Selected texts
Claire MacDonald (artist)
"In her Acoustic Footsteps: Listening to the artist's voice"*
BEGINNINGS
‘Any work is made to meet itself at the crossroads.’ Rachel Blau DuPlessis This summer, I talked to several artists about their new work, and the practice of making decisions during its making. At the time, I was writing an essay about a new video-installation, ‘A Play in Time’ by the British artist Susan Trangmar, who, as part of her process of reflection, talked about her approach as a response to the conditions of making - its linguistic, cultural and artistic environments, and her chosen medium. I noticed how she characterised the practice of making decisions differently at each stage of the process, beginning by immersing herself in a context and allowing her camera to lead, she said: ‘There is a feeling of absorption, of entering into a relationship with the place and not knowing what will come from this. Anything might happen and then it becomes a question of response.’ That question of art process as response, or perhaps as call and response, and how that is articulated, interests me a great deal. The Canadian poet, visual artist and Classics scholar Anne Carson, talks about her work taking place between ‘the landscape of objective facts’ and the room of her own aesthetic creation. Everything one needs is in that room, the problem is to clear it so that one can see what is there. ‘It is the clearing that takes the time’, ‘once cleared the room writes itself’. I am also interested in how artists use language as part of the process of response. As the poet and critic Lyn Hejinian says, ‘Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.’ (Hejinian 2000:48) This summer I talked to two Greek artists, Leda Papaconstandinou and Lizzie Calligas, both well known and widely exhibited, and both now in their sixties, on the island of Spetses. Each of them works in installation, lens based media and painting and, in Leda’s case, performance. Our discussions focused on their new works – in Leda’s case a recently completed video and performance work commissioned for ‘Heterotopias,’ the Thessalonika Biennale in 2007 and called ‘In the Name of …’, and in Lizzie’s case, a work in development called ‘Relocated Memory,’ which concerns the relationship of two spaces, the old and the new Acropolis museums. The conversations I had with each of them were even less formal than the recording Rebecca Fortnum has just analyzed – each was recorded only in note form, and each took place in the artist’s home. Each was example of what Paul Carter calls ‘creative re-membering,’ in which the artist attempts to ‘articulate’ (and if you remember that word refers to the anatomy of the body and to the opening up of the joints) – the process of making work - in an intimate situation, with a known listener, and in an oral form that mixes many discursive registers. It is in contexts that – as Rebecca has pointed out - ‘have a semi-public status,’ that take place ‘in an intimate environment’ and where ‘the statements appear to range between the rehearsed and the spontaneous’ – that certain kinds of terms can emerge, ones that are less evident in the contexts where artists commonly have to both represent their work, and adhere to the publicly acknowledged discourses at play within art schools and the art world. It is in the space between the formal and informal – where we are focusing on the work but allowing the ‘outside’ in – that the associative process of an artist’s thinking sometimes emerges into language. I also want to talk today about the importance of the incidental or unexpected within the process of making work; the kinds of ‘surprising things’ that, as Christine Borland says, happen when working with materials - as if the work has an agency of its own, as if, at times the artist is, as Leda Papaconstandinou put it to me, ‘a ventriloquist.’ Of course, randomness, intuition and the incidental are hardly unusual or arcane topics. The notion of the artist as ventriloquist has parallels with William Burroughs’ concept of the ‘third mind,’ and chance procedures were the formative model for Fluxus, generating, post-Cage, a set of primary methods for later American art. But what I am interested in picking up on, is not to do with chance and the incidental as conscious decision making method – but what is happening when artists refer to the unexpected, intuition taking over, or work ‘speaking’ back to them – a process we probably all recognise. I am beginning to think that it connects to that Bahktinian process of ‘ideological becoming’ that Rebecca discusses, a notion of identity which is always formed dialogically, generatively, perhaps provisionally & experimentally and certainly progressively (in the sense that it ‘moves’) in the exchange between art making and language. Making the work, and creatively re-membering the work through language – orally and graphically – engages and develops the autographic identity of the artist. By this I mean that – to parallel what Roland Barthes says about writers – an artist’s identity is not a biographical point from which the work emerges, but a constant state of being in process, which is formed & then iterated and projected through the work. Autography, or self-writing, suggests a constant ‘re-membering’ of the self through the steps that make the work, and the following steps that an artists uses to reflect on it. Performance critic Peggy Phelan describes the work of choreographer Yvonne Rainer (films, writing, dancing) as an expanded practice of ‘graphing’- suggesting the Greek root ‘graph’ to refer as it does to all forms of mark making – and somewhere in there to suggest ‘graph’ that diagrammatic form which emerges horizontally and vertically from a tiny axis in the bottom left hand corner of a given sheet. That expanded notion of ‘graphing,’ or mark making, also might include the oral – that is, talking, as a form of provisional practice rather than, or as well as, as a form of representation of the work. Lyn Hejinian notes the provisional, uncertain nature of language - ‘In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayyable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion.’ (56) ‘We long to join words to the world – to close the gap between ourselves and things – and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so.’ SOUNDINGS I want to stop here – momentarily – to alight – or to return to Leda Papaconstandinou in her house in Spetses. This is what happened. She met me, in the late afternoon, wearing a yellow silk dress, and together we walked up to her house, talking about making clothes. She told me she had made the dress from a 70s Vogue pattern she had bought in England, and that she had found the material in a market, one of those markets. ‘You remember them, the Russians who came from the Black Sea, they are gone now, you can’t get any of that stuff any more.’ I did remember, in the early 90s the Russians who returned from the Black Sea brought amber and silk and box cameras and linen, and wooden toys and sold them in street markets, until they ran out. We sat at her table. I want to ask you about making decisions I say. I want to ask you how things get made. ‘We are all pressed to make decisions,’ she says. ‘It’s related to context. Sometimes you have to make a decision, and not making the decision is making the decision. Decisions are appropriate to one’s moment. I am asking people to ask me three questions, she says, which they think are the most important to them.’ ‘Why?’ I say. ‘I need to tell Carol, who is leaving us soon – to ask her three questions - she says - and then, its related to Oedipus and the Sphinx, they are always the same questions, they are about the things we need to say before we go.’ I give her three questions and she talks a bit more about Carol, who is Carol Roussopolos, the French Swiss film-maker, who is dying of breast cancer. And we move on. She says, ‘the way I make decisions about art making is not linear.’ She says, ‘something acts as a prompt at a critical point. The artist has a taxonomy, a kind of internal taxonomy of interests that she recognises when she sees it.’ |
She says, ‘the conceptual structure is there in language – it is made manifest and recognised. Writing helps to make form distil. It helps to make time, and, yes, it makes material available in time. Something pops up and if there is no note it will go away and be lost but it is a material presence – it can be lost. So notebooks stay and I keep them. And a box, everything goes in – so returning to is an important part of decision making – knowing one can return is important it is formal – something to do with seriousness – with self-receiving – with gesture – the gesture from self back to self.’
