Slavka Sverakova – Enclave Review

Convergence

Robin Foley — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:54:02 +0000

The ambitious intentions of the curator – the competent, informed and cerebral Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Reader at the University of Ulster – are grounded in her ongoing research and curatorial activity (e.g. Joyce in Art at the RHA in 2004). According to an email sent by Dr. Lerm Hayes to the reviewer, this exhibition intended to show ‘how reading and interpreting literature is … at the core of some … art practices’, to highlight ‘that artists make a major contribution to how we can all think about literature … as something relevant and liberating’, and to provide ‘… an alternative ‘monument’ to writers, their work, to well-read artists –and to innovative ways of bridging these realms through exhibition’. The formidable connection to literature related Convergence to the Perverse Library Exhibition of conceptual writing that had previously been shown at Shandy Hall, Yorkshire (2010), whose curator, Simon Morris of Information as Material, saw it as an exploration of the ways in which artists can help visitors of the museum to unlock the collection. This rhymes with the second aim above, though Lerm Hayes’ unlocking is more inclusive: it includes all we read.

On my visits to Convergence, however, I failed to experience the art-literature transfer as anything like a ‘major contribution’ and felt unconvinced that a life informed by literature was at the core of the artworks on display. At least since the Biblia Pauperum, artists have engaged in literary interpretation, and it is understandable that art historians should research this body of exegesis. But, as M.C. Beardsley argued in The Aesthetic Point of View, such intentionality is insufficient matter for the interpretation of an artwork – understanding of the core processes of art in terms of mere subject-matter, in fact, was a staple of socialist realism schools of criticism in the former SSSR (a legacy of Peredvizniki). In contrast, it is my conviction that literature significantly contributes to what Aristotle called ‘the good life’, and it is in this ‘good life’ that literature and art ‘converge’. Such convergence was not exhibited at the Golden Thread.

Julie Bacon transformed two jigsaw puzzles into a colourful relief spiral, which looked like recent scientific images of galaxies. The text associated with this piece (The Twins) – Kurt Vonnegut’s city-based novel Lonesome No More – is about the destruction of lives, those of a twin brother and sister. Two empty jigsaw boxes, titled ‘Bamiyan Buddhas’ and ‘Afghanistan’, high up on pedestals, reinforced another reading. The twin pedestals easily morphed into a schematic model of the ‘Twin Towers’ destroyed in 2001, and the motifs on the carpet underneath included a Kalashnikov and a tank. In this case, embedding ideas within ideas is not convergence (it is perhaps ‘recursion’, to use Michael C. Corballis’ coinage).

Beyond the curatorial agenda, however, much of the art operated on its own terms. The elegant economy of means of Brian O’Doherty’s Untitled (2009) and Eric Zboya’s 2010 transformation of Ginsberg’s Howl #16 into a black hole succeeded immediately. Musique (2009), by Michalis Pichler, felt effortless. He embedded several ideas with minimal means: dark bars, appearing like an aleatoric score, dropped down across the screen, morphing into beautiful pearling staccato sound as they passed through a band of different frequency. The bars related to a book published in 1969 by Marcel Broodthaers, in which he replaced the words of Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés with black bars and subtitled it Image. Pichler presented Broothaers’ intervention as laser cut-outs in a closed book and re-named it Sculpture (2008). A similar intervention was to be performed by Cerith Wyn Evans in 2010 (Wyn Evans cut out Broodthaers’ black blocks, and presented the pages framed, to be hung on a gallery wall). The bars in Image, the laser cut-outs, Sculpture and Musique correspond not so much to words, but to their position on the page, to the typographical layout prescribed by Mallarmé, which harvested the silence of space about the print. Typography is also forefronted in Complete Text of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ecke Bonk and Isa Quandt (1989), which explores the power of scale to change a meaning: the book shrunk to four A5 cards. Without a magnifying glass, the meaning is not accessible – a smiling metaphor for the difficulties one may have both with Wittgenstein and the ineffable in art. A witty contrast to this I found in Cerith Wyn Evans’ screenprint, part of the Billboard for Edinburgh series (2009), where a robust poetics of wisdom was made clearly visible, but remained difficult to achieve.

At times, we cannot distinguish between our own contingent values and the artwork’s intrinsic value. Joanna Karolini claimed that the re-writing of fifteen of Kafka’s love letters had given her insights into his personality. Yet is more likely that the act of writing over written text pushes the original experience towards even greater inaccessibility. Nick Thurston removed and replaced some words in the three large panels with texts from Beckett’s Watt. Six pairs of small line drawings devised by Pavel Büchler, drawn on walls by Karolini, appeared to trace the spaces of removed words. Embedded in Simon Morris’s Fan No. 10 (2011), the text by Thomas Campbell recalled phenomenology: “Reading is art when the act of reading, the moments of slippage, nothingness, unreadability are presented in our perception”. Afterall, there may be a thought without language. Allotrope, Antepress and Andrea Theis placed their faith in multitudes and theories. Tim Rollins (and K.O.S.) grounded his in social work.

