a cliché is not to be despised: its automatic comfort is the happy exteriority of a shared language which knows itself perfectly well to be a contentless but sociable turning outward toward the world.

… Soft as an Easy Chair, the result of a residency with the Cork Film Centre by recent Crawford College of Art graduates Robert Power and Rachel Barton, is an exhibition of video and drawing the premise of which – the well-worn themes of love and heart-break – inhabits this somewhat complicated world of attractive and comfortable cliché. Relying on the shorthand of ‘serious feelings’ that the subject matter implies, this exhibition exceeds the limitations of sheer triteness and, through experiment with form, manages to create something that is at times sharp and engaging.
 
Robert Power’s most substantial body of work consists of a number of pieces dominated by I Love You, a short film made of appropriated film scenes. The piece is bookended by extracts from You Only Live Twice and starts with Bond in his Sean Connery incarnation falling through a trap door onto an unsurprisingly convoluted steel slide to arrive – unperturbed of course – in the secret underground headquarters of Tiger Tanaka. There follows a short exchange between the two where Bond drawls ‘If you’re Tanaka, then how do you feel about me?’ to which Tanaka replies ‘I… love you’. This sets off a fast paced section of video which splits the screen in four and consists of minute extracts from films wherein the characters say ‘I love you’. The result, reminiscent of Dara Birnbaum’s appropriation works, is a montage of very short clips from familiar films – Brief Encounter, The Wizard of Oz, Rocky, When Harry Met Sally, Anchorman, for example –ranging from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. Power has organised these clips largely chronologically, creating an interesting effect where the formal conventions of particular eras, in terms of the sharpness of image and the colouring of the film, are foregrounded in their repetition. The rapid movement from one era to another creates a patchwork of textures and hues that highlights the formal qualities of film. Most memorable is the sound created by the multiple ‘I love you’s: ranging from restrained and trembling to screeching, it creates a soundscape that is peppered with tiny bursts of music, dialogue with other characters, and background noises, but taken in such small sections and overlaid so as to create a dissonant and overwhelming noise. The multiple ‘I love you’s make the sentiment seem entirely meaningless; though in not limiting his clips to stereotyped love scenes, but rather including declarations of love between friends and sarcastic jibing, filmic convention comes to the fore and any expression of love seems entirely overplayed and drenched in affectation.
 
Adjuncted onto this film are pieces narrating a break up. In Text Scroll, a small television nestles on the floor scrolling bitter emails sent from a jilted lover to their ex. The text moves so fast that it is barely legible, but small snatches can be caught: bitter expletives, desperate entreaties, harsh reprisals. In a connecting room You Left …. plays; the screen is again split into four. Showing a black and white close up of the mouth and nose of a man who speaks to an ex-lover in hackneyed terms, the image is presented in such high contrast that the figure is abstracted and at times he is almost totally effaced. The same footage is repeated in the four sections of the screen, but they are set at a short delay, meaning there is a round robin effect which destroys comprehension of the language being spoken. Although subtitled so as the speaker’s message is still coherent, the destruction of communication created by too many words too earnestly spoken creates a critical distance between the timeworn sentiment of the speaker and the artist’s inclination.
 
This collection of works pushes at the boundaries of the clichéd and expected. Although heavily reliant on the kind of contentless expulsions that Riley describes, Power seems aware of their emptiness yet still allows there to be authentic emotion behind them. Acknowledging the way in which the concepts of love and heartbreak are by their nature pedestrian and predictable affairs, Power seems to leave room for redemption; in You Left …. there is a moment where the sound is faster than the images that accompany it. This leaves the words ‘love you/as much/as I do’ only to be read as subtitles without the discordant soundtrack, creating a brief moment of clear, quiet and genuine sentiment in the midst of the babble and blather that accompanies the personal experience of conventional feelings.
 
Rachel Barton’s drawing and animations approach similar subjects but sometimes without the critical distance shown by Power. Make Shift Hearts and Rusty Spines is an animated film that narrates the break-up of a relationship. Portrayed with eccentric, ugly-but-attractive doll-like characters the narrative is familiar: the end of a relationship marked by both a nostalgic affection for one another and the knowledge that there is no future. The characters, though present in the same quirkily constructed room, are distant and clearly lonely; at one point they dance together, but it is a sad clinging on to something lost rather than the easy affection of a current relationship. Barton illustrates the emotional weight by animating a small silhouetted elephant moving across the walls of the room. Although charming, this piece fails to interrogate the clichés that it relies upon. The elephant in the room metaphor feels heavy-handed, and the scenes, though beautifully depicted, feel incredibly and uncritically familiar.
 

Her three line-drawn animations are more interesting, particularly Biddy with the Big Diddy and Fleeting, Shadowy, Misty Strife. Biddy with the Big Diddy shows an absurdly big-breasted woman aiming and squirting her breast milk onto an anthropomorphised tree. This seemingly causes the tree to start to hallucinate breasts with legs running across the screen, single breasts suddenly appearing in the air and after becoming linked disappearing again. The piece is short and intense, the way images melt and transform is evocative of Alice Maher’s animations, but Barton puts more emphasis on lightness and narrative within her surreal set-ups. Fleeting, Shadowy, Misty Strife shows a couple waltzing. The figures look almost as if drawn by a child; idealised representations which could be a prince and princess from a fairy-tale, they twirl and glide across the screen for almost a minute, finally kissing. After the kiss the female figure seems to collapse in her partner’s arms and then melt, falling away to become a puddle on the floor which then floats upwards and off the screen. As she melts the male figure walks off, seemingly unconcerned about his lover’s sudden liquescence. These short pieces are witty and sharp, their consideration of female subjectivity forms an integral part of the joke.

 
Despite its heavy reliance on a deeply clichéd subject matter, … Soft as an Easy Chair comes out well. The strongest moments in both artists’ work come when they acknowledge the problems of trying to speak within a language always already spoken, and either use repetition and embrace of cliché to carve out some kind of an authentic subject position as in Power’s work, or with light-hearted mocking of expectation erupting into the surreal in Barton’s. Although the artists are not always successful in their negotiation of this difficult line, this work is full of promise.
 
 
Soft as an Easy Chair was on view 17-31 May 2013

As a result, this was a visual/spatial as well as an auditory event. The space was marked out by the individual or grouped performers at their tables (with their instruments, percussion, laptops, electronic equipment, bowls, plastic balls, pieces of string and miscellaneous constructions) but its configuration was also changing as audience members clustered and separated, sat, stood up, disappeared, whispered, sipped coffee, took photographs, stared or shut their eyes… Shifting configurations also characterised the sounds – burblings, scrapings, skitterings; rattles, groans and pings; bursts of feedback, drones or rhythmic patterns; isolated or overlapping – that filled or tentatively probed the space.

 
Given the acoustic conditions and the distances that separated some performers, the level of mutual respect and responsiveness among the musicians was quite impressive (though one in particular might usefully have spent a little more time exploring the enriching possibilities of silence and listening). There were sustained passages where a single spirit seemed to animate the many contributing voices or where collective restraint allowed that focus on a very limited palette of sounds that tends to characterise this field (the word genre would probably be frowned on by those involved). In a sense, therefore, this was a variation and an expansion of the concept underlying the more modest Strange Attractor series, if the performance with Rhodri Davies (and, for a while, by chance, a large secondary-school art class on a guided tour) that I witnessed in the Crawford Gallery a few years ago was representative. It did not seem appropriate to treat the LP launch, a co-creation, as a series of individually reviewable performances. The conditions of the day and the choices of particular performers probably meant matters had been played out a little before the performance finally came to a halt but, as a once-off, on-site experience this was on the whole an effective and even a happy event.
 
In theory, this kind of music can go on forever. There can be a sense of tuning in to an on-going process – not unlike standing near flowering borage and listening to the varying hum of bees (or, in other cases, like being forced to listen too long to a whining fridge). In a photograph in an old book about the early years of the Soviet Union, a man atop a building is using flags to conduct a performance for factory hooters and sirens. There was something expansive in the ambition. A few years ago, in a small church in Paris, tears ran down my face as the forty voices of Tallis’s Spem in Alium criss-crossed the space in which I sat. I have also, I should add, experienced something approaching perfection from performers who would have strong affinities with the contributors to Sonic Vigil 6. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering if this music is not somehow too content within its own confines. I have been at concerts where, in a kind of wilful puritanism, the sax-player would never blow a full note or the accordion-player never let the instrument sound… I could never devote myself as wholly to this world as Richard Pinnell does in his meticulous blog, The Watchful Ear.
 
Perhaps that is why I don’t fully trust my own ear in this particular area. In any case, where the Sonic Vigil 6 recording is concerned, it is to those tracks where there is grit or resistance in the machine, where a surface is abraded, where jips and jitters play themselves out against deeper or larger sounds, where the layering and shaping of sounds suggests a traversable, multi-dimensional space and even a hint of narrative, that I tend to respond. I am thinking, for example, of intervention #1 to #6 by Berkus, Speculative Narrative Part 1 by The Quiet Club & Katie O’Looney, Untitled Memory # 5 by Anthony Kelly & David Stalling, Chronostasis by Andreas Bick or render by Francis Heery.
 
My mention of bees above could indirectly evoke the sound recordings of Tom Lawrence.
 
