1

One Drop of Water Contains as Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm 2 3

One Drop of Water Contains as Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm

James N. Hutchinson 4 5

Contents

1 Of Time and the Hill: An Introduction Edinburgh

11 Looking at Pictures, Thinking about Exhibitions Dieppe | Varengeville-sur-mer

39 A Symmetrical Echo: Some Thoughts on Art and Biography Rouen | Wädenswill

59 Three Moves Around a Problem Fontainebleau | The Peak District | Cape Town

89 Dyads or A Review of Römerstrasse Car Park for Google Guides Baden | Viamala | Bologna

113 An Asterism of Absences: Four Short Texts Bad Ragaz | Soncino | Como | Chiavenna

133 From Art Objects to Art Things: The Broken Artworks of Mark Landis and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini Brescia | Laurel

145 Sidhe Vicious Bolca | Eigg

6 1

Of Time and the Hill An Introduction Edinburgh 2 3

This book contains a set of site-specific essays, written to be read on Calton Hill, Edinburgh. They are part of a wider project, Rumours of a New Planet, which I have undertaken over the last two years, following an invitation from Collective to devise an alternative way to access the potentialities present in a site rich in historical and associative narratives. My approach – both in this book and in the wider project – has been to consider Calton Hill as a central node in a network of ideas, events, people and spaces. As such, the essays in this book are not about Calton Hill, but instead represent a view from it, or more specifically, a view from a building positioned on its peak: the City Observatory.

In its heyday, the observatory site contained numerous telescopes pointing up into the night sky, but it also contained a deep-earth thermometer, pointing down to the centre of the planet. Looking up beyond the earth’s atmosphere and looking down beneath the earth’s surface are both embedded in Edinburgh’s understanding and representation of time. In terms of astronomical time, during the building’s working life as a Royal Observatory (1822-1896)⁠1 its main purpose was to track the movement of the stars in order to keep the observatory clock accurate, such that it could be used to calibrate the clocks and navigation instruments on the ships in Leith Harbour. The observatory was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment as was the idea of deep time, which was proposed 4 OF TIME AND THE HILL by the Edinburgh geologist, James Hutton. The rock face on nearby Salisbury Crags is named ‘Hutton’s Section’ because it is where many of his observations were made. Half of this rock face is visible from the front gate of the observatory. This is not the only sight you can see from here though; Calton Hill has long been a vantage point for looking out onto the entire city. In 1787, the artist Robert Baker produced the world’s first panoramic painting from atop the hill (and coined the term, panorama, in the process), in which Salisbury Crags appears, as does the emerging New Town, and the site which is now occupied by Edinburgh’s currently operational Royal Observatory: Blackford Hill.

The intense activity that took place in Edinburgh during the Enlightenment gave rise to a number of significant thinkers (such as David Hume, Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart) who have become synonymous with that period, and who have left their scientific and cultural marks on the city and the wider world. Many of these figures had a direct relationship with Calton Hill, and the ideas (and histories) they generated loom as large as the hill itself. There is, perhaps, little to be gained in mining their stories further when there are other people whose outputs are yet to be brought to the foreground, and as an artist attempting to a) find a different way of looking out from Calton Hill and b) develop a method of production that might offer some sort of access to the hill’s unique relationship to time, it was those currently in the background to whom I turned.

One of these people is Jessica Duncan, a woman from Aberdeenshire whose work can be found via the dominant narrative of her husband, Charles Piazzi Smyth, the last Astronomer Royal for Scotland to be based at the observatory on Calton Hill. Piazzi Smyth took up the position in 1846 after working at the Cape Observatory in South Africa, where he’d observed Halley’s Comet with astronomers Thomas Maclear and John Herschel. OF TIME AND THE HILL 5

His tenure at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh mainly consisted of battling against poor financing and equipment that was borderline obsolete, but his significant achievement was the design and construction of the timing device on the adjacent Nelson’s Monument. This was a ball, connected to the observatory clock by an underground electrical cable, which was automatically raised and lowered depending on the time. The monument’s height made the ball visible to the captains of ships anchored in Leith Harbour, enabling them to set their chronometers by it. The famous one o’clock gun fired from Edinburgh Castle was an advance on this device, so that clocks and chronometers could still be set when the ball was obscured by fog. The ball is now operated manually, and is set not by the astronomical clock but – perversely – by the sound of the gun. Piazzi Smyth combined his interest in astronomy with pyramidology, and visited Egypt to measure the Great Pyramid, from which he drew a number of ‘divine’ conclusions. He constructed elaborate theories about relationships between the dimensions of the pyramid, the number of days in a year and the distance between Earth and the sun, and he used his formulas to predict three dates for the Second Coming, modifying each when it turned out not to be true. He married Jessica Duncan in 1855, and they took their honeymoon on Tenerife, to which he also shipped a massive telescope in order to conduct a number of high-altitude astronomy experiments. His achievements and his eccentricity make it clear why he is so present in the story of Calton Hill.

Following their marriage, Duncan accompanied Piazzi Smyth on all his trips, writing up all his field notes. In the archive at the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill, there are a number of boxes that contain Piazzi Smyth’s notebooks (in Duncan’s handwriting) and a number of projects the pair did together, such as observational studies of ferns. There are three small notebooks amongst the set, however, that represent a solo project by Duncan that she’d 6 OF TIME AND THE HILL embarked on before they met, a project that would ultimately remain unfinished.

Duncan moved to Edinburgh in 1847 to attend Alexander Rose’s lectures on geology, which he delivered at his house on Drummond Street. Rose was a craftsman with an interest in geology, and he set up the Edinburgh Geological Society in 1843 with a group of friends. In her notebooks, Duncan transcribed all forty- three of Rose’s lectures (which she illustrated with drawings and diagrams), made translations of essays and articles by Italian and French geologists, produced instructional texts and schematics on fieldwork methodologies, and also documented a number of local excursions she went on with her classmates, including one to Salisbury Crags to study Hutton’s Section. After she’d completed Rose’s course, she went on a number of other geology excursions, mainly around Scotland, England and Ireland. She was in Belfast in 1852 for the 22nd meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and although Smyth was there too she does not mention him, so it isn’t clear whether they met there. The climax of her notebooks, though, the final section before she becomes absorbed into the Piazzi Smyth story, are notes from 1854, when she undertook her most ambitious excursion, which took her across Europe from Dieppe to Florence.

Her journey seems to have been made by rail and – at the Swiss and Italian lakes – by water. Her notes consist mainly of geological observations, sometimes from the window of a train or the deck of a ship, and sometimes from close quarters as she hiked up a mountain. It is an unusual set of notes in the sense that her journey took several weeks but is covered in a single, short stream of text (roughly the same length as this introduction), and although the tone is consistent with her previous notes on geology (other than the occasional aside or observation) they have little scientific value, as she’s describing hundreds of miles of terrain in OF TIME AND THE HILL 7 just a few sentences. The pace and the consistency suggest to me that they are notes extracted from a more detailed diary, written in a manner intended to evoke something of the changing of the landscape encountered at high speed. The reality of the trip would have been entirely different, though. She seems to have been travelling alone, as she mostly uses the pronoun, ‘I,’ only using ‘we’ during the sections in which she is on the move, therefore presumably referring to the mass of travellers of which she’s a part. There would have been some detailed logistical work necessary, because although the major towns and cities were connected by rail, many of the smaller places were not, and some sites she refers to remain relatively remote even today. It is these smaller places that get the most attention – the Viamala and its surroundings, for instance, and the mountains behind the Grand Hotel Hof Ragatz (both in the Swiss Alps) – so she is clearly more focused on geology in these settings. What she doesn’t say is as intriguing as what she does, not only in terms of how she was getting around and who she was meeting, but what she was doing in the big cities. She stayed in Paris or Milan for days on end, but does not report on what happened there, presumably because she is not thinking about (nor discussing) geology. It is worth noting at this point that the route looks suspiciously like the Grand Tour, despite the fact that it was on the wane by the 1850s, being replaced instead by Thomas Cook’s less exclusive organised package holidays (1848) and circular trips around Europe (1849) for Britain’s growing middle class. She seems to be caught between two eras, as well as between two significant phases in her life (she was forty-two years old by the time she undertook the trip), newly equipped within an emergent scientific field and imagining a new future for herself. It is a shame that her diaries, if they ever existed, are not in the box of notebooks too.

Duncan’s notes from her 1854 European excursion are the starting point for this book, and the wider project of which it is a part. 8 OF TIME AND THE HILL

I used her field notes as a set of instructions, and travelled roughly the same route as she did, but in a campervan over ten days. The essays contained herein function collectively as a cross between a travel journal and a work of auto-theory. Each essay builds out from a location on the route, sometimes being linked to other locations I have travelled to over the last few years in my capacity as an artist, and always as a means to access ideas related to my own field of interest: exhibition-making. During the process of constructing this method, I spent an afternoon with a geologist, Prof. Godfrey Fitton, who took me and a group of artists around Salisbury Crags, explaining what he believed to be the difference between how he read the land and how we, as artists, read the land. He, of course, understood time and movement completely differently, pointing out that where we might see a ‘landscape’ he saw a set of texts explaining how the earth had come to be like this. These texts allow him to imagine what lies beneath the surface, and how what’s there might behave in the future - a future so vast that it is completely beyond anything we are able to imagine in cultural terms.

The essays I have written here, when taken as a set, are intended to explain something of how they came to be, and in addition to address the structures inherent in exhibition-making. They appear in this book in the order in which the locations appear on Duncan’s (and my respective) journey, but they were not written in that order and they need not be read in that order. I imagined the route as an exhibition in progress, one that had been begun by someone else and that I’d been assigned to bring into some semblance of order, an exhibition that placed me somewhere between viewer and maker. I would look at surfaces but also beneath surfaces, attempt to join disparate events and characters across space and time, and try to reconcile the biographies of those I encountered with my own. I somehow had to find a way for the individual elements within it to exist on their own terms, but also as part of a OF TIME AND THE HILL 9 whole, of a single ‘thing.’ It is simultaneously an exercise in setting limitations and seeking potentialities, of drawing boundaries and then trying to look out from within those boundaries. Mine is therefore one of many possible interpretations of the ‘exhibition’ route, so as a reader I suggest that you choose your own way around this book as you would around a set of objects in any other exhibition.