I remember seeing her perform at Chelsea College of Art in June – a performance given at a dinner held by two artists, Maria Walsh and Mo Throp as a tribute to Simone De Beauvoir, in the sixtieth anniversary year of the publication of ‘The Second Sex’ – self to self – eating marigolds. I think of Leda’s lipstick, with which she wrote in the performance. I think of her slow chewing. ‘Decisions are material,’ she says ‘they have to do with life and death. All riddles have to do with life and death. If you die without having made decisions.’ ‘You are compelled to return’, I say. ‘Not exactly. The practice makes decisions – it is paying my dues. Through making decisions you are informing yourself – and then the making process becomes obvious.’ I haven’t told you what we are doing. We are looking at a series of images of her recent work ‘In the Name of …’ in which she began by making a film of herself, lipsticked and hated and dressed in black, and visited a series of foreign cemetery sites in Thessaloniki – Indian, Jewish, British – some from the period of the 1st world war – pushing a cart full of old clothes, in a commemorative gesture, a harsh, ‘uphill’ struggle. She also made brief, sonic and visual, formal, commemorative performances at sites in the city where the new immigrants now live. The performances were all videoed. The final work consisted of projections onto screens positioned just beneath the water in the port of Thessalonika, initiated by a performance in which the viewer was signalled to them along a trail of occasional items of clothing, scattered along the old rail track carrying goods to the dock. Once there, Leda began the installation by burning an item of clothing. ‘I had been collecting clothes of people who had died, for years,’ she says. ‘And you know, old clothes have this energy, you have to get rid of them.’ ‘I saw a documentary about the secret passages that immigrants use to come into the country. They are like little gates situated on the ancient paths – the monopatia. The images were of the wilderness with people’s clothes scattered round. They cast their clothes off – you know – Greece is the first border to the west. They cast off their clothes, because they make them visible, and then they wear other clothes and they enter our countries like ghosts.’ She says, I’ knew I would be something to do with clothes.’ I can’t remember how it ended, but I now that when I left, she was still sitting at the table, wearing the yellow silk dress. When I left Spetses and came back to England I looked up Carol Roussopolos’s work. ‘My work, she says, has always been in the voices of others.’ She has made radical, feminist films for 35 years, several, like her 1976 film on the SCUM manifesto, with the actor Delphine Seyrig. In 2001 she made a film about Simone De Beauvoir’s the 2nd sex. I think of Leda eating marigolds. I think of her yellow silk dress. ‘I knew I would do something with clothes.’ POETICS When I reflected on that evening’s events I began to realize that Leda wanted to close the gap between selves and words. The mode of rhetorical, oral and performative activity that she quite naturally used, that evening, was a multiply inflected practice of articulation, in which narrative and the functionality of language were combined with other elements. It was essentially a kind of ‘graphing’ process, a practice of making marks, or note taking. The elements of her taxonomy contained the yellow dress she wore, the – at the time confusing - questions she asked me - my 3 urgent questions, the entry of Carol herself as a figure into the story without any apparent narrative motive, but through association. All of that spoke metonymically of the conditions that ‘allow surprising things to happen.’ As she engaged in showing me slides, telling me the ‘what happened’ of her recent work, she looked back and forward, actively engaging the processual nature of her own ‘autography.’ … wearing a dress I made from a 70s Vogue pattern …. I knew I would use clothes … Old clothes have an energy …. I happened to see a documentary As listener, I was following her acoustic footprints, so to speak, and watching as I followed. On reflection, I am aware that this artist at least – I can’t speak about artists in general – is always in a process of becoming herself – always in a process of re-membering and articulating that progressively reforms her identity, and by identity I mean the taxonomic set, or constellation of practices, tools, methods and qualities that she draws from as an artist. Paul Carter calls this process ‘shuttling back and forth,’ recalling the movement of a shuttle across a loom as it makes cloth – it doesn’t move forward but from side to side – reminding us as well of the material origins of the word text in textile, to write is also to fabricate – it makes and well as marks. In moving onwards, I want to think in future about this ‘tracking back and forth,’ this ‘shuttling,’ as a kind of ‘distributed agency,’ as the artist marks, notes and speaks her way through a process of making and telling leaving traces along the way which then seem to speak back to her. