focus on the humble postcard – a source for several artists.

Roman Ondak is an artist concerned with process and record. I remember experiencing his installation at Tate St Ives some years ago, where he asked visitors to mark their height on the gallery wall with a pencil, then write their name and the date. The wall became an abstract drawing, a fluctuating line that looked like a tide marker (appropriate situated next to the sea). In his new piece, Messages, shown at Basel by Galerie Martin Janda, Ondak has taken a series of postcards, and redacted the writing with a sweep of heavy dark acrylic, leaving just a tantalising unreadable mass. The dark blocks are (again) like a tide consuming the text, something solid, oppressive – a tumour, a tomb. By choosing to show the cards text-side up, and then obliterating the greetings, we are left not knowing what the image is on the other side, or what the sender wanted to say about it. We are given clues – sometimes the printed text at the top reveals the location, and Ondak has preserved the stamps (I see him as a bit of a closet stamp collector); we can see all the cards shown in this selection originated in America – and weren’t sent yesterday. So notions of time, and how the past is obliterated, enter into the piece.

Zoe Leonard is an artist who is new to me, but looking at her other work online, she is predominantly interested in photography, exploring a theme exhaustively through a series of pictures, found and then pinned to the gallery wall. In her installation, The Gorge, on the Hauser and Wirth stand, she presents 240 postcards, all depicting a single location, the Gorge at Niagara Falls. Like Ondak’s cards, these are the kind you find stacked in boxes in antique shops, the senders and recipients long dead (and because the cards are presented face-out, we can only guess if they have been written on).

There is something both obsessive and detailed about looking at a whole wall of these, the cards often showing the same image, a body of water swirling towards a central whirlpool, like someone has pulled the plug in a bathtub. The textual element comes in the identification of the site – the font suggesting the cards are from the 50s and 60s (in addition to their faded quality). Niagara, of course, is famous as a honeymoon destination, a place of natural beauty, a tourist attraction. It sits on the border of two countries, America and Canada. It is the site of hydroelectric plants that provide power for both nations. Blondin the magician walked across the falls on a tightrope, carrying his manager on his shoulders. Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotton starred in the eponymous film, the strapline for which was “a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control”. But there is something in the repetition that quells the torrent, creates a sense of boredom, flattens the drama.

The Portuguese artist Carla Cabanas, showing at the Carlos Carvaho Gallery, takes a different approach. Her postcards become sculptures, mounted (so that the viewer can see both sides) inside a perspex box. The handwriting on each card has been carefully sliced away, letter by letter, allowing the cut-out letters to fall onto the box’s white floor. The scattered cuttings suggest some kind of damage, as if a letter-eating worm has attacked the browned surface (as with the other artists, Cabanas chooses antique postcards). Or perhaps they are a kind of extension of the image; one card depicts a little cabin at the foot of white-capped mountain, the letters like a snow drift. Although this ‘letter slicing’ preserves the text, it is still difficult to read; but I think it’s Cabanas’s way of tracing the hand that wrote the card, repeating the slow and deliberate action of writing, becoming the sender, speaking another voice.

What all three artists create with their found postcards is stasis – these rectangular vistas, written in one place and sent to another, are now halted, made into something else. The messages they transmitted have been hidden, so they are no longer vehicles of communication – just the opposite. Still, we understand what they mean, how we send them to people who are absent, with the familiar ‘wish you were here.’

A little train

If concrete poetry is a form which confounds the reader’s sense of meaning, then perhaps it is easier to think of it not as poetry – something which can be read and (eventually, in the case of some poems) understood – but as an arrangement of letters and sometimes words which pleases the eye simply in its presentation of forms and shapes. Ian Hamilton Finlay believed that concrete poetry is voiceless, not meant to be spoken.

I was thinking of this when entering the recent exhibition of Mira Schendel’s work at Hauser and Wirth. The creation of her monotypes was occasioned by the gift of a ream of Japanese rice paper, so fine and thin that Schendel wanted to exploit the difficulty of the material. But every time she tried to draw or paint on the paper, it would tear. What emerged, she said, came ‘out of chance and curiosity’. The process she adopted was to cover a glass surface with oil paint, then laying a sheet of rice paper over the top and using either her fingertips or the side of her hand she would create shapes. What we get feels handmade because it is – the hand being the tool employed, rather than a brush or pen.

Like Gego, Schendel came to South America from Europe. Words and phrases enter the work in multiple languages. She was inspired too by Stockhausen and his Song of the Youths which took texts from the Book of Daniel. These fragmented and layered languages and texts might give the impression of many voices at once. Laid out in the gallery in a stretch of cases along the walls, the reflections of West End buildings also merged with the frail marks, to give the impression of birds taking off into the air.

