Chère petite soeur
Elfi Turpin
Dear little sister, this is to give you an idea of the sea during the storm we had yesterday. Will give you details on this, best wishes and see you soon. Marie.
Finally, these words come back to me. They are coming back after a winter afternoon spent chatting with L. An afternoon walking along a river, talking about Matías Duville, looking at the bottom of the water, arbitrarily linking his work to that of other artists who even began to come together during the conversation. L. often uses this type of conversation- digressive conversation in which we hear many speakers, close friends, artists, writers, theorists, scientists, people we often know personally, who have died, who are alive, but who all interact in a more or less orchestrated debate, made of stuttering, repetitions and borrowings. A good way to test ideas and edit while speaking, with speech as the only instrument.
This afternoon debate along the river brought up many topics in addition to Matías Duville: drawing, storms, shipwrecks, disasters, fantastic realism, augmented reality (no relation), disappearance, anticipation, time, fiction. And a recurring question: is it metaphysical or political? The afternoon was heavy and oddly warm for the season. After a warm-up lap with our imaginary interlocutors, the conversation soon turned to Tacita Dean’s seascapes: and in particular to two large blackboards, depicting the sinking of a boat in chalk, exhibited at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art in 2003. L. distinctly remembered the work, which he described to me as follows:
“Yes, yes, a very large diptych… the size of a movie screen. Remember, two blackboards as big as movie theater screens, showing a marine scene in chalk. On the left board, a ship caught in a storm. The sea is unleashed. We see a lighthouse in the distance. (Tacita Dean and her obsession with lighthouses). The boat is certainly going back to the port. Words can be read, written on the surface of the drawing, which seem to be directions for a screenplay. I cannot remember those words. On the right board, the boat is sinking. It looks like the mast is broken. It is disappearing. This is a cinematic drawing. This piece is based on one of Marcel Broodthaers’ films. Let’s see, what movie is it? Two 16 mm films, I think, with a similar painting of a boat in which only the soundtrack, a voice-over, changes … Yes, that’s right, two films with the same image upon which Broodthaers tells two different stories. Bateau-tableau isn’t it? No, no, that’s not it, my bad. Bateau-tableau is a slideshow made of photographs of an amateur painting (or anonymous, that is yet another question) representing the return of a fishing boat -a 19th century painting bought by Broodthaers in a flea market. Broodthaers «cut up» the board by framing details to make up a story. Just editing. Pure time-image! You thought you saw a painting, right? But you saw a movie. Ah, but there is also A voyage on the North Sea , a film that follows or precedes Bateau-tableau, a 16 mm film that assembles and compares the images of the painting of the boat returning to port to reproductions of a photograph of a sailboat set against a modern city background. The film is usually shown on a standing foldable projector (as used in schools). A book combining reproductions of the same images accompanies it: painting versus photography. Or perhaps it is the book that comes with the movie? The image of this sailboat’s photograph could foreshadow that of the boat which showed Bas Jan Ader disappearing while crossing the Atlantic, lost at sea, which Tacita Dean moreover refers to in Disappearance at sea. It is still a common concern. »
What concern? Something concerning the sea? Lost at sea? The storm? Images appearing? The river flowed. We observed a couple of mocking ducks. Male and female. L. asked me which was the male. The one with the green collar, I replied. He asked me how I knew. I found his question strange. I knew it, that’s it, and L. continued:
“All this at once. The boat, the storm. They are both metaphors and structuralist tools. The purpose of image analysis and cinema deconstruction. The language in which everything happens. They are meta-boats. Trips are conceptual itineraries and fictional realities. Well, in fact the two films I was just telling you about only make up one movie that is called Deux films, in which Broodthaers show views of boats with empty screen images. Did Broodthaers work with a single painting to make all these films? Because there is also Analyse d’une peinture and Une peinture d’amateur découverte dans une boutique de curiosité. I never saw all these films together. I am unable to say whether it is the same painting. I like the idea of a painting with as many films as editings.
Here, we get closer to the source of this Broodthaers’ film adapted into a chalk drawing by Tacita Dean. But this is still not it. Dean’s drawing was an accurate representation of a boat returning to port, while caught in a storm. »
The riverbank became inaccessible, and we had to go back, leaving the sun, still so strangely warm for the season, in our back. I took the opportunity to stop him:
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- The Broodthaers’ storm movies? I only know two, and we saw them together.
- I do not remember.
- They were set up in the room just before Un Jardin d’hiver. Two 16 mm Eiki projectors, back to back, on white pedestals, each playing a storm movie.
- They were turned off.
- One of them is called Histoire d’amour (Dr. Huysmans). It is believed that love stories are always restless and wild. Broodthaers is filming an old postcard: first the front, i.e. the image of a raging sea, then handwritten words on the back that he frames and isolates: I – REGRET – YOU, etc., before filming the entire message.
- You see Miss that I keep my words. I have only one regret: not finding prettier cards to send to you.
