Original Version
Version 1
Version 2
To see other pages from this project please click here.
Art, Writing and Research
Continuing from what I was discussing yesterday (see Humument), I decided to make a start on my own ‘Humument’ by reading the first page of Pilgrms of the Wild by Grey Owl, using the text to describe something about the moment in which I was reading it. Given the snow and the freezing conditions outside, I was surprised at what I came up with, and very pleased with the result. The image below shows the original pages with my amended version below:
It goes to show how this technique can lead to unexpected, and in this case, rather beautiful results. I would never have thought before of describing snow as ‘water sleep’, but as my eyes scanned the page, the combination of words lept out at me.
My plan is to rework a page a day – not necessarily every day – and to rework the same pages with the Diary of Adam Czerniakow in mind.
In January this year, I used words from two seemingly unrelated books to create an installation in Shotover Country Park as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. The piece was called The Woods, Breathing, the title coming from an entry in the diary of Adam Czerniakow, who was ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto up until his death in 1942.
In his diary, on January 19th 1940, Czerniakow describes a book he’d read, of which, he wrote: ‘The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.’ The book was Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl, and his comment is especially poignant given the horrors of the time in which he was living. It’s as if in the book, he found the freedom he craved, freedom which vanished as soon as the book was closed. The previous year, a few months after the start of the Nazi Occupation, he wrote how he was ‘constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times.’ There is a sense then, when he describes Pilgrims of the Wild that he is also envying the author, Grey Owl.
I’ve always seen Grey Owl’s book as a map, as in many respects all books are, maps through fictional landscapes, half conjured up in the minds of the author and his or her readers. Having read Czerniakow’s diary, reading Pilgrims of the Wild bought me closer, not only to him but to the time in which he was living, as if reading the book was a shared experience; as if we were walking through the same landscape, emerging at the end in very different places. That is not to say of course that reading the book enabled me to understand what it was like to live in those terrible times – nothing can ever do that. But by reading the words he would have read, it was as if I was following in his footsteps.
Looking up from the page, gazing out the window at the sky made me consider the present, the moment in time in which I was living. The sky was that of the book’s landscape, and that which Czerniakow would have seen outside his own window. We must remember, although it seems quite obvious, that the past too was once the present. By understanding this, we can begin to find indviduals lost to the pages of history. We don’t know what it’s like to experience the horrors of Nazi persecution, but reading the book beomes a shared experience, both mentally and kinaesthetically. It is an everyday activity, which opens up a crack through which we can glimpse the past.
Tom Phillips’ ‘treated Victorian novel’ – A Humument – (a page from which is pictured above) has always interested me; the technique of taking a text and changing it to make something entirely new is appealing for a number of different reasons. Every conversation we have, letter we write or note we take borrows from conversations, letters and notes spoken and written over the course of centuries (depending of course on how long the language has been used). Similarly the way we move, whether walking, sitting, standing or reading, borrows from the ways people have moved, again over the course of many hundreds, if not thousands of years. For me, Tom Phillip’s technique as used in The Humument articulates this. It’s as if we’re in the same landscape created by the original work (A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, first published in 1892) and yet are making our way through it in an entirely different way, as if the words are breadcrumbs on a trail, most of which have long since vanished.
As we walk down streets today, across parks, or through woods, we find ourselves within the same place as those who walked there a hundred, two hundred, maybe three hundred years before. We use the same words, we move the same way, but find ourselves interpretating the place quite differently. But it is the same place.
I want to useTom Phillips’ technique and create a new work from Pilgrims of the Wild, a page from which can be seen below; a work that articulates both my time of reading the book and that of Czerniakow’s.
When I told people that I would be installing almost 200 markers in Shotover Woods as part of a Holocaust Memorial Day project (The Woods, Breathing), many said the markers wouldn’t stay there long. I however, believing that people – even if they didn’t like the work – would at least respect it, put them in anyway. Besides, I believed the work was powerful, using the act of walking through woods as a means of identifying in a very small way with those who suffered during the Holocaust. And, furthermore, I believe anything which attempts to engage people with something like the Holocaust is worth pursuing. However, within one hour of completing the installation, 3 had already been stolen and over the coming days, the labels were turning up in small piles along with the stands. Clearly there were two different types of vandals at work; those who stole or threw the stands into the undergrowth, and those who were at least a little more considerate. I could almost imagine these methodical vandals as they made their small piles, saying to themselves (and indeed to me) “not here thank you.”