The last track is his and it is to him that this finely produced and startlingly blue LP is dedicated.
 
 
The LP recording of Sonic Vigil 6 was launched at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery on 19 May 2013. It is a limited edition (250 copies) vinyl, pressed and distributed by Farpoint Recordings (see http://farpointrecordings.com for more details).

If there are no explicit references in Gallery 1 to what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘State apparatuses of identity’ (there is no identity without fabric of subjection or without law – the legislator and the subject) or the ‘regime of subjectification’, they are sufficiently signalled by the way in which the subjects are secretly surveilled, staged for aesthetic purposes, ordered to sit still, forced to hide/be invisible, depicted as thwarted narcissists, documented for their emotional response to suffering, and treated as medical experiments.

 
Upstairs in the Sisk Galleries, Eleanor Antin, in her series of black and white photographs from the 1970s, The King of Solano Beach, plays with the idea of the drag-king. In this work (which has become de-politicised by being de-contextualised here: there were also live performances, drawings and meditations in a personal journal), she becomes the self-appointed ruler of Solana Beach in Southern California. The photographs on display document some of the king’s daily adventures. Antin’s male self looks like a parody of a South American drug baron in a Dracula cape. Because she is not trying to pass as a ‘real’ man, this is an instance when the artifice of the performance can be read as artifice; what Judith Butler calls ‘an appropriation and then a subversion.’
 
Alex Rose also appropriates and subverts – this time found objects and images. The macabre display, vitrine, contains sketchbooks, found photographs, old teeth, an oval brooch depicting two rings, and two phials of what appears to be urine. This is the visual equivalent of an Edgar Allan Poe mystery. His photographic prints are equally dark, gothic, liquescent. One of the most discomfiting works in the exhibition is his black crate containing two candles decorated with photographs of missing young boys – the antithesis of a Moses basket.
 
Reminiscent of the work of Larry Clark and Richard Prince, Steven Shearer’s inkjet print Choices and Associations is a quasi-anthropological collection of pop cultural representations of beautiful boys, undermined by the central image of Kurt Cobain holding a gun to his mouth. His drawings and photographs of long-haired heavy metal fans are unambiguously celebratory.
 
Julien Nguyen, a student at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, is a visceral artist who creates almost anti-form sculptures and watery acrylic paintings incorporating pseudo-heraldic symbolism and text taken from tragic ballads. Nguyen is bang on the zeitgeist. He would have fitted right in at the Venice Biennale this year, in the central exhibition, the Encyclopedic Palace, that housed outsider artists, occultists, and visionary creators of astral paintings.
 
Taking its name from Peter Pan, The Lost Boys is a 1987 horror film about two brothers who move to California and end up fighting a gang of teenage vampires. In Lost Boys: The Territories of Youth, the overall impression in Gallery 1 is that the lens of the camera is the vampire, and that the territories of youth are places where boredom, poverty, violence and suffering are endemic. In the Sisk Galleries, where many of the works have the shrine-like quality of fan-art whose natural abode is the teenager’s bedroom, the Lost Boys are, at least, allowed to speak for themselves.
 
 
Lost Boys: The Territories of Youth ran from 29 March – 7 July 2013.

Amongst the drawings are some early examples of her sculptural work. Taking advantage of the machinery that littered her new studio space, these works recall Duchamp’s assisted readymades and are informed by a sly playfulness. Cool Zone (July 1965), for example, is one of the least ‘worked’ of these pieces, but contains within it many aspects of what would become her signature sculptural concerns. A circular metal plate with three spokes that converge at the centre like a spindle is fixed high on the gallery wall; threaded through it is a length of rope that hangs limply, its ends precisely trimmed. The sculpture marks a further literalization of the drawn line – if in the painted reliefs Hesse’s line evolved to painted cord, here the line moves completely free of the support to take melancholy, pendulous form. The extension of the line away from the page and into three dimensional space was a formal device explored more widely in the 1960s by artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Fred Sandback, but whereas Matta-Clark and Sandback used line to change our perception of space, Hesse’s concern here seems different – it is the quality of helpless ludicrousness that seems most pressing.

 
In the show’s final gallery space, an anteroom off the main gallery, are housed some small sculptural works along with an example of her later mature work in fibreglass, Sans II (October 1968), a translucent honeycomb of gently irregular hollow rectangles. However, there is also one very large work on paper, No Title (1964), almost a metre high, which seems to contain all of the ideas that she would work through in her time in Germany. The upper half of the sheet is filled with cubes, colored a pale blue or rose; some of these are filled with busy networks of intersecting forms, hatches and striations, but in a blurring liquid density of color. The bottom half of the sheet is filled with an unintelligible circuit diagram, replete with obscure numerical notations and a busy network of arrows. Such works may recall Picabia’s drawings or Dada’s malfunctioning machines, but Hesse’s drawings do not seem to allude to a broken mechanism, only one whose purpose is utterly unfathomable.
 
The layout of the gallery dictates the hanging of the show – an obvious point perhaps, but it also explains the exhibition’s (arguable) flaw. The viewer enters the exhibition by drawing back a heavy curtain to the largest room, in which are hung both the paintings and relief works. Depending on which direction the viewer chooses to circulate, she enters either the little anteroom containing small sculptures, as well as Sans II – or a gallery liberally hung with her drawings, most of which preceded the relief panels.(Hesse would describe the reliefs as “contraptions” that grew out of the drawings.) So there is a sense that the viewer follows Hesse’s train of thought in a rather distorted way, reinforcing the conventional – and in this case not very accurate – view of drawing as merely preparatory or subsidiary to her exuberant painted reliefs. However, witnessing the evolution or distillation of her concerns through her changing drawing style is, arguably, one of the most illuminating aspects of the exhibition. This is, admittedly, a minor quibble in reference to a truly thrilling show – one that allowed the viewer a privileged glimpse into the thought process of an artist poised on the brink of monumental aesthetic breakthrough.
 
 
Eva Hesse 1965 was on view 30 January – 9 March 2013.

An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. (Ezra Pound)

 
There’s a long tradition of ekphrasis, that is, of writers responding to works of visual art, shaping in words some sort of corresponding work. The locus classicus in the European tradition is Homer’s description in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles, but there are many examples also in both Chinese and Japanese traditions, for example. In fact, so familiar is this mode that it can seem almost natural to describe briefly the work, and then elaborate on it, suggesting, perhaps, what the depicted figures felt or thought, or imagining what had just happened, or was about to happen in the narrative. Certainly, ekphrasis provides opportunity to writers to display their connoisseurship, to impress with interpretation, and to charm by sharing appreciation of an established icon.

Clustered peonies, towering pines, peacocks in glorious exhibition
And red-crowned crane shouting at each other;
Purple camel-humps seethe agreeably in viridian glaze;
All is blended, and implied meanings are deep, implicit and rather fascinating.

Composition is exquisite, layout clearly demarcated.
It gives a splendid scene of the gentle people echoing and mixing in.
The plot of false or true, moving or still, has been organically linked.
Truly monstrates natural interaction, is worth seeing a hundred times.

 
That’s from Spring Comes, a poem based on a poorly translated Chinese account of the scroll painting of that name by Yuan Jiang of the Qing Dynasty, in which I had fun exaggerating some of these indirect self-flatteries.
 
It would be disappointing, though, if no deeper or more interesting correspondence were possible between image and word. Many visual works contrive, through articulation of shapes and colours on their plane surface, to construct a complex superstructure of intermeshed meanings. Can we not ambition, at least in some cases, a verbal work which develops resonances, parallels, and sympathies of another sort with crucial formal structures within that complex (an isomorphism, as the mathematicians might say), foregoing the easier pleasures of description and response in pursuit of something, perhaps more demanding, which would invite that rushing of ideas which Pound describes?
 
There’s one particular image which has occupied me some forty years now with unpacking and translating it. As with all good translations, of course, my going concern has been to preserve, if possible to augment, that whirling vortex through which ideas come rushing, and to dispense with all secondary details, fascinating though they be. The focus must be on the essential, not the anecdotal. Let me rehearse here first a rough first-draft translation, before the necessary triage.
 

Botticelli: La historia de Nastagio degli Onesti III (1483)

 
A row of figures, standing, seated, or part-way between the two, facing outward towards the viewer, and all arrested in mid-gesture. Despite the variety and force of their gesticulation, their heads are neatly on a level, as though pinned to the screen which hedges them round behind, as the meal-tables in front of them constrain them narrowly also. One figure, dressed like the diners in civilian clothes, but seeming very self-possessed, appears to address them with both arms raised, his back to us. This side of him, framing the scene along the lower edge, are the stumps of freshly felled trees, echoing the trimmed trunks of the trees beyond the screen, their canopies still intact.
 
This static grid of orthogonals is penetrated from right of canvas by an uncivil intrusion. A mounted figure, armoured and with drawn sword, follows his hounds who, centre scene, bring down a naked woman. She topples, arms outstretched, with feet still running, and dishevelled hair, like a cardboard cutout of anguish in extremity. This dynamic wedge motivates the expressive gestures of the slim band of upper bodies, in which the men, though centrally positioned, avert their gazes from the falling woman, looking instead at the horseman, or down at the scatter of goods on the table in front of them, or at their fellow diners. It is almost as though the victim were invisible to them.
 