1 An observatory has been present on the site since 1776, leading a stop-start existence until 1812, when it was taken over by the Edinburgh Astronomical Institution. It was they who commissioned William Henry Playfair to build what is now the iconic central building on the site. George IV made it the Royal Observatory in 1822, but it was not fully equipped until 1831, and the first Astronomer Royal, Thomas Henderson, was not in place until 1834. When the city grew around Calton Hill and the light levels were too high, a new observatory was built on Blackford Hill in the south of Edinburgh. The new building took on the mantle of Royal Observatory, and the old one on Calton Hill became known as the City Observatory. 10 11

Looking at Pictures, Thinking about Exhibitions Dieppe | Varengeville-sur-mer 12 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 13

1.

I am standing outside 95 Grande Rue in Dieppe, which is occupied by a branch of the French children’s fashion chain, Catimini, and whose exterior is clad with scaffolding. Its window display consists of three mannequins, a printed backdrop that partially obscures the shop behind it, a cut vinyl ‘curtain’ that frames the display, and various information notices such as prices and logos. It is a sunny bank holiday and the lights are off inside, so the window strongly reflects the pedestrianised street, the shops opposite, the street furniture, the tables of the busy café next door, the people passing by, and (of course) us, which makes viewing the arrangement of objects difficult. This is one of over a hundred Catimini branches, meaning that variations of this display exist in cities on every continent, protected by windows that reflect the various streets and shoppers of the industrial and post-industrial world. It is closed today; but I did not come here to shop, I came to stand outside and look through the window, as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth did when they came to Dieppe in 1932.

For Nicholson and Hepworth, Dieppe was the mid-point on a number of the couple’s excursions around France in the early 1930s. Nicholson’s father, William, had painted Dieppe, and Ben had been part of family trips there as a child. Dieppe was a useful meeting point for English and French based artists in the 14 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS early twentieth century, due to the railway line linking directly to Paris, and it being roughly equidistant between the two capitals. By the time Nicholson visited with Hepworth, which was early in their relationship, he had many artist contacts across France, and was keen to introduce her to them, as she was young, relatively unknown and not yet well connected. They visited, at various points, Picasso, Arp, Braque, Brancusi and Miró.

In 1932, they spent longer than usual in Dieppe, and their stay gave rise to a number of paintings made by Nicholson, including Au Chat Botte, Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise & Journal de Rouen. Au Chat Botte, a particularly important work in Nicholson’s development, as it turned out to be a bridge between his representational work and his abstract work. It is part of the last set of paintings he made that contained recognisable forms, and one of the first in which he successfully demonstrates the principles of spatial organisation he had drawn from his interest in Cubism. Au Chat Botte (Puss in Boots) is ostensibly the view through the window of the shop of the same name, which was then located at 95 Grande Rue. Nicholson explained that looking through this window

set going a train of thought connected with the fairy tales of my childhood and, being in French, and my French being a little mysterious, the words themselves [Au Chat Botte] had an abstract quality - but what was important was that this name was printed in very lovely red lettering on the glass window - giving one plane - and in this window were reflections of what was behind me as I looked in - giving a second plane - while through the window objects on a table were performing a kind of ballet and forming the “eye” or life-point of the painting - giving a third plane. These three planes and all their subsidiary planes were interchangeable so that you could not tell which was real and which unreal, what was reflected and unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space or an imaginative world in which one could live.1 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 15

Charles Harrison notes that the arrangement of objects in Au Chat Botte superficially harks back to classic cubist representations by Picasso in particular, but that the most telling reference is the use of text, which is reminiscent of Braque’s use of lettering in The Portuguese (1911) that performs the task of explaining that ‘this is where the surface of the painting really is.’2 According to David Baxandall, Nicholson’s experiment ‘is not a question of giving the illusion of immense distance but of creating shallower though more organised space, of expression through organisation rather than suggestion, and of sacrificing the romantically evocative for the sake of a space-idea sharply limited in extent but admirably suitable as a setting for rhythmic and formal relationships of the utmost precision and power.’3 What is unusual about this painting, and a number of others produced by Nicholson in this period, is that it did not reduce the objects of the still life to neutral elements tasked with carrying technical experiments or innovations; Nicholson instead retained biographical elements in the work. In Au Chat Botte, the head is both the physical reflection of Hepworth, and also a rendering of her sculptural work Head (1930-31) - thereby operating as a projected apparition (a reflection), a physical object in the arrangement, and a representation of the coming together of ideas as a result of his relationship with Hepworth. Head also appears in other Nicholson works, such as 1932 (Head with Guitar) and is also present in a number of photographs of Nicholson, and the couple’s studio in London. The paintings that Nicholson made about Dieppe were shown in the two-person exhibition he and Hepworth held at Tooth’s Gallery, London in November 1932, as were Hepworth’s Head, Abstraction, Woman and Two Heads. The cross-referencing was not limited to the painted surface, but extended to the interplay between numerous works by the couple in the space of the exhibition. 16 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS

The layering that so interested Nicholson during this transitionary phase in his practice, which was inspired by his lingering ever so slightly longer in what was for him – and for many of his peers – a transitionary town, is perhaps a useful means to consider the layering, the ‘expression through organisation,’ and the flows that become evident when we study the exhibition as form, and the nature of the exhibition as a transitory site. In her essay, Curating, Dramatising and the Diagram, curator and writer Bridget Crone argues that what happens in an exhibition is the drawing of a diagram that makes the flows and movement, the fleeting experiences of everyday life suddenly become visible, and it is our experience of everyday life, of now, that causes us to recognise it. She suggests that we ‘think of curating as the result of a constellation of pressures and forces that in gathering force (or necessity) act together in producing this point of emergence...staging [an exhibition/event etc] offers us a double-action because it simultaneously recognizes our immersion in the unfolding action and at the same time it separates us from it, offering us the view from the “outside” of the stage: a position of spectatorship.’4 The position that Crone is describing, one of simultaneously being immersed and separated is an echo of Nicholson’s description of his painting. When we look at Nicholson’s painting, we are positioned directly in front of the canvas, as the artist was in front of the shop window – it is a direct replication. The window is transparent, revealing what is behind it, but also reflective, revealing what is in front of it (and behind the artist), but it also has lettering on it that locates it as a thing, as the site of the action. These are Nicholson’s three primary planes, but there is an additional plane (which Nicholson may have considered as ‘subsidiary,’ but I believe is primary), represented by the presence of Hepworth, which appears both as a representation of Hepworth herself, and of her work as an artist. Its biographical and relational aspect locate it within the flow of time – both personal and in terms of the artist’s development in relation to his peers. It represents three spaces in which the LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 17 artist stands: the sensible world in which his life takes place, the relationships he develops in that world, and site of the exhibition in which he attempts to describe these things. He’s made a real world in which he is able to recognise how his experience is structured, which opens up to him an ‘imaginative world in which one could live.’5 It’s a world, like Crone’s, in which one can be simultaneously immersed and separated.

The year after he made the Dieppe paintings, Nicholson began work on a set of small reliefs. They were single colour (grey, brown or white) abstract works in which simple shapes were built up and cut out from the painting’s surface, producing an architectural effect and causing the painting to ‘change’ over the course of a day as light from the sun moves across the room. He appeared to be stripping out the ‘content’ of the Dieppe works in order to directly access the structure, negating the possibility to read the pictures biographically or representationally. He also seemed to be stripping out those aspects of painting (colour and tonal variation) that would normally be used to create harmony/disharmony (in an abstract work) or illusion (in a representational work), and instead utilised the kind of layering that might normally by found in a stratigraphic model.6 It is an important shift in Nicholson’s oeuvre, in which he extracts what he considers the most important aspects of the Dieppe paintings and abandons what he considers superfluous, meaning thatAu Chat Botte et al function as a pivot between his representational work and his abstraction.

There is an echo of Nicholson’s painterly shift in the exhibitionary shift performed by Richard Hamilton twenty-five years later, when he made an Exhibit with Victor Pasmore at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. Hamilton’s equivalents to the Dieppe works were two exhibitions he’d made in the early/mid 1950s: Growth and Form in 1951 (a collaboration with Nigel Henderson) and Man, Machine and Motion in 1955. The former was based on the work 18 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS of the Scottish mathematician and biologist, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, specifically his bookOn Growth and Form (1917) which was a pioneering study of morphogenesis (the process by which organisms change shape). Made as part of the Festival of Britain, Hamilton’s exhibition combined the most contemporary display technologies and industrial design with organic and scientific materials, as a means to access and communicate Thompson’s ideas. The successful combination of subject and display led Hamilton to begin to recognise that the exhibition was a form in itself.7 This idea was further explored in Man, Machine and Motion, for which Hamilton built a complex steel, formica and transparent perspex modular structure onto which he applied images of machines that humans had built in order to propel themselves in some way, whether along the ground, under water, in the air or through space. Where one exhibition explored organic shapeshifting at a molecular level, the other explored advanced forms of transportation at a technological level, but both involved particularly inventive forms of display that made it difficult to determine what was being represented and what was the support structure. The ‘content’ had essentially been drawn from elsewhere, and was not identifiable as art as such, despite being visually compelling, but Hamilton sought to devise forms of display that gathered the material into a context where it could be seen on aesthetic terms. Hamilton’s friend, Victor Pasmore, famously remarked that Man, Machine and Motion ‘would have been very good if it hadn’t been for all those photographs,’8 which led the two artists to collaborate on an exhibition ‘which would be its own justification: no theme, no subject; not a display of things or ideas – pure abstract exhibition.’9 Working from a set of rules they developed together, they produced a number of transparent perspex panels in a variety of colours but in a standard size, and then hung them from steel cable at ninety degree angles from each other in various positions around the exhibition space. The result was an arrangement of dividers that interrupted visitors’ LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 19 progress around the space, but without obscuring the space itself or the other visitors occupying it. Lawrence Alloway, who worked on the written elements accompanying an Exhibit, explained that ‘the visitor is asked to look neither for separate works of art nor for symbols but to inhabit, for the duration of the game, [this is how they referred to the exhibition, which was in play while it was open], an environment…It is a game, a maze, a ceremony completed by the participation of the visitors.’10 It was an exhibition that had been stripped of all content other than its exhibition-ness; Crone’s simultaneous immersion and separateness being isolated, standing in for the show’s apparent absence of content.

