All that summer conceals, winter reveals. Outside everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and reseeds the easy way (...). Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. When the leaves fall the strip-tease is over; things stand mute and revealed.
J'ai découvert pour la première fois le travail d'Hélène Binet en visitant la galerie Gabrielle Ammann. La galerie est située au fond d'une petite cour qui laisse entrevoir un jardin minimaliste de graminées et de petits cailloux blancs impeccablement ratissés à la manière d'un jardin zen. Je me souviens des photos des églises de Nicholas Hawksmoor et d'un ou deux meubles design semblables à des sculptures. Je suis restée longtemps à regarder les photographies sans pouvoir m'en détourner, sans pouvoir échapper à leur séduction. Je suis retournée plusieurs fois à la galerie pour essayer de percer le secret de leurs lignes, de leurs textures, de leur composition, de leurs ombres. Il me manquait toujours quelque chose. Ce presque rien qui rendait les photos habitées, qui allait voir au coeur des choses, qui les déshabillait pour les montrer dans leur nudité. Hélène Binet raconte comment elle joue avec les ombres pour capturer l'essence de ce qu'elle photographie, mais aussi pour jouer des tours à celui qui les regarde. "Shadow is an amazing subject. Shadow is an absence. As an absence of energy you can compare it to silence or maybe cold air. It tells you the most. But it’s the one also that can trick you. Because you could have a feeling that it’s something else that you see. If you look at anthropology, different cultures, there has always been this interpretation of shadow. Shadow is always the lead in to something else. But then if you think about shadow as a sense of light you can go back in time and space and you can see that it connects you to the past." Dans ses photos d'architecture, il y a souvent des ciels chargés de nuages en mouvement, signes du temps saisi sur la pellicule qu'elle utilise exclusivement. "I shoot only on film and plate. I don’t touch digital. There are many reasons: mentally it’s very different to work with film. It’s precious and every photograph you have to say yes! It’s now! There's no fiddling about and fixing it later. I really believe the soul of photography is its relationship with the instant. And the concentration is very different. It’s like a momentum, it’s like a performance." Depuis, j'ai compris que chacune de ses photographies a la puissance de créer une petite épiphanie, à chaque fois différente qui célèbre les noces du regard du photographe et du regard de l'orante que nous devenons quand regarder nous ouvre à nous-même et qu'une aile claire nous parcourt d'un frisson de plumes.
Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy.
Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light...
Virginia Woolf
Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations — naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today — that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example — who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words — they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation — but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.
And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still — do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.
Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English — hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.
Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity — their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light. . . . That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no — nothing of that sort is going to happen to-night. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? “Time’s up! Silence!”
Non seulement nos souvenirs mais nos oublis sont logés. Notre inconscient est logé. Notre âme est une demeure. Et en nous souvenant des maisons, des chambres, nous apprenons à demeurer en nous-mêmes.
Gaston Bachelard
1991, atelier de Brooklyn. Je suis intrigué par la maquette en plâtre d'une grande maison ancienne posée sur une table devant la fenêtre. Je suis surpris par la précision de la facture, d'un réalisme inhabituel.
"C'est la maison de mes parents à Choisy, je l'ai refaite de mémoire et en m'aidant de photographies, mais il y a ici un espace dont je ne me souviens pas très bien, dit-elle en désignant une terrasse au deuxième étage. Ce n'était pas symétrique. Il faudrait vérifier, pouvez-vous y aller quand vous serez à Paris, prenez des photos, je dois absolument vérifier comment c'était exactement." (Louise Bourgeois n'est plus jamais revenue en Europe après l'inauguration, en 1990, de sa rétrospective à Lyon, puis à Barcelone). De retour à Paris, je suis allé à Choisy, Louise m'avait donné l'adresse, 4 avenue de Villeneuve-Saint-Georges à Choisy-le-Roy. Mais déception, la maison n'existait plus, elle avait été détruite et remplacée par un Théâtre baptisé du nom de Paul Eluard. Quand Louise Bourgeois a une idée en tête, elle ne pense plus qu'à cela. A cette époque, elle recevait aussi régulièrement la visite de Mâkhi Xenakis qui vivait alors à New-York. Louise envoya aussi Mâkhi à la recherche de la maison de Choisy. Mâkhi prit des photos de ce qui restait: un bout de jardin, quelques arbres ayant survécu, envoya les photographies à Louise, puis lui téléphona pour lui expliquer la situation. Mâkhi raconte que Louise resta muette. Quelques semaines plus tard, de retour à New-York, me trouvant de nouveau devant la maquette de la maison, je commente la situation et naïvement je lui dis: "Mais elle est très bien comme ça votre maison, le souvenir est plus important que la réalité, la maison dont vous vous souvenez c'est vraiment votre maison." Elle se fâche: "Vous n'avez rien compris, ça ne doit pas être seulement à peu près exact,ça doit être absolument exact."
La maison est demeurée ainsi, elle a été refaite en marbre blanc, elle trône derrière le grillage d'une cellule, surmontée du couperet d'une guillotine. le couperet du présent qui relègue le passé. C'est la Cellule Choisy. (...)
*
"I need my memories, they are my documents", elle l'a écrit, elle l'a même brodé en rouge. Son oeuvre se fonde sur les souvenirs, mais il faut des documents, des preuves tangibles. La mémoire est infidèle et l'infidélité n'est pas tolérable.