Contrariwise, the women, from their vantage on the left, stare in evident horror at the naked victim, tipping over in their own upset their table, and spilling its service on the grass. It appears to be to them, primarily, that the young man with his back to us is directing his exhortation, arms raised to calm and control their excessive distress.
 
This whole action plays out for us before the privating screen, broken only at the extreme right, where several figures are gathered at some tents. Recognizable among them by his distinctive red leggings is that same young man who, on the left and facing into the scene, gestures to control it. Now he does business with a young woman.
 
I first encountered this painting in the early 70s, in a guide to Madrid’s Prado museum. As I had previously known Botticelli only through the consonant sweetness of his Primavera and The Birth of Venus, I was completely taken aback and intrigued by the clashing discords which here survived even the muddy colours of an execrable reproduction. A little research revealed that this painting was the third in a series of four from Botticelli and his workshop, the entire set illustrating one novella from the Decameron of Boccaccio, a tale, we are informed, which will elicit from us both pity and delight.
 
A young man of Ferrara, Nastagio degli Onesti, who has recently inherited a fortune, fixes his affections on the beautiful daughter of an even more wealthy and distinguished family. Despite his attentions and attractions, the young lady rejects him, and seems so repelled that he is driven even to consider suicide. Yet he continues to waste his fortune in trying to win her. In an effort to save both him and his inheritance, friends advise him to leave Ravenna for a while. He accedes, and with his entourage and traps, travels some three miles from the city. There he strikes camp, erects his tents and pavilions, and resumes eating, revelling and spending.
 
One Friday evening, he goes brooding alone in the pinewoods. Suddenly he hears a screaming, looks up, and sees a beautiful girl running towards him, naked and crying for mercy, lacerated by the underbrush and by two large mastiffs who savage her. In pursuit is a dark knight on a black horse, cursing incessantly and threatening murder.
 
Wanting to save the girl, Nastagio picks up a tree-branch and moves to intervene, protesting the cowardice and savagery of this hunt, but is warned off by the horseman, who identifies himself as a former citizen of Ferrara, whom Nastagio knew when a child. He tells how he had been in love with a woman who had cruelly rejected his advances, and how as a result he had killed himself with his sword. The woman had initially rejoiced in his death, but soon died also. Both were condemned to hell, but with a specific punishment appropriate to their sins: he to pursue her, and she to flee before him. Each time he catches up with her, he kills her with his sword, tears out her heart, and feeds it to his dogs. Soon, however, she resurrects unscathed, and the chase resumes, always at the same times, in the same places where she had rejected him. Specifically, the horseman avers, at this time every Friday, he hunts her down in this very spot.
 
Nastagio, fearing to interfere with divine justice, draws back, and watches as the screaming girl is dragged down by the hounds, and the rider rips out her heart and other organs, and throws them to the dogs who devour them. Almost immediately after this, the girl picks herself up, and runs on again, with the dogs in pursuit, and the rider remounts his horse and follows them.
 
Nastagio is initially nonplussed, but then sees how to turn this predictable horror to his own advantage. He arranges a banquet for this exact spot in the woods at exactly the same hour on the following Friday. Promising that he will cease his expensive courtship, he insists in return that the girl he loves be invited to the festivities.
 
This is reluctantly agreed. The tables are set, the guests gathered, and the banquet begun at the scheduled hour, when, dead on time, the infernal hunt breaks in upon them. Several of the guests attempt to intervene, but the knight addresses them just as he had done Nastagio, and like Nastagio, they withdraw as the action repeats exactly. Amid the immediate hubbub of discussion, Nastagio’s inamorata recognizes her own situation in that of the victim of the hunt, and signals complete compliance to Nastagio’s wishes, and so they are swiftly married. Since then, says Boccaccio’s narrator, the women of Ferrara have grown far more tractable to the desires of their menfolk.

Botticelli’s Series

 
Evidently, the Botticelli I have described above illustrates only one segment of this tale: the arranged banquet in the woods and Nastagio’s consequent acceptance in marriage. In fact, this is the third in sequence of a set of four spalliera panels in which Botticelli laid out the entire narrative. The first two show Nastagio’s wandering in the woods, his encounter with the infernal hunt, his recoil from the knight, and the resumption of the hunt after the death of the victim. Both feature the device of continuous narration, whereby distinct episodes in the timeline of a story are shown within a single setting. In the first panel, the figure of Nastagio is twice shown; in the second, both knight and victim twice occur. The final panel depicts the wedding ceremony, in which Nastagio, still in his trademark leggings and smock, sits facing his bride, as two files of servants serve the feast in conspicuous symmetry, and the best ware is displayed in the centre of the scene, just where the murder was enacted in the third panel.
 
Progressively, throughout the sequence, the forest is shrunk, its trees trimmed or completely cut down. In the third panel, those nearest the viewer have been felled, granting sight of the action. In the final panel, the only remnant of the woodland is a little greenery, trimmed and shaped on either side of the dining area, over which built arches replace the natural canopy, as genteel banquet now altogether supplants the earlier shambles of the hunt.
 
Returning for a moment to the term spalliera: it denotes a type of panel used as the backboard of a bench, or on a marriage chest. They were often commissioned as wedding gifts, characteristically illustrating some moral designed to induce appropriate behaviour in the newly-wed bride. There are treatments of Boccaccio’s tale by other artists also. Two panels from a sequence by Ghirlandaio, for example, may be found in museums in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. These Botticelli panels were, in fact, probably commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici as a gift for a wedding he had himself arranged, uniting two leading Florentine families. The two banquet scenes include portraits of several leading citizens, including the groom’s father.
 
So, these panels by Botticelli were themselves intended to function just as did the intervention of the hunt in the third panel: they illustrated the unavoidable and violent destiny of any woman who comported herself coldly to her man, and thereby ensured the tractability of women in society, and safeguarded the civil order.
 

Repetition

 
Discovering all this context, my interest in Boccaccio’s tale, and in its representation by Botticelli grew and deepened. What drew me was the intersection of the various material world of appetite and consumption with the spare and exactly repeating realm of eternal justice, and how the latter was enlisted by opportunistic impresarios – Nastagio, Boccaccio, Botticelli – to reinforce a repressive order, though not, perhaps, without irony in the cases of the latter pair.
 
What then to say of repetition that has not already been said? The motif of damnation as the eternal same had already figured in Dante’s Inferno, and is more recently employed in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. It features prominently in the thought of both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and as ‘reproducibility’ is a demand of the experimental method in science. It is familiar in patterns of trauma and addiction, and is characteristic of modern industrial processes. Furthermore, correlation of the binary change/stasis with that of life/death is well-established, and to be found formally deployed from the ‘never, never, never, never, never’ and ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ in two of Shakespeare’s tragic climaxes to the persistent ostinatos of Beckett’s late prose in Lessness, Ping and Imagination Dead Imagine. Last in this inventory, I would draw attention to the way the absolute predictability of the infernal hunt is harnessed to repress the social unpredictability of women in marriage, and how Nastagio turns the occasion of his own helplessness into a means towards mastery of his world. Invoking anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer on de Sade, Nastagio exemplifies ‘the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world by the observer’.
 
It was these considerations, along with the conspicuous human drama of the story, that interested me in the mid-seventies. But how to enlist these for poetry? I’d got bored with what I had been writing, and could see little point or interest in doing a conventional retelling of the tale, even if specifically foregrounding those aspects which interested me.
 
Instead, I was taken by the notion of somehow ‘translating’ from the narrative only those dynamics which attracted me, and ditching the period shtick, which had so absorbed the poet John Dryden, for example, in his retelling of the tale, as admired by his early-nineteenth century editor, Sir Walter Scott:

Nothing can be more highly painted than the circumstances preliminary of the apparition; the deepening gloom, the falling wind, the commencement of an earthquake; above all, the indescribable sensation of horror with which [Nastagio] is affected, even ere he sees the actors in the supernatural tragedy. The appearance of the female, of the gaunt mastiffs by which she is pursued, and of the infernal huntsman, are all in the highest tone of poetry, and could only be imitated by the pencil of Salvator.

 
Indeed. It’s exactly this over-reaching to mark the language as high-toned poetic (so much so, here, as even to be able to describe ‘the indescribable’) that’s most necessary to avoid. Ezra Pound demanded of the poet a supercharged language, but here we get go-faster stripes instead.
 
What I wanted to retain was the display of exact repetition and violence, and their exploitation to quell difference in the interest of social stability and civility, narrowly defined. To do this, I needed to find or invent a possible formal implementation, which might bring over those, and only those elements of the original.
 

Volved, Involved, Convolved

 
There are a couple of further characteristics of the succession which any intervention must bear in mind.
 
To start with, any translation now must take its place within a recursive series of previous versionings, each with its own significant subtractions and additions. This recursive pattern has eight levels: 1) the courtship and deaths of the original suitor and Ferrarese lady; 2) the divine condemnation of the pair to the infernal chase; 3) Nastagio’s encounter with one episode of the hunt; 4) Guido, the original suitor’s version of the story to Nastagio; 5) the witnessing of the same episode of the hunt by Nastagio’s guests; 6) Guido’s second explanation of the situation, for the guests – the moral is brought home, according to Botticelli at least, by Nastagio as well; 7) Boccaccio’s version, with the coda of Nastagio’s marriage and the new regime of compliancy; 8) Botticelli’s recruitment of the tale on behalf of his Medici patron, stressing the intersection of austere eternal with sumptuary present. Among these only the second, almost mechanically played out like the elaborate action of a Renaissance clock, involves exact repetition. All the others are recursive reframings, taking that repeating nub to heart.
 