Nicholson’s first relief painting was created by mistake. He accidentally chipped a section of a painting he was working on, which revealed two previous layers of paint underneath. It was this that led him to experiment with the idea of building up a painting though the application of multiple strata, rather than his recognition of the planes in Au Chat Botte. The quotation above in which Nicholson explains the three planes of Au Chat Botte is from 1941, eight years after his first relief work, so it seems that his accident perhaps revealed something about Au Chat Botte that had not been apparent to him initially. The other Dieppe paintings do not have the same richness in their references or their execution, so it is possible that he had not recognised the painting’s qualities until he saw the physical planes in his reliefs. It has been widely suggested that Hepworth’s influence on Nicholson was growing, that the rapid developments she was making in her sculptural work was being reflected (though not literally this time) in his reliefs. The autobiographic element is therefore partially retained, though not as easily recognised. Similarly, although Hamilton’s projects were producing a kind of symbiosis between exhibition 20 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS form and exhibition content, it took an outsider to suggest the removal of the photographs (the apparent ‘content’) in order to generate a situation where a ‘pure, abstract exhibition’11 could emerge. Nicholson’s reliefs and Hamilton’s (and Pasmore’s) an Exhibit are generally seen to be the culmination that the earlier works were heading towards, but it is important, I think, to recognise them as means rather than ends. According to Isabelle Moffat, Alloway’s accompanying text (which should also be seen as part of an Exhibit) was emblematic of much British art at the time, which sought to ‘professionalize the production of art and make it more like a scientific, methodological exercise of effective communication in order to strip it of its idealist, Romanticist, and even esoteric (read: dillatente, elitist) connotations.’12 Although it remained playful (a game), an Exhibit can be seen as an experiment to find what is ‘exhibition’ about exhibitions, and the result is our ability to read aspects of the exhibitionary in other situations, where previously it might have passed us by. Hamilton and Pasmore’s experiment positively reflects on Hamilton’s previous efforts, offers the foundations for future work and perhaps even offers a link between the curatorial worlds of, say, Alexander Dorner13 and Harald Szeemann14. Crone’s observation on the exhibition as a diagram sits in this tradition, drawing on the language of science, engineering (through philosophy) and dramaturgy. What is important is that it recognises everyday life in all its messiness and incomprehensibility, despite affecting to represent it in an ordered, recognisable way. For me, Nicholson’s Au Chat Botte is as much a representation of an exhibition as it is a painting, for as well as the planes that Nicholson describes, it also describes temporal flows (all of which are moving at different speeds) and contextual relationships (to the world as experienced by Nicholson, and to the world as experienced by the painting), in a single image. Nicholson and Hamilton each seemed to be attempting a removal of the ‘messiness’ inherent in Au Chat Botte and Man, Machine and Motion / Growth and Form respectively, in order to open up the ‘imaginary worlds in which one could live’ to others, rather than to occupy it themselves. LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 21

2.

I leave Dieppe and head along the coast to the commune of Varengeville-sur-mer. When I arrive I go to the Saint-Valery Church, which is located on a cliff edge, 80m above the sea. The image of the church and the surrounding landscape will be well known to Claude Monet enthusiasts, as it appears in numerous landscape paintings he made while at Varengeville in the early 1880s. There are numerous viewpoints set up by the local tourist board enabling visitors to stand in the same spots where Monet made his paintings, and they’ve even reconstructed a house that appears in one of the pictures but has since been demolished.

More recently, and more pertinently to the narrative of this essay, Braque had a house built here in 1931, spending six months a year in it until his death in 1963. Between 1928 and 1939 he produced thirty five Normandy seascapes15, an unusual subject matter for Braque as he’d abandoned landscapes in 1911 in his pursuit of Cubism.16 I head down a path to the beach where these pictures were made, and pick up some pieces of chalk, chalk from which, in 1939, Braque made a set of small horse sculptures (including The Little Horse and The Pony) that were subsequently cast in bronze. Nicholson and Hepworth also made the journey along the coast from Dieppe to visit Braque whenever they came to France, and there is a photograph of Nicholson looking at Braque’s seascapes/still-lives on his studio wall during a stay in 1933. In fact, Braque played host to many artists, and in 1937, Nicholson and Hepworth were joined in Varengeville by Joan Miró and Alexander Calder. As I make my way from the beach to the van I stop off at Braque’s grave in the churchyard, which contains a mosaic of a bird he made in advance of his death, such that it could be installed on his gravestone. 22 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS

After visiting Braque, Miró moved to Varengeville with his family in 1939, where he began working on a set of gouache paintings that would come to be known as his Constellations. Each work was made on paper torn from a watercolour pad roughly 18 inches by 15 inches, and consisted of a set of sharply defined intertwining lines and shapes (some of which were recognisable as stars, crescent-moons, bodies or body-parts, and some of which were simply circles, quadrilaterals or triangles), rendered in black and a limited palette of flat colours, floating in front of a soft- blended, painterly background. On the completion of the tenth work of the series in 1940, Miró realised he had to leave France. The Nazi forces were closing in, and he decided to return to his native Catalonia, via Dieppe, Rouen and finally Paris, where he and his family caught a train to Perpignon, only eight days before the capital fell to the invaders. The only possessions he took were the ten completed Constellation paintings and enough blank paper to finish the series. After a stint in Barcelona, he relocated to his wife’s family’s home in Palma on the island of Mallorca, where he made ten more paintings, and then returned to his parents’ farm in Montroig to make three more, completing the series. Though not as explicit in its response to war or to the fascist victory in Spain as, for example, Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Miró insisted his work’s resistance comes in the form of an ‘inner drama,’ of a ‘soul trying to escape the reality of the present…to offer men the possibility to rise above the present.’17 He refused, on political grounds, to exhibit in Spain, and instead smuggled the completed series (except for one, which he retained for his wife) to his friend Paulo Duarte, an exiled Brazilian intellectual who lived in Lisbon, and who – in turn – shipped them to New York in 1944. Miró wanted the work to be shown as a set of twenty two at the Museum of Modern Art, but the museum was unable to accept them on financial grounds. Instead, Miró’s dealer, Pierre Matisse, accepted the shipment and offered to show them at his own gallery. Counter to Miró’s instructions, and in discussion with curator/critic James LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 23

Johnson Sweeney, writer André Breton and Duarte amongst others, Matisse only showed sixteen of the works at the same time, but swapped works in and out during the exhibition, so that all twenty two works were displayed at some point during the four- week run. After the show was over, the works were dispersed to collectors around the world and were not exhibited as a complete set until 1993, when they were finally exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York almost fifty years after Miró had made his original request. It remains, to this day, the only time all the pictures have been seen in the same room together.

Although he considered them a set, Miró titled each of the images individually and the set was not named as a set in any of his correspondence, nor during the show at Matisse’s gallery. It is thought that Breton might have given them the moniker Constellations retrospectively, sometime around 1957. Coincidentally, Calder – who had been with Miró and Nicholson in Verangeville in 1937 – produced a set of sculptures in 1943 that bear some resemblance to Miró’s works on paper, in that they represent a set of abstract wooden forms connected by thin wooden ‘lines.’ The two men shared an interest in cosmology, and it is feasible that the conversations they had at Braque’s house led them down similar paths. Also coincidentally, Calder showed his works at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in 1943, and the series was named Constellationes following a conversation with his friends, Marcel Duchamp and, again, James Johnson Sweeney. Both sets of work appear to depict what could be described as diagrams of constellations, multiple forms connected by thin lines that draws the forms together into a singular image, but I prefer to consider Miró’s work in particular as a constellation in itself, constructed together and then flung out into the world, drawn back together when the curatorial gravity is strong enough. Calder’s Constellationes and Miró’s Constellations were shown for the first time together in New York in 2017, in a collaboration between 24 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS

Pace Gallery (which represents Calder’s estate) and Acquavella Galleries (which acquired the holdings of Pierre Matisse’s gallery on the gallerist’s death in 1989), though again Miró’s set was not complete, the curatorial pull not sufficient to draw all the elements into its influence.

As I sit and look at Braque’s mosaic headstone and think about Calder and Miró making their separate constellations on either side of the Atlantic, my thoughts turn to another man who attempted to make the journey Miró made from Paris to the Spanish border as France teetered. That man is philosopher Walter Benjamin, who fled Paris only a day before Nazi soldiers entered the newly occupied city and turned up at his apartment to arrest him. He made his way to Portbou, where he planned to cross the border into Spain on his way to neutral Portugal, from where he intended to sail to the USA on a visa arranged for him by his friend and fellow philosopher Max Horkheimer. The group with whom he was travelling was refused entry to Spain and Benjamin committed suicide in his hotel room that night. Though their journeys were the same (but with horribly different outcomes) it is not so much the biography that has led me to Benjamin, but rather the presence of the forms that appear in Varengeville, the constellation and the mosaic, which appear in one of Benjamin’s most important propositions. This proposition allows me to take a further look at the diagrammatic aspect of exhibitions that I began in Dieppe.

Throughout his life as a writer, Benjamin likened himself to a rubbish collector, sorting the city’s trash and salvaging what history disregards. He collected what he saw as fragments, excerpts, images, documents and experiences, which he archived, ordered and re- LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 25 ordered. He believed that the weighty tomes of the past were no longer a useful means of understanding the world and instead we should turn to more dispersed forms of information gathering, such as journalism, advertising, radio, film, photography etc. Benjamin’s form of gathering eschews exactness in favour of a form of collecting that generates, in his words, ‘a relationship to objects which does not emphasise their functional, utilitarian value - that is their usefulness - but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage of their fate’.18

In order to understand an artwork, Benjamin thought, it has to be gathered or collected in this way. He saw criticism not as an attempt to recover original authorial intention, ‘but as an interpretative intervention in the afterlife of an artwork, where meaning is transformed and reconfigured as the artwork is read and understood in new contexts and historical constellations.’19 He believed that the meaning of an object unfolds as part of a historical process as it is drawn into multiple and unexpected confrontations and combinations with other events, objects and ideas. The word ‘constellation’ is useful because the multiple points within it remain precarious in relation to other points, they have no ‘real’ tangible relationship to each other. Points which seem closest together from a certain position are, in reality, the furthest apart and therefore each constellation must be recognised as only one among an infinite number of possible configurations, conjunctions and correspondences. They are subjective, moveable and not ‘final,’ they can be reconfigured as new information becomes available.

