How to Disappear Completely

Dear Readership,

The next two articles I have in mind are, to borrow David Byrne's words, 'kinda big'; so I am a little averse to undertaking them with exams ongoing. In the meantime, here is a review of the current exhibitions on display at Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery.

Yours,
Luke.


Despite the generally subdued, melancholy atmosphere of all of the works in the Ingleby's partial retrospective of the late American photographer Francesca Woodman, there is considerable variety within this collection. One recurring theme, however, is such that - in light of Woodman's suicide at the age of 22 - I can't resist linking to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story about madness and depression, 1891's "The Yellow Wallpaper". This is the notion of hiding, of creeping into nooks in space. Gilman's protagonist does just this. Confined to a single room for the sake of 'The Rest Cure', she has little else to do but study the room's eponymous wallpaper intently. Gradually losing grip of reality, she comes to believe that there are women trapped in the paper:

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over [...]
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

The narrator's intense identification with these phantasms means that by the end of the story she is found, by her husband, 'creeping' on her hands and knees, along the walls, mentally 'inside' the wallpaper's pattern if physically excluded:

I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

The parallels with Gilman's work are evident in many of the works in this display, though perhaps none more so than this 1977 image, part of the artist's Space2 series.



In all cases Woodman appears to want to embed herself in some impossible portion of space - behind the wallpaper, between the fireplace and the wall, inside a tree trunk. She is in the process of disappearing into domestic space without a trace (in a discussion with friends yesterday, we hit upon the idea that perhaps the only effective way to imagine your own inexistence is to picture the room you are stood in, empty). This does not read solely as the image of self-annihilation Woodman's biography might suggest, though - I am aware of the limitations of reading prophetically from hindsight. There is undeniably an element of that in Woodman's work, but it is intermingled with a desire to know the magical in the everyday - to embed oneself not just in a vanishing point, but also in a fantastical 'Second World' of the imagination. This is visible in Woodman's more surrealistic images, images such as "yet another leaden sky, Rome, Italy, 1977-78", below.




The paradox of Francesca Woodman's work is that it figures retreat-into-the-imagination (whether willed or brought on by mental illness; for better or for worse) as a literal vanishing act, even as her works snowball towards an increasingly singular visual identity. The maker's mark is present in 2 untitled works, both produced in Providence in 1976. In one, 3 naked women cover their faces with images of Woodman's face - a reversal of the artist's philosophical camera-shyness; in the other, another naked woman - perhaps the artist herself (for, like in so many of Woodman's works, we don't see the figure's face) is seen sat by an Yves Klein-style body-imprint. But these are notable exceptions, and for the most part the works in this exhibition function on the paradigm of redress-through-escape, of incessant-creation-through-incessant-self-abnegation (That this conclusion arises from autobiographical precepts is a necessary hypocrisy). In the exhibition's final work the artist is nearly out-of-frame, she sticks out her arm as if to wave goodbye.


Also on show at the Ingleby is Tommy Grace's show Dummy. Three rather eclectic thoughts coloured my appreciation of these works: the knowledge that 'show-throughs' could be a source of bawdy - and sometimes subversive - humour in the newspapers of Fin de siècle Paris; the joke, 'what is the last thing to go through a fly's mind as it hits a windscreen? answer - its arse'; and certain Tintin frames involving newspapers. The first and second relate to the works "Recto Verso (day & night)" and "Recto Verso (dawn & dusk)" (both 2009), which present the (largely unviewed) back-sides of Michelangelo's sculpture groups "Day and Night" and "Dawn and Dusk" on opposite sides of thin kozo paper, allowing the light shining through them to create a 'show through' effect; and enacting a comically graceless (no pun intended) 'arse-through-mind' implosion, collapsing these sculptural masterpieces into 2-dimensional images that look as if they need to be awakened by 3-d glasses.




The latter thought is pertinent to the collages "Volodorper", "Dolum" and "Greeking" (again, all 2009). These make play with Lorem Ipsum, the graphic design industry's 'standard dummy text', which is seen in newspapers read by the characters in Elipse/Nelvana's animated television adaptation of Hergé's Adventures of Tintin (1991-92). Tintin, in all its media appearances, is an interlingua comparable to this 'dummy text'. Its images are exportable to all manner of contexts; its protagonist was even labelled by the creator of the series, Hergé, as the 'degree zero of typeage' (for more on Tintin-as-dummy, and, indeed, Tintin-as-incessant-self-abnegator, see Tom McCarthy's superb text, Tintin and the Secret of Literature). But embedded in the title of Grace's show is a mocking attitude towards such attempts at international interlinguas. Perhaps the artist, owing to his 'alter-ego as a graphic designer' (that's according to the exhibition's information leaflet), is simply sick and tired of Lorem Ipsum, in which case these works too have a certain bitter humour to them. However, that mocking attitude is also arguably turned towards Malevich's Suprematism and other similar internationalist avant-gardes, which are referenced here by the geometric patterns Grace uses to construct his collages. Grace may take his place among the mass of artists renewing criticism of early 20th-century utopianism.

Francesca Woodman and Tommy Grace: Dummy run at the Ingleby Gallery until 13th June.