Second, as spalliera, the painted images find themselves in the display of wedding gifts, objects among objects, like those on show dead centre of the final panel. They lie comfortably in the human horizontal, the social dimension, and only when interrogated by the curious reveal their vertical reach, which finds divine above, hell below, and judgement and control through all.
 
And we have no account of the female victim’s feelings in the matter. Not only is she nameless, but she is effectively speechless also, rising only to generic cries for mercy and mournful complaint, represented in the third person. Guido, the vengeful knight, can tell us of his suffering in love, and of the shape and reason of his personal hell, but all we glean from his quarry is an incoherent sense of her pain. What is the status of a phantom’s suffering? Is her agony greater than that of, say, a stag torn down by hounds in the chase? Or of a fish landed by an angler, or a squashed fly? Why do the men in Botticelli’s third panel ignore the victim, and look instead to the armed assailant? Why do the watching women act so distressed, contrariwise? What response does a cry for help elicit when it has been already uttered many thousand times, and gone unheeded, and even within the painted image, the victim seems cardboard, her gestures stiff, the stuff of cliché? What does the body-language of agony in extremis portend when the body appears naked to make a scene at a formal repast? What matter an unseemly death immediately supplanted by a wedding, cancelled by assurance that things will take their course as before, and that these sad events may be put to constructive social use?
 
Certainly, through pity and terror, this cruel lady is made an example of. Her agony may be great, but it serves well pour encourager les autres. And don’t the audience, and their opportunist impresario, all live happily ever after? And how can any later teller of the tale decouple themselves from this train of moralizing? How detach from the purchase of such deep and extensive indoctrination, without becoming prosy, without seeming oneself to break a butterfly upon a counter-moralising wheel?
Let me break off.
 

Cube As Constraint

 
In writing an account such as this, there’s a danger that the whole thing be made to seem too clean, too much a product of volition. My own experience with this sort of a business is that what’s worthwhile is usually the outcome of an encounter as multiply recursive as the Nastagio story, and that was certainly the case in this instance.
 
For one thing, by the early ’70s, my own technical development as a poet hadn’t got much further than the standard Irish bag of tricks: lyrics of description and expression dressed in the most transparent of formal attire; the emphasis being almost entirely on the language as carrier of information, with little heed to other possibilities.
 
Luckily, I came across Rayner Heppenstall’s book on Raymond Roussel. Roussel (1877-1933) was a French novelist, poet, and dramatist, who was for a while championed by the Surrealists, until it became evident that the strange works he produced, far from being the spontaneous outpourings they had seemed, were in fact the outcome of highly conscious strategies of composition. It was Roussel’s notion of ‘composition under constraint’ that attracted me, as it had also drawn Raymond Queneau to found the OuLiPo movement.
 
In crude terms, Roussel’s method was to invent for each work a non-trivial set of non-traditional rules, and to generate the work accordingly, with little attention to the standard ‘poetic’ niceties of language. By this means, he produced a series of works which feature passages where the most bizarre of tableaux are described in language more akin to a user manual than to conventional fine writing. To me, less unconcerned than Roussel about questions of meaning, this suggested the possibility of generating complex formal dispositions of language which might correspond in some way to certain aspects of the world which interested me, and then to implement these forms using every literary device I could find or invent.
 
As, in the mid-70s, I began to earn my living as a systems analyst, this method appealed to me as a way of ‘modeling’ the world in language, as an alternative to simple descriptive/expressive approaches. My approach was to try to set up certain constants of texture or structure, and then to set loose within those constraints an apparently free subjective voice, the intent being to simulate in various ways the common experience of seeming to act freely and spontaneously, while even a minimal self-awareness reveals that this freedom is to a great extent generated and governed by forces and concerns in which one has had no hand, act, or part. Without some reframing of this sort, I fear that the language of description, expression, aspiration, is constantly being sucked down the sink of calculated, monetized use. Moreover even our means to refresh it have been appropriated. Weep me a tear for the victim of our eternal hunt, which hasn’t been glossed by television and advertising, and isn’t already co-opted to its place in the sump of a readymade politics.
 
Accidentally or not, this period of experimentation coincided with two taciturn decades, during which I published almost nothing. The up side of this was that I had plenty of unpressurized opportunity to pursue the most unlikely lines of thought. Also, I had been playing a good deal of three-dimensional noughts and crosses, and thought I had found a way to use the 4x4x4 grid on which I played to serve as a matrix for composition. But after about a decade’s experimentation with these approaches, I was in the end left only with two sixteen-line poems and one isolated line (these were incorporated into my mid-nineties volume, stone floods). It was, nevertheless, this apparently unfruitful idea which at last suggested a way to implement a sort of ‘translation’ of the aspects of the Nastagio story which interested me.
 

Sestina Form

 
There is, as it happens, one traditional poetic form whose structure enforces an almost obsessive repetition: the sestina. This has also the virtue of only slightly pre-dating Boccaccio’s story, having been invented in 12th-Century Provence. Here, by way of example, is one of the first sestinas written in English, this one by Sir Philip Sidney in the 16th Century. Note how, instead of the line-ends being marked by rhyme, in the sestina we have instead a repetition from verse to verse of the same small set of end-words: sorrow, fortune, damage, public.
 

Nature, wailing (see figure 1).

 
So, as you can see, the heart of the sestina is six six-line stanzas which are bound together by recurrence of the set of six identical end-words permuted in a strict pattern. As you can see from the Sidney example, the form traditionally ends in a three-line stanza, the envoi, but I omit this as inessential to my purpose.
Here’s a nice diagrammatic version from Wikipedia, which shows that the reordering of the end-words is less arbitrary than it seems (see figure 2).
 

Sestina As 6×6 Cube

 
Given that I had been playing for over twenty years with the possibilities of using cubes as a compositional device, it’s not surprising that at last the penny dropped with me, and I saw how I might version the Nastagio story using this armature. Without retracing every step of the process, but substituting instead a regrettable amount of hand-waving, I’ll try to indicate what I was at.
 
Let’s forget for a moment about language, and treat words instead just as objects. Focus only on the end-words of the sestina, ignoring the remainder of each line. We can arrange these words in a 6×6 grid, the verses in columns, the lines-numbers in rows:
 
1 6 3 5 4 2
2 1 6 3 5 4
3 5 4 2 1 6
4 2 1 6 3 5
5 4 2 1 6 3
6 3 5 4 2 1
 
Now we’ve got this stripped-down version of a sestina, let’s play with it, obsessively building in more repetition. We’ve reduced each line to just the end-word, so now let’s build up those lines again, but using only those same six words. (Remember that we’re treating the words just as objects at this point. Don’t worry about whether or not they make sense.) In the same way that the order of these words is rigorously prescribed by the form, so, we, developing our own form, can prescribe an order of permutations for the words within each line. And so, we end up with a standard six-stanza sestina (sans tercet), each line of which is made up of the same six words in varying pre-set sequences. In other words, each word will recur thirty-six times. Doesn’t make a lot of sense yet, but it’s sure as hell repetitive!
 
But we can go further than this. Remember that the murderous knight and his victim are, as we have learned from science fiction to say, from another dimension. Their penal tableaux merely mark the moments when their austere universe of judgement intersects with our zone of bright commodities. There is in the visual arts an equivalent for this extra-dimensional incursion: the anomalous pale shape that occupies the centre of Holbein’s Ambassadors, an anamorphic skull recalling otherworldly realities.
 
So, in order to represent its otherworldly status, let’s take our cube, literally, to another dimension. As a straight line extends in one dimension, a square in two, and a cube in three, so does a tesseract or hypercube extend in four. Extend, then, those procedures we have used to generate from just six words, a 6x6x6 cube, and apply them one more time to get a 6x6x6x6 tesseract which, unlike the cubic construct, cannot be physically built in three-dimensional space unless it’s partly unfolded, as is the tesseract which forms Christ’s cross in Dali’s versioning of the Crucifixion as Corpus Hypercubus (1954). So, as the infernal hunt, itself a stripped-down précis of Guido’s courtship of his nameless lady, whirls through space and time with the merest suggestion of its meaning on show, and needs interpretation, by Guido, by Nastagio, to reaccommodate it to the social realm, we now have here a kernel of such sheer iteration that it exceeds our physical space. How now to make it mundane again?
 

The Worldliness of Words

 
About sixty years before Boccaccio constructed the 10×10 grid of his Decameron, within which Nastagio’s tale occupies the eighth position on the fifth day, the Majorcan philosopher, Ramon Llull was constructing his Ars Magna. This was a tool for converting Muslims to Christianity through rigorous logic and reasoning. With much intellectual labour, Llull conceived an infallible theological machine by which a reader could enter in an argument or question about the Christian faith, and the apparatus would then return the correct answer. Llull went on actually to construct a number of physical machines, along the lines he had set down, and it is through this work that he is seen as a progenitor of computer science. He was eventually stoned to death by recalcitrant Muslims in their rage against his machine. Llull’s project also fits into another, related lineage, that of the attempt to create a perfect language. Often intended as a means to regain the divine language spoken in Eden, and since then whispered only by angels, this tendency was particularly widespread among the religious wars of the 17th century, when the flawed dissonances of natural human language perverted the divine order to mayhem and bloodshed. There have, since then, been many attempts to construct a perfect rational language, or ‘conlang’, the best known current examples of which are probably Esperanto and Klingon.
 