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis says any work comes to meet itself at the crossroads - and in doing so it re-cognises itself. It seems as if what happens in an art process is that the process itself projects a field of possibilities which allows agency to be distributed to objects and materials – and that the process of reflection can be – and in this case was - less narrative or analytical than associative. In beginning to try to think about these things I have found the work of the writers and critics I have mentioned – Paul Carter, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, others (Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Craig Dworkin) helpful, and I am wondering if the strands of practice in which artists have also engaged with language (Mel Bochner – ‘language is not transparent’) especially useful, because it attends to the nature of language and of discourse as material, to its plasticity, to its agency – it knows more than you do. I want to leave you with an image of Robert Smithson’s ‘A Heap of Language’ as an aide memoir – a work that quintessentially reminds us of the materiality of language, that operates between looking and reading, drawing and writing, analysis and response. It operates as heap, graph and grid, list and handwritten note to self, as gesture and trace of activity. As Rebecca has pointed out in her talk, artists are expected to adhere to a fairly narrow set of functional discourses in discussing their work. I want now to look at how to activate the dynamics of the engagement of language and art making in ways that attend to the creative problem of making the connection of selves, things and words. * Published in Art and Artistic Research, Zurich Yearbook of the Arts vol. 6, Corina Caduff, Fiona Siegenthaler and Tan Wälchli (eds.), Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) and Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010. |
Syrago Tsiara (Director, Contemporary Art Centre of Thessaloniki)
"For a Subversive Conceptualisation of the Sacred"*
Leda Papaconstantinou’s installation at the old oil press and soap factory in Elefsina visualizes the terms of a journey of experience; it is the journey into womanhood, with stops at such landmarks as childhood and youth, the rupture of the mother-daughter bond, a sexual coming of age and eventual reconciliation with the maternal body. It is a ritual drawing of gender lines across both the spaces of the permissible and the taboo, through the domains of visibility and intentional concealment, of absence, of the trace and the shadow that is a reminder of human presence.
In Papaconstantinou’s work, the constitutive myth of Demeter and Persephone, which first appears around 550 BC in the Homeric hymn to Demeter,[1] seems to shed all its descriptive qualities and is demystified, reduced to its basic ingredients. The artist’s conceptual proposal allows us to dig deep into the fundamental structure of the myth as a cultural narrative that helps visualize the various stages in the evolution of human relations, since the myth itself serves as an allegory of the adventure of living. Yet we do reencounter along the way, either as dubious reference or subtle intimation, the archetypal scenes of the daughter’s abduction and captivity at the hands of Hades, the mourning over the violent parting, the mother’s disguise and futile wandering, the voluntary offering of female services for the appeasement of divine wrath, the identification of springtime bloom with fertility and the constant concern of the mother-nurse over the earth’s bearing of fruit, which is a guarantee of the daughter’s annual return and the two women’s periodic reunion. The myth is interpreted – according to the practice of social anthropology – as a narrative of the rites of initiation into the community of womanhood and into adult sexuality; as a ‘sexuation’ ritual that presupposes the descent into the impenetrable, enigmatic darkness of the sexual act. Sexual maturity is portrayed as a symbolic and ritual death, requiring a dangerous immersion into the unknown for the necessary lifting of fear that will allow admission into the community of women. Areas of glaring or subdued light and thorough darkness are structural elements of the installation, activating the viewer’s perceptual mechanisms and facilitating an experiential connection with primordial desires and fears: viewers respond to the sensory stimuli received while feeling their way through and are faced with the unconscious surfacing uninvited. The elements Papaconstantinou keeps are those that she deems indispensable to structuring her representation: light, colour and sound. Their presence, profusion, or absence serve to guide each of us through the work, though there are no visible signs of a dependence on narrated events. It is not simply an alternative reading of the myth that the artist proposes; rather, she reformulates the myth’s notional content, linking the concept of sacredness with the life adventures of gendered subjects. The notion of the ‘adventure’ is here perceived as an adverse outcome of our actions, a sudden twist of events, an occurrence that can have either a destructive or beneficial effect on human relations. The meaning of the ‘sacred’ is likewise redefined through Papaconstantinou’s work; its semantic charge re-determined. The realm of the sacred is the space where life’s