PASSAGES

The foundations of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed presents themselves as remnants with remanence.  While the slow pace of entropy, and the faster pace of immolation, reduced the woodshed to the trace of a foundation, the space, the missing volume, is inhabited by memory.  The persistence of memory has been in defiance of the many physical wounds inflicted upon the installation, with the sense of that residual energy seemingly threatining the authorites at Kent State University, such that they have sought to erase it as fully as possible.  As ruins, the site became a container for many memories, and an 'open wound' in the Freudian sense of the melancholic's unresolvable anguish.

Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed

The eerie ears of the acoustic mirrors on England ’s coasts, resonate with these residual traces.  Here, the metaphysical drifts in the ether by way of acoustics.  Once at the cutting edge of technology, and deployed for the monitoring of enemy approaches, the acoustic mirrors were quickly abandoned with the advent of radars.  Yet, they did not cease their collection and amplification of sound.  While materially they disintegrated, their asomatous presence continued to resonate.  Tacita Dean captured the acoustic haunting in her film Sound Mirrors (1999), with the soundtrack conveying the ongoing remanence of the decaying mirrors.  The mirrors' physical form remains, to a greater or lesser extent, yet their purpose has long since past.  Brian Dillon reflects on the mirrors' 'melancholy presence', enhanced by their astonishing aesthetics [2]. 

  Sound Mirror

 [1] Thanks to author Martin Edmond for posting a piece from Julia Blackburn’s The Emperor’s Last Island which described the notion of remanence within dowsing.

[2] Brian Dillon (2003/4) Listening for the Enemy.  Cabinet Online, 12. 

SHISHKIN & KUINDZHI

The light of St Petersburg's midsummer days (and nights) was enchanting, ethereal.  The forest around my small dwelling was bathed in an eternal supernal glow.   It was a light which was imbued with the nostalgia of times untouched by the cool, cruel glare of modernity's fluorescent rays.  As romantic and sentimental as it might seem, it conjured up a childhood I never owned, a life I've never lived, yet was very much part of. Like the Proustian taste of madeleine which brings on a cascade of reverie, this light triggered an incandescent reminiscence, borrowed from books, films, suffusing my world and memories.  The house I stayed in took on all of the qualities of the houses in Tarkovsky's films; it was most definitely the house in Solaris, and had a strong family resemblance to the Sacrifice's dwelling, which was most certainly one of the central characters of that film, its enigmatic presence and chimerical alchemy saw it constantly change as though in dialogue with those around it, exposing its small, introspective spaces, or opening out light filled cavities to the surrounding landscape. My movements around the city were in a continuous take, aware that I had become a player in Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark.  This led to a constant feeling of a dreamlike state, filmed all in one breath, knowing that if I were to divert from the continuous movement the whole thing would come to an end, as in the filming of Russian Ark, where  the need to maintain that continuous take impelled the film, one dared not take a breath while watching it.  Almost a burden, something to be carried, as in Tarkvosky's film, where ‘every gift is a sacrifice.'   

But how to hold that light?  Shishkin and Kuindzhi!   I will always be indebted to Konstantin for this revelation, a glorious epiphany through his tour of Russian State Museum.  As a landscape architect and a truly religious soul, in the most divine of senses, Konstantin navigated via a radar which led me exactly to the works which spoke so softly, deftly, about the light.  Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898) and Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842 - ?1910) were artists whose works glowed upon the walls, shimmering with this very light that suffused the St Petersburg stay.  Returning home with postcards of the paintings was some sense of seeing the light, holding it, and they are here, still glowing in the gloomy depths of winter, talismans of some never known but always known past, a golden age.

I.Shishkin. Oaks. 1887, Russian State Museum

Arkhip Kuindzhi, Birch Grove, 1879