Primary among the aims of the conlangers are the elimination of the ambiguity and redundancy which are a feature of natural language. How can a bank be both a financial institution and the edge of a river? And why should a river also be known as a watercourse, and a man be simultaneously a bloke, a chap, a guy, a dude, and a gentleman? Writing to Sir Philip Sidney, and speaking of himself, Giordano Bruno gives us a glimpse of a less imperfect order, where things answer to their names:

Here Giordano speaks the common language, he calls bread, bread, wine wine, a head a head, a foot a foot, and other parts by their proper name, he calls eating eating, sleeping sleeping, drinking drinking. He holds miracles as miracles, prodigies and marvels as prodigies and marvels, truth as truth, doctrine as doctrine, goodness and virtue as goodness and virtue, impostures as impostures, deceptions as deceptions, knife and fire as knife and fire, words and dreams as words and dreams, peace as peace, love as love. (Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Explanatory Epistle, Trans. Ingrid Rowland)

So, having ground down my iterative gem to six spare aspects, I must now bulk it up again if it’s ever to be so at home in the world as Cosimo’s wedding gift. And what I need to build onto this austere armature is precisely what conlangs throw away: ambiguity and redundancy.
 
I talked of those six end-words in a sestina, but asked you to think of them just as things, not as words. Now, reverse the charges, and consider them as words again, with meanings and associations and grammatical functions. Select from the entire available vocabulary of English, six words which might be applied to our infernal hunt. As we will want these words to fulfil other strict criteria, I’m going to cheat a little here to save time, and present you six I’ve prepared earlier, along with some synonyms to suggest possible applications:

cover
 
to conceal, clothe, copulate with a female (esp. of horses), shield from harm, compensate or make up for, act as a substitute for, traverse a stretch of ground; a table setting, a false background
 
run
 
to move swiftly on foot, ply (the bus runs hourly), be valid in a given area, tend or incline (his taste runs to the ecentric), hunt or pursue (dogs running deer), cause to function (run a machine)
 
play
 
to sport, to flirt, to perform a role;
drama, conduct (fair play), freedom of action (give full play)
 
blood
 
vital fluid, a dandy; give (a hunting dog) its first taste of blood, animosity (bad blood), bloodshed or murder, noble descent (royal blood)
 
course
 
onward movement (course of events), route, mode of behaviour (best course available), customary passage (ran its course), part of a meal; to hunt with hounds
 
fast
 
swift, disposed to dissipation (a fast crowd), faithful (a fast friend), sexually promiscuous, firmly fixed, lasting; to abstain from food

 
Even this small sampling shows, I hope, that these are words one might use, each with several distinct applications, in recounting our Nastagio story. But even such polyvalent words as these can’t but get tedious if they simply come around again and again in our transcendant text. Right, then, as it’s a flawed quality of natural language that its words fan out in a span of synonyms, let’s avail of that to humanize our neat inhuman: for each of our six chosen terms, take six synonyms, mutually exclusive in their senses. In other words, they should be as widely distinct from one another as possible. But, wait, it’s more difficult yet. For each of these synonyms, generate another set of synonyms, following the same rules, and building in one further one, namely, that no word should recur at any level in this cascade of splayed ambiguities. Since I was at this point trying merely to achieve proof of concept, a maquette, as it were, for the fullscale work, I didn’t yet proceed to the fourth, phantom dimension.
 
But this has all been not only complex, but densely abstract. Let me try to put verbal meat on the algorithmic bones (see figure 3):
 

It’s in the rock, but not in the stone,
It’s in the marrow, but not in the bone,
It’s in the bolster, but not in the bed,
It’s not in the living, nor yet in the dead.
What is it? (Solution: The letter R)

 
Construct a riddle something along these lines for each of the 216 derived words, and theoretically, an astute solver could reconstruct the grid, even though the solutions aren’t given, and by extension, that solver could, equally theoretically, derive by reverse logic the original six words which generated our entire sublunary word-grid and its attendant verses. And what ‘shape’ should each verse be? Well, since our whole structure is derived from the sestina, it seems appropriate to take the total number of lines in the six verses of that form as our modulor: constrain each verse to be exactly thirty-six words long, and vary them within that to test and bend the constraint in every way that thematics, tone, and notation will allow.
 

Starting up the Engine

 
Those cells which are shaded in the grid of words are the ones for which, at that point, I had written verses. I’ll quote a couple here by way of example.

the bell is
mercifully
undamaged
 
its familiar
note again
interrupts
women
at market
old men
at conversation
children
at their play
 
so they may
celebrate
this narrow
sea divides
their own good
settlement
from the main

 
The seed-word here is “sound.” The verse plays with the idea of a provincial community held together by its ignorance of alternatives, and hence judging itself as “good”. That is, of course, one sense of the word “sound,” and others, taken in sequence as they occur are “undamaged, whole” (sound as a bell); noise; and a narrow stretch of water (as opposed to the main, or sea).
 
Here’s another, simpler in its approach:

hard words
 
no jawb
reakers though
 
nothing
obscure
in itself
 
no insults
either no
tonguelashing
or pieces
of anybody’s
mind
 
instead
an oddly
constrained
formality
 
with fore
grounding
of occasional
details
specific
effects
 
surely it
must mean
something?

 
The seed-word here is ‘riddle’, which is, of course self-reflexive. It starts from a possible definition of a riddle as ‘hard words’ and then distinguishes the required meaning from other possible alternatives.
 
Note that the meanings of the seed-words used in the verses are independent of those used to derive these seeds, thus: fast > firm sound and cover > screen > riddle. They have, as it were ‘forgotten’ their own histories, rather as in the medieval period saxifrage was, in a mistaken understanding of the etymology of the name, taken as a cure for gallstones, or as St. Agatha became, through error, the patroness of bakers. It is by these irrational means that the human world rubs along.
 

Eventual Fatigue

 
Stravinsky has observed that ‘the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit . . . the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to better precision of execution.’ The point here, as with the OuLiPians, is that it is vital that one follow through the constraints, wherever they may lead. As I hope might by now be apparent, my purpose is different. To start with, my constraints are not arbitrary, but are chosen as analogues of certain aspects of the world. Also, specifically in this instance, it was intent precisely to escape the inhuman perfection of the seed tesseract, with its repeated six words.
 
The process of composition involved testing every conceptual link in the procedure. Thus, my grid of words which demonstrate, in principle, the feasibility of deriving synonym from synonym until all repetition is expunged. Similarly, I had to test the thirty-six word form, to see how much weight it could bear in practice, so to speak. There would be little point, for me, in creating an elaborate verse-writing machine if, in the end, those verses were vapid and uninteresting. That, too, went well, and I quickly found these thirty-six word modules were developing a life of their own. There were, however, difficulties. The stipulation that the verses function as riddles of some sort, risked making the whole too difficult to resolve back to its original six-word seed, but I felt there would be enough redundancy in the system to make this possible. The other problem was much more serious. As composition gradually realized the overall plan, I found myself recursively revisiting the whole structure, testing whether its emergent meanings matched my intent. I found in the end a radical fracture between intent and realization. The plan had been to allow in composition the six seed-words to fan out semantically via cascades of synonyms, and then allow the reader reverse that process, reducing the whole back to the original six words. But I had wanted, precisely, to flee that otherworldly seed, not to return to it. I was, in fact, building for myself and the potential reader a repetitive machine whereby a variegated human world of actions, objects and apprehensions was brought almost within reach, but was always again subsumed back into its origins in a reditus worthy of Eriugena.
 
So, in the end, I cut the cord and let these thirty-six word units assume distinct identities, while retaining in their modular form the memory of the system which produced them, and retaining its thematics of compassion and coercion.
 
Given, then, that I failed to prove the viability of my phantom concept, what am I left with? Not, certainly, the fullscale meticulously planned set of correspondences that I had hoped for, but not, either, a mere debris field. The template of the thirty-six word module survives, and it bears now, simply by virtue of its history within the larger, aborted work, certain genetic characteristics. Because it draws its thematics from the presentation of the infernal hunt by Nastagio, Boccaccio, Botticelli, and Lorenzo de Medici, its focus is on social conventions, and on the covert coercion which enforces them. Because of its brevity, it is severely cropped, like a snaphot, or a Hiroshige print; it marks a specific point within a process, from which a larger whole may be constructed. Like that third panel of Botticelli’s, through which I first encountered the entire complex, it is often an enigmatic encounter of clashing registers, in which all elements are held for questioning; it is an interrogative rather than a declarative form. And, always, it remembers the calculation and ruin which generated it.
 

court
tombs
constitute
our earliest
examples
 
local sites
exhibit small
side chambers
 
transepted
galleries
 
only the
largest
slabs
remain
 
fallen
displaced
 
smaller stones
purloined for
nearby walls
or roadworks
 
the ideal form
exists
in imagination
only
 
(Solution: play > game > quarry)

‘Oh look – you dropped your jar of lemon curd! And some of it’s landed in a spider’s web… Don’t eat all your cheese in one go… it’s murder!’