Benjamin uses a number of useful terms to break his critical process down. He uses the word phenomena as a substitute for an artwork – to him an artwork occurs in mysterious circumstances which are only possible to understand through the act of criticism. By working critically on an artwork, a wider picture begins to appear, 26 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS and this act of forcing emergence is what Benjamin calls the concept. This is where he uses the metaphor of a mosaic, in which the artwork is imagined as an individual tessera. As we examine the tessera, we begin to see other tesserae surrounding it until finally a picture appears, and this picture – this moment of recognition – is what Benjamin calls the idea. The idea is what Benjamin believes is the truth content of the phenomena, the work of art. A work of art derives its significance from its location within the hypothetical mosaic, which the critic establishes through the development of a concept, and the idea then reflects back upon the artwork. This leads Benjamin to state that ‘ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.’20 Ideas are the arrangement of artworks only, brought about through a concept. Phenomena are not fused nor even contained within ideas, but rather ideas are the representation of phenomena – ideas and phenomena exist in different worlds, on different planes.

Writing on Benjamin, Graeme Gilloch, points out that in constellations of stars,

the most remote objects are conjoined to form a unique, legible figure, which cannot easily be undone. Similarly, in the idea, a sudden yet enduring connection between extreme phenomena is brought into being […] The constellation involves a fleeting but irrevocable shift in perception of phenomena which preserves both their integrity and their mutuality. Hence, for Benjamin “ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements being seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and redeemed” [...] The artwork does not dissolve […] but remains ablaze as a point of illumination within the constellation.21

The phenomena retains a degree of autonomy, but its meaning is derived from its surroundings. Its autonomy is derived from its LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 27 potential to have its surroundings reconfigured, or the borders of its surroundings redrawn.

Benjamin introduces another interesting term in relation to the construction of constellations, and that term is origin. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Benjamin’s origin does not describe the process by which the extant came into being, but rather a way to identify that which emerges from the process of becoming. The origin is not where the artwork or phenomena comes from, it is instead the point at which the ‘constellation of phenomena comes into being, when it is suddenly recognised as a constellation, when the idea is perceived by the critic.’22 An artist makes something, but he or she does not fix its meaning; its meaning remains in flux while it is worked on by what Benjamin calls the ‘ruinous actions of criticism.’23 Artworks are ‘continuously reconstituted in their afterlife,’24 he says, their afterlife being when they are in wider circulation, when they have been dispersed. So the origin occurs not at what one might consider the beginning, when the artwork is made, but when the afterlife is drawn to a close, in an artwork’s ‘final moment of mortification […] Origin is temporal disturbance, an “eddy in the stream of becoming,” as time is folded back on itself […] Origin is a historical moment in which the idea is represented and recognised and the phenomena which compose it are redeemed. Origin becomes the goal of study, not its starting point.’25 In the age of the curatorial, this is what we might expect an exhibition to do.

Nicholson’s analysis of Au Chat Botte was recorded nine years after its production, when he reflected on it in light of the work he had produced in its wake. This, I said earlier, is not to say that he wasn’t aware of what he was doing at the time, and that Au Chat Botte’s construction was merely instinctive or even accidental, as his response to what he’d made was to disregard certain elements of his spatial construction to achieve a purer abstraction in the 28 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS following work. But his analysis, and the cluster of analyses that developed around it in the context of artistic developments of subsequent years (such as those discussed above), could be reflected on in the context of discussions around constellations and the curatorial. It is perhaps also clear how the description of Benjamin’s critical method, which I have heavily simplified here, maps neatly onto processes widely adopted by curators today. However, the metaphors Benjamin utilises to explain his structure of phenomena, concept, idea and origin – the mosaic and the constellation – offer the curator two opposing forms of spatial organisation. In the mosaic, the artwork is an individual tessera, which becomes a picture when it comes into contact with other tesserae during the critical process. While not entirely disregarding the idea that a single tessera could be part of many different pictures that emerge through the concept, the metaphor is essentially flat and undynamic, and also suggests that the component parts have no inherent value nor life of their own. The constellation, on the other hand, is entirely dynamic, opening up the possibility for multiple planes, viewpoints, temporal registers, and combinations of object forms. An exhibition as a mosaic fixes its artworks as points in a singular vision, whereas an exhibition as a constellation recognises the separateness of its constituent parts, and the potential to see them from different positions and in different combinations.

However much this way of looking at exhibition-making acknowledges its form as one of many potential forms, as its combination of elements as one of many, it still sees the artwork’s moment of becoming, its moment of ‘redemption,’ being in the exhibition moment itself – the exhibition seems to be the artwork’s ‘origin.’ At the same time as challenging the artwork’s autonomy, LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 29 it positions the exhibition as the point at which the artwork is understood not in its relation to the wider world, but in relation to these other things in the exhibition, other things that have brought together by its curator. Though exhibitions are temporary, and the works are released in their aftermath, not all artworks get another chance to speak. They are marked by their exhibition (and thus contextual) history. Unless an artist or artwork has become iconic, canonical, or part of a particular collection – and thereby generating questions around ‘ownership’ (physical, intellectual or cultural), and making the site of mediation a battleground – the pressure for the production of ‘newness’ generally lies with the artist: new objects are sought, rather than new origins. But when an object is only shown once, it is merely a tessera in a mosaic; it is when it is shown multiple times, when it becomes contested, that it becomes a point in a constellation.

3.

Manuel DeLanda offers a different structure through which emergence occurs, which also seems to be visible in Nicholson’s painting, and which will eventually lead us back to Bridgit Crone. DeLanda proposes a view of the world based on flows of different speeds and kinds commingling and interacting to produce new forms. Such flows might include the geological (the comparative movement of rocks, lava etc), the linguistic (the spread, restriction, or standardisation of languages), and the biological (biomass, genes), but can be scaled variously to understand how certain things came into being. Like Benjamin, its non-linearity resists the dominant narrative of human history as a recognisable line of progress, but unlike Benjamin, what appears is not the result of a retrospective sorting process, it is instead an emergent process that is self-organised. DeLanda proposes that as a set of intensities gather, the converging flows decelerate and stabilise, producing 30 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS what he describes as a hierarchy, or a strata. These hierarchies exist in relation to other hierarchies that are produced elsewhere in the system, generating what he calls a meshwork. A system that is dominated by its hierarchical nature is said to be a highly-stratified structure, and one dominated by its nature as a meshwork is said to be destratified. Since meshworks give rise to hierarchies and hierarchies to meshworks, and since the borders of a given system are unstable (or, in realty, don’t exist – they are drawn only by us) it continues to be affected by flows and intensities outside of itself, there is a continual process of destratification and restratification. One can grow or shrink the system as much as one desires, as long as we bear in mind its relativity.

This is a small aspect of DeLanda’s project, one that I have extracted from its multitudinous terminology and argumentation, and have therefore perhaps abstracted too much. A good ‘real’ example that DeLanda uses to illustrate his idea is the formation of cities:

Cities and their mineral exoskeletons, their shortened food chains, and their dominant dialects are among the structures [that] emerge from these non-linear flows. Once in place, they reacted back on the flows, either to inhibit them or to further stimulate them. In other words, cities appeared not only as structures operating at a certain degree of stratification (with a certain mix of market and command components), but they themselves performed destratifications and restratifciations on the flows that traversed them. And a similar point applies to the populations of institutions that inhabited these urban centers as well as to their populations of human minds and bodies.26

Cities appear as the result of human relationships to the mineral world, such as mining and agriculture, but also the agglomeration of skills, money, knowledge and so on. They are a form of homogenisation as dispersed populations gather in the same place, LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 31 but they also give rise to new institutional forms (governmental, financial, educational, cultural) and new biological forms (disease), which themselves generate new flows and intensities, and spread beyond the city. The city itself becomes part of a meshwork of other cities, of trade routes and so on. This leads to further hierarchical structures as certain formations of cities dominate others. But again, small meshworks may form within the existing hierarchies in order to challenge dominance:

Certain relatively backward cities in the past, Venice when it was still subordinated to Byzantium, or the network New York-Boston-Philadelphia when still a supply zone for the British empire, engage in what [Jane Jacobs] calls, import- substitution dynamics. Because of their subordinated position, they must import most manufactured products, and export raw materials. Yet, meshworks of small producers within the city, by interlocking their skills can begin to replace those imports with local production, which can then be exchanged with other backward cities. In the process, new skills and new knowledge is generated, new products begin to be imported, which in turn, become the raw materials for a new round of import-substitution.27

In a particular system, there are what DeLanda calls ‘attractors,’ which are ‘patterns of stability and becoming that are inherent in abstract dynamical systems and may be “incarnated” in a variety of actual physical systems.’28 He goes on to say that ‘at any one moment in the system’s history it is the degree of intensity of [its key] parameters (the degree of temperature, pressure, volume, speed, density, and so on) that defines the attractors available to the system and, hence, the type of forms it may give rise to. (That is, at critical values of these parameters, bifurcations occur which abruptly change one set of attractors into another.)’29 An attractor is the simplest form of what DeLanda refers to as 32 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS an ‘abstract machine,’ an idea he draws from Deleuze and Guattari. An abstract machine is an ‘engineering diagram’ that allows us to see the ‘structure-generating processes that give rise to more or less permanent forms but are not unique to those forms.’30 Attractors are therefore localised phenomena that appear as a result of particular situations, patterns that can be identified in retrospect, when new situations arise. They are caused by specific localised intensities. We can then follow these into the more complex abstract machines, or diagrams, which we can see when new hierarchies or meshworks appear:

