Artwork: Candida Höfer, Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen I, 2001; Photograph, colour, on paper
I seem to be on a Halloween inspired writing spree! Just posted a new art story of Candida Höfer’s eerie photograph from her series featuring libraries, Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen I, 2001. Check it out here
After months being MIA OWLKITTY aka Lizzy is back just in time for Halloween…in Top Gun!!!! Awesome and hilarious and I love it!!! 😻
Artwork: Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, Paris, Salpetriere Chapel (1986)
One of the first Art Stories I wrote was inspired by Christian Boltanski’s installation series Lessons in Darkness/Leçons de Ténèbres. Recently I wrote a short piece on Boltanski looking more at his art from the point of view of the ideas, themes, and life experiences that shaped his work, and perhaps gives another dimension to the story I wrote about the boy who lived under the floor during WWII.
The Disappearing Artist
Christian Boltanski liked to describe himself as a preacher, a clown and a crook. He was a trickster playing and blurring the lines between fact and fiction, good and bad, art and life, reality and representation. And what he wanted most with his art was that it asked questions with no easy answers, or none at all.
Boltanski was born around Liberation day in Paris. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic. During WWII, Boltanski’s parents legally divorced (and remarried after the war), while his father hid under the floorboards of their apartment to evade capture by the Nazis. Growing up, the influence of Boltanski’s parents and this period of history was profound, such that he left school at eleven to paint at home, and didn’t go outside of his home by himself until he was eighteen. His father especially wanted him not to speak about being Jewish, associating his own Jewishness as negative, especially in regards to anti-Semitism. Boltanski believed his childhood was strange, but that most people’s childhoods are strange. Yet he revisited the recent past of WWII and his childhood continuously in his art, even as he said as an artist, when creating the work, he was becoming invisible, that he was disappearing, that the act of creating in some way negated the one creating it and their biography.
Boltanski’s art is replete with contradictions. He was obsessed with death, especially the idea of his own disappearance, but with his installations he focused on the lives of individuals who’d passed away, bringing them to our attention, often through photographs. Despite their absence, he gave them a presence. They might be strangers, but he wanted their lives to be remembered for their humanity, their uniqueness. In this respect Boltanski was interested in what he termed “little memory”, which was emotional memory and everyday knowledge, as opposed to memory with a capital “M” that belonged in history books. Boltanski said of this idea: “This little memory, which for me is what makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and it disappears with death. The loss of identity, this equalisation in forgetting, are very difficult to accept.” Death to Boltanski was inherently strange—to be an enlivened individual one moment and then gone. Which prompts the question: What enlivens the person; what gives them life?
While using photographs of individuals in his work to facilitate remembrance, Boltanski also understood how photography could be manipulated to confuse what it truly represented. In the case of his work Les Enfants de Dijon (Children of Dijon), there is no way to tell if the child was specifically Jewish or German. While his work might allude to the Holocaust, Boltanski never directly referenced it in his work. The ambiguity was also deliberate, inviting questions and stories to be created by the viewer, keeping interpretation open and ongoing. Boltanski wanted to reclaim these children now dead from simply being a number. He lit each photograph of a child’s face with light bulbs like votive candles in a shrine, emphasising that each was an individual life, a light, a spark of humanity. It is elegiac, a kind of memorial, but an affirmation too, of life itself. While Boltanski was not religious, he believed the reference to creating these “monuments” highlighted the holiness of each person, their soulfulness.
Mostly Boltanski utilised simple, fragile materials he referred to as “stupid”. Materials that were close to people’s every day lives, such as candles, biscuit tins, photographs, light bulbs and magazines. With his installations of piles of clothes these ordinary “stupid” items had once belonged to someone; had intimate contact and held the memories of those people. On occasion, Boltanski allowed the viewers to purchase the clothes through donation, and the cycle of life was reaffirmed, the clothes changing hands, bodies and memories. There is the possible interpretation of the piles referring to the clothes and items confiscated from the Jews in WWII by the Nazis and left discarded in massive piles. Yet Boltanski prefered the idea that depending on the place these installations are shown and the people viewing them, the meaning will change.