In his review of EV+A in a previous issue of Enclave Review, Ed Krčma wrote that curator Annie Fletcher had ‘an unruly way of drawing images and things into the charged field between thought and sensation’. I read the paragraph in which this was written, started the next one, and stopped. I went back, re-read it: ‘drawing images and things into the charged field between thought and sensation’. The more I read it, the more I lingered over each word, the richer it became: it’s so poetic, so allusive. So visual. It evokes those articles in the New Scientist which attempt to make comprehensible the activity of electrons, gluons, quarks and so on for non-scientists like me. A charged field… between thought – ideation / conceptualisation / consciousness – and sensation – that is, direct physical perception of the material world. Back and forth shuttle our cognitive processes between these dimly-understood, ill-defined, highly-contested poles of knowing and being. And we, drifting about aimlessly in our post-Cartesian world like so many molecules, we interrupt the seemingly natural causal relationship between one and the other, inverting the chain time and again. We ‘introduce images and things’ and we question them, ourselves, and the world, and come to some kind of accommodation with the idea of existence and its knowability and predictability. Art helps us with that process, by introducing images and objects that, sometimes, we might otherwise prefer to dismiss or deride for their lack of sense or logic or explicability. It gives us ‘unreasonable’ images, with which we can try to reanimate that space between our thoughts and our perceptions.
 
I suppose it is fair to call Cian Donnelly’s work ‘unreasonable’ but it’s not the whole truth. In his performances and the other works that arise from and go towards them, Donnelly introduces the viewer to a reason of his own, one that at times seems absurd, uncanny, excessive, ridiculous and disturbing, but which is nevertheless possessed, for Donnelly, of an internal logic, in which cause and effect are present and where actions have specific ‘reasons’, or ‘reasonings’. Donnelly’s work is not elegant, or deferential toward the viewer, or to the world that pre-exists it. It is not non-committal. It is populated by characters and gestures dragged from a gory half-world between knowing childhood fantasy and innocent psychosexual trauma: a figure with a long latex nose and a pointy hat combs the pubic hair of a seated skeletal mannequin; Pointyhat enacts a strange sexualised ritual with a yellow fake fur figure – an adult teletubby with the face of an anime monkey; on the instructions of a disembodied head, objects are pulled from compartments in the underside of a bright red alligator, each triggering memories and associations and further stories. Masks and costumes and disembodied voices make the human figure disgusting, and terrifying, and ludicrous.
 
It can be difficult – or at least exhausting – to describe Donnelly’s performances, since they are so all-encompassing: they involve the production of so many different elements. Some have had a life before as paintings or sculptures but are now props in this new world, some are used in different ways in successive performances, some are entirely new, painstakingly constructed specially for one piece of work. Donnelly writes and records complex audio accompaniments for the performances, incorporating his own music and spoken word pieces; these accompaniments act as a kind of metronome for the live material, with Donnelly performing in time to pre-recorded segments. He makes videos and animations which are projected within the performances, besides designing and making costumes and furniture and various objects and sets (complete with trap doors through which characters appear and disappear), rehearsing his performers and, of course, performing himself (in both senses of the phrase). A typical performance involves the interplay and interdependence of all these ‘particles’, none of which is significant in themselves until they are brought to life in the space-time of the work.
 

Sex, grief and belly laughs

 
The stage is bathed in multicoloured light, continually changing – pink, blue, purple, green, yellow. A large painting rests against the back wall: two red figures assuming the posture of a pietà, except that the ‘Christ’ is upside down, facing the ground. They are poorly defined, have blank white circles where their faces should be. The prone figure also has a white circle around his arse, which the seated figure has its hand on. On one side of the stage, a figure with a long pointed nose, dressed in ivory sateen, with a red wig and a bonnet; it has no legs, but is attached to a wooden stand. On the other side of the stage, set in the wall, a circular projection screen, showing a cartoonish animation; another spindly figure leant against the wall; a table against the wall; and at the front of the stage, a large furry yellow figure lying face down across a red wooden stool. Loud, kitschily poignant electronic music. The yellow figure slowly stands, his back to the audience, showing the oval blue plastic inset around his arse. It (he?) looks at the painting.
 
Donnelly describes his journey from abstract painting to the Gesamtkunstwerk of his performances as one from an austere, phoney conservatism, which had very little connection to his own life and circumstances, towards an explosion of meaning-making possibilities, one that is ongoing, and which is driven by a desire to explore in much greater depth the themes and ideas with which he is preoccupied: death and grief, the unlikeliness and abjectness of life, fetishisation, objectification and desire. To this end, around a decade ago he began to think about creating fictional ‘contexts’ for the drawings and small paintings that he was making, and this eventually led to his performing as a character named Daniel Cullen, who had produced all the works in response to the death of his wife. Cullen was developed in performances at the British School at Rome and Catalyst Arts, Belfast, amongst others, during 2008 and 2009. These performances increasingly employed live and pre-recorded musical accompaniment (in Rome this included the formation of a choir, The Order of the Golden Ghost). Overcome by grief and guilt, Cullen had begun to hear voices and receive visitations from entities he called ‘blood wizards’, who performed numerous songs to him. The blood wizards are represented in Donnelly’s performances by sculptural objects made from layer upon layer of dripped acrylic paint and resin, which take many months to make; often the various layers, of multiple bright colours, are visible from the underside, beneath their glossy white shell, like the rings of a psychedelic tree. In common with the other ‘things’ that Donnelly makes and uses these blood wizards have a discomfiting materiality, their liquid state frozen and made solid, their unwholesome, oozing warmth made cold, hard and white. Occasionally, when they appear in performances, they have eyeballs or a wig.
 
The demands of this manner of working – constructing an elaborate explanatory narrative which eventually seemed to close down the works rather than to throw them open to new meanings – reached a natural conclusion. Donnelly returned for a time to painting and presented a solo show, Burnt Wig Blues, at the Third Space Gallery in Belfast in 2010. Included in this show were a number of pieces (including the large ‘bum pietà’ described above) which would go on to feature in subsequent performances.
 
It’s worth mentioning at this point that Donnelly’s relationship with the art gallery has at times been a little ambivalent. The basic activity in which he is engaged usually relies at some stage for its dissemination and validation on galleries or museums of one type or another, but the manner in which such institutions can predetermine the nature and form of the work they exhibit has never entirely satisfied Donnelly. Just as object-making, painting and drawing, as ends in themselves, are no longer Donnelly’s primary activity, so the gallery is not necessarily the most natural home for the works that he is now producing. And art objects which, when first exhibited, had a monetary ‘value’ attached to them, commensurate with their display in a commercial gallery, are now recycled as performance props, with no value other than that momentarily ascribed to them during the performance itself; they seem successfully to have found some kind of afterlife. In fact they are almost ‘meta art objects’, self-aware and self-referential, objects which amongst the other props and materials used in the performances are a sign of ‘art’, and thus even more rarefied, amongst all the totems and relics and amulets that Donnelly uses in his works.
 
The performance described briefly above was presented at the Context Gallery in Derry in 2012. This was the first occasion on which Donnelly fused all the diverse elements of his practice into a new, self-contained world, moving away from a literal narrative (around the character Daniel Cullen) to a context constructed through actions, music and imagery, as much as the spoken word. As the work thus became radically more open, it was able to inhabit a greater range of symbols and metaphors, and to step further away from the familiar causal relations of the world beyond the work. In fact the completeness of Donnelly’s performative universe induces a sort of vertigo: do you really want to follow him in?
 
To Donnelly himself, however, the analogues of his symbols and props and actions are always obvious: he seems to find describing or explaining them a little odd, like being asked why your handwriting is a certain way, or you don’t tie your shoes with a double knot. He is not reticent, nor does he seek to mystify. ‘Why’ questions just take him off-guard, make him take a step back to find out when a character started doing this, or behaving this way, or using these affectations (which is entirely the wrong word, since none of this is an affectation or a pretension; it’s all there, the ragged costumes, the distorted bodies, the expressionless masks, the music, the movements, the sex and the death, because it is an essential part of everything else).
 
  *
 
A figure wearing a grotesque latex face with a greying beard and moustache sings along to some harsh electronic music. His right cuff is extended into a long, closed cone. The beat of the music is up-tempo, drums and synth. Sometimes the man sings himself, sometimes he holds the microphone to mannequins dressed in ragged costumes, whose mouths he moves as they take their turn to ‘sing’. He sings with a falsetto, he sings with a resonant bass. There is lots of reverb on the voice. After a few songs he sits down at the back of the room and holds the microphone to a disembodied latex head with a shock of hair. The head tells a story:
 
‘I was in the sea, by these rocks, very close to the shore. I feel safe. And then, there was this strange nudging, right against my arse. I turn around and see the body of a dolphin behind me. It must have its snout between my legs. It starts to penetrate me. My cock gets hard. I look around, seeing if anyone else is about, but there’s no-one about, so I take my cock out of my shorts and start wanking myself off. I feel the dolphin nudging itself deeper inside me. It’s so strong. I start to come, and it’s the most intense I’ve ever felt. The dolphin pulls out, and I fall back, seeing my cock come out of the water, and the spunk is going everywhere, all over the rocks. The dolphin pops up in front of me, with that strange dolphin smile, and my spunk is landing on its face, dribbling down all over its mouth. I don’t know what happened, but I started to punch the dolphin in the face. I punched it and I punched it, but it just kept bobbing back up again. My hand was bleeding, the dolphin had my blood on it, and its skin felt very dry, even in the water it felt like rubber.’
 