The hierarchy-generating machine involve[s] a process of double articulation, that is, a sorting operation that yields a homogeneous distribution of elements and a consolidation operation that defines more or less permanent structural linkages between sorted materials. The meshwork-generating machine, on the other hand, articulates divergent but partially overlapping components by their functional complementaries, using a variety of local intercalary elements as well as endogenously generated stable states.31

At this point, I’d like to return to Bridgit Crone. Her description of the curatorial as a diagram, or as a ‘staging’ is also drawn from Deleuze, but this time from his concept, or method, of ‘dramatisation.’ In her reading of Deleuze, ideas emerge through ‘agitations of space, pockets of time, pure synthesis of speeds, directions and rhythms,’ rather than through a specific enquiry or question, but ‘because these subjects and ideas are produced through the situation itself – through a kind of subterranean dynamic that exists “beneath organization”, “a system filled with qualities and developed in extension” – there is a constant threat of not emerging or disintegrating back into obscurity.’32 In reimagining Deleuze’s concept in the context of the curatorial, Crone suggests that the threat of obscurity is reduced because LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 33 the site of emergence is highly visible. The ‘sensible stage,’ as she calls it, is where the action happens, where it is experienced and interpreted by its audience. I wonder, therefore, whether the curatorial might be better thought of as an attractor within a system of swirling intensities and potentialities, that an exhibition represents an engineering diagram of a pattern that begins to form in a localised collision of these intensities. By viewing the curatorial this way, the possibility opens up to view the history of art in a non-linear way. Rather than seeing it as a progression of linear developments, it could be reimagined as a self-organising system of hierarchies and meshworks; of stratifications, destratifications and restratifications; of sudden increases in the intensity of certain parameters (financial, political, material, intellectual etc.) that lead to the emergence of new forms, structures or institutions, which then act back on themselves or position themselves within networks of other new forms, structures or institutions that emerge elsewhere out of entirely different circumstances. It adds fuel to Florence Derieux’s oft-quoted observation that ‘it is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the 20th century is no longer a history of artworks but a history of exhibitions.’33

This way of thinking still requires care, as by analysing these structures it must be remembered that for every potentiality that finds space to emerge, there are many that remain trapped in the ‘subterranean dynamic,’ and even though we might discover something different about art in general through such an approach, we must not forget to mine for unrealised potentialities, potentialities that never emerged because the surrounding set of intensities prevented them from doing so.34 Even Crone’s ‘sensible stage’ does not entirely prevent some potentialities from remaining obscure, but it does represent a degree of transparency that allows us to perhaps be able to understand where certain avenues were opened and others blocked. So when adopting non-linear historical thinking we still need to bear in mind the message of 34 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS

Benjamin’s final work,Thesis on a Philosophy of History (1940), a copy of which was eventually smuggled into Spain by Hannah Arendt a few months after his suicide. In it, he maps out a vision of progress as a storm blowing the ‘angel of history’ towards the future. The angel is facing backwards as he is swept along, looking at the past and, rather than seeing a chain of events as we do, he sees a single unfolding catastrophe, ‘which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’35 Benjamin’s process of sorting is a process of redeeming the past and this is achieved by seeing historical events in the form of constellations from the position of the present, but to do so by attempting to access the detritus, the rubbish that has been left behind or ignored. It is a sorting process that challenges dominant narratives, rather than reinforcing them. It doesn’t just look for the cast-offs and detritus, but for the potentialities that failed to emerge.

4.

I depart the French coast and head inland. On this leg of the journey, I have attempted to see the curatorial through Ben Nicholson’s painting, Au Chat Botte; to re-cast it as a diagram that makes visible the flows, forces and intensities giving rise to certain forms of emergence. On seeing his own, subsequent, white relief paintings, Nicholson began to recognise this diagram in terms of planes, on which certain technical, biographical and relational narratives were playing out. A similar kind of recognition occurred in the field of exhibition-making when Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore made an Exhibit. In the stripping out of what was ‘extraneous’ in order to see what an ‘exhibition without content’ might be, it sought to turn all the parameters down to zero, such that one could see what was being added.36 This appeared in the wake of Growth and Form, which I believe is Hamilton’s Au Chat Botte. Growth and Form represents a pivot in curatorial history LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 35 in the sense that, according to Ben Cranfield, it brought ‘objects and ideas into specific relation as a mode of experiment and inquiry [that] extended the possibility of the curatorial from the mere presentation of sameness, to a distinguishable practice of open-ended exploration: associating not by stylistic incongruity, narrative structure or artistic teleology, but by unfolding an idea in the space, while laying bare the mechanism of investigation.’37 The progression from Growth and Form to an Exhibit mirrors the progression of Au Chat Botte to the white reliefs.

By considering a meeting that took place down the coast from Dieppe, I discussed ideas around dispersal and gathering through Miró and Benjamin, adding the idea of constellations to the idea of planes as a means to see how the exhibition reflects back on the art that’s in it (how the art is ‘redeemed’). Finally, I added a discussion around hierarchies, meshworks and attractors as a means to understand the curatorial in the context of the emergence (or non-emergence) of potentialities. By working through Nicholson’s diagram, and introducing the diagrams of others, we can start to see exhibitions as sorting operations. One form of sorting occurs through the gathering of intensities, the curatorial functioning as an attractor that brings multiple energies into contact with each other, a stratification that occurs infull view (on Crone’s ‘sensible stage’), a hierarchy that appears as part of a larger meshwork, but which can only briefly hold its form before it dissolves back into the swirling plasma from which it emerged. The other form of sorting locates and redeems the potentialities that were never realised, or reorganises phenomena into new combinations, challenging the dominant narratives that appear to have solidified. As I drive east along the autoroute and look in my rear-view mirror, I remind myself that although Dieppe was the first point on my journey, it is not yet the journey’s origin. 36 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS

1 Ben Nicholson (1941) quoted in Sophie Bowness, “Ben Nicholson and Georges Braque: Dieppe and Varengeville in the 1930s,” in The Dieppe Connection: The Town and its Artists from Turner to Braque, ed. Caroline Collier & Julia MacKenzie (The Herbert Press Ltd & The Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums: Brighton, 1992), 44–45. 2 Charles Harrison, “Notes on Ben Nicholson’s Development and Commentary on Selected Works,” in Ben Nicholson, ed. Charles Harrison & Norman Reid (Tate Gallery: London, 1969), 22. 3 David Baxandall, Ben Nicholson (Methuen: London, 1962), 32. 4 Bridget Crone, “Curating, Dramatising and the Diagram: Notes Towards a Sensible Stage,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, Jean-Paul Martinon (Bloomsbury Publishing: London, 2013). Loc.38321-2 & 3836-8. Kindle. 5 Nicholson in Bowness op. cit., 45. 6 See the models produced by Thomas Sopwith in the 1840s as an example of this. Sopwith was an engineer and surveyor who also had substantial carpentry skills. He made a set of teaching aids out of wood in which a number of layers were built up to each represent a separate strata in the earth’s crust. These are held in numerous museum collections, but a large number of them can be seen through the image bank on the Natural History Museum’s website: https://www.nhmimages.com/en/search/do_quick_search.html?q=sopwith [accessed 11 July 2018]. 7 The exhibition was remade by Tate and Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA) in 2014. It is now part of MACBA’s collection, and a brief discussion of it can be found on the museum’s website: https://www. macba.cat/en/growth-and-form-5245 [accessed 11 July 2018]. 8 Victor Pasmore (1957) quoted in Isabelle Moffat, “Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore, an Exhibit, 1957,” in The Artist as Curator, ed. Elena Filipovic (Mousse Publishing: Milan & Koenig Books: London, 2017), 20. 9 Ibid. 10 Lawrence Alloway quoted by Isabelle Moffat, 32. 11 Pasmore in Moffat op. cit., 20. 12 Ibid, 24. 13 Dorner was at the forefront of museum display in the 1920s, when he became the director of the Landesmuseum in Hanover. He reorganised the displays of the collections so they were no longer hung in a ‘salon style,’ but in rather more de-cluttered displays in which viewers move from picture to picture. This is the form of exhibition display we are familiar with today. Dorner’s techniques also incorporated what he described as ‘atmosphere rooms,’ which were intended to immerse the viewer in the theme being explored in each space. This was done by the use of different colours or materials covering the walls, or all the frames being standardised for a particular period. Further LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS 37 to this, he employed artist Friedrich Kiesler to design particularly inventive display furniture to house the displays of new art. 14 Widely considered to be the first independent curator (on leaving Kunsthalle Bern in 1969), Szeemann’s approach was one of what he described as ‘from vision to nail,’ ie that the curator was active in every element of an exhibition’s production, rather than making thematic displays of existing work. Curators would therefore not only be explaining what an artist has done, but inserting themselves into the creative process. 15 Boats on the Beach: Dieppe (1929) was shown in Edinburgh in 1956 as part of the International Festival at the Scottish Royal Academy, as was The Portuguese (1911), which was discussed earlier. See Douglas Cooper & Robert Ponsonby, G.Braque: An Exhibition of Paintings (Edinburgh International Festival & The Royal Scottish Academy: Edinburgh and Arts Council of Great Britain, 1956). 16 He seems to have reconciled this by treating the washed-up boats on the beach that occupy the foreground of any of these paintings as still-lives. 17 Joan Miró (1939) quoted in Lillian Tone, “The Journey of Miró’s Constellations”, MoMA, no.15 (1993): 1–6, www.jstor.org/stable/4381235 [4 July 2018]. 18 Walter Benjamin (1934) quoted in “Introduction,” the editors, Walter Benjamin’s Archive, ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla, trans. Esther Leslie (Verso: London/New York, 2007), 4. 19 Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin - Critical Constellations (Polity Press, Cambridge and Blackwell Publishers Ltd: Oxford, 2002), 30. 20 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Verso: London, 1998/1963), 34. 21 Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin - Critical Constellations, 70–71. 22 Ibid, 72. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid, 72–3. 25 Ibid, 73. 26 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Swerve Editions / Zone Books: New York, 2009/1997), 262–3. 27 Manuel DeLanda, “Markets and Antimarkets in The World Economy in Alamut”, 26 September 1998, accessed 4 July 2018, http://www.alamut.com/ subj/economics/de_landa/antiMarkets.html. 28 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History,263. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Gilles Deleuze (1967) quoted in Bridget Crone, “Curating, Dramatising and the Diagram: Notes Towards a Sensible Stage”, Loc.3785-96. Kindle. 38 LOOKING AT PICTURES, THINKING ABOUT EXHIBITIONS