Boltanski believed people could be touched and have an intuitive and emotive response to his work. He never wanted to create art for museums, seeing such places as repositories of relics and not close to people’s lives. Instead he saw his work at the edge of art and life: relatable to people, even as it might be mysterious, the meaning elusive and open to questions.
A large part of Boltanski’s work will disappear given the fragile “stupid” materials used, and he saw this impermanence as fitting, closer to real life. It also seems to suit an artist always on the verge of disappearing.
Artwork: L.E.T, Freedom is not given, stencil and crayon on metal, 2022
Brilliant stencil work by L.E.T. (@l.e.t._les.enfant.terribles): Freedom is not given.
You have to fight for it.
Artwork: Rebecca Horn, Unicorn, 1970
Rebecca Horn’s art is rooted in her own experience: "I use my body, I use what happens to me, and I make something." Originally from Germany, Horn leads a nomadic existence, often living in places where she’s asked to create her work, which spans drawing, sculpture, painting, installation and films. A defining experience in her life was the year she spent in a sanatorium in 1964 having contracted a lung condition from using fiberglass to make sculptures at art school. During this time her parents passed away, she was totally isolated, and that’s when she began producing her first body-sculptures, which she sewed while lying in bed.
Such works as Finger Gloves (1972), Pencil Mask (1972), Black Cockfeathers (1971) resulted from this experience, and the unforgettable Unicorn (1970) where Horn made a simple bandage-like costume for a fellow student with a unicorn horn atop her head. Naked except for the costume, the woman walked through a field as Horn filmed her. The strange beauty, grace, playfulness and daring of this work carries forth into the art made throughout Horn’s career.
What is fascinating is that Horn is also a poet and writer. She makes artist books featuring text, drawings and her artwork. Born at the end of World War II, language was always complicated, and she comments on this saying: "We could not speak German. Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always travelling somewhere else, speaking something else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw." Apart from drawing, poetry seems to be a form of expression Horn gravitates to, creating a synergy with her art, another “extension” like the soft-sculptures, where she can reach beyond her own experience to a wider audience, to the world outside of her self.
One such book La Lune Rebelle (1993), recounts her time in the sanatorium and the strange encounter with a man in Barcelona that was not simply desire or sexual, but a way to reach out, reanimate herself, to feel alive. It became the springboard for my own art story inspired by her installation El Rio De La Luna (The River of the Moon). The art story explores ideas of intimacy, storytelling, desire, love and bodily sensation, how we experience the world and self through our bodies, emotions and connections. How we transfigure and grow. In this story I wrote a Scheherazade-like tale of lovers coming to an understanding of each other through a journey involving their bodies, language and feelings that is a transformative, perilous and revelatory experience.
Horn’s mechanical sculptures and installations such as Metamorphosis (1986), The Hydra Forest, Performing Oscar Wilde (1988), The Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989) and Missing Full Moon (installation in Bath, 1989) similarly feature these elements of transformation and animation, of the potential for regeneration, to break down, alchemize, fuse, collapse, expand, cause chaos, harm or protect, touch, or spark with electricity. They are human-scaled, relatable, humorous, confronting and surprising. They also evolve Horn’s deeper concerns of “being-in-the-world”, where our journeys are not merely physical but spiritual, and Horn’s art engages these liminal points where states of being intersect. This cosmic, spiritual dimension is explored further in her artist book Cosmic Maps (2008), featuring Horn’s paintings and poems. One poem The Universe in a Pearl, speaks of origins and creation that has the quality of myth:
I
The Universe gathered in a Pearl
In primeval blue—hovering.
Crashing through veils into the deep
reflection of the orb of heaven
in water of sapphire.
II
Fire ignites the suns
in the body of the beloved.
The light under her feet
Reaches out far beyond the sphere of heaven
Horn believes in the mysteriousness of life, of cosmic, creative energies that shape experience, and she seeks connection with this: "Every day," she says, "for an hour in the mornings, I breathe, I open my spine, I put up my light. A swami taught me." A poem she wrote in her book, Tailleur du Coeur (1996) gives expression to this process:
Reverse the law of gravity
The spiraling movement drawing energy upwards,
Leaving the body,
Rising into the vast expanse of light.
