Beyond interpretation and judgement, writing the story of art

There are many ways to dance the dance that is the invitation to write on art. In this text, which is orchestrated around the work of the Australian artist James Geurts at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE artist-run centre in Québec City, I do not wish so much to interpret or account for his specific endeavours in the residency that he undertook at the centre.¹ Nor do I intend to evaluate or judge his practice at large, for worse or for better, whether that concerns his research methods, skills with materials or his overall artistic vision. I am not playing the role of accountant or judge, on this occasion. Rather I wish to take this opportunity to tell some stories. In case this seems errant, I can assure the reader that my stories are connected intimately to the artist’s work, for the journeys involved in these excerpts from my experience with Geurts – journeys that are always combinations of shadowy recollection, lucid encounter and day-dreaming – are inspired by his own journeying, as conveyed through the aesthetics and atmosphere of his work, and the stories that he himself charts.

In this way, I am proposing that writing on art becomes a way of thinking through the particular space that artistic research and art exhibitions offer. Writing then extends artistic spaces, by moving through the original art work, yes, but towards the ultimate goal of spurring the further making, and use, of critical, creative spaces: in the mindseye, in the city, and beyond. I imagine this to be the greatest goal of art: an offering that leads to more concerted doing ; an intimacy by way of the public.

And so…

Once upon a time a woman was sitting at a desk in an attic, at the top of a three-storey terrace house, on a small island, not so far away from here, over an ocean known as the Atlantic, named, in passing, after a mysterious and lost underwater civilisation. The woman is working late into the night as is her disposition, poring over journals which she receives from around the world, under the modern light of an angle-poise lamp. The magazines holding her attention discuss the work of men and women engaged in the ancient ritual pursuit of making art, in which, incidentally, our female nightworker is herself involved. Her task in this work scene is to take the mass of these magazine contents and from it compose abridged versions of the myriad tales, to add to an encyclopaedia of art produced by a company whose business is the buying and selling of knowledge. Every once in a while, amidst the cascade of gloss and black that she efficiently channels into synthesis, the woman comes across something that, suddenly, captivates her above the rest, and which therefore she studies not with workman-like thoroughness but with natural curiosity. And so it is that she is interrupted by one such moment, this evening, as her eyes fall on the story of a man, who had made it his mission, she reads eagerly, to circumnavigate the world’s equator, all the while carrying with him a sculptural device, a totem, of his craft. At four points on the imaginary latitude that is known as 0, he duly photographs his right-angle sculpture, and with these four cardinal images he assembles a mandala, an optical poem, on psychogeometry. His story is presented in diary form to her, and the journey in question is called: 90 Degrees Equatorial Project by James Geurts.²

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Storytelling is a primordial function of art. Art becomes potent because of the space it offers for this experience of power over lives: le déroulement de notre histoirexperiences, over the primordial state of our existence, which Sigmund Freud, after Homer, called the ‘oceanic’. Science, including psychoanalysis, is also, in passing, a means of epic storytelling. It, like art, falls back on the mythic: from the Greek ‘mythos’, that which involves representation: words, images, and all demonstrations of symbolic consciousness. These combine with action to form that human-animal way of engaging with the world that enacts the fact that, as Ludwig Wittgenstein clarified, we are not in the world but of it.³ That human-animal engagement with the world is known as ritual. Geurts performs many rituals, through which he tells many stories, involving water and journeying, incorporating them in temporary arrangements of light and 3D structures. These are accompanied by less ephemeral marks on man-made surfaces, notably drawings and photographic prints. Fluidity, or mutability, is his leit-motif.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Stories in, on and through lines and channels, of (human) landscape and bodies of water. The fluidity of representation. In relation to Geurts’ work, we come to the question of figuration and abstraction. These are distinctions that, as with the distinction between poetry and philosophy, only take us so far. Still, one must leave the house by some means, whether through the front door, or an attic skylight. To consider how things function through their opposites, how extremes in fact meet, and so how distinctions give way to a greater whole – as a dymanic of nature at large and Geurts’ practice in particular – one might look to Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of the way that intense experiences in life collapse each into the other, to finish in that fundamental and trans-historical place that comes forth as a manifestation of will, of life-force. Thus a process of distillation, as in Geurts’ channelling of water from his artist’s apartment upstairs at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, through clear tubes that he ran down to the gallery below, becomes an epic story. Epic encounters always at once both distill down and transport away. The epic and the simple in stories and phenomena are kindred.⁴

To go beyond the first step of categorising things in terms of opposites, following Nietzsche’s example, one might also look to the magical principle of sympathetic semblance. One thing becomes another, through playing on that quality that is common in both. Thus, for example, a figurative representation – an effigy – may stand for a person in certain rituals. Finally, where the limits of taxonomy are concerned, I am reminded of the understanding that things are connected by their kind, rather than simply their external form: thus a stolid horse resembles a stolid woman more than she does a faint-hearted horse, a spiralling man ressembles a spiralling constellation more than he does an explosive man, a waterfall in transformation resembles lovers in transformation more than it does lovers in stasis.⁵

The work of Geurts lends itself, if one is so disposed – and I am – to the fabulous. What lies in fables? Something fundamental about experience. Should we name it becoming? What is at the heart of the epic and what simply is life? This becoming, that is the source of power. Geurts passage at la chamber blanche was called Drawing Field, implying the opening up of a mission field, “spurring the further making, and use, of critical, creative spaces: in the mindseye, in the city, and beyond,” which I suggested at the outset of the text remains the ultimate goal of art. To name what I have until now endeavoured to demonstrate: I think journeying is required, of the kind the artist shows us he has undertaken, to get to a space beyond, through that of the exhibition. One can say that this work, generously, points to the great decision to simply undertake a journey.