33 Florence Derieux, “Introduction” in Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, ed. Florence Derieux (JRP|Ringier: Zurich, 2007), 8. 34 It could be argued that this process has begun in a few museums in Europe, such as those identified by Clare Bishop in her book Radical Museology, or What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2013). Earlier still, Okwui Enwezor’s text The Post-Colonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition (2003) could also be said to have suggested a similar approach, albeit in a different way. 35 Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (Publisher: London, 1999), 249. 36 Two other classic and oft-cited examples should be mentioned here. Firstly, Seth Siegelaub’s Xerox Book (1968) for which artists were given set parameters for making their work, thus enabling viewers to understand the difference between them. It is not only revealed to the audience what each artist had done, but also what elements of the idea and presentation were external to them and their work yet still present in the experience of viewing. Secondly, Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969), for which he chose to ship artists to the gallery, rather than objects, thereby forcing/enabling them to make their work on site. This made the exhibition processual, rather than being a display of previously existing objects. 37 Ben Cranfield, “Between Consensus and Anxiety: Curating Transparency at the ICA of the 1950s”, Journal of Curatorial Studies, volume 1, number 1, (Intellect: Bristol, 2012), 93. 39

A Symmetrical Echo Some Thoughts on Art and Biography Rouen | Wädenswill 40 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 41

I have come to buy chocolate from Confiserie Heloin, which has been on the Rue des Carmes in Rouen since 1832. I knew to come and buy sweets around here, because I’d heard that Marcel Duchamp was window-shopping down this street of chocolatiers when he saw the chocolate grinder that would appear in his works, Chocolate Grinder (1913) and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). Duchamp was born in the nearby village of Blainville-Crevon, and attended school in Rouen. He received the only diploma of his life here, by working as a printer’s apprentice in order to halve the length of his compulsory military service. Lawyers, doctors and ‘art workers’ were only obliged to spend a year in the military rather than two, and since Duchamp had failed to get in to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and had no intention of entering the professions, the apprenticeship was the only means of (partial) escape available to him. As a result of his connection to Rouen, one encounters occasional references to him around town, such as street names or adverts for walking tours. Such references seem to be nothing but biographical asides, though, laying claim on a man whose achievements mostly occurred elsewhere, and under other circumstances. Duchamp stated in an interview that he’d seen the chocolate grinder here, but the object’s biography cannot be said to be embedded into the 42 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO image’s meaning. However, there are two of Duchamp’s works that are connected to Rouen, works that have attempted – but failed – to decouple themselves from their biographical roots. They appear as a result of journeys Duchamp made to Rouen to see his family, both literally depicting the journey, and also representing a cerebral journey from one intellectual space to another.

The theorist, Thierry de Duve, establishes the connection between Duchamp’s daily life and his artistic output by utilising a technique used by Sigmund Freud. In order to interpret a dream, Freud first outlined two narratives: the ‘preliminary narrative,’ or the events preceding a dream, and the ‘narrative of the dream;’ and only when he’d done this would he proceed with his analysis. A direct application of this technique is actually impossible, says de Duve, for the following reasons:

Should the “preliminary narrative” be composed exclusively of extra pictorial events? If the answer is yes, how can we grasp them, knowing quite well that it is imprudent to trust biographies that have been constructed by persons other than the artist? As for the works, are they mutatis mutandis “dreams,” “narratives” (of the dreams), or “narratives” that have already been interpreted?1

However, he adopts a pragmatic approach based on Freud’s own selective use of information, suggesting that, ‘the preliminary narrative is a piece of autobiography already selected by the material of the dream.’2 De Duve suggests that Duchamp feeds us titbits of biography when it suits him, specifically in interviews, but sometimes in the works themselves. A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 43

The first of the two works I wish to discuss, Sad Young Man on a Train (1911), epitomises this, the preliminary narrative running as follows: Duchamp’s family consisted almost entirely of artists; his grandmother, his mother, his two older brothers and his younger sister all being painters or sculptors. His brothers were Cubists who had established a collective called the Section d’or in the suburbs of Paris, which distinguished itself from the Cubism of Picasso and Braque by specifically articulating its links with (rather than its breaks from) a grand tradition, including a fascination with the golden section (from which they took their name). The collective’s members included Francis Picabia, Fernand Leger, Marie Laurencin and Robert Delaunay, amongst others. Duchamp would attend group meetings but would rarely participate, perhaps – de Duve suggests – because during this time he was producing a series of portraits of his family that appeared superficially to be in a Cubist style, but fitted into neither of the two dominant positions of the day: neither Braque and Picasso’s interrogation of space, nor the theoretical concerns of members of the Section d’or group. Perhaps the most difficult of Duchamp’s works for the various Cubists to comprehend were a set of self- portraits he made, including Nude Descending a Staircase and Sad Young Man on a Train, both made in 1911. Self-portraiture was considered too introspective to be able to carry the concerns of the Cubists, but Duchamp avoided this by – counter-intuitively, and counter to Cubist ‘tradition’ – introducing a moving subject into his pictures, adopting what he called ‘elementary parallelism.’ Sad Young Man on a Train is a painting of a full, abstracted figure of a man appearing in multiple positions across the width of the canvas, the most foregrounded representation appearing in the centre. The parallel movements being described, according to Duchamp, are that of the forward movement of the train on which the man rides, and the man’s movement as he stands in the corridor and is shaken from side to side by the shuddering of the train. One therefore has to acknowledge that the painter has two 44 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO positions in relation to the subject: one position is in the carriage with the man, the other is on a platform observing the train going past. This representation of form, the static painter observing the moving subject, is in contrast to the classic Cubist position in which the painter moves around a static subject in order to represent it from all sides. De Duve suggests (and we are now moving into dream narrative territory) that a third movement can be identified if one considers Duchamp in relation to Cubism itself, that he has managed to both get on board and miss the Cubist train at the same time; the represented man (the artist) has been carried away, and the representing man (also the artist) is watching it happen. De Duve concludes that ‘it’s as if Duchamp were trying to give himself an anticipated retrospective portrait: he will have been a Cubist; thus, he is already no longer a Cubist.’3

Duchamp stated retrospectively that the man is sad ‘because there is a train that comes afterward [sic].’4 This strange and awkward statement, when placed in relation to de Duve’s observation, could mean that the subject of the painting knows he’s on the wrong train – he’s sad because a better train is coming, but he jumped on the earlier one, which is a good train, but the wrong one for him; he’s on the wrong journey, being propelled by the wrong force. In addition, it could be that he is setting up an elementary parallelism within the title. In its original French, the painting is called Jeune homme triste dans un train, which contains an untranslatable wordplay. Duchamp explains the importance of the double ‘tr,’ suggesting that the title can be split, pivoting around the word triste/sad. Jeune homme triste: sad young man, and triste dans un train: sad on a train. He states that he has seen the title translated as Melancholy on a Train, which pleases him.5 This is interesting as the picture itself operates as one of two parts in an aesthetic mechanism that pivots around a central biographical event. The opposing part in the mechanism is one of the first objects Duchamp made in his most well-known set of technical innovations, his readymades. A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 45

In 1914, Duchamp made the second of the two works I wish to discuss, a work called Pharmacy. While on a train to Rouen at dusk, he had noted the lights of houses in the distance on the horizon. The next day, he went to an artists’ supply store in Rouen and bought three identical commercial prints of a winter landscape at night. The scene represented was a drawing by an unknown artist that had been reproduced and made widely available for use by art students. ‘There were a great number of them [commercial prints of this landscape],’ Duchamp said, ‘in the same way that there are a great number of snow shovels in the world.’6 He added two coloured gouache ‘lights’ on the horizon of each print, based on what he’d seen on the train, one in red and one in green, such that they resembled the coloured bottles that appear in the windows of French pharmacies. This kind of art object, made by selecting a familiar and widely available object from the world and making a small alteration to it would, the following year, come to be classified by Duchamp as a rectified readymade7, and would represent a significant development in western art.

We have already seen that Sad Young Man on a Train is a self- portrait, but so far the train has only been described in terms of its formal and metaphorical potential, a train-ride in general, rather than a specific train ride. Duchamp himself stated in 1967 that ‘[Sad Young Man on a Train] was autobiographical, a trip I took from Paris to Rouen, alone in a compartment. My pipe was there to identify me.’8 De Duve believes that Duchamp made this trip at the end of 1911 in order to visit his younger sister, Suzanne, and her new husband, Charles Desmares, a pharmacist. Duchamp was particularly fond of Suzanne but did not approve of her wedding to Desmares. He cryptically expressed his disapproval by presenting the pair with his painting Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911) 46 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO as a wedding gift. This painting was a contemporary reworking of Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding (1434) and depicts a man and woman cavorting outdoors either side of a mirror, in which the couple can be seen reflected, but with the artist, who is also reflected, standing in-between them. De Duve suggests that this arrangement, combined with Duchamp’s penchant for word play (and perhaps de Duve is thinking specifically of Duchamp’s later rectified readymadeLHOOQ [1919]9 here) led him to hear Desmares’ name as ‘D. Mar,’ (Duchamp Marcel) thereby allowing him to see himself in place of (or at least shielding his sister from) her husband, and thereby come to terms with a union that made him unhappy.10 Sad Young Man on a Train could therefore be read as a direct recording of a miserable train journey. Pharmacy documented a happier journey taken on the same train three years later, this time to visit Suzanne as she was divorcing Desmares, the dots on the horizon representing the pharmacist disappearing into the distance, into the past. Duchamp refutes this reading of the works, describing Pharmacy as ‘a distortion of the visual idea to execute an intellectual idea.’11 It’s a good but hollow protest, as when his sister married a different man five years later, he presented her with Unhappy Readymade, a significantly less cryptic wail of despair than Young Man and Girl in Spring.