I have made work like this before in public spaces in the city centre. In one work (‘Murder‘) I installed 200 stands in a cemetery in Jericho, a place frequented by drinkers and rough sleepers. Not one of the stands was stolen and only one label was lost. If anything, from my experience, those we might often think of as being on the ‘fringes’ of society are often the most interested. Sadly the same can’t be said of others.
Today I went up to Shotover to take what was left away and found that since my last visit a great many more of the stands had been taken; almost 80 out of the 198 had been removed (at £5 each this is quite a loss) . Furthermore, someone had taken the time to scrawl messages onto some of the labels having clearly not bothered to learn what the work was about.
This vandalism was not I believe anything to do with its theme (the Holocaust) but rather an expression of petty narrow-mindedness. Someone who enjoyed the woods, someone who obviously walks through them regularly objected to ‘their walk’ being changed these last few days. One label they defaced is quite revealing:
This work is all about freedom; something denied to so many not only during the Holocaust but in countless times and places, both before and since. Yet all this individual can do with his or her freedom is scrawl remarks and obscenities, to deface a work which aims to remember those for whom freedom was denied as was, in the end, the right to life itself.
Looking at the vandalism by this particular individual, it’s clear they didn’t understand what the work was about. They seemed to think that I was a girl…
…who’d written nice words about the wood. The word civilization on one of the labels and what they wrote beneath is testament to this. What they wrote is also somewhat ironic.
I was on the radio this morning to talk about my forthcoming installation at Shotover Country Park.
Details of the installation can be found by clicking on the image below.
This evening I began working on an idea I’ve had for a while which incorporates the World War 1 postcards I was given by Tom Phillips. The idea was to show these postcards on a wall but with only a few the right way round i.e. showing the portrait (they are all portrait postcards of soldiers, most individual, some with other people). The rest would be displayed reversed showing either writing or, as is mostly the case, nothing – they would just be blank. I wasn’t sure how this would look and so I began putting the postcards up on my bedroom wall and fairly quickly I could see that the postcards, displayed in this way had an impact.
There was something about the blank postcards which was particularly resonant and the more I looked, the more I could see what it was that leant them this quality. On most of the blank postcards there is a motif running down the centre of the card (dividing the address from the text). These lines are of various designs, some very simple, others more elaborate. I decided to scan a few which can be found below.
For me these motifs have something of the grave about them, perhaps because they are each shaped a little like a crucifix, and they reminded me of some of the memorials I had seen in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
And as I started making connections, I thought of the X paintings and those I discussed in a previous entry – Black Mirrors and thought about how these marks could be incorporated into a work just like the symbol of the ‘X’.
I also thought how these various motifs/symbols resembled the botanic labels I’ve had made, each engraved with the name of one of my ancestors such as that of Henry Jones (below).
And finally, one last connection between the motifs and a work I made in November 2006, soon after a visit made to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Having worked some more on what I have come to call my ‘X’ paintings, I realised there was something interesting in the contrast between the rough, physical paintwork, and the crosses marked on the canvas in pencil, which appear almost spoken by comparison. Perhaps this contrast was all the more appreciable after what I’d written earlier in the day regarding the suicide of my great-great-grandfather.
The crosses, barely distinguishable in the scraped and painterly landscape call to mind how nature can overwhelm us; not only in its beauty and its tempests, but in its age, which, in many respects, is as much a storm as any hurricane. At the moment of death, the world ceases to exist, as if all the storms of a lifetime are condensed into a dying breath. In this reversed storm, the living stand outside in the eye, whilst the dead are collapsed like shacks; stars imploding at the centre of the universe. And the ‘X’ becomes a marker on the landscape, of what was once but is no more; an absence marked by a presence.
How does a man who cannot write his name, leave his farewells as he contemplates the taking of his own life? The repeated mark-making of Xs on the canvas call to mind my drawings of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, having considered my own non-existence (death), I was through the act of drawing confirming my life and my existence. I was also, through the rapidity of the drawing, trying to capture the present – the moment; the gap between the past and the future, the interval of the shutter’s release.
The Xs on the canvas therefore are in some ways like these drawings; they are confirmations of existence, not of many people, but of one person.
