Sleep-drunk I dance

Moult is one of the pieces in The Beginning of History. Bit of chaos and calamity around getting it ready for the show – as I couldn’t afford professional services I had ordered a made-to-measure frame on-line which arrived on Friday with a flaw so a new one had to be made and sent which arrived on Monday with the plexi-glass shattered and the wood scratched by shards so a new one had to be made and sent which arrived Tuesday just before 6 pm, this time in good order, but my arms were leaden with fatigue, and useless. Got up early the next morning and proceeded to cut to size the cardboard onto which I’d sewn the piece – hadn’t dared do it before in case there were discrepancies with the frame’s measurements… The first cut is the deepest took on new meaning as I cut one side with my scalpel knife, lay down for a while, made the second cut, lay down, next cut – you get my drift. It took me close to three hours to get everything done and ready for pick-up, most of it spent resting up for the next trifling step, without ever fully lifting the frame off the floor. Infuriating and ridiculous and the only way as help, which would have been available over the weekend, wasn’t now. Then my lovely friend M. came and carried and we had a chuckle about my challenged uprightness – as I waved her goodbye I stood as if I wanted to illustrate a 90 degrees angle. Put me in a text-book, please!

Big sigh of relief when I heard my work had arrived safely at the gallery. Ended up lying on my cutting mat which took pride of place at the centre of the living room where I normally reside. I say: better than on a bed of sewing pins after you’ve upended the container which brought visions veering between the soft ground in a pine forest (oh, the scent) and a fakir’s nail bed. My arms were like tree-trunks, seemingly heavier than the rest of ‘me’ and for a day or two felt as if they were fusing with the carpet floor.

Well, the only thing that matters is that Moult is in the show with my other pieces, and on Sunday, all being well, I’ll be there too. It’s been hard not to do the install (and the banter and discussion and buzz) with Nick Kaplone and the other artists, tantalising really, but I’d written instructions re: presentation of each piece and just had to trust that it would be done well. Had the frame-saga not been a saga I’d have finished prep at the weekend, as planned, and might have been able to pop in… Anyway, had a sweet sneak preview from the photos Nick mailed – it’s going to be good, really really good!

When not pinned or sewed to a surface, and stretched like a flayed skin, Moult curls up, becomes formless – something about the tension in the stitches crocheted from strands of hair. Flatness has been a conscious feature in all of my crochet work, and here it’s amplified, through a folding back of the bodice’s front, a flipping open, for display.

The German translation for bodice is Leibchen. Leib is an archaic term for body, chen a diminutive when attached to another word. Leibchen – literally little body. This word was actually my starting point, I love it’s meaning and look and sound. It refers to a child’s garment, and as I write I realise it’s a garment that has literally fallen away, is not in use anymore – after the war that extra layer between undershirt and shirt/blouse disappeared. It is also close to the word Liebchen, little darling.

I think I’ve produced a heirloom of a kind, an outfit that might have been tenderly made/kept/stored away/handed down/maybe forgotten in a chest or drawer or box (something which I’ve longed for lately). You will have seen my Perfect Maidens – early hair-work, fairy-tale work, with feminist leanings, with which this piece does connect, but in this context (The Beginning of History) there is a clearer awareness that hair, even if artificial, and esp. blond hair, brings with it certain connotations – Aryan ideals, Auschwitz… A self is relational – whichever way I turn, this is something I’ll come up against, with.

Moult (2013)
Dimensions: 45 cm x 21 cm (plus strands of hair), framed 58.5 cm x 37 cm x 4 cm
Materials: crocheted from artificial hair

I’m trying to get my work ready for The Beginning of History, an exceedingly slow and fraught process as it can’t be done lying down. Every activity is cut into countless infinitesimal = manageable segments, interspaced with longer and longer rests. Living and bedroom floors are covered with acid-free tissue paper, bubble wrap, cardboard boxes (I seem to be predisposed to fall into one), crocheted pieces, masking tape, scissors, and often enough my own tired form… Lists are being written and re-written, titles pondered, and questions of presentation sorted (all in the horizontal, hooray). Then there are the spanners thrown in the works from outside: two frames I ordered on-line arrived faulty – more waiting, and having to trust that the replacements will arrive in time and good order.

Pricked my right index finger when sewing a hair piece to backing board and just about foiled a treacherous blood drop’s intended trickle on the work. Breathed a sigh of relief, also for not having fallen into 100 years of sleep, although sorely tempted.

Over the years I’ve become a great pusher and slider (across the floor – I don’t do things on tables) as my arms are weak, but it doesn’t work for everything. Help is coming for heavier and safe lifting/holding/packing, and then the lovely Kate Murdoch, co-exhibitor with an exciting project planned for the show, will pick it all up and deliver to the gallery for me.

At the same time a plethora of possible pieces push for attention from my hands. A new thing’s steady growth has been halted, needs must. Funnily enough at some stage the idea overtook me to try and finish it in time for the show. My wanting and inner drive is undiminuished by ill-health. Reality check!