And with this expansive, dimensional perspective comes a sense of purpose, of giving to the world her extraordinary life-experiences through her art.
(Note: Title of post comes from Rebecca Horn’s La Lune Rebelle: “Whilst dreaming, the Keaton-face reappeared and she realized that he would be the catalyst for her escape into the freedom of her own story.” p.8.)
Artwork: Wolfgang Tillmans, in flight astro (ii), 2010
Digital pigment print
Alongside photography, astronomy has played a lifelong role in Wolfgang Tillman’s search for the “boundaries of the visible”.
Tillman’ s affirms this saying, “When I was ten or eleven…I fell in love with the stars.”
This led Tillmans to observe astronomical phenomenon such as sunspots through a telescope and placing the camera against the eyepiece to take photographs, and specifically in 2004 and 2012 he photographed the transit of Venus, the planet’s passage across the Sun over several hours.
Commenting on this fascination, he says, “Astronomy is located at the limit. Can I see something there? Is that a detail or is it just noise in the camera sensor? By going to the limits, to the borders, I find comfort in being in-between the infinite smallness of subatomic space and the infinite largeness of the cosmos. It gives me comfort to feel infinity.”
[source: Interview with Aimee Lin, Wolfgang Tillmans: On the Limits of Seeing in a High-Definition World, ArtReview Asia, 2018]
Artwork: David Zinn, “Philomena, steward of the Strategic Sky Reserve, always keeps a keen eye out for squirrels”, 2022
Every time I see David Zinn’s art I can’t help smiling. Whimsical, funny, poignant and plain silly, Zinn creates what he calls “underfoot ephemeral impossibilities”. Utilising an approach called “pareidolic anamorphosis” or “anamorphic pareidolia”, Zinn’s temporary street drawings are composed of chalk, charcoal and found objects improvised on location. These impermanent pieces incorporate grass, twigs, cracks, flowers—any surface or object becomes the inspiration for the wonder-world of characters Zinn creates, such as his regular creatures “Sluggo”, a bright green monster with stalk eyes, and Philomena the flying pig. You can check out more of his work at www.zinnart.com or @davidzinn.
Recently in the city of Utrecht for the ILFU festival, Spanish collective Luzinterruptus created an iteration of their installation “Literature versus Traffic”, previously featured in cities such as Madrid, New York, Toronto and Melbourne. The site intervention of 10,000 illuminated books placed haphazardly in the street literally disrupts the usual flow of traffic, and according to Luzinterruptus, “For a few hours, stories and poems replaced with their silent whispers the noise and pollutions”. People are then given the opportunity to walk among the books and even take them away. The books are recycled through people claiming them, giving them another life beyond the installation, and the story/project continues.
Of this ongoing project, Luzinterruptus said: “We want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word.‘
Artwork: Paste-up by Alban Rotival (@agrume_), Upgrading a laptop, Paris, 2022
Love this. Paste-up on wall in the Paris district La Defense by artist Alban Rotival (@agrume_): Upgrading a laptop. I wonder what would sprout from my laptop if upgraded—hopefully some new stories!!!
Thinking, dreaming, wishing…
Artwork: Paste-up by @strassenmaid, Hamburg
More of all of these! 😊
Artwork: Chiharu Shiota, Tell Me A Story, Kosovo, 2022
Chiharu Shiota’s recent installation at Manifesta 14 Biennial in Prishtina, Kosovo, is about storytelling and how interwoven stories and memories are in people’s lives. Featuring her distinctive red thread, the installation Tell Me A Story is a collaborative project inviting the people of Kosovo to write a story inspired by subjects such as birth, childhood, their family, nation, country, religion, love and death, and in a language of their choice from Albanian, English, Turkish, Serbian, Roma or Egyptian.
The installation takes its inspiration from the main theme of Manifesta 14—with its rather convoluted exhibition title, “it matters what worlds world worlds. how to tell stories otherwise”—which is about generating new practices and ways of collective storytelling.