Recalling how these paintings began, as images concerned with Jonah Rogers, my great-great-uncle, I looked again at the landscape which inspired them – or at least the photographs of this landscape.
Jonah Rogers was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres, and the white of the buildings amongst the vivid green of the landscape called to mind the white gravestones of military cemeteries.
They also reminded me of another project on which I am working: Deckchairs, and it is with deckchairs that I am turning to again a regards my painting of this subject, using them as canvases. Having placed them on the wall of my studio, the effect they had was strong. They seem to become instant memorials, their shape and their very essence denoting the human, or in this instance, presence through absence.
Whilst reading the Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (edited by Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz) I came across the following two entries:
“December 26, 1939- Wawrzecki’s death, no sleep all night. Disturbing thoughts about the new gzajrach in January (emigration) and about the complaints of ill treatment which I have no power to remedy. At night I read a lot, constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times. I am about ready to go to the Community offices. Walking down the staircase I notice on the doors of the second-floor apartments that visiting cards, naturally ‘Aryan,’ now serve as amulets. A special charge for delivering coal [to wearers of] the armbands. Deianira’s coat. Jugs of cherry brandy. A. Rotwand, Wasong (Christians of Jewish descent). It is reported to me in the evening that one of the workers from the Labor Battalion has been arrested (a section leader?). Later Mrs. Rotstadt about her husband. I will be going to the Gestapo in this matter tomorrow morning. Pawel was robbed.”
“January 19, 1940- The community in the morning. Families of the arrested. A meeting of the Council. I issued instructions. During the night I read a novel, ‘The Pilgrims of the Forest’ – Grey Owl – Szara Sowa. The forest, little wild animals – a vertiable Eden. Lichenbaum is told: ‘Sie wollen unsere Sachen nicht kaput machen‘.”
What I found so interesting and indeed poignant about these two entries was how Czerniakow had become envious of the fiction he was reading, how the escape afforded by a book (which is of course there for all who read) was almost too much to bear in light of the dreadful reality in which he lived. He wanted to escape, but the text of the book kept him out; I’m thinking here of the work I did on ‘The Gate – The Ordinary Language of Freedom‘, in which the text of history keeps us from seeing the reality of that which it describes. To paraphrase Elie Wiesel’s words (himself a Holocaust survivor) we can move ‘closer to the gate but not inside, because we can’t go inside, but that’s close enough.’ I can’t help see Czerniakow at such a gate, beyond which is the veritable Eden he found in ‘Pilgrims of the Forest.’ He too could move closer, but not inside.
This appalling reality which Czerniakow and the Jews faced at the time is well known – or at least, well documented, but what the diary reveals is how the Nazi machine ground down its victims over a long period of time; heaping upon them punitive laws and levels of bureaucracy which would have broken anyone. The fact that Czerniakow continued for as long as he did says a lot about the man he was. It also calls to mind thoughts I had on the Holocaust a while back in relation to a document discussed in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (a document discussed by the editor of this book Raul Hilberg). You can read about Fahrplananordnung 587 here.
Returning to the book which Czerniakow was reading in January 1940 (which is actually titled Pilgrims of the Wild), I found a 1935 edition which I recently bought.
I’m not sure what I’ll do with the work, but to read the same words (I’m not sure whether he read the English or whether there was a Polish edition) about the freedom denied him and all those in the community, would I think be interesting and another way in to a very difficult subject.
Today I made what one might term an ‘intervention’ in the Larkin Room of St. John’s College as part of the Travel and Trauma Colloquium which is being held there today and tomorrow. The work has been written across two large glass doors and throughout the day I’ve been reflecting on its meaning in light of answers I have given to questions posed by delegates and also in light of the papers delivered as part of the colloquium.
When I started to create the work in the morning, the weather was beautiful; blue sky, sun – a perfect Spring morning. Yet very quickly the day changed and as I was writing about the bad weather on 26th March (that being the day on which I wrote the text: see Work in Progress – The Gate) so the heavens opened and the rain (and hail) began to fall. And at once I began to think about the weather and history (as you do). History (with a capital ‘H’) is of course full of accounts of bad weather (storms, droughts and so on) but what one doesn’t read (for perfectly understandable reasons) is accounts of average or day-to-day weather conditions in relation to less than average events. There are of course numerous historical exceptions to this, such as in the diaries of Samuel Pepys whose accounts of the weather serve to bring the seventeenth century alive, but as the rain fell, just as it had over two weeks ago, I began to wonder what the weather was like at times of less than average – great – historical events. In my text I wrote:
“It’s stopped. The rain, but all around, the colours are by a few degrees darker.”