* * *

Wondering and worrying about making work about trauma. The translation into art – what can you meaningfully carry over from someone else’s or even one’s own experience? Is that even the point? My new piece-in-thwarted-progress made me think about wound stripes – the officially sanctioned attempt in former wars to make visible/mark out/credit physical war injury. They were worn on the soldier’s uniform, in battle and out. I can’t quite get my head around these (and so much more), but then I’m lucky to live far from war. Many aren’t – It’s something that burns me up every time I switch on the news.

Last winter I read a book that deeply impressed me, Thomas Keneally’s Daughters of Mars, about two Australian sisters working as military nurses during the First World War. To me, the experience and effect of years of fighting, here seen through the often terribly wounded soldiers they tend to, would seem traumatic, in detail and accumulation. But then there’s maybe that one specific event that stands out and sharpens (not dulls) the sense of one’s (precarious) existence to a fine point, a fulcrum around which past and future realign and reassemble. I marked out the description of Sally’s state of mind after having almost drowned when the hospital ship she is stationed on is sunk by torpedoes:

“She quaked with remembered and not yet dispelled terror, and found herself concerned above all with her mind. She tested it and thought she found it a stranger’s mind. Her own having dissolved in the sea, she had picked up someone else’s drifting and bobbing mind. She saw herself now not as a continuous thing. She was no more than a mute core — or a pole on which rings of a particular nature could be placed. Each ring was a successive self — that was it. Her self was utterly new and needed to be learned all over. …

And now she was utterly new again, she found herself alarmed to be so. The latest hard little hoop — being taken out of the water — could just as easily be lifted off and replaced with another as accidental, whose description was: drowned in the Mediterranean. Since she was so tenuous, she might still swerve at any second from her rescued state and into oblivion. There was no such grand connector as destiny at work in her and never had been. Such a thin skin existed between parallel states and chances that they could leak or bleed or be welded into one another.”

How wonderful to find that you are reading me – a day after I’d been filling a friend’s ears with moans about holding monologues I saw that I’m back in the top10. Merci! Conversations will ensue.

More good news: the side-effects of my new meds have lessened if not disappeared, and I’ve had a rather good art-visit by Nick Kaplony and Kate Murdoch. We are working towards The Beginning of History together, with four other artists. Kate remarked afterwards how well organised I appeared. Well, needs must. It’s not often that I can show my work unmediated by a computer-screen, hear about that of others and have a face-to-face art-conversation. I’d laid out my offerings on the carpet in the living room, got pieces out of boxes and drawers days in advance so I could focus my day’s exuberant if limited energies on the actual meeting. It was stirring to see how Nick and Kate responded, both of whom explore memory/family history with their work. Such a perceptive, inquisitive and thoughtful audience – I encountered so much enthusiasm that for a few hours my doubts about the quality of my work were dispelled. They came back almost as soon as N and K were out of the door though…

A piece of writing-in-progress joined the finished pieces on the floor. I have been teaching myself Sütterlin, a form of handwriting taught in German schools between 1915 and 1941. One of my most treasured possessions is a post-it note from my dad to me, but I’ll have to tell you about its shifting connotations another time. Suffice to say that it’s handwritten and that in it I can detect traces of Sütterlin. In old photo-albums, which I looked through with my mom a few months ago, the annotations, probably made by my maternal grandfather, are in Sütterlin too. I am fascinated by the similarities and differences between today’s and yesteryear’s scripts, the continuities, conversions, rejections. There’s a lot of zigzagging here, serrated but neat lettering which has been ironed and rounded out. It does look beautiful and mysterious and encapsulates something for me about the workings of history.

My writing felt fitful, jittery even; wrist and hand cramped rather quickly. I wanted to explore a phrase the meaning of which I keep re-calibrating. So many intertwined stories! A few years ago I had a correspondence with my favourite clever boy (not so small anymore – he’ll turn sixteen in December), son of friends in Germany. We wrote to each other in English (in Germany children start on their first foreign language in 3rd grade) and after the banking crisis I received a letter setting out in diagram form how it all fell down. A consice feat! At the end of the letter I found an apology in German: ‘ich habe noch keine Vergangenheit’, meant to say something like ‘I haven’t learned yet how to construct the past tense in English’, which literally translates into: ‘I have no past yet’. Now there’s a loaded sentence! It was as if he was implying ‘I know that you, the generation(s) before me, have landed us in this mess.’ As I was already/always in the process of thinking about our Vergangenheit this phrase slotted right in, and jarred, on so many levels. Ich habe noch keine Vergangenheit. A statement, a charge, a reproof, a wish, a worry, a woe that it is not so.

Looking back looking back. I’ve been thinking about a video-installation I made 16 years ago, at college.
I filmed myself sitting in front of a 1000 Watt lamp, for approx. 40 sec. (enough to lightly burn the skin on my face), then painstakingly edited the material, running footage backwards and forwards and cutting and joining together tiny increments, deciseconds long. Thus I extended the footage to 4,49 minutes, achieving a sense of endurance in a way that made it look quite natural. The small movement of the fingers, the occasional gentle heaving of the chest interwove with moments of death-like stillness. The performer’s/my identity, while under scrutiny, remained elusive in the process – the light had a similar effect to darkness, obliterating the face. I was interested in the tensions evoked conceptually and visually – between interrogator and the person who is interrogated, inner life and surface, truth and falsehood, real time and constructed time, still image and moving image, etc. Neither one nor the other, but always in-between and both.