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- How come?
- This is the entire message written by the hand of some Dr. Huysmans: You see Miss that I keep my words. I have only one regret: not finding prettier cards to send to you. The author of the postcard, Dr. Huysmans, complains about not being able to send the correct image, the one he would have wanted to send.
- Yes, that’s exactly it, but the other piece inspired Tacita Dean. The one in which Broodthaers films a postcard showing a boat caught in a storm while returning to port. Shots of this image on the front are interspersed with views of the back making the stamp, address and posting date visible, while the message text is cut out word-by-word and shown, in typewritten form, in white on a black background, like subtitles. I don’t remember the entire text. I remember that a subtitle said AN IDEA OF THE SEA.
- I do not know. The projector was turned off. I remember the version by Tacita Dean perfectly well. And in Tacita Dean’s version, the boat sinks. The mast is broken. She continues Broodthaers’ film. This is the end of the film. The end of the story and the end of a technology. The boat that sinks, it is both the after image and the 16 mm film that disappears. Tacita Dean concludes by drawing Marcel Broodthaers’ film, although Broodthaers himself claimed not to do any film. How to make films without film? Dear little sister .This is the title of the piece written on the left board.
We had long since passed the starting point of our walk and were entering an industrial area traversed by the river. An impressive chimney spat thick smoke. L. was astonished to see an industrial area still active; meanwhile the work of Matías Duville inexorably brought us to the idea of a storm, a catastrophe and to the question of drawing. Drawing, not as a means of projection, but rather as a means to approach reality through fiction. L. quickly carried on:
“Duville’s drawings mostly represent fantastic landscapes of the end of the world ravaged by hurricanes or by fires, isn’t that right? And when they are done in charcoal, in black and white, they reveal these negative images. It’s as if Duville turned reality inside out like a glove. I think of Dove Allouche’s series Mélanophila II où l’ennemi déclaré, 140 graphite drawings based on photographs of burnt eucalyptus forests. The artist visited a forest in Portugal after a fire and photographed it in a hurry. He then started to reproduce and interpret negatives of each shot of this disappearance. It took him five years. The black drawings are ideally presented chronologically. They leave empty spaces between them, spaces without drawings that correspond to periods of work interruption of at least 30 days, while they form a kind of itinerary, that of a disorganized capture of 140 images after the fire. Allouche speaks about the inability to witness realness, and more importantly, the disappearance of a subject. L’ennemi déclaré moreover refers to Jean Genet’s eponymous book – a collection of texts including, amongst others, Quatre heures à Chatila. Genet describes his passage through this camp the night following the 1982 massacre, starting with the following sentence: “No photograph will ever show the smell of death”. The drawing slowly reinterprets the image, which is unable to document realness, while the forest regrows. »
- made a long pause. The sun was setting. It was still very hot. We followed the course of the river. We were exiting the city. The bank became more and more rugged. We passed under a bridge. L. continued:
“Duville also worries about the motif and notion of disappearance, although the work process is very different. The drawing documents a fictional reality arising from imaginary shifts. It records, for example, metaphysical landscapes devastated by unknown catastrophes. The artist reveals the inability to testify while paradoxically positioning himself as the observer – observing fictional situations and perhaps waiting to see them rise from the Real. Tacita Dean says that while working on Disappearance at the sea, she found the Teignmouth Electron (Crowhurst’s trimaran that disappeared at sea) in the writings of J. G. Ballard well before rediscovering it washed ashore in Cayman Brac Island. She also sent to Ballard a picture of the boat set against a background of vegetation, and he replied that it made him think of those Second World War airplane wrecks that were still found in the jungles of the Pacific islands, where he imagined the boat was lying, or that it reminded him of a tank or an animal carcass or an exoskeleton left by a now-extinct creature. Whatever it was, this thing seemed abandoned by their time. Dean and Ballard were exchanging letters. I even think that Ballard asked Dean to imagine the boat for which Robert Smithson may have drawn the Spiral Jetty. Which boat could approach the Spiral Jetty? And what if Duville’s drawings were movements through time? Or better still: what if they referred to spaces abandoned by their time? A Ballardian time? »
Night fell. We were now unsteadily walking in the dark down an unknown trail. We shared a few fanciful theories on Chinese astrology according to which each person would have at least four signs depending on the year, month, day and time of birth. Four animals in one person. Which is a pleasant thought, for it produces multiple combinations, a montage or collage, in short. L. is “inner monkey.” The monkey is a whimsical, playful and sometimes depraved being that loves excess drinking and smoking. L. likes to think that his inner monkey sometimes takes over.
I remember running into him in a very joyful mood, in the middle of the night, at a party, and asking him if his inner monkey was taking over. L. replied to me:
“The problem is that I am my inner monkey and the only thing I’m trying to do, at the moment, is not to lose my jacket. »
And he added:
“We must take care of science fiction; otherwise science fiction will take care of us. »