And I wondered, how were colours similarly changed in the past?
I was talking with a delegate about how it is such small things which tell us the most about the past, and knowing how the weather was on certain notable days in history would help paint a better picture of the past. There isn’t much weather in history, some yes, but there should be more! Anyway I digress… suffice to say, what the similarity in the weather showed me, was how from year to year, century to century, rain is always rain, sun is always sun. They both come and go along with fog and snow. They help fill in the outlines of facts with colour (the outlines in my case were the words I was writing).
Going back a moment, to Wednesday when I typed up the transcript (the text of what I had written on 26th March) I found the version I was typing was almost a dreamlike replica of the actual event. It was very different to remembering the event, for the remembered event doesn’t follow the same temporal pattern as the memory inspired by the typed text. The memory (not that inspired by the text) of that time is limited to a few images which blur and blend together to create an homogenous view of the hour I spent in the Larkin Room; on remembering it, I have by no means the sense of any linear time. Writing it out word for word however was like re-living that moment, but time was changed to the time it took me to type it up again; the hour became more like two – but it was linear all the same.
After a few of the speakers had delivered their papers I began to consider what I could see as a connection between tourism and history. One of the questions raised in the colloquium was why we are tourists? (The question emerged from a discussion about 19th century tourists but it still holds today) What are we doing when we visit other places? One of the answers which emerged was that we are somehow comparing the places we are visiting with that from which we’re from, usually unfavourably. We go away in order to return grateful for what we have, we travel, in part, to confirm that where we live is better. Of course this by no means universal – far from it, but travel often augments are sense of home.
As I wrote in my introduction to the project, for me, it’s the individual tourist’s resolution of a disquiet resulting from a shift in the status of a place – the act of leaving or being able to leave – which in some respects makes such places popular today (heightening as they do our sense of existence, of life).” Just as we return from our holidays with a heightened sense of home, so we return from the camps with a heightened sense of life.
We are I believe, in History, tourists of the past. History is a place, a foreign country which we can visit and leave. It goes without saying that those in the past cannot. When we write or read about the past, we are making our own barbed-wire fence to keep the past in. We look as Wiesel says but go no further. We observe but cannot participate, we see from a distance. The barbed wire keeps us out just as it keeps the past in. But as I have written lately in regard to another project (Umbilical Light), to read history, to know it properly – to understand it – necessitates our own non-existence, we have to tear down the wire and enter the past into which we must then dissolve like smoke in a grey sky. The text of history books is therefore an armature by which we are shaped, it makes us the living and those behind the dead. But what about the not-yet-born? Are they also to be found behind the text, or like the dead within the words itself? As I have already written, “to know it properly necessitates our own non-existence” and in our conscious minds that becomes the very image of death. Does that not mean therefore that we exist amongst them?
As one can see, the creation of this work today in the context of the colloquium has thrown up many more questions. But to summarise… the historical text in respect to trauma acts as a fence to keep that trauma at bay, we can read of the trauma in words and glimpse a world behind them, but as when one reads the words on the window, we cannot see the world very clearly. If we focus on the world behind, we lose sight of the text, of the past. Standing in Auschwitz-Birkenau I could of course see the world as it is now, but the words I had read seemed vague, I could not correlate the two – my mind simply couldn’t conceive it. And now, when I return to the words, my memory of the place in which I’d stood is vague, as vague perhaps as the images I have of the past and all its traumatic events. I have gone to the gate but no further.
The project I am working on for the Travel and Trauma (Dark Tourism) conference (11-12th April) is now – in light of Elie Wiesel’s comments regarding the Holocaust’s visual representation – called The Gate. I shall be writing on the windows of the Larkin Room at St. John’s college (see photograph below) using text I wrote whilst sitting and looking out the window for a period of one hour on 26th March 2008, between 12 and 1pm.