Humour is a device that Donnelly uses with deftness and cunning; he turns it like a pocket knife turned in the ribs. The impulse to laugh – nervously, or in confusion, or out of embarrassment – is one that he exploits. At first, the garish technicolor, the outlandish costumes, the sexual references and the squeaks and farts of the music seem to be nothing more than gleeful mess-making, endearing (or annoying) childish naughtiness. But the comedy always has some darkness, an unpleasantness which is present from the start and which quickly takes over: the sex becomes more excessive, more insistent and troubled, like a compulsion, and with it comes an obsession with gross physicality, with emissions and involuntary desires; death, too, and sickness; incapacity and physical dependence; tenderness, and grief; and all of it, very often, with some element of corporeal disgust. None of this is really played for laughs; not just for laughs anyway.

 
Inherent in this is Donnelly’s willingness to take on the persona of the abject subject of his performances. He debases himself, to the point where his degradation becomes a confrontation with the audience. His deadpan pretend-honesty, his first-person narratives, dwelling on all the wanking, and dolphin-fucking, and shit-eating, and vomiting and crawling and crying leave us standing there, considering the exact nature of the accommodation that we make with our selves, the psychologically-inauthentic manner of our coming-to-terms with our selves; all the necessary compromises we make in order to be able to get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other. But it’s just a lark, really; Donnelly provokes this contemplation only to show how pointless it really is. Since the 1960s, when Philippe Ariès began to historicise childhood, and R.D. Laing attacked psychiatry, and Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault described the functioning of the institutions of state power, it’s become customary to think of this business of becoming ‘selves’ as marked by violence and repression: the family, the school and the state teach us to socialise, to ‘subject’ our selves to being named and called forth and made to account for themselves. We learn to inhabit rough, approximate images of our selves, images that can be regulated and transacted, but which never truly fit, and which become the triggers for all the traumas we experience in adulthood, as the repressions and denials become unbearable, the contradictions untenable. The thing is that this has all become a new orthodoxy: the knowledge of shame and compromise doesn’t bring with it an ability to access some kind of authentic self – watching Donnelly, we have to wonder who on earth would want that – but just more shame, and loss, and alienation. We have learned that this is what we are, fundamentally traumatised agents (‘divided selves’), whose best bet is to carry on taking the SSRIs, or not taking them, or trying to get off them; whatever other options there may once have been were abandoned long ago. Donnelly’s libidinous, potty-mouthed, polymorphously perverse performance ego (or id) is a goad, a taunt. We are what we are: none of it makes any sense, nobody planned it this way, and knowing that doesn’t make you any cleverer, or any happier. But now you know, you can never forget it: you’re shit, and you know you know you are.
 
We are drawn into Donnelly’s work by its otherness, its frightening, electrifying, horrifying, hilarious unfamiliarity; this world is so replete, so full, and once we are inside it we strive to find logic within its unreality, to find or impose order, so that we can reassure ourselves that meaning is indeed present. And yet we are always aware of the work’s illusion, its mechanics. We oscillate back and forth between self-awareness and absorption. We desire to comprehend and decode, but we can only do that by constantly stepping back and making reference to our own real-unreal world, making comparisons and analogues that we can then test by re-entering the lifeworld of the performance. After all this, the work becomes unsettling precisely because its rules and its causalities are ultimately so reasonable, even whilst they are so thoroughly abject. This playing out of psychological anxieties, repressed desires, unexplained dreams and unrealisable fantasies is compelling and credible. It is, we come to realise, very familiar after all, even as it becomes stranger and more tortured and darker and funnier.
 
 

INTERVIEW

 
– Your very first drawings after your recovery depicted figures floating in the sky above mountains.
 
Yeah, after I got out of Silver Bridge…I started making all this new work… About six months into it, there was an incident with a ghost. I was in bed, with this godawful sickness and dread…really awful…total despair…I thought about everything that had happened over the last couple of years; my father dying, the anger, sadness…the grief broke me…I never felt pain like that…awful…awful…awful I was writhing around in the bed…moaning, when I saw a figure scurrying across the ceiling..
It leapt onto my bed, punched me, then squatted over my face… The smell man…shit, piss, rotten fish..all the dead things from the sea It’s arsehole swelled…huge…grey and mottled like fishes skin… It trembled, and slowly produced a huge strawberry…a fucking strawberry, that toppled out of the arsehole and hung there…dangling on a golden thread… It reached back and forced the strawberry into my mouth I blacked out then and had this vision of a two-panel painting…with an image of me on one side, from above, lying in bed…I looked like I was in shock, with electricity surrounding my body… On the other panel were these floating figures, monks and nuns, in tunics… But they were young, little boys and girls, rosy cheeks, big blue eyes… They floated over the mountains and way off into the distance…spread out through the sky like some kind of procession or flock of birds travelling somewhere…

This aesthetic focus disconnects politics from the organized struggle of working people, making politics into what spectators see. Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress capital as they circulate from the streets to the galleries. (The Communist Horizon, 2012)

something nonsensical about it, like dreams in which, having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls from a basement.
(Minima Moralia, 1951)

Funny how, once awareness of the possibility of nuclear war seeped through to popular consciousness, the philosopher’s absurdist image became stock-in-trade for the film industry, as though we were all, since the 1940s, in the business of ‘surviving’.

Wols died shortly after making Blue Phantom, at the age of 38, and his status (buoyed, perhaps, by the myth of the doomed artist that grew up around him, a myth cultivated to some extent by Jean-Paul Sartre) was made clear by inclusion in the first and second Documentas and the 1958 Venice Biennale. Unfortunately, in the sixties, the market became flooded with forgeries, and galleries backed away, with the result that he was largely overlooked until 1989 and 1990, with exhibitions in Zurich and Düsseldorf respectively. Neverthless, this sober, modest, but wholly sufficient retrospective in Bremen constitutes a major opportunity to reappraise Wols’ achievement, as it includes not only work from various museums and private collections in Germany, France and the US, but has been able to draw on the comprehensive Menil Collection in Houston.

That such a reappraisal is necessary was made clear when in 1996 the important Formless exhibition, curated by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, included only Wols’ photography, on the grounds that his painting was ‘tachiste’ (i.e. part of the gestural, self-projecting French school of painting inspired to a degree by Wols, and associated with Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Soulages and others). In the ensuing publication (Zone Books, 1997) Bois further discriminated between the informe (or the ‘formless’, a category coined by Georges Bataille) and art informel, and included Wols, along with Fautrier and Dubuffet, in the latter, a category capable of overlapping slightly with the former (in the case of Wols’ photography for instance), but in general too concerned with the ‘depicted object’, differentiation (rather than entropic collapse back into materiality) and the ‘“authenticity” of the personal touch’ (Formless 140-143).

The problem with all this is that it treats Wols’ paintings as a single object, something that the Bremen retrospective strongly demonstrates not to be the case. Yes, some of the oil paintings seem to anticipate tachisme, or at least to border on its concern with personal marking, but it is not a sizeable part: the tachiste painters who claimed Wols as a predecessor seem to have seized rather opportunistically on a single, not always convincing, aspect of his work. And most of Wols’ paintings do not, admittedly, fit Bois’ and Krauss’ agenda of ‘formlessness’ – but some do (Composition IV [1946], I would suggest), and it would have been strange if the same sensibility that dwelt photographically on a disturbing, dismembered fleshiness of small objects, should not have been in the least transferred into the later painting practice. More importantly, perhaps, Wols’ painting places pressure on the border between the anti-formal, disintegrative movement towards material displayed for its own sake, and that appearance of the ‘unreal’ object that concerned Sartre in his writings on art informel. What is at issue, I suspect, is that question of the ‘figurative’, beyond abstraction or realism, that engagement, even if as a resistance or a wholesale antagonism, with the viewer’s anticipations of a represented ‘reality’.

But I’m going too far: Formless was exhibition as thesis, intended to throw other histories of modern art into relief, and as such was presented in bold, unambiguous outlines. It remains, however, that the dismissal of Wols as a tachiste painter is highly reductive.

In one thing Krauss and Bois were certainly correct: the photographs are well worth recovering. Taken in 1930s Paris when Wols was in his twenties and associating with the surrealists, they are highly sophisticated. From the clever applications of Cubist space in Untitled (Paris) (at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles), to the already apparent fascination with decay and degradation (an Untitled that features the word ‘Canaille’ [‘scum’] at the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in Stuttgart , and the fetishisation of dismembered, biomorphic details (pastries? cannolis perhaps? resembling fat fingers, in a photograph at the Kunsthaus Zurich), they reveal a precocious, idiosyncratic talent. The war, however, put a stop to his photographic career, and in his drawings he seems to have to begin again from almost nothing.