Sources:

Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper".
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html (accessed 24/04/09)

McCarthy, Tom. Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Croydon: Granta, 2006.


Thanks to Chris Tregenza for his input.

A Non-Seasonal Non-Sequitur

Edinburgh's winter-stung youngsters recently begun to brave the elements for another season of working and feasting on the Meadows. Not all that long ago, the air temperature was so inclement that numerous gigantic snowboulders, created in the first flurries of snow-enthusiasm, were able to survive for weeks on end even as the grass around them grew greener. I can't help seeing these creations as Winter Proxies, versions of ourselves that are physically capable of - even physically dependent on - being outdoors in the extremes of the Midlothian winter. Especially so in the case of the host of snowmen, who peopled and stood watch (as do, we may imagine, the Inukshuk of the Arctic or the Moai of Easter Island) over a landscape that many of us were pushed to forswear for weeks (except, of course, for the time it took to build the snowmen). Here, then, is a catalogue of some of the characters that served us well as Winter Proxies, lest we forget.

Lost in the Paradise

'Meu nome é Gal'
- Gal Costa

Their names are Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos and Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun respectively. In my imagination the two have a great deal of overlap. It has to be down to more than the fact that the music of the former - more commonly known as Gal Costa - provided a musical backdrop for my discovery of the latter during the summer of last year. Never mind the that the two are separated in birth by 160 years, an ocean and a language; by differences of medium, culture and politics; as well as by that essential disjunction between the land of the living and that of the dead. Just listen to Gal's 1971 live recording of "Falsa Baiana", included on Wrasse Records' 2007 compilation Gal Favourites, alongside a reproduction - or, if you have the resources and the time, the original (in the National Gallery, London) - of Vigée-Le Brun's pitch-perfect Self-Portrait in a Silk Hat of 1782; and try telling me that the two pieces don't possess precisely the same atmosphere.




It's an atmosphere of supreme clarity, luminosity, and graceful spontaneity; of what Matthew Arnold might have called 'Sweetness and Light' had he been granted the opportunity to develop an interest in both Rococo painting and Música Popular Brasileira. In Gal's case, this accomplishment seems all the more commendable given its historical context. 1971 saw Brazil suffering under the military dictatorship of Emílio Garrastazu Médici. It also saw Caetano Veloso, Gal's long-term friend and collaborator, still languishing in his London exile for his leadership of the subversive multi-disciplinary Tropicália movement, alongside one Gilberto Gil, later to become Minister of Culture under the Lula administration. Gal's prominent role in this counter-cultural phenomenon puts her at a distance from her French counterpart: as well as gaining admittance to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Vigée-Le Brun served as court painter to Marie Antoinette for a period of 6 years until 1789, when she was forced to flee France after the Revolutionary forces arrested the royal family. The graceful spontaneity of her self-portrait - executed 7 years before the Revolution - may be a direct result of her priveliged position as a belle of the Ancien Régime; Gal conjures Sweetness and Light out of thin air in a climate of anti-intellectual reprisals, economic catastrophe, official censorship and state-sponsored torture.



These historical factors may be hard to ignore when experiencing the two works together. Never mind. What the two artists share is something more profound, though for this it'll be more helpful to consider a different Gal Costa song. "Meu nome é Gal" was released on the 1969 album Gal. Its Portuguese title translates - you might have guessed - as "My name is Gal". Its lyrics initially read like a personal ad:
Meu nome é Gal
E desejo me corresponder
Com um rapaz que seja o tal
(which translates thus:
My name is Gal
And I wish to make contact
with a boy who would be 'the one'...).
Gal then lists those she admires (Veloso and Gil are top of the list) and sketches a brief profile of herself: 'My name is Gal, I am 24 years old...I believe in God, I like dancing, the cinema'. Simplistic as this may seem, the delivery lends it a real gravitas. By the end of the song, when Gal screams,
Meu nome é Gal
E não faz mal!
(And It's OK!)
It feels like something mildly transcendent has gone on: a powerful act of self-affirmation, perhaps of what Coleridge called the 'Primary Imagination' ('a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM', Biographia Literaria). If this idea seems overly theological, then at least concede that there is something incisive, lucid and invigorating in the way Gal presents casts her own identity. For it is precisely this mode of self-presentation that she shares with Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun. Though the painter co-opted the iconography of an earlier painting by Rubens - the 1622-25 work 'Le Chapeau de Paille', also in the National Gallery's collections - for her own self-portrait; she very successfully makes this iconography (and here I risk paraphrasing Simon Cowell) Her Own. She is her own woman, in charge of her own depiction as well as her livelihood. She is neither flippant nor stern; the delicate poise of the ostrich feather in her straw hat is elegantly counterpointed by her firm grip on the tools of her trade, the pallette and the brushes. The presentation holds flair and substance in perfect balance. Incisive, lucid and invigorating.

Though a whole spectrum of ideology may lie between the artistic circles with which these two women chose to afilliate themselves, their trajectories were essentially the same: both eventually attained such prominence within their respective circles that they were able to become not only artistically self-sufficient but self-definitive. Through the myriad overlapping voices of their times, they could shout, 'I am what I am! And it's OK!'

thanks to Anna MacSwan for help with the translations