All good stories feature some heartfelt confession. And so… Art per se does not interest me. Rather art is a means for the creation of a space, for movement, with purpose: transformation. To reiterate Nietzsche’s insight, the character of the purpose is less important than its quality: things meet through the conditions that they offer for intensity. Like a cathedral and a library. An airport lounge and the stage of a Samuel Beckett play. A shopping mall and a cemetery. An art gallery and a river, to return to the content of Geurts’s work at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. Galleries can make the city their own, that is be a point of departure, in this way. Through an alliance of their intention, the intention of artists that work in them, and naturally the intention of visitors to use them in this way.

I have sought to convey something of the essence of the intention in Geurts’ passage at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE, and that is its instigation of the fundamental. What does fundamental art look like, what is it? The answer cannot be spoken. Because transcendance – or “movement beyond” – has no one face. And therein lie the limits of the mask of judge or accountant, and the limitless of the ritual of enacting stories.

I have sought, in other words, to conjure the story of spaces that have the purpose of creating movement, that is a story of the collapse of differences of form into fundamental intensities in kind: the power of water, the power of dreams, the circulating dream structure that we know as the human body: back to Geurts.

The act of will on the part of the artist to create a space for movement invites the visitor’s enactment, and story, of transformation. In a cavernous space in a former women’s prison, which has now become an art museum, I asked James Geurts how possible he felt it was for the visitor to take up this invitation. My motive in asking something so hypothetical was this: LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE supports artistic endeavours, but what is its relationship with the public through what it offers? Here I want to state the obvious, which is the fact that artist-run centres do more than nurture arts communities, and support artists’ practices. And so whilst artists do what they have to do, the larger social and personal conditions of visitors to arts centres cannot be abstracted. How to enter into the space of the art work from the street, from psychic and social, including work, spaces that consistently level stories and regulate ritual: that teach and tame? After all, as Jean-Luc Godard reminds us “Policing is to society what dreams are to the individual”⁶

The question of how possible it is for the visitor to enter into this act of will can and can’t be answered, as at the beginning of the day each man and woman decides for themself. However a key aspect of artistic spaces that offer movement, that is which open up the ritual enactment of being of the world, leads to one response to my question: artists can favour this possibility through the atmosphere of initiation in their work.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

An essential characteristic of powerful art is its initiatory aspect, because when stories unfold through us, we move through this aspect of initiation. Atmosphere is crucial for this to happen. I have written elsewhere⁷ that art that is powerful in atmosphere by its very nature invites us to leave the art work behind, as we move through it to a space that is at once born of it and beyond it. All art that offers this movement meets in an experience that lies above, and so below, the grounds of historical time or a contingent present.

And so I return to the captivation of our nightworking woman in her attic that evening with the atmosphere of Geurts’ equatorial journey. And I return to my initiation with Geurts’ space of water and light, at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE. To atmospheres that inspire not the account or verdict of art but its story.

1. The residency of James Geurts took place from November 10 to December 21, 2008.
2. For further informations [online]: http://www.jamesgeurts.com/index.html (consulted on December 21, 2008).
3. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001, Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Paris: Gallimard editions, 121 p.
4. Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophise with a Hammer, from Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1889. One commentator of this text explains Nietzsche’s argument as follows: “For art to exist, or for any form of aesthetic activity to exist, there must be a condition inspired from the part of the artist or the viewer. The inspired condition is described as “Apollonian” or “Dionysian”. The Apollonian state is an intensity state in which a creative vision of the form is fully realized. The Apollonian impulse is order, form, rationality and control. The Dionysian state, on the other hand, is characterized by a dissolution of form, and a release of energy. The Dionysian force is an impulse towards disorder, irrationality and spontaneity. The Dionysian state is characterized by an ability to respond to any stimulus and is a state of emotional intensity. Art is the result of the interaction or conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian and the Dionysian transform one and the other, so that the control of the irrationality is obtained, and the Dionysian state becomes the creator of the “living will” to assert itself.” [online] http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/nietzsche.html (consulted on December 21, 2008).
5. This elucidation is inspired by “Parlour Games” from om lekha publish in In Place of Passing, Julie Bacon Ed., Belfast: Interface/Bbeyond, 2007.
6. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1984, Prénom Carmen. France: Sara Films, JLG Films, Films A2 productions, 85 minutes.
7. For exemple in the essay “Silence, Failure and Non-Participation: Art Beyond the Manifest” in In Place of Passing, Julie Bacon Ed., Belfast: Interface, 2007.