The text to go on the glass is as follows:
Looking outside the windows I can see the following. A modern complex straight ahead in front of which is a lawn. The bells are chiming twelve o’clock. The lawn is uneven, partly covered with weeds and daisies. To my left are a few shrubs, most bare except for the first green leaves of Spring. A small tree grows beside it and through the brambles I can see that the sky has turned dark; I expect it will rain soon, or even given the recent weather it may even snow. Beside the shrubs are a few daffodils which already seem weary. Last years leaves are mixed with the pebbles just by the bottom of the windows and the earth is peppered with acorns. Ivy grows up the exterior wall. To my right – another tree and more shrubs which are looking in a somewhat healthier state. Again a few meagre daffodils seem uncertain as to whether they should come out or not. The shrubs have been pruned here and the leaves are moving slightly in the breeze. Across the path grows a much older and larger tree – I’m not sure of the type – is it an oak? That might account for the acorns. Surrounding it is a large flower bed – more shrubs, another tree and a much larger crop of daffodils. I start to wonder about the wall; a number of people walk up the path and disappear from view from behind the concrete pillar. I can hear voices and also the rumble of traffic from town. There’s only voices and the sound of birds. I return to the wall and wonder about its provenance. How old is it? Did it mark the boundary of something? A man with glasses and a bald head walks down the path. Someone outside is coming down the stairs – there are two of them, a man and a woman. They disappear and the birds start singing again – not that they really stopped. The wall runs round the perimeter of this garden, except on one side where it has become a part of the modern building – concrete pillars, girders and glass. A small strip light is on and seems very ugly in this place. A girl walks past checking her phone. She walks without looking as if she knows this place so well she hardly needs to look – like a ghost following the trail of their lives. There are two litter bins; one is made of concrete and has a lid – the other is dark grey – plastic and much smaller. I think it must be a blackbird I can hear – much louder than any other. Next to the modern building is another – a different design and just as ugly. It’s hard to tell its age, whether it’s newer or older than that which faces me, or even that in which I am sitting. There is a long grey piece of guttering running down its entire length; I notice as I look at it that rain is beginning to fall; not as heavy as I thought it might be, just a veil of rain. Following my eyes to the left of the gutter , I find myself looking at a row of houses. From the design and the brick work I imagine that they’re nineteenth century. Strange how they seem much more human than those ahead of me and that behind which I am sitting. A girl walks past with a purple scarf and a bag – dark hair – she’s gone. A door slams somewhere behind me. In the corner of this garden (here comes the man I mentioned earlier, bald with glasses; he’s carrying a book) is another tree; strange how they seem to appear, how I didn’t notice them earlier. Another man in a short-sleeved shirt walks past. I see his reflection in the windows as he walks behind me. I think I can see a shield engraved on one of the windows ahead of me; is it the crest of the college? I can’t tell what it is – it actually looks like a cockerel. A pigeon wanders about on the grass – another tree! A silver birch sapling. I can hear footsteps and I see someone’s reflection in the window. A girl with a dark jacket, hand in pockets head bowed against the rain. I notice now, that the roof of the building straight ahead (another man in a t-shirt – then a couple, a man and a woman wearing a hood – then one carrying an umbrella) is made from what look like old tiles. Was there a building here before from which they were taken? If not, where have they come from? A bird flies across in front of me, I didn’t notice what it was. I see now that the wall around the garden is actually breached by a passage which goes somewhere – I’ve no idea where. Also, just next to the large flower bed (a man in a blue sweater walks past, his keys or something clanking with each step he takes) there is a flight of steps. They must lead to a raised pathway. The girl I mentioned earlier with the purple scarf walks across carrying a large pink bag. There are voices just outside . They greet each other? The couple – the girl with the hood and the young man walk back. An aeroplane roars overhead as another shadowed figure drenched in a wet coat walks past. More footsteps and again I cannot see where they come from. Then I see a young woman with a purple hat. Her steps echo as she walks through the passage to my right. A young man with glasses saunters past carrying a bottle of something, he walks around the lawn and down the passage I didn’t see earlier. The pigeon takes off and flies over the wall. In the windows of the building opposite I see the pale grey sky and the reflections of the older buildings. Two reflections just like ghosts appear in the glass ahead of me then disappear just like the rising tide of the traffic. And suddenly, for the first time since I sat down, I can hear the sound of a clock ticking somewhere in the room, counting of the passing time, just as the words of the those who walk around the