Schendel wants us to associate these drawings with movement. Sometimes she lifts the sheets out of the cases and suspends them from wires, as in the sculptural piece Trenzinho / Little Train, a train moving through an imaginary landscape, a train of thought, a flimsy sheet of paper trained to become something more than itself. But ‘little’ keeps us focused on the scale, thinking about the artist stringing these sheets herself, no higher than her body can reach; the intimacy of the hand. Hand made.

Schendel liked the fact we can see through the paper, so that each drawing, whether laid flat or strung along in air, is itself, but also what we can see through it. The drawings in the cases and their reflected city in the glass providing us with a double view, but also the illusion of something reflective rather than transparent – pick a sheet up our of its case, and we would see our own hand through it.

I followed Schendel’s train out of my own city, and to another – Edinburgh – where her work is part of a group show of South American constructivists. Her disk of letters, like the monotypes, stems from the idea of ‘seeing through something’, how that expression really means gaining the truth by exposing the artifice; but Schendel subverts that by asking us to ‘read’ a text that isn’t fixed, that dances in the air and is transparent.

I love being confounded by her wor(l)d.

Naked if I want to

In a 2008 issue of Cabinet magazine, Alan Jacobs writes of the connection between nudity and shame, beginning with Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/jacobs.php. He concludes that even the strategically placed fig leaf is not enough to protect us from ‘exposure’:

Exposure cannot really be undone; what is revealed remains, in memory and image, even after it has been re-hidden. The words of the man and woman are transparently evasive. Likewise, the fig leaves merely call attention to what they are meant to hide, and in fact are another kind of evasion, another way of passing the blame, this time not to a creature or Being but to a part of the body, as though the sexual organs acted of their own accord — even though sexuality clearly plays no part in the story, in either its prohibitions or its rebellions.

In 1912, the artist Egon Schiele was arrested for sexually abusing a young girl. At the time, Schiele was painting striking portraits of some of Neulengbach’s local children, most of whom were poor and virtually homeless, and Schiele gave them shelter and a sense of purpose; this enraged the local bourgeoisie. When the police arrived at his studio to arrest him, they also seized a number of ‘pornographic’ drawings. Although the charges of sexual abuse were dropped, the judge found the artist guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings, one of which he burned publicly in front of the assembled courtroom. Schiele was imprisoned for a month.

What the good people of Neulengbach really objected to was an artist who flagrantly depicted not simply the body, but its sexual organs, the part that is to blame for our sins. Schiele’s nudes are posed so that we see them from the feet upwards, as if we are crouched over them, their faces furthest from us, sometimes hidden or cropped from the drawing, so we are forced to focus on their centres of desire. They open their legs, finger their vulvas, so that we might see inside the ‘secret cave’, as John Updike said in a piece for the Schiele show at MoMA in 1997; they are not so much exposed as laid bare.

Six years after his brief imprisonment, Schiele would die at the age of 28 after contracting Spanish flu. Nearly 100 years on, his drawings are acceptable to polite society; in the pampered halls of the Courtauld, where they are currently on show, they are viewed by well-healed elderly ladies in cashmere twin sets. Of course at the beginning of the 21st century we are nearly blinded by the easy pornography that is just a mouse click away.

So they have lost the power to feel illicit; have they lost the power to shock? Compared to Paul McCarthy’s new paintings on display just a few miles away at Hauser and Wirth, they are pretty tame. McCarthy uses photographic images from hardcore porn, which are superimposed onto paintings of figures engaging in extreme sexual acts. His palette captures the stained hues of bodily fluids. Hauser and Wirth have blacked out the huge glass windows that face gentile Saville Row, so that entering the gallery is like entering an adult shop in Soho. McCarthy wants us to be shocked, disgusted. The paintings are ugly, his figures are grotesque. This has always been one of his motives as an artist, to present the body as a hideous object, ejecting foul liquids and odors.

But this is not Schiele’s aim. His palette often suggests bruised flesh or blood, but this is the body electric, to quote Whitman, the soul firing the skin from within. There is love in Schiele’s portraits, sexual love, but also something more – a respect for the living, breathing, procreating figure. There is also pain; the body is twisted, bent into tortured shapes. When we do catch a glimpse of a face, the expression often betrays this pain. Schiele depicts himself so often as a Christ figure, his arms outstretched, his gaunt body splayed open. His work was misunderstood, derided, burnt in public – it is not surprising he made this connection.

Somehow, even in pain and discomfort, he manages to convey beauty. It’s difficult to say why; perhaps it’s empathy; we are also naked under our clothes; our carefully constructed outer layers do not betray what’s beneath, the secret cave, the dark core, not only of our bodies, but of our emotional terrain.