These relatively small (generally less than A3) ink and watercolour pieces begin to appear about 1937 and are initially little better than imaginative doodles – surreal landscapes in which he tries out devices borrowed from Tanguy, Miró and Ernst. The serious work begins about 1942/1943, by which time Wols was living in extreme penury with his wife Gréty in the south of France, after years spent in internment camps. This means that, the photography aside, Wols’ mature artistic career occurs across a period of only nine years, with only six of these dedicated to both drawing and painting in oils. It might seem surprising, then, that I insist on the diversity of his work, but what the Bremen exhibition makes clear is that there were multiple strains, motifs, lines of thought pursued during this short but highly productive time.

As regards the ink-and-watercolours, despite Ewald Rathke’s assertion to the contrary in the exhibition’s catalogue, it is impossible not to see the influence of Klee operating, at least along one line of the work.

This line, culminating in a series of images of towns and villages (Ville Chaude of 1943/44, for instance), shows Wols more or less content to be Klee’s disciple, albeit a nervy, obsessive one, with a touch of Masson pulling at the little formations. But his most characteristic pieces – they mark the arrival of his post-photographic maturity – are quite unique: biomorphic figures, positioned centrally, within an aura that conveys a sense of ‘apparition’. These tinted drawings are vividly coloured and obsessively detailed, the details often bringing to mind miniscule or microscopic features: cilia, pubic hair, formations of living tissue, polyps, tiny primitive limbs. They bring with them a sense of closeness and magnification, like a rockpool viewed by a child; of the alien; and of something that spasms, blushes, transforms abruptly, perhaps even transmits, but, being in a different element, is incapable of acting in our world, though visible here – a mere register of affect. The ‘closeness’ is related to the innate intimacy of the medium: the relation of the sheet of paper to the artist bending over with pens or small brushes was exaggerated by Wols’ practice, who often painted in bed, his bottle and food nearby, his dog at his feet. Some of this intimacy is carried into the public space of the gallery: it is difficult for a watercolour to be properly viewed by more than one member of the public at a time. This relation bypasses something that Wols must have sensed strongly, as it is dramatised by an early series of images with the title Circus Wols (from 1940): the presence of the spectator, especially of spectators in the plural. In these quirky fantasies the insectoid, surreal creatures of Wols’ early drawings are surrounded by caricatures of an audience. Between the two appears an apparatus with a system of lenses of some kind, and marked ‘polyscope’ in one of the drawings: the suggestion is of a tiny world being brought to perform before an anonymous, but pressing, self-assertive crowd. There is an inherent sense of something small and private being artificially made apparent in a not altogether hospitable public space.

So, what happens, as happened to Wols in 1946 when a gallerist gave him the materials for oil painting, if the minituarist is suddenly released into the open, half-body-with-arms-outstretched-sized space of the easel painting, capable of being viewed by six or seven people at a time (if not more, if the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre are anything to go by)? Agoraphobia, to some extent. Many of the canvases (which are far from universally successful) show evidence of a crisis – how to fill that exposed, more public space, and still maintain some kind of control? One solution, which seems to me close in spirit to the category of ‘formlessness’, was to seemingly scrape at the white ground, to achieve an all-over abstraction that resembles a floor scored by what it has supported, and dyed by innumerable washings of what looks like wastewater. Along another line (the styles are not wholly separate, there are various crossovers), certainly more tachiste, there are attacks, markings, assertions of the artist’s physical presence against the empty space, often resulting in what looks like a structure, and often quasi-representationalist (like the Bateau Ivre of 1951). There is a sense of flailing intoxication about some of these, and a looseness after the intense detailing of the drawings, despite the artificial means of the prominent ‘structure’. These same ink and watercolour pieces take on new chromatic power in the same period, becoming less governed by their drawn dimension, doubtless under the influence of the oil painting. Meanwhile Wols was also producing exquisite black-and-white book illustrations, those for a collection of Kafka stories called L’Invité des morts being particularly fine.

And then there are oil paintings like the Veil of Veronica (1946/47), Blue Grenade (1948/49) and the Blue Phantom (it should be noted that most of these titles were not given by Wols himself). Here the old centrally placed, figurative motif manages to hold its own in the expanded space of the canvas, but the results are more than merely expanded versions of the ink and watercolour pieces. Something happens because of the oil paintings’ particular scale, something to do both with how we tend to ‘read’ the figures before us on the canvas, and the kind of relational space surrounding the work. Facing Blue Phantom we find ourselves thinking less along the lines of microscopic organisms (despite the continued use of biological details) and more of something human-sized, something capable of confronting us rather than something we observe, separate and whole in its elementally different milieu. Certain more representationalist drawings come to mind – Woman with Nails (1944), Fool with Flowing Hair (1942/43) – as well as images by Ernst, Miró and, especially, Picasso, where a disc on a stem, with flowing lines that stand for hair, serve as a shorthand for a woman’s neck and head. The Blue Phantom, in short, is a woman’s head, or rather, it looms before us in the place of a woman’s head. This is where the second effect of the new scale comes into play: moving straight from an ink and watercolour piece to an oil painting one has a sense of sudden expansion and openness, like the experience of looking up from a small, very near object, like a book being read, or an insect examined, to focus immediately on figures in the space ahead of you. Whence the whole jolting, unnerving quality of Blue Phantom: occupying that space, the one where ordinarily human figures interact, or address the viewer, is an image as alien as the apparitions in the world beneath human scale, but somehow now in place in the human dimension, surrounded by its own, toxic to us, element. This uncanny but beautiful painting gathers to itself a host of experiences, concerning the war and its aftermath, the relation of private to the exposed and public, of self to the alien, the emergence of the ‘inhuman’, etc. etc. It is clearly the work of a master of twentieth century painting.

In Picking Progress to Pieces (2013), Polly Morgan remakes an Untitled Sol LeWitt sculpture from 1989. To reconstruct LeWitt’s white openwork towers, taxidermist-artist Morgan has deployed 2,428 delicately flesh-painted crow femurs. The curiously resonant piece interrogates the original object’s denial of the hand and insistence on modular repetition; Morgan’s hyper-organic edifice summons not only the bodies of 1,214 crows but the corporeal acts of severing, plucking and boiling required to render down clean bones from dead birds. Owing to the fantastic regularity of its osteal components, the piece is at once an aesthetically compelling paean to LeWitt’s serial doctrine and a playfully macabre rebuke to its sterility./

 
Three untitled works by Alex Rose (2010), displayed at ground level, draw the eye down and the mind toward a consideration of less visceral processes. Combining images of horses and boys—fragments pulled from divers dimensions and divested of any relational congruency— these composite photographs evoke the memory’s impossible feats of suturing, conflation and dislocation. The precise, clean treatment of each separate element, whether equine of human, imbues the work with a melancholic charge which is only enhanced by the distressed grounds and the fragments of organic matter overlaying these formally eloquent collages. Via his deconstruction and recombination of two strains of affect-laden imagery, Rose produces an unsettling evocation of aesthetic consolation derived from tender rituals of recollection and psychic dissection.
 
Stephen McKenna’s contribution most fully represents the last of the show’s four animating concerns. Each of his four oil paintings depicts a single, static animal. Pictured in profile or three-quarter view, McKenna’s subjects seem to shrink concertedly from our gaze. Only Bran (2011), the avid-eyed wolfhound, appears oblivious to his position as subject of the portrait. The donkey in Narcissus (1999) is not, as his namesake would have it, gazing upon his own lake-bound reflection, but standing sidelong on its bank, his eyes cast down in a betrayal of what from both Heron (2002-11) and the self-silencing Young Gorilla (2012) we can only read as shame. McKenna’s animals, unlike Derrida’s cat, apprehend their own nakedness and, when forced to sit for the portraitist (and, eventually, for his complicit audience), they twist in agonized awareness of their own animal subjectivity.
 
Frances Upritchard’s three sculptures, Mask Monkey, Ug Monkey and Sniffing Stoat Monkey (all 2009) elicit a similar discomfort. Lumps of milky glass occupy their sightless eye sockets; dessicated muzzles sprout patches of hair and yellowed teeth in plaster-pink gums. Most distressingly, the fur stretched across their misshapen frames has been reclaimed from old coats, their hands and feet from old leather gloves. Finding ourselves in the company of this trio of remade creatures, we are assailed by the unpalatable logic of their bodily reappropriations. Nearby, Garret Phelan’s Bloody Mynahs (Series 3, 2012) spreads arboreally across one corner of the gallery. His drawings depict a flock of birds in pen, ink and pencil; impersonators of human voices whose feet grip not branches but bleeding human hands. Yuriy Norshteyn’s animated film, Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), references the cross-cultural traditions of peopling children’s stories with animal figures. Situated among so many disconcerting representations of animality, the hedgehog stands in for a bestiary of other comfortingly humanistic non-human protagonists.
 
In his catalogue essay, Stephen Brandes identifies the source for the exhibition title in Animal Farm, writing: ‘One might be mistaken, given the title, in thinking that this is a show about the political relationship between two countries. It is not…it’s an exhibition about animals, though wider political implications arise in some of the works.’ While it might, indeed, mislead some prospective viewers, Brandes’ Orwellian borrowing successfully primes us to be attentive to the wide and powerful implications of this show as a whole. It prepares us for an encounter with a politics that transcends the cross-national to address the ripe problematics of cross-species interchange.
 
 
Beasts of England/Beasts of Ireland was on view, 8 June – 7 September 2013.