Artwork: Mural by Seth, Jardin Secret, Jersey City, USA, 2022
I love the idea of a secret garden, whether imaginary or real. To have space that’s a sanctuary, hideaway or simply a “secret” space that allows you to just let go and be. Recently artist Seth (@seth_globepainter) completed a mural in Jersey City, USA, focusing exactly on this, Jardin Secret (Secret Garden). A door to another world, just like in the wonderful story by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden. And with spring coming, it’s a reminder of nature’s fundamental importance to inspire, heal and connect. Kind of need that right now!
There’s something absurd, joyous and uplifting about Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan’s temporary landscape installation Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (2020). Situated in the desert of Al-Ula, Saudi Arabia, for the Desert X festival, it’s basically a series of 12 trampolines dug into the ground where people could lie on them, jump on them—have fun. Yet the installation is a serious dialogue with the environment, its desertification and the impending water crisis the country faces with the prediction it only has 13 more years of groundwater reserves left. The trampolines represent puddles of water, an incongruous sight in the middle of a desert, more akin to an oasis. AlDowayan says this about the installation:
"Puddles are humble, beautiful things, and they used to have a longer life on Earth. Al Ula was founded because it had plentiful springs, it was this oasis in the desert, but as the climate changed these local communities had to start tapping into the underground reserves, so even when it does rain, puddles disappear almost instantly."
And, “In the evening they become Moon Circles through a series of lighting techniques used to create this effect. They are activated by people interacting with them, and through the body and this experience we may reflect on the environment this artwork has been placed in.”
Last night I reread a story written by Dutch children’s book author, Guus Kuijer, The Book of Everything (translated by John Nieuwenhuizen). It’s been a while since the last time I read it, but it left such an impression, I’ve never forgotten it. It’s a story about a family, set not long after WWII in Holland, and told by 9 year-old Thomas who sees what most people do not.
He sees swordfish swimming in the canal; he sees the witch who lives next door and who fought in the Resistance; he sees Jesus who befriends Thomas and visits regularly; he sees frogs inundating the street and coming through the letterbox; he sees the beauty in his sister’s friend Eliza with her leather prosthetic leg and hand with only one finger; he sees the undercurrent of fear in his family and how his father abuses his mother, himself and his sister. He sees the magic and wonder of the world and the darkness as well and writes it all down. It’s a heartbreaking tale of domestic violence, but is elevating in its humanity, humour and ultimate goodness, told in poetic, simple prose.
It’s a story where love overcomes fear; where kindness and compassion triumphs over meanness and closed-mindedness; and where bringing what is kept hidden behind closed doors to light transmutes it into truth that can be known and understood without shame or terror. It’s a short story with a big heart and a world-widening view, and I simply love it.
And when the witch next door, Mrs Van Amersfoot asks Thomas in one of their encounters, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Thomas says, “Happy…When I grow up, I am going to be happy.” And Mrs Van Amersfoot responds, “That’s a bloody good idea. And do you know how happiness begins? It begins with no longer being afraid.”
Artwork: Cornelia Parker, Avoided Object Photographs of the sky above the Imperial War Museum, London, 1999
How do we confer meaning onto an artwork? Often it’s a confluence of unique factors and dependent on the individual viewing/experiencing the work. Take this photograph for instance, one of a series of four, created by British artist Cornelia Parker of clouds above the Imperial War Museum in London in 1999. Aesthetically it appears ominous, potentially rain clouds, overcast, heavy and dark. There’s even a hint of foreboding, that sense of a shift in atmosphere where a change in weather seems inevitable. Yet it’s the story behind the creation of the image that truly casts a more disturbing interpretation or impression.
Housed in the museum Parker discovered a camera belonging to Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss. Parker was given permission to put film in the camera and take it outside the museum. Parker said this about the experience:
“I asked the Imperial War Museum if I could use the camera that belonged to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. He used it to photograph his family. Who knows if it recorded the horrors of the prison camp too? I was allowed to take the camera outside the museum and photograph the sky. Capturing the clouds seemed appropriate. It was a way of averting my mind from the fact I was looking through the same aperture as a mass murderer. The camera was loaded with infrared film, making the resulting image appear more sinister than benign.”