Sad Young Man on a Train and Pharmacy pivot around a sad episode in Duchamp’s personal life, and it is possible to read them as an emotional response to it. Indeed, de Duve calls Pharmacy a ‘symmetrical echo’12 of Sad Young Man on a Train, a symmetrical echo that relates directly to his family life, but also to his artistic life. Sad Young Man on a Train sees Duchamp climbing on board a train he knows he’s too late to ride, one that is already running out of steam but one which his family have been deeply involved in constructing and fuelling. Pharmacy sees the weight of his sister’s ‘absence’ lifted, and appears at the point when the ties to the aesthetic tendencies of his brothers are finally snapped for good. A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 47

Two days later, I am driving south along the east bank of Lake Zurich, and the relationship between art and autobiography flashes up again. Looking across the lake to the opposite bank, it is possible to make out the Villa Abendstern (The Evening Star), a house located on a hillside in the town of Wädenswil. The writer, Robert Walser, lived here for four months in 1904, whilst working as a clerk for the inventor, Carl Dubler. Dubler had purchased the house for his family, and it had an office and technical workshop in the basement, as well as a spare room in the turret for an assistant, which is where Walser lived during his stay. Dubler had been a low-level engineer in a factory, but on inheriting some money, had bought the house and invested the remaining money into developing his inventions, his plan being to generate an income from the licensing of his designs. The four months that Walser worked for Dubler would form the basis of his 1907 work of auto-fiction, The Assistant,which Walser described as ‘an altogether realistic novel. I barely needed to invent anything. Life saw to it for me.’13 It’s this juxtaposition of ‘invention’ and ‘life’ that leads me to place Walser in relation to Duchamp, and to suggest an alternative reading of the work he produced based on his time in Villa Abendstern. The novel is written in the third person, the inventor’s name being changed to Carl Tobler, and Walser’s to Joseph Marti (Marti being Walser’s mother’s maiden name). Marti is present in every scene, and – unlike other characters – his thoughts as well as his actions are expressed. The narrative is therefore centred around Marti, and the thoughts and actions of the other characters are presented as his interpretation. So Marti and Tobler are clearly the doubles of Walser and Dubler respectively, but I also contend that the Tobler character is a second double of Walser himself, that the two characters represent another sort of elementary parallelism. 48 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO

When Marti arrives at the villa, there are four objects that Tobler is working on: the ‘Advertising Clock,’ the ‘Marksman’s Vending Machine,’ the ‘Invalid’s Chair,’ and the ‘Deep Drilling Machine.’14 The Advertising Clock is the most developed invention, and the one which seems to be causing the most distress. When Marti arrives at the workshop, there is already a working prototype that he has to familiarise himself with. It is simply a clock that can be installed in public spaces, but it contains a separate display mechanism with several fields. Only one of these fields is displayed at a time, but as the hands of the clock turn, they cause the display field to change at regular intervals. Tobler’s idea is that businesses will pay a fee to rent a field, on which their name and the nature of their business will be displayed. As businessmen, commuters, or other townsfolk use the clock while catching trains or setting their watches, they will see the adverts. Although the description of what the clock looks like in the novel makes it sound antiquated, Tobler (Dubler) has essentially invented a forerunner to the scrolling advertising signs which continue to exist on our streets, bus stops and in train stations today. He has patented this device, and over the course of the novel, he and Marti are seeking licensees to produce it, and advertisers to rent space on it. The Marksman’s Vending Machine is a vending machine designed to be installed at ‘shooting festivals’ across Switzerland, which dispenses bullets. Like the clock, it contains a mechanism with a rotating set of fields containing adverts. Each time a coin goes in the slot, a new advert appears. A prototype of the Marksman’s Vending Machine is being built at a workshop in the nearby town, and appears later in the novel. The Invalid Chair is a folding chair designed to be used during recuperation, and also appears in prototype form during the novel, the user (Tobler’s wife) suggesting modifications that the inventor must make in order that the chair functions properly. The Deep Drilling Machine never makes it off the drawing board. A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 49

The novel is a slow, unfolding tale of the failure of the inventor to get the Advertising Clock into production, and the subsequent descent of the household into financial ruin. Tobler has channelled all his financial reserves into developing his inventions, and is living off his ability to secure credit. Only essentials are purchased with cash, but he is in debt to a variety of townspeople from bankers to gardeners, and Tobler is constantly using his credit lines to appear successful, funding everything from the production of prototypes to the hosting of lavish parties, from his electricity supply to his villa extensions through promissory notes. Even Marti, who is clothed and fed and given pocket money at weekends, is merely promised his salary. As Tobler’s adverts in trade publications fail to bear fruit, he makes more and more business trips, initially to secure funding but increasingly to avoid the debt collectors who are turning up at the villa. The credit lines dry up, as does the goodwill of the townsfolk (including the craftsmen who are making the prototypes) and soon the household is isolated and in darkness. The novel begins in summertime, with the hope that accompanies a new job and the potential of a new idea, and the slow march towards winter runs parallel to the slow descent of Tobler’s projects, the gathering gloom accompanied by the inventor’s increasing agitation and aggression. The novel ends with Marti departing the bankrupt house, and Tobler’s wife (though not Tobler himself) admitting defeat.

Walser’s natural double, Marti, is presented as an uncreative individual, lacking the ingenuity and desire of Tobler, satisfied with the humdrum nature of his position, and curiously unconcerned about the lack of his salary. He is content to be kept by the Tobler family, to carry out the tasks his position demands, and to be given odd jobs to do around the house. At one point in the novel, he offers the following assessment of Marti/himself: 50 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO

he always felt pleased, indeed happy, when he was granted the privilege of performing physical labor. Was he really so unwilling to exert his mind, the better half of a human being? Was he destined to become a wood-cutter or a coachman? […] He was perhaps by no means unintelligent – a deficit, by the way, which persons born healthy are unlikely to suffer. But there was something about him that favored the physical […] He preferred swimming in cold water to pondering lofty things […] He was possessed of intellect when he wished to be, but he liked to take breaks from thinking. One day he saw a man carrying sacks in the middle of the village and immediately thought that he would do the same as soon as Tobler sent him away.15

In a short story Walser wrote a few years later, Kleist in Thun, the main character, Kleist, is also a double of the author. It is another self-portrait based on real life events reflecting a decline, this time of the author’s mental health. Kleist is a working writer who is lamenting having moved from cosmopolitan Potsdam to rural Thun with ambitions to become a farmer, ambitions that he has not attempted to fulfil. Instead he continues to write – even visiting Berne to present his work in literary circles – but is crippled by the physical and mental torture of sitting at his desk, trying to be creative. He takes to walking, and although he initially finds this physically demanding, ‘his soul thrills for bodily exertion’16 and the resulting ramble around the town is what provides the material for his story. Kleist in Thun was written in 1913 and like Kleist, Walser had returned to Switzerland from Berlin to live with his sister, coming to Thun temporarily, to write. He’d lived in Thun previously, in 1899, that time working as a clerk in a brewery. In the story, Walser/Kleist’s sister comes to collect him and, seeing his illness and distress, suggests that he needs something practical to do. She believes that being in Thun without the day-to-day tasks required by the brewery has contributed to his illness. Since he was last there he’d published A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 51 three novels (including The Assistant), and although none were successful, he has become first and foremost ‘a writer.’ The irony of the story is, of course, that the walk he undertakes to escape the pressure to create, placed in contrast to the anguish caused by being trapped at this desk, is what ultimately produces this strange and alarming short story.

Coincidentally, at roughly the same time as Walser wrote Kleist in Thun, Marcel Duchamp was grappling with a similar dilemma. He’d abandoned Paris and headed to Munich, and appeared to be using his time there to exorcise Cubism from his work. His training as a printmaker had resulted in him obtaining the title of art worker (bouvier-d’art), a specific category of labourer who has specific technical skills. Although he appreciated the skillset he’d developed (and would utilise it in later works) the idea of being an art worker was seen by Duchamp and his fellow painters in Paris as being distinct from being an artist. Despite requiring a degree of technical expertise to produce a Cubist painting, Cubism’s proponents saw it primarily as a form of pictorial thought rather than the result of any manual skill. Duchamp, remember, had become an art worker following his rejection from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he would have learned to become an artist. This mental shift, the disconnection of artistry from the artisanal, is what would allow Duchamp’s colleagues to head towards abstraction and painterly purity, and would lead Duchamp himself to the idea of ‘selecting’ rather than ‘producing’ art objects. When in Munich, away from the intensity of the Parisian artworld, his pictorial thought was able to free itself from Cubism and head in an entirely new direction. On his return, he told himself to get a job, ‘in order to get enough time to paint for myself.’ 17 52 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO

Duchamp retained a complex relationship to the idea of work for his entire life. He was much more comfortable finding ways to inhabit and articulate the separation of the ideas of work and not-work than Walser was. He would rarely participate in the production of work for more than two hours a day, and devoted the rest of the time to ‘laziness.’ Indeed, he wanted to open a Home for the Lazy, because ‘laziness represents a different way of inhabiting space and time’18; and, he believed, it is harder to be lazy, to do nothing, than one thinks. Without time devoted to non-production, what is made by artists becomes indistinguishable from other forms of work. As sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato points out, eventually – by producing through repetition as a means to live – ‘the artist, like the factory worker, is deprived of his “know- how” as production becomes standardized; he loses all singularity, even in painting.’19

By 1913, writing seems to have become work for Walser. Until then, he’d worked in banks in Biel and Zurich, at an elastic factory in Winterthur, in the brewery in Thun, and at Villa Abendstern in Wädenswil. He’d even attended servant school in Berlin and taken a job working as a servant in Oberschlesien. During this time he’d produced short articles and poems, but between leaving his job as a servant in 1905 and writing Kleist in Thun in 1913, he appears to have devoted himself entirely to writing. Even though he was not making anything remotely resembling a living, the division between work and not-work had seemingly evaporated, hence his sister’s suggestion that he take on some practical activity.