At the time I was exploring issues around German identity, the weight of history, the holocaust, and as you know I keep returning there, albeit in very different ways. What is interesting to me is how I approached the subject then. I spent ages in the editing suite, making miniscule edits, arranging and rearranging the tiniest snippets. It seems to me that this compulsive focus on the incremental, the fragment, helped me bear exploring the larger picture. In a way I made (make?) myself into a kind of camera-lens in close-up mode, staring at a pinprick-sized part of a huge wound. At the same time it was quite an intimate process, a thorough inspection of the image itself (of myself myself?). I can’t remember if I made the work before or after I saw the Riefenstahl film, with which I in effect did something very similar, choosing one detail to focus on, allowing a sideways look at the larger picture. At college I was steeped in theory, reading Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, Hal Forster… That’s certainly different now, my M.E.-frazzled brain doesn’t easily cope with such complex and often abstract reading, but I hope it still works away at the back of my mind. I wonder about the space between the intangibility of the video-image and the materiality of my crochet-outfits, as well as the shared elements, i.e. putting something together edit by edit, stitch by stitch. On the whole my work seems to have slipped deeper into the body, but in terms of how it gets under my skin nothing has changed.

part 2

In the mean-time I’ve finished three pieces. Will show you the one I’m most ambivalent about first, a strange unwieldy thing that I don’t much like the look and feel of. I call it ‘This is a room I’ve never lived in’. For the pants-bit (crocheted a couple of years ago) I entwined black and white wools, for the upper ‘body’ I used a black yarn from a batch of hand-me-down materials, thick, coarse, heavy. Some threads flow through your fingers, are pleasant to work with. This one wasn’t, in fact every stitch required effort and seemed to leave my hands greased and stained.

The upper ‘body’. How easy it is to write such things. Umpteen different shapes had been tried, as well as yarns of various weights and colours (whites, pinks), only to be unravelled again. I wasn’t sure what the final shape should be until I’d made it. And then there was a sleeve.

And I’ve been obsessed with sleeves lately. So why does this piece makes me so uncomfortable? Part of it is the yarn I used – not only did the crocheting feel awkward, strenuous, uncouth even, its dense texture lacks beauty, is rough, almost carpet-like. Would I feel different if I’d used a delicate, silky yarn? I’m almost glad I didn’t – because of the emotions evoked it’s made me think difficult thoughts which I’ve kind of been avoiding/evading. And I’m groping about trying to formulate them.

You’ll remember I talked about the little girl’s gesture in LR’s Triumph of the Will (see post #62, 24 June 2013), which out of context could be seen as a wave but there is an approximation of a Hitler salute. In pieces like my Soldier’s child or LR’s children, the (offending) arms/sleeves are cut away. Here the arm/sleeve has become the upper body, a collar/cuff at the top leaves it open if a head or a hand might emerge. As simple as this piece is, to me it’s a bit like the return of the repressed…

In summer I was looking through old photo-albums with my mom (who will turn 80 this year), listening to her stories, even recording some. There aren’t many photos of her as a small child, and unsurprisingly none at all were taken between the age of six and eleven – the war years. When I told her about the little girl in Triumph of the Will she remembered an instance, when she was nine or ten years old, of being slapped by a 13 year-old pre-Bund Deutscher Mädel-leader for not raising her arm in Hitler salute when they passed on the street. Children were taught the salute in kindergarden, it was ‘normal’ to them. This normality, everydayness of gestures and attitudes, does get to me, as does the idea, no, the knowledge, that my mother and father would have raised their arms when greeting a teacher at school and in other contexts.

When I tried to research the Bund Deutscher Mädel one of the websites that popped up fast offered materials for re-enactments. When I thought about buying a photograph to work with and checked on ebay I couldn’t because of the worry about paying someone who might be a fascist. My feelings constantly veer between abjection and anger, resentment, revulsion; between shame and wanting to turn away to ideas around obligation and responsibility; between uncertainty about the littleness of my work and commitment to keep exploring. Deep breath now.

Looking back at my work of the last twelve years I know that the weight of German history has impacted on quite a few of my pieces, directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally. Something is different now though, because it’s closer to home. On an unexpected level the materiality of this piece has connected with a gamut of emotions. This also makes me question if it’s art. Looking at it now Gogol’s story The Nose comes to mind, and Richard Kentridge’s talk on absurdity as a form of knowledge (see post #34, 22 Nov 2012). Tell me your thoughts, I’m in need of conversation.

This is a room I’ve never lived in (2013)
Dimensions: 26.5 cm x 65 cm x 4 cm
Materials: various hand-me-down wools and cottons