A simple image, a seemingly innocuous subject, and yet the story and correlation of events in the photograph’s making gives these clouds a slanted, uneasy, even menacing meaning by association with a horrific past, person and place.
The story behind it becomes the bridge between the recent and historical past, with the subject and potential interpretations, and with the artist and the audience. Imagination also plays a critical role in making the leaps and connections that shapes interpretation.
Otherwise, they’re simply clouds.
Lately I’ve had this spacey track by Thom Yorke on repeat, Cymbal Rush, The Field Late Night Essen Remix from The Eraser RMXS. Check it out.
Artwork: Wolfgang Laib, From the Known to the Unknown, Barjac, France
Anselm Kiefer has opened his incredible studio complex in Barjac in southern France, featuring indoor and outdoor installations, to the public as well as inviting artists to create work. In 2014 Wolfgang Laib was commissioned to create a permanent installation at La Ribaute, From the Known to the Unknown—To Where is Your Oracle Leading You. It is a 40-meter-long wax corridor lit only by bare lightbulbs, encouraging the viewer to experience a meditative state through the warm, golden lighting and smell of beeswax.
The installation took four years to complete, and Laib wrote this letter regarding the project:
“In this endless underground labyrinth of corridors, spaces, cryptes, tunnels with incredible artworks—
You suddenly come down the stairs into a chamber with beeswax—40m long, simply lit with some bulbs.
I normally never refer to historical themes, but as Anselm mostly does—this wax chamber with its shape refers to the corridor in Cumae near Naples in Italy—
The oracle of Sibyl of Cumae
From the known to the unknown
And from the unknown to the known…..
What an incredible work together of two artists—
What a pity that this is so rare in our contemporary art world.
Anselm can do what I cannot do—
And I can do what he cannot do.
And together it becomes so much more.
The two worlds give so much to each other.
And then we will continue this with Anselm’s painting ‘la clarté qui tombe des étoiles’
In the forest near my studio in southern Germany”
(Laib, 2021)
Photograph: Nick Cave and Susie Bick by Polly Borland
In the latest Redhand Files letter, Nick Cave responds to the questions: Do you have a safe space? How would you describe it?
This is Nick’s answer and it’s beautiful:
Dear Arianna,
Safe spaces these days feel hard to come by – the world, in its nature, feels precarious and unsafe. But, after thinking about it for a while, I arrived at an answer which is probably kind of corny and influenced by the fact that, at the time of writing, I have been on tour for six weeks and, well, I miss my wife. My answer also involves a happy and serendipitous accident upon which the life I live now is built – having found a partner who loves me and whom I love. I understand that, in this regard, I am extraordinarily fortunate, and hugely privileged. I am happily married.
But my 'safe space' is not the marriage itself. Far from it. A marriage is many things, and barely any of them are safe. A marriage, at its best, is challenging, dangerous, complicated and meaningful, and requires, like anything of true value, a certain amount of sacrifice and a certain amount of work. Inside it exists sorrows and joys, both big and small, and failures and triumphs too. But within this complex marital vortex there is, for me, a constant that never waivers – and here lies my safe space. My safe space is in the regard of my wife’s gaze. By this I mean when I look into the eyes of my wife I find a beauty, and this beauty has a moral value, of goodness; a goodness that manifests as a kind of benevolence. And that goodness reflects back and elicits my own goodness and, in turn, the necessary goodness of the world. Within this incoming and outpouring of reciprocal regard lies our mutual protection which is my saving and my wife’s saving. Put simply, we see each other, and through that seeing we want the best for each other, without condition – she has me and I have her. There, in the benevolent eyes of my wife, is my safest space and my truest privilege.
Love, Nick
Artwork: Paste-up by @adidafallenangel, Montreal, 2018
Make Art. Live Free. Love Life.
I’ve posted this before, but I saw it again today and it’s simply great advice from @adidafallenangel 😊