lawn. Another aeroplane – or is it thunder? The sky is much brighter now although the rain is falling no less hard. As I speak however it starts to come down harder. I can hear it now, before it fell and didn’t make a sound. Now I can hear it scratching at the glass – I can see how it makes people run whereas before they were happy just to walk. I notice a drain cover down to the left – on it more acorns. A young man runs down the path to my right. Someone is talking behind me. The path is now reflecting the world through the fact it is so wet. The concrete pillars opposite are fragmented in the pattern of the slabs, as is the concrete bin. A couple walk past – the girl is carrying a pinkish patterned umbrella. The rain comes even harder now; I can hear it on the leaves of the shrubs, it drowns out the clock, as if each drop is a second and all the seconds that came before are returning to the earth. The drain cover has a distinct puddle now. Someone bangs something. Voices come behind me. I see their reflections in the windows, but I don’t see them. The sky appears to be becoming blue now, but yet it continues to pour with rain. I can hear the clock but I can’t see where it is. I just know time is passing without knowing how much. Someone is whistling; there is no tune to speak of, just a vague collection of notes strung together with a breath. There is, I realise another – what looks like a flower bed to my left, surrounding the tree. I wonder how it looks in the summer. My eye holds the image of a young man in a luminous jacket. He’s gone now but I can still see him. Where does everyone go, I can’t tell from where I am sitting. The rain is easing now, and the sound of the traffic intensifies, pricked by the footsteps which echo behind me. I can hear words but do not understand them, they are shapeless. I can see another light – a round, globe light in the building ahead and to the left; there’s something so depressing about them – lights on during the day. It’s stopped. The rain, but all around, the colours are by a few degrees darker. , the pathways reflect the world around them. A door opens to my right with a creak and closes. Footsteps. The sky is brightening up and the sun picks up the wet branches of the trees,, as if the sky itself has been cut to shape and laid upon them. And some are decorated with small droplets – of course now it’s started to rain again. What’s beyond the wall? There is the drone of an aeroplane, the percussion of rain and footsteps. Harder and harder it comes now. I can see it strike the path ahead of me. It’s actually hail. The rain seems to fall as lengths rather than drops. In front of me, on the step just outside, I watch the drops strike the puddle which has formed like the arms of an old typewriter striking the letters on the page. A few hailstones leap upon the lawn, as if they have been spat from the ground rather than fallen from the sky. The pigeon takes flight – a blue and green umbrella – one with a proper wooden handle. Three people walk past. They laugh through the passage. The girl is wearing a pink coat. I wonder what they are laughing about? A man walks but I couldn’t hear what he said – now I can – his friend is talking about something with flowers on. He laughs and they’re gone. The puddle on the manhole cover gets bigger, but the drops are falling slowly now; the typewriter is slowing down, the world has a little less to say. Funny how the walls surrounding this garden seem so unmoved by the rain – how much rain has fallen upon them in the years they have existed? Who have they seen walk past? Are we a blur to them? Do we pass by so quickly that we are not seen? I see a reflection walk slowly past in the glass, as if the glass is ice and the image is slowed to the speed of its molecules. Abstract patterns in the glass ahead of me like modern stained glass. A girl walks past and into the building. I see her through the windows at the top. I see her walk all the way to the left before she is swallowed by the dark of the glass as if she was never anything but a reflection. The clock strikes the hour. One o’clock.
Today I began to install the Dreamcatcher work at MAO which after a while trying to package up the ‘net’ I finally managed to do. Right away I was taken aback by the difference between the work as it appeared in my studio and the work as it appears in the gallery; there is something rather staid about it which might be to do with the lighting (which we will work on tomorrow) and the power-socket in the corner. It just seems at present to be a decorative hanging.
The other problem for me is the backdrop which still looks a bit contrived; the sheets of music are I think essential but the way they are presented isn’t quite working. It might be down to the fact there isn’t enough paper so I bought some more today and will add that tomorrow morning.
The detail below shows for me the importance of the manuscript paper as one sees the net superimposed upon it as if it is music written on the page. I guess it’s just a case of trial and error at the moment, but in the case of this show I might removed the paper altogether.
Another option might be to go back to the original idea and add the drawn images of Auschwitz?
In his book, ‘At the Mind’s Limits’, Auschwitz survivor, Jean Améry writes:
“We emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out, disoriented – and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom. Still today, incidentally we speak it with discomfort and without real trust in its validity.”
