Imagine

 imagine

Wim Wenders in London

Alerted (from Canada - I love how this happens) by wood s lot, I went to see the exhibition of Wim Wenders' photographs, Places, strange and quiet, at the palatial Haunch of Venison gallery. Attracted by the sort of scene that draws him, the unexpected beauty of the odd and lost and out of scale, neglected or abandoned, I was none the less inclined to mutter that he only gets a show in these fabulous surroundings because he's a famous film director. It's true I didn't mind this in the of case Nuri Bilge Ceylan, was happy to see another facet of the work, adored his photos. And anyway, when I think about how little fashionable photography excites me, I'm not complaining about anything I find beautiful or intriguing. The photos move through bold, but modest black and white scenes to large-format shots of corners pale and lost, stark and lurid, with a lovely, often painterly eye for colour and abstraction. The last is a strange, engrossing wide-screen wonder: a damp, decaying wall painted with a mural by Os Gemeos of figures lined up as if for a firing squad. I would have taken it for a painting. Thoughts continue about photographing art. I was quite won over.

The exhibition coincides with the London opening of Wenders' new film, Pina, about the Tanztheater Wuppertal of Pina Bausch. My first experience of 3D. I was apprehensive. The bulky glasses perched over my own left deep and painful furrows in my nose, but it wasn't, as I'd feared, headache-inducing. Squirm-inducing, though, my limbs inclined to move in synch with movements that seemed so 'real', seemed to come towards me, and tiring on the eyes, which kept wanting to close. And wonderful, worth the discomforts, viscerally gorgeous and disturbing. The music, the dancing, the faces of the dancers and their words in many languages about their dead choreographer - all utterly compelling and absorbing. I wasn't familiar with Pina Bausch's work. I can see why some dislike it, call the often writhing and repetitive movements a 'pornography of pain'. But it seemed to me just bruisingly evocative of the texture of life and emotions, and the dancers a peerless animation of music. The film is a mixture of theatre and rehearsal scenes and dancing out in the streets of Wuppertal, in countryside and beside the sea. Both enclosed and open spaces work beautifully. I've always loved films about dance, how they let you get close to the dancers, their faces and muscles, and see from many viewpoints - Carlos Saura's films of Antonio Gades and his flamenco company remain vivid in my mind many years after I saw them - and 3D does deepen the experience, takes you right into space and movement. Here again in the realm of the beyond-words - is everything this week about that?

Pond suite

A place that is not me

This one reminded me of a drawing in ink and watercolour.

.. always moving, blown by wind, dissolving into the moisture in the air evoked by the mixture of ink and water on the paper. They are always out there in a place that is not me.

From Paul Kahn's review of drawings by Gao Xingjian in the latest issue of Cerise Press. 

A place that is not me: what a wonderful evocation of looking at art!  And it struck me in particular because T J Clark, in a recent talk at the London Review Bookshop, said something related, in less poetic but not less shockingly resonant words. 

I'd encountered T J Clark through his recent writing in the LRB. These few articles were not enough for me to form a view of his approach to art history, but I was quickly engaged by writing as exhilaratingly personal as it was knowledgeable. I especially liked his piece on the Cezanne exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery a few months ago  - both the paintings and the review spoke so much to the thoughts stirred up by the blogpost Parmanu had written around the same time on Edward Hopper and the eternal moment.    

Tim Clark and Wendy Lesser, talking at the LRBookshop about their books*, which share the impossible project of putting into words that which defies words, but is conveyed by painting or music, were exciting if frustrating, as such brief discussions perhaps always are. The ultimate appeal of a work of art, he said - and Paul Kahn's words reminded me of this - is all about escape from self, escape from here. [Another kind of moment - the 'yes!' moment when someone articulates the thing you've always known.]

Painting, Clark went on to say, offers the non-textual, non-grammatical; it exceeds or eludes verbal language. So is there a contradiction, a violence even, in approaching the non verbal through words?, Wendy Lesser asked (she was fascinating too - I have to read one of her books). Not violence, he responded; it's a contradiction, yes, but it's what people do, what language does. Language must struggle, he said, with what it is in a fine painting that most compels - the momentary, the uncontrollable that materialises, confirming or undermining the structure, the form of the work.   

These notions dance in my mind: 'the momentary', 'escape', 'a place that is not me'.

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* T J Clark, The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing

* Wendy Lesser, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets 

Dancer

Finding this much-needed time off insanely difficult. Longing to float outside routine, recover a bit from too much work and not enough of anything else, but hopelessly out of practice at floating. I suppose this is why so many people drink too much on holiday, and argue. Words become pathetic. Maybe photos reassert a kind of aspiration.