Jean Frémon, Louise Bourgeois femme maison, L'échoppe, 2008
Kaori Tatebayashi grew up in the Japanese village of Arita famous for its Imari ware. As a child, she spent a great deal of time playing in the pottery factory of her relatives. She breathed the atmosphere of ceramics making mesmerized by the work of the craftsmen. I imagine her sitting near the potter's wheel, silent as a cat, unobserved and totally absorbed in the assimilation of all she could sense. Her work is fed by the thousand details of her daily life in South London - a squirrel paying a visit to her Austin roses, her black cat sniffing a stag beetle, a black bird filling his chubby cheecks with grains, baby pigeons playing hide and seek in the dusk. Nature is omnipresent in her work. Creating her pieces of clay is a way for her to encapsulate and to transform the memory of her chidhood landscapes. She explains how the pattern of Kage plate, named after the Japanese word shadow was inspired by the silhouette of a plant. Similarly, the edges of Kumo series resemble mountain ridges. Browsing through the pages of her Tumblr is like being admitted to have a peek at her sketchbook, to share some of her inner world and harmony power. To me it is an endless source of joy and meditation. It is like tasting the essence of Japanese Spring.
Chaque ville a son rêve qui dort, palimpseste sur lequel s'écrit la mémoire de ses paysages, de ses murs, de ses fleuves, sur lequel l'ombre de ses arbres n'est figée qu'en apparence. La moindre touche peut le mettre en mouvement, le pli de la nuit la plus obscure peut se défaire pour laisser entrevoir tout un monde. Dans cet espace le passé, le présent et le futur ne font qu'un; Isis se confond avec Sainte Ursule, les voix se superposent les unes aux autres pour dire un maintenant qui se gonfle comme une voile au vent. Le regard qui scrute la toile, qui la regarde longuement soudain la voit vivre et s'animer. Le rideau qui dérobait à la vue ce maintenant s'est déchirée. Le portrait de Cologne en Jérusalem céleste si fidèlement dessinée vient transformer le paysage d'aujourd'hui; sur le ciel d'or du tableau les lourds bateaux à voile descendent le Rhin solennellement, les remparts de la cité renferment à nouveau le cercle des vivants, laissant les eaux noires s'éloigner des collines de Bonn et nourrir de leur vapeur céleste la frondaison des arbres au loin. La ville ne sera plus jamais la même, le musée lui a rendu sa mémoire. Elle n'est plus cette entité isolée qui élève ses bretelles d'autoroute et ses piles d'acier et de béton coupée des vieilles montagnes avoisinantes, des sources et des forêts de sapins doctes et savants dont elle aurait perdu la science. Ses hôtels de verre, ses immeubles et ses tours en forme de grues* sur les docks se rappellent ses peintres de la fin du moyen-âge, ses maîtres des légendes et des passions qui avaient leur atelier à un jet de pierre, dans la Schildergasse toute proche et qui ont fait de Cologne un immense centre d'art et de renouveau. C'est curieux comme en écrivant ce petit texte après la visite de l'exposition, Secrets of the painters au Wallraff Museum, je me suis souvenue du poème d'Apollinaire. Combien de temps, étaient-ils restés là dans l'antichambre de ma mémoire ces sapins rhénans? Savaient-ils de toute éternité ces astrologues en chapeau pointu que j'irai un jour habiter les rives du Rhin? Faut-il qu'à travers leur silhouette disparue sous la neige de l'oubli le passé rejoigne le présent pour dire quelque chose du futur?
Ce point, où une forme vire à l'informe, au chaos lumineux d'un excès de matière, où une forme se défait dans une autre, où le réel se mélange à son fantasme... un point pulsionnel baroque.
Christine Buci-Gluckman*
Sarah Westphal is a German photographer who lives and works in Berlin and in Ghent. Her work is currently on show at The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. With Timpano, she adresses the theme of a "visual fast." Nine large format or multi-parts photographs fill the gap left by important works which have been moved from the medieval section for the major special exhibition Secrets of painters, thus relating to a long tradition of the theme of concealing and revealing. The title of the exhibition, Timpano evokes a historic genre of "textiles that were hung in front of valuable paintings" to underline their precious character. "Space is always present although we do not realize it. As soon as the slightest touch effects a change we can take a fresh look at that space. It is this touch, more than building things that I am interested in. Perhaps you could say that taking a photograph is the slightest touch. By doing as little as directing our gaze we touch things and are touched ourselves." Sarah Westphal
Sarah Westphal
Timpano
Wallraf das Museum
Cologne
27. 9. 2013- 2. 2. 2014
*Christine Buci-Gluckman, La folie du voir. De l'esthétique Baroque, Editions Galilée, 1986
1, 2 Sarah Westphal, Photographs J'attends...
3 Maître deLa légende de Sainte Ursule, L'apparition de l'Ange,(1492-1496), detail, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Photographs J'attends...
Les corps peints par Alfonso Vallès ne reposent pas sur le sol, aucun plafond ne limite leur expansion dans l'espace. Travaillés par les diktats de l'ordre établi, déformés par l'énergie du refoulement, sous ses pinceaux ces corps se libèrent d'une loi plus forte que toutes celles imposées par la société, la loi universelle de la gravitation. Sa série Hystérieinspirée des photographies prises par le docteur Charcot, de patientes enfermées à l'hôpital de la Salpétrière au début du XXème siècle montre des corps aliénés par la répression toute puissante du corps médical. Nourri du texte de Georges Didi-Huberman, L'invention de l'hystérie, il interroge inlassablement les corps pour traquer les signes des passions humaines, des émotions, des affects, des traumas.Plus récemment les fresques peintes pour l'Hôtel 14 ou ses peintures sur plexiglas montrent des corps d'aujourd'hui subtilement asservis aux lois de la société de consommation. Ces corps célébrés par la grande tradition de la peinture anatomique ont tous en commun de porter en eux une promesse de libération par le défi lancé aux lois de la pesanteur.
1, 2, 3, Photographies Petra Bindel, visite de l'atelier d'Alphonso Vallès
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Photographies des peintures d' Alfonso Vallès sur son blog, L'union différencie