manifold expressions, the emotional states that determine its content, come together in a coherent whole: desire, fear and the constitutive loss of the maternal body, eroticism, companionship, the bereavement of separation, and a return to the primeval womb. The desacralization of place and history is realized by means of the consecration of common experience in an attempt to extricate the notion of ‘sanctity’ from the theological connotations attached to it by western culture. Julia Kristeva draws a distinction between the terms zoë and bios, maintaining that the former refers to the simple, biological act of life, while the latter gives meaning to the social and historical aspects of human existence. By placing her definition of the ‘sacred’ outside the theological framework that monotheism has imposed upon western thought, she attempts to abolish ‘the ancestral division between those who give life (women) and those who give meaning [to human action] (men)’. Meaning thus returns to its primordial source, the maternal body, since the creative force is no longer strictly confined to a physical relation with the act of life, but rather extends to include the act of bestowing meaning as well: After two thousand years of world history dominated by the sacredness of Baby Jesus, might women be in a position to give a different coloration to the ultimate sacred, the miracle of human life: not life for itself, but life bearing meaning, for the formulation of which women are called upon to offer their desire and their words?[2] |
In the last video projection, Leda chooses to juxtapose the image of two women, facing one another, silently crying. I am quoting from the artist’s own description:
Inside the well, the image of a young woman crying is projected upon a round, floating screen. Above the well, a similar screen displays the image of an older woman crying. They look at each other. No sound is heard. From the women of ancient Sparta who were publicly exhorted by the ephors to ‘bear their suffering in silence’ when mourning their dead[3], to the Serbian Women in Black, who in 1991 began to hold silent vigils in public spaces across Belgrade as a way of protesting against nationalist aggression and its repercussions, the female language of bereavement is a language of non-sound, either by duty or by choice. Through their eloquent silence, women ‘claim a voice for what has been left unsaid […], expressing political mistrust over the very limits of language’[4], as Athena Athanasiou aptly remarks. Leda Papaconstantinou makes an economical use of sound. She does not hesitate to exploit non-verbal ways of communication when deeming that the semantic value of ‘eloquent silence’ as an agent of pure emotion is greater than that of words. In staging the reciprocal relation of the two women facing each other in mourning, she stretches the space within which the subject and its social relations are formed beyond the authority of discourse. From the end of the 60s, when Papaconstantinou presented her first performances, to this day, she has systematically dealt in her work with the deconstruction and radical revision of fundamental concepts, including those of religiousness and eroticism, with a clear intention to investigate their interplay in connection to the human body. In Votive, 1969 [a profoundly religious comment of unspecified dogma], Private Structure and Ritual, of the same year, and Bite, 1970, Papaconstantinou explicitly aimed at formulating a new, heretical mythology that is freed from the dominant Christiano-centric and Euro-centric narratives concerning acceptable expressions of sexuality and the respective practices of repressing and delimiting it. Reminiscing about the spirit of that time, Sally Potter speaks of the groundbreaking gesture in the work of Leda Papaconstantinou as she evaluates the boldness of the performances she presented: ‘The giant crosses evoked all crosses everywhere in the history of Christianity but made of plastic they were almost kitsch, and violently twentieth century. In combination with the naked bodies they took on the mantle of blasphemy. This was dangerous terrain, ambitious and big […].’[5] The iconoclastic intent of those early ventures still survives intact in Leda Papaconstantinou recent works, though the means she now uses may not be as loud as they once were. The installation in Elefsina brings together all of the artist’s daring and original personal mythologies in a mature, dialectical approach of the body as social space; one that is home to both restrictive and liberating forces. NOTES: [1] Beate Wagner-Hasel, “Oi theotites tou sitariou: Dimitra kai Persephoni” (The Goddesses of Wheat: Demeter and Persephone), Archaiologia kai Technes journal, issue no. 68, p.p. 24-31. [2] Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, Columbia University Press, New York 2001, p. 11 [3] Xenophon, Hellenica, 6.6.16 [4] Athena Athanasiou, Zoe sto orio. Dokimia gia to soma, to fylo kai ti viopolitiki (Life on the Borderline. Essays on the Body, Gender and Biopolitics), Ekkremes, Athens 2007, p. 235. [5] Sally Potter, “Leda’s Events”, in Leda Papaconstantinou, Performance, Film, Video 1969 – 2004, Cube Editions, Athens 2005, p. 13. *Essay written for the exhibition Forever, 2009 More |