Can you see the dancer? Keep looking. 

Three, no - four, no...

Venturing out yesterday from my sheltering space to spend the day with some new friends, this is how they seemed to me, perhaps: ordinary and extraordinary, fluctuating, multiplying, not quite there. Or was it me who wasn't quite there, sporadically unable to look into their eyes, away from the reflections on the wall?

The sheltering space

Without shared rituals

I know it's a bit pointless to keep raving on about Antonio Munoz Molina, when his articles and blog are in Spanish. On the other hand, so much of his writing is interesting and beautiful enough to be worth sharing even at second hand. Today he writes of the great processions of Holy Week in Spain; of how alienated he felt, as an awkward, questioning youngster, from these obligatory public manifestations - obligatory like so much of the stifling conformity of life under dictatorship and therefore inextricable for him from state oppression. He pleads eloquently for the right to not take part, whether your motive is profound dissent or just not being in the mood.

Munoz Molina's is a sensibility that resonates deeply with me. I can imagine sharing these feelings if, like him, I'd grown up in a provincial city in the long decades of Franco's Spain. And yet, and yet... don't collective, universal rituals exist, haven't they always existed, because they express a deep need to lose ourselves in something bigger, for catharsis? Isn't there a great psychic cost to a life without them? And doesn't the Easter ritual, happening over several days and explicitly passing through horror, mourning, contemplation and deliverance, express and help to hold some great truths of life?

Antonio Munoz Molina has recently become part of my near-daily reading. Beth Adams' blog, the cassandra pages, has long been part of it and I've been following her account of Easter services in the Anglican Christchurch Cathedral in Montreal, where she sings in the choir. She's the blogger par excellence, sharing through music, sketches and photographs as well as words - a gentle, informal drawing into her daily reality. I have found myself riveted and ambivalent. Brought up Anglican, I was not much engaged and often bored by services and, by adolescence, increasingly alienated by the working-class Protestant ethic (work and cleanliness are next to godliness; we don't have much and that's what we deserve, but we're more deserving than they are). Not hard, then, to identify with the young Spanish boy's alienation from his church and its cooption by a repressive ideology. But also, there's a deep pleasure in hymns and readings familiar so early they can never be forgotten, and the sheltering space and light of a church is something I learned to love as an adult seeking respite from the crowded chaos of the world outside. So there's considerable allure in what Beth recounts, and the subtle, thoughtful interpretations of which she speaks, of which Anglican writer Esther de Waal speaks, are vastly different from those which affronted me as a child.

I have a yen to experience a Greek Orthodox Easter, and one of these years will make sure I'm there for it. The disturbing and wonderful Orthodox singing, the whole village in church for candles lit at midnight and the cry of Christ is Risen! - my heart longs for this, for a ritual of renewal that clearly goes back further than Christianity.

My own slow yearning in middle age for a recognition of the spiritual has led me to Buddhism. The minimalism of the Vipassana and Zen traditions have been, and remain, compelling and have led in their own way to huge, surging feelings and an experience as collective as it is individual. But the more extroverted kind of public religious expression is not part of these, and I yearn for that too, even though, like Antonio Munoz Molina, I dissented from it so early and so thoroughly I can never take part without reservation. If I get to Greece for Easter one day, I will only be a tourist. 

All white, not quite

Azaleas in Dulwich Park: photographed every year since I got a camera. Thinking that I look more now at light and shade and shapes, abstractions and less at blossoms. More sense of something I do all the time, and these pass through it, than of a flowering moment that comes and soon goes. This is both satisfying and alarming. Important to hold in mind the ways in which photography is eye-opening, expansive, but also exploitative, reductive.

Doodling

I'd like to think such photographic doodling is not just self-obsession, but part of trying to repair myself and be able again to move beyond only self. The week off work has been mostly solitary: sleep and culture and walking and reading. At an LRBookshop talk on Tuesday, I ran into a lovely woman I used to see at a meditation group and we both had a lot to say, in the break, in the street and outside the tube station, about art and music, about Italy, where she's from originally, and mainly about writing - her MA in creative writing, my blogging and inspiration by fine writers and artists met on line, most notably of late, of course, Teju Cole's novel, Open City. Her face lit up. A Spanish friend had phoned her to recommend Antonio Munoz Molina's big review of the book in El Pais. She had loved the review and marked it down as a novel she must read. Then back to solitude. I could wish, perhaps, that this was not what I need for self-repair, but it's the bedrock. Relaxing with others can only come after - next week, I hope.