Given the work I have been exploring recently, which is all centred around text, I found this particularly interesting, particularly given the text I’m exploring is that of post-memory which in terms of its validity (in respect of actual events) is by definition untrustworthy – post-memory doesn’t pretend to be accurate. Amery goes on to write:
“If I may quote once more, and once again an Austrian, then I would like to cite the words that Karl Kraus pronounced in the first years of the Third Reich: ‘The word fell into a sleep, when that world awoke.’ Certainly, he said that as a defender of this metaphysical ‘word,’ while we former camp inmates borrow the formulation from him and repeat it sceptically as an argument against this ‘word’. The word always dies where the claim of some reality is total. It died for us a long time ago. And we were not even left with the feeling that we must regret its departure.”
I didn’t know anything about Karl Kraus and so looked him up on Wikipedia. The following is taken from that source:
“Karl Kraus was convinced that every little error, albeit of an importance that was seemingly limited in time and space, shows the great evils of the world and era. Thus, he could see in a missing comma a symptom of that state of the world that would allow a world war. One of the main points of his writings was to show the great evils inherent in such seemingly small errors… Language was to him the most important tell-tale for the wrongs of the world. He viewed his contemporaries’ careless treatment of language as a sign for their careless treatment of the world as a whole…
…He accused people – and most of all journalists and authors – of using language as a means to command rather than serving it as an end. To Kraus, language was not a means to distribute ready-made opinions, but rather the medium of thought itself. As such, it needed critical reflection. Therefore, dejournalising his readers was an important concern of Kraus in “a time that is thoroughly journalised, that is informed by the spirit but is deaf to the unity of form and contents”. He wanted to educate his readers to an “understanding of the cause of the German language, to that height at which the written word is understood as a necessary incarnation of the thought, and not simply a shell demanded by society around an opinion.”
Thinking about the backdrop for the Dreamcatcher I have decided that it would be best to stick with just empty sheets of manuscript paper rather than bits of everything else. The trouble is I haven’t collected enough different types of paper and having just three things (manuscript paper, postcards and lined paper) makes it as a whole look a bit ‘cobbled together’ and rather contrived. Having just the manuscript paper however helps me to avoid this. Furthermore it makes for a stronger piece. With just the empty manuscript paper as a backdrop, the cut string would become just the unwritten notes, unsung music; and they would I believe be more pertinent to the theme of lost voices, silenced voices. There is something more human about these pieces of string being unplayed or unsung music.
One particularly interesting contrast is the idea of music (sung music in particular) filling a space. One can imagine the sound waves with the potential of filling a vast area and then the pile of unsung notes (unheard voices) piled in just a corner. There is the difference too in the quality of the two; the sound being light and the string being dense and heavy.
I am reminded here of something I read in Bill Viola’s collection of writing: ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. Writings 1973-1994’.
“Chartres and other edifices like it have been described as ‘music frozen in stone’. References to sound and acoustics here are twofold. Not only are there the actual sonic characteristics of the cavernous interior, but the form and structure of the building itself reflects the principles of sacred harmony – a sort of ‘acoustics within acoustics’. When one enters a Gothic sanctuary, it is immediately noticeable that sound commands the space. This is not just a simple echo effect at work, but rather all sounds, no matter how near, far or loud appear to be originating at the same place. They seem to be detracted from the immediate scene, floating somewhere where the point of view has become the entire space.”
I’m particularly interested in the idea of the net being a score of sorts, one that can be sung or played (I like the idea of the cello being used in this context, as this instrument, a mournful one in many ways, has often been described as being the closest sounding instrument (in terms of its timbre) to the human voice. If one was using the net as a score, what would one be playing? The lines of the string, the intersections (knots) or the spaces between?
In many ways, this takes me back to a research project I started, but on which I never worked that much called Pathways Project. And already a title has come to mind. Dead Light: Unsung.
This afternoon I worked on a possible ‘backdrop’ for the Dreamcatcher installation which will itself be installed at MAO on wednesday. As it stands (without the backdrop), it works, but I want to make a connection between the string and text, music, drawing etc. and the idea of the pile of string being a pile of unwritten words, unwritten music and so on. One idea I’ve had is to place pieces of blank paper, postcards, manuscript paper and writing paper on the back wall, and all the while I’ve thought about it, the more the image of the ‘rescued’ Jewish gravestones made into a memorial war in Kazimierz-Dolny (Poland) appeared in my mind.