The fascination with migrating themes, exemplified by Convergence, is a good starting point. But the specific themes matter, as does what happens with them afterwards.

Convergence ran from 6 June – 6 August 2011.

Aiming

Robin Foley — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 16:38:48 +0000

In partnership with Bbeyond and supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute the Naughton Gallery commissioned four Polish and two Belfast-based artists to present performances on the campus.

In 1981 Zbygniev Warpechovski (b. 1938) delivered a memorable performance on the subject of Solidarity being crushed by the totalitarian regime at the Art Research Exchange in Belfast. His 2009 performance juxtaposed dreams about poems with dreams about a young muse (performed by Kinga Kedziora) expressing an anguished faith in creativity. Back on Earth, Jerzy Beres (b. 1930) offered the traditional Slavonic gestures of sharing (splitting a log) and greeting (a glass of vodka) as signatures for friendship. Jan Swidzinski (b. 1923) reduced his gestures to two movements of hands, and conjured a merry-go-round of ambiguity from four words: was it Life? Art? Beginning? End? Waldemar Tatarczuk (b. 1964), wrote words with fallen leaves on a pathway, using his foot: ‘It was, It is, It will not be.’ The leaves and the words ceased to be two separate phenomena in an induced metaphor for cycles of being. Through the fellowship of poetry with love, friendship with sharing, life with art, death and renewal, a concept of togetherness emerged.

The performances by Sandra Johnston (b. 1968) and Alastair MacLennan (b. 1943) evoked still different kinds of togetherness. Their collaborative practice (mode of togetherness) came about by chance: as a response to an organizational error during the Borderline project in Timisoara, Romania, in 2009. There were two artists and only one slot. That experience motivated their performances in Belfast: Stillest (in two parts) and Gust to Dust.

Alastair MacLennan and Sandra Johnston: Stillest and Gust to Dust.
Performances at Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University Belfast, October 2009. Images courtesy of rorymoore.com.

Part 1 of Stillest involved the barefoot performers holding a pig ear in each hand and each pushing a fish, very slowly, from one end of the black and white tiled floor to the exit door. Dressed in matching black trousers and tunic they meandered towards and away from each other. Johnston later remarked that the fish kept sliding into proximity with the other one.

Stillest part 2 in the Senate Room, with the audience seated along the walls, switched from synchronised to parallel actions, and at a poignant moment, to an interaction. Divided by a row of tables, the performers delivered their solo actions. Johnston could not see MacLennan at all; he could only see her silhouette against the windows.

MacLennan balanced a large tree branch horizontally on his head; Johnston pressed a glass of water against her neck, approximately against the thyroid gland: gestures related to energy levels. She managed to do this for almost an hour, a remarkable feat of will (when I tried it at home, I started choking in seconds). The mind and body forged a double bind: intention controlled the will, the will invented skills that controlled the body: a matter of holding it still, overcoming natural reflexes, or simply avoiding failure. This togetherness requires complete abandonment of dualism, and of the neat division between perception, cognition and action, of any separation between thought and embodied action.

This mental investigation into how quickly the body uses energy then switched from the two separate actions to one that involved both performers at once: Johnston turned and moved slowly towards MacLennan while he continued balancing the branch on his cranium. The vacuous frozen gestures of both arms functioned as counterweights to the heavy unwieldy load, keeping his neck and head steady. Johnston placed her glass of water in one of his hands, the hand that was engaged in sensitive balancing. The continuous componential thought process (do not let the branch slip) was opened by a ‘catch and toss’ thinking, the source of which was Johnston’s interaction. She altered one part of the chain of MacLennan’s action with asynchronous input behaviour, utterly unexpected in relation to her previous solo action. She prompted an adaptive process that forged emergence of functionally valuable side effects, like softness, gentleness, caring, giving, sharing, giving up, cooperation, collaboration, working together, etc. This was togetherness of brain and body, body and mind, thinking and feeling, calling for more than a componential explanation, which would be insufficient in the face of the emerging values, continually at risk of failure.

In a mute, stationary, durational performance Gust to Dust, given later outdoors on the lawn, the two performers held a large tree branch each (cut from MacLennan’s garden). The body appeared to be extended by the branch soaring vertically up. Incredibly they manage to carry the weight for the better part of an hour. Freeing their hands at the end, they scattered seeds into the wind.

These performances involved unimaginable physical discomfort for the artists, placing their bodies amongst the ‘cognitively inert’ creations, like rocks and volcanoes. This remnant of dualism was swiftly undermined by making dead fish, pigs’ ears, tree branches, and water into components as essential as the bodies and minds of the two artists. These selfreflecting universes wiggle out of traditional analysis, reminding us why the study of creativity had to expand to include neurology.

If I were to apply one context only, I would interpret these performances as metaphors for life in Northern Ireland, the fish relating to its livelihoods and religion, the branches cut off and difficult to balance relating to fragmentation, alienation and loss of coherence. The emerging values of togetherness signal the chance of better life.

Aiming took place 22-24 October 2009.