"Each art has, by nature, its distinctive Duende of style and form, but all roots join at the point where the black sounds of Manuel Torres issue forth—the ultimate stuff and the common basis, uncontrollable and tremulous, of wood and sound and canvas and word. Black sounds: behind which there abide, in tenderest intimacy, the volcanoes, the ants, the zephyrs, and the enormous night straining its waist against the Milky Way."
Federico García Lorca (1930) The Duende: Theory and Divertissement
Below - Jose Merce performs a Manuel Torres Fandango ...
Mein Lieber! Du liegst im Gras, den Kopf im Nacken, um Dich herum keine Menschenseele, Du hörst nur den Wind und Schaust hinauf in den offene Himmel - in das Blau dort oben, wo die Wolken ziehen - , das ist vielleicht das Schönste, was Du im Leben getan und gesehen hast.
My dear friend! You are lying in the grass, with your head thrown back, not a living soul is around, you hear only the wind and look up to the open sky - into the blue, where the clouds float by - perhaps this is the most beautiful thing you have done and seen in your life.[1]
Reminscent of Alexander Rodchenko's Shukov Tower, the installation is an expression that nature and technology are not mutually exclusive. There is a further link to Rodchenko's photograph of Pines, and "via cultural memory, this image of nature blends into Kabakov's installation."[2]
Seibold-Bultmann suggests yet another layer which the Kabakov installation links to - a passage by Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774/87): "Lying in the grass near a stream where only a few rays of sunlight penetrate the darkness of a forest, he observes insect life, and is then prompted to feel the presence of the Almighty, who ... in a state of continuous bliss bears and sustains us - then, my friend, when ... the world around me and the sky fully rest within my soul like the figure of a beloved; then I ... often think: oh if only I could express it all on paper, everything that lives so richly and so warmly within me, in such a way that it would reflect my soul, just as my soul is the mirror image of the infinite God! - My friend - but it makes me perish, I succumb to the violence of the splendour of these images."[3]
This in turn connects to the ‘epiphanic sky' - a portal to the Sublime - and Goethe's Sturm und Drang, with self intimately reconnected to the cosmos. "The possibility of epiphany through nature is bound up with a memory of the unfragmented Romantic self [...] Epiphany can be, but does not have to be experienced as a result of viewing the work. If it is, this results from the potency of a cultural tradition combined with the sublimity [...] of the natural sky and of infinite space."[4] The aerial-like ascending form of Kabakov's textual sculpture, and the association with Rodchenko's Pines, opens up further layers. Bachelard's meditations on the verticalising image, and the ‘aerial tree', and to Schopenhauer's pine at the edge of the abyss, and Nietzsche's fir tree "on the edge of the abyss, [which] is a cosmic vector of the aerial imagination."[5]
[1] Ursula Seibold-Bultmann (2000). New Projects for the City of Münster: Ilya Kabakov, Herman de Vries and Dan Graham. In Jan Birksted (ed). Landscapes of Memory and Experience. London: Spon. p. 219, n.6
[2] ibid, p.208.
[3] ibid, p.208-9.
[4] Ibid, p. 209.
[5] Gaston Bachelard. (1988). Air and Dreams: An essay on the imagination of movement. Trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell. Dallas: The Dallas Institute. P. 148. Originally published 1943 L'Air et les songes, essai sur l'imagination du mouvment.
Perhaps it is a myth. Even so, there is often an ominous sense of darkness here. Black introspection. A kind of vertigo, being at the earth's edge. Someone, a poet, was speaking on the radio from Auckland a while back, and said he was "three stops from the end of the world..." The darkness that is suppressed in so many marketing ventures, like stage sets propped up in front of the melancholy vastness beyond, bathed in their eternal sunshine. Monte Holcroft, essayist and long time editor of The Listener, once described this place as "a glow at the edge of darkness," or something like that (the exact quotation is elusive). The last post before the sublime drop into the abyss. In the early 1960s CK Stead wrote how "a form of romanticism has been bred, in which topography becomes a substitute for human society." The title of the book this line comes from, Distance Looks Our Way: The Effects of Remoteness on New Zealand, has long sat in my mind. (Perhaps it is guilt - my copy bears the stamp of my old high school...). Charles Brasch's lines reverberate in the title, from his poem The Islands,
Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring
Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;
And none knows where he will lie down at night.