So with my various pieces of paper, I went to the studio and made an attempt at creating something. The results are as below:
Looking at the above, one can see a connection with the image below – the wall in Kazimierz-Dolny.
Below, is the backdrop as seen behind the net and the string.
So, I think this idea works very well, my only problem is the quality of the fragments. As the above was made this afternoon, just to see how it would look, I’m a little unsure of how it should be displayed come Thursday when it’s installed in MAO. I think the paper is important but I’m not sure blu-tacking is good enough. Also the paper looks too clean and the postcards I think should go (maybe just one or two pieces). The main thing is not to let it look too contrived; the string and the net work well, at the moment the paper fragments jar just a little – something to work on tomorrow and Monday.
Having thought about the ideas raised after my visit to St. John’s College, I decided to try the idea out in my studio space at Brookes. I began by copying the entry on St. John’s College from the Encyclopaedia of Oxford which, using a water-based marker I then wrote out (in part) onto one of the windows. The windows are not the right shape for the project but I got a good idea of how it would look nevertheless.
Having used the text of the history of St. John’s I decided to write on another window, all that I could see as I looked through the glass, and, having done this, I considered the significance of the two.
The text delineates the surface of the glass and so defines it more readily as a barrier; the text itself is not a physical barrier but rather a conscious one. One is able to shift one’s focus from one to the other but can never see them at the same time – at least not clearly. With regards the text describing the scene beyond the window I found that this created an interesting, temporal exchange. Looking through the text one can see the world as it is ‘now’, whereas when reading the text one can only see the world (albeit in words) as it was. You have to read/view one or the other – you can’t do both.
Reading the text traps the viewer for a moment in the past and obscures the reality of the world. It follows therefore that seeing the world as it is outside hides the past. Reading the text describing the scene outside as the text was written, one can flit between past and present but can see by doing so how some things remain the same. A building for example described in the text might well be the same as when viewed through the glass, whereas someone who was walking beyond the glass when the text was written will exist in words but will not be visible to the viewer when looking (reading) between lines. Of course it might be that words used to describe a person in a somewhat vague fashion in the text may be applicable to someone beyond the glass when the viewer’s focus is shifted; for me, this is a good way to represent the continuity of life and also acts as a warning that the past can always repeat itself.
How does this work resolve with the issue of Dark Tourism? Let’s assume we are in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As tourists we are exposed to a place of trauma; we constantly flit between the past (that of which we’ve read in testimonies or seen in films and photographs) and the present (the reality of the world around us). Often we cannot make a connection between the two. We may well have read about one million dead but standing where we stand in the present, we simply cannot imagine it. However, when we do see something that fits the ‘text’ and the world around us, when we find a correlation (such as the gate tower), the past with all its trauma is brought into the present and vice-versa; there is in effect an exchange. But of course we are always safe behind the barrier; the barbed-wire-text fence doesn’t keep us in, but keeps the past at bay.
So why do we visit places of trauma? Perhaps it’s because we can always leave, we can move between past and present, yet know that we can always go home. Perhaps that’s why we go to places such as Auschwitz; because we know we can leave – leave with our existence all the brighter because of it, framed by the shadow of the past.
In the end, words (whether describing the experience of a tourist or a victim) can only take us so far. As Elie Wiesel wrote: ‘I would bring the viewer closer to the gate but not inside, because he can’t go inside, but that’s close enough.’ We can walk up to the ‘barbed-wire’ (text) fence, we can see the wires (read the text) and see through them, but we can never go any closer – not would we want to; that is, as Wiesel says, ‘close enough.’
On my way to Luxembourg, I considered the pile of string and went over what I’d previously written, that the lines equate to hair, memories of the individual, individuals themselves, written words, unspoken words. The dreamcatcher, I summarised, is the attempt of the tourist to piece together a moment from the mass of dead light. It is the attempt to imagine what victims might have written /thought at the time (unwritten words) and maybe in the future; it is the attempt to piece together unsung melodies (music) and, to some extent, unsaid words (wires). But how do I help people make that connection?
Could I use postcards, manuscript paper, writing paper?
Having drawn the above (right-hand side) I was reminded of the wall of broken/displaced gravestones myself and Monika saw in Kazimierz-Dolny.
If I use postcards, manuscript paper, writing paper and so on (put on the wall behind the pile of string) would it be best to rip them and attempt to put them back together in the manner of the wall?