The book proceeds like notes in the margin of the book of the world. Each chapter folding out this odd melancholic sense of being out here, on a limb ... forlorn, as in E H McCormick's chapter title, 'Last, Loneliest, Most Loyal.' Even the birds and the trees are somehow marginal, seen by much of the world as aberrations as they tried so hard to classify things within their Eurocentric systems - as though their natural history was somehow right and ours was wrong. Our next-door neighbour, Australia, is also considered aberrant, a place where "All Things Are Queer and Opposite." The platypus was named Ornithorhynchus paradoxus - yet there's nothing at all paradoxical about it. As George Seddon writes, paraphrasing Michael Hoare's earlier work, the platypus is actually "logical, almost predictable" and "highly evolved and well-adapted." It's just ... different. Not better, worse, or paradoxical.
Yet that difference, the remoteness, the sense of these forgotten isles, creates a melancholic sense of both abandonment and loss, of loneliness and vastness. The 'weird melancholy' of Marcus Clarke's view of Australian Scenery suffused with Holcroft's glimmer at the edge of darkness. If there is a paradox then it's here, in this love of loneliness. And if there is a problem, it is when geographic distance, and difference, is conflated with intellectual distance by those at the 'centre' ... as for artist Stephen Bambury, who had for years laboured under the misapprehension that he was engaged in an international art dialogue. However, when he visited the United States he had to ‘confront the fact that you can’t have a conversation if only one party is able to speak. That was the reality [he] had to deal with. In world terms, we outside New York didn’t exist.’ Those at the self-proclaimed centre continue this intellectual hegemony, returning work to those at the so-called margins with the request that it be rewritten to be 'relevant,' while at the same time valorising their own writing with some kind of 'universal' status.
It is late at night. Raining. I'm reading. Vertigo, by W G Sebald. There is an unnerving passage that demands being read, over and over ... .
A doppelganger moment. Recognition. Walk out of one door and into another from long ago. The feeling of Vertigo throws down a golden thread, and suddenly I am elsewhere, yet there ...
Closing passage of The Making of the English Landscape ... “What else has happened in the immemorial landscape of the English countryside? Airfields have flayed it bare…Poor devastated Lincolnshire and Suffolk! And those long gentle lines of the dip-slope of the Cotswolds, those misty uplands of the sheep-grey oolite, how they have lent themselves to the villainous requirements of the new age! Over them drones, day after day, the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable’s and Gainsborough’s sky. England of the Nissen-hut, the “pre-fab” and the electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment; England of the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil, murderous with lorries; England of the bombing-range wherever there was once silence…Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men and the politician; let us turn away and contemplate the past before all is lost to the vandals” (Hoskins 1955, pp 231-2)
"the ache/ toská: No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom, skuka. The adjective tosklivïy is translatable as 'dismal,' 'dreary.'" Vladimir Nabokov's notes to his translation of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. (1991) Princeton University Press.
Murray River, SA, Australia, JBowring, October 2003
ON READING AGAMBEN AGAIN
The passage of things, the fugitive quality of phenomena, a procession of drifts. In every sense of security there is always already the imminent fear of loss. An emotional dynamo results, driving us ... on. Eros and thanatos do-si-do. Giorgio Agamben elevates the creative potency of melancholy, and the intertwining, twinning, with love. Simultaneously it is destructive, bleak, sadness without a purpose ... Amongst all of this, the ephemeral swirls past, the nostalgia for ruins, stains, sepia, senescence, even evanescence ...