In The Assistant, Marti escapes the anxiety of the Tobler household by going for walks in the canton’s capital city, or by climbing up the nearby mountain, or swimming in the lake.20 These episodes act as diversions in the novel, as they no doubt did in the day- to-day reality of Walser’s time in the employ of Dubler. Walking soon becomes the practical activity that he desires to escape his A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 53 writing desk, and to give him some structure when he returns to it. In 1914 he seems to be approaching this conclusion in his very short story, less than a single page, called A Little Ramble. In it, he makes a number of simple, barely noteworthy observations about a short walk he takes through a valley. The gradient goes a bit up, then a bit down, the weather is a bit grey, but he has to take his coat off, the mountain and the stream are attractive and give him pleasure, and he encounters a man who asks if he’s seen two people, which he hasn’t, but then he does see them shortly after. He ends the story by saying that there’s nothing really to report, but then ‘we don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.’21

This story is followed in 1917 by something akin to a novella or even a manifesto for how he intends to write. Entitled, The Walk, it describes a walk that takes him a full day, and outlines all the encounters he has along the way, with people he meets on the road, in shops or at the bank; and all the things he observes about the weather, nature, the season and so on. Each encounter is treated as its own short story roughly the length of A Little Ramble, and each person met is left under no illusion that his meeting with them is not the sole purpose of his being out in the world. He is always ready to move on, sometimes even breaking off an encounter before it’s run its course. Once he has sufficient material for the story, he takes his leave. It is explained along the way, either through the thoughts he has, or in his conversations with the characters he meets, that his walking and writing are co-dependent, and that although they are separate spaces, each needs the other. After being struck by a particular juxtaposition of encounters, he even states that he will write the story we are reading: ‘“All this,” so I proposed to myself as I stood there, “I shall certainly write down in a piece or sort of fantasy, which I shall entitle ‘The Walk.’…”’22 Further down the road, he is discussing his tax affairs with a civil servant. The man accuses him 54 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO of being a man of leisure, as he always seems to be out for a walk. The author is affronted, and replies:

Walk…I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could not write the half of one more single word, or produce the tiniest poem in verse or prose. Without walking, I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed. Also, without walking and gathering reports, I would not be able to render one single further report, or the tiniest of essays, let alone a real long story. Without walking, I would not be able to make any observations or studies at all.23

The writer needs the walk to generate material, but the walk needs the writing or it cannot be justified; both share the same, seemingly purposeful linear directionality, they both cover ground. In order to be at peace with himself, the writer/walker ‘will have to cover a considerable stretch of this road, and write a fair quantity of lines. But one realises to be sure to satiety that he loves to walk as well as he loves to write; the latter of course perhaps a shade less than the former.’24 This final observation echoes Duchamp’s declaration in 1916 that playing chess was the part of his life that he loved the most.25

So to return to the idea of invention. It seems to me that The Assistant is Walser’s Sad Young Man on a Train, that it contains what Duchamp described as elementary parallelism. Like Duchamp the painter, Walser the writer adopts multiple positions when depicting himself. Each of these works is described as auto- biographical by its author, or to use a Duchampism, apropos of himself. Duchamp witnesses the two movements of himself, once from the platform and once on the train. Although Walser is telling A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 55 a story ‘as it happened,’ the two main characters could also be seen as parallel trajectories of the same person: the author. Marti could be said to represent the practical side, the side that works or walks; and Tobler the other, the writer, who invents. In that sense, The Assistant also predicts the downfall of the author if this is the path he chooses. When de Duve describes Sad Young Man on a Train as Duchamp giving himself an ‘anticipated retrospective portrait: he will have been a Cubist; thus, he is already no longer a Cubist’ he could also be describing The Assistant. The inventions of Tobler/ Dubler could be seen as representing Walser’s creative output in its various states of production. His books also need publishers, just as the inventions need licensees, and Walser did not always see eye to eye with them. Susan Sontag describes Walser’s work as being a ‘refusal of power,’ a declaration of his ordinariness, the ‘“I” of Walser’s prose [being] the opposite of the egotist’s: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.”’26 Marti begins the novel in the service of Tobler, but Tobler’s steady, predictable descent into failure is juxtaposed with Marti’s own moral steadiness. This reflects the path Walser’s life would take. Although he finds a means to balance the practical and creative sides of his character, he eventually has a breakdown and is committed to an asylum and then a sanatorium, where he would gradually give up writing but continue walking. He died of a heart attack while walking on his own on Christmas Day in 1956. Where the relationship between the biography and creative output of Duchamp are positioned as preliminary narrative and dream narrative, resulting in the projected retrospective self-portrait, the relationship between Walser’s biography and creative output happened in reverse, The Assistant proving to be less a ‘deadly dull’ affair, as Max Liebermann described it,27 and more a harbinger of doom.

Duchamp unambiguously states that the character in Sad Young Man on a Train is him, ‘he can be identified by his pipe,’ and Walser also states that The Assistantis a true story. Duchamp, 56 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO however, claims that even though the work is a self-portrait, it should not be read as autobiographical. He feeds us lines, though, about the painting’s subject, referring to the figure as both himself and the man, allowing him, the artist, to be both present within it and also at a critical distance, observing the man’s movement. It expresses as much a sense of personal and professional anxiety as it attempts to display an advancement in pictorial thinking. The existence of its symmetrical echo, Pharmacy, however, (and, indeed, Young Man and Girl in Spring and Unhappy Readymade) suggest a deeper autobiographical aspect to the work. Conversely, Walser’s statement that everything in the novel actually happened, blinds us to the possibility that both the leading male characters could actually be him. In Pharmacy, a huge burden is lifted from Duchamp, he escapes Cubism and celebrates his sister’s divorce at the same time. Because of the intellectual achievement of the former, he is able to deny the latter. In The Walk, Walser finds relief in the duality of life and art that he had lost by abandoning the practical, by losing work that is not art work. In committing to his writing as work he had placed a burden on it and himself that was too much to bear. His precarious state of mind in Kleist in Thun is a testament to this, and he is exhibiting the signs of collapse that he reported in Tobler/Dubler, another man who gambled on his creative output. The Walk is a re-emergence from Kleist in Thun, but also the beginning of the shift in the balance of his character, as he gradually errs towards the practical obedience of Marti, just to get through the day. The Assistant represented a symmetrical echo in itself, one that sounded the loudest when its author was no longer around to hear it. A SYMMETRICAL ECHO 57

1 Thierry De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan & Thierry De Duve (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, date), 11. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid, 13. 4 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (Da Capo Press: London, 1979), 29. 5 Ibid. 6 Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, (Delano Greenidge Editions: New York, 2000), 597. 7 The same year, 1914, Duchamp made Bicycle Wheel, in which he attached a bicycle wheel to a stool, an example of what he would call an ‘Assisted Readymade’; and also Bottle Rack, an object designed for drying bottles that he bought from a hardware shop and to which he made no alteration at all, an example of what would simply be called, a ‘Readymade’. 8 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 33. 9 A postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503-06) on which Duchamp drew a moustache. He wrote the letters LHOOQ underneath the image which, when read aloud, sounds like one is saying ‘she is hot in the arse’ (ie sexually restless) in French. 10 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, 53. 11 Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography (Random House: London, 1997), 135. 12 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, 45. 13 Carl Seelig, Walks With Walser, trans. Anne Posten (New Directions: New York, 2017), 47–48. 14 A fifth invention is mentioned in the novel: a perpetual motion machine. This is not Tobler’s invention, but rather one of a visiting ‘mad-man’ in one of the final scenes. 15 Robert Walser, The Assistant, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Penguin: London, 2008), 188–189. 16 Robert Walser, “Kleist in Thun” in The Walk and other stories, trans. Christopher Middleton, and others (Serpents Tale: London, 2013/1992), 17. 17 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Thierry De Duve Pictorial Nominalism: On Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, 15. 18 Maurizio Lazzarato, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2014), 11. 19 Ibid, 14. 20 The novel is set in the fictional town of Bärenswil, and the canton capital, the mountain and the lake are not named, so it cannot be ‘located’ without 58 A SYMMETRICAL ECHO prior information about its origins. Ostensibly, Bärenswil is a Swiss town, and its topography bears more than a passing resemblance to Wädenswil, but Marti is paid in marks rather than francs, so there is an underlying ambiguity when it comes to place. 21 Robert Walser, “A Little Ramble” in The Walk and other stories, trans. Christopher Middleton, and others (Serpents Tale: London, 2013/1992), 29. 22 Robert Walser, “The Walk” in The Walk and other stories, trans. Christopher Middleton, and others (Serpents Tale: London, 2013/1992), 68. 23 Ibid, 87–88. 24 Ibid, 65. 25 Allan Savage, “‘All artists are not chess players – all chess players are artists’ Marcel Duchamp”, Tate Etc. Issue 12 (Spring 2008), accessed 24 June 2018, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/all-artists-are-not- chess-players-all-chess-players-are-artists-marcel. 26 Susan Sontag “Foreword: Walser’s Voice” in The Walk and other stories, trans. Christopher Middleton, and others (Serpents Tale: London, 2013/1992), viii. 27 Carl Seelig, Walks With Walser, 41. 59

Three Moves Around a Problem Fontainebleau | The Peak District | Cape Town 60 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 61

I arrived at the Forest of Fontainebleau early evening. I had imagined I might stop for a walk, or perhaps even camp, but was completely unprepared for the scale of the forest. I had no map other than a road atlas, no guidebook, and a slow and patchy phone signal. As I was driving down one of the main arterial roads running through the forest, I passed between Chailly-en-Bière and Barbizon, and decided to pull into the first carpark I found. It transpired that this carpark offered a curious position from which to assemble a constellation of historical narratives and personal experiences, a constellation which I present here as a ‘problem,’ for reasons that I hope will become clear. In the following text, I will describe a set of what I would like to call ‘moves,’ which will come together to reveal the ‘problem.’

Move 1: Who Owns the (Image of the) Forest?

The towns of Chailly-en-Bière and Barbizon may be familiar to some due to their role in the story of Fontainebleau’s position as Europe’s most important site for plein air painting in the nineteenth century, an accolade wrested from the Roman Campagna and Naples in Italy. Chailly-en-Bière and Barbizon became the point zero of an explosion of interest in Fontainebleau Forest that would 62 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM lead to a battle over the ownership of its motifs and narratives between artists and the newly emergent tourist industry.

Although the Forest appeared intermittently in paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was a minor subject compared to the Campagna. Neither site, however, was seen as a subject in itself within the salons, and the shift from Italy to France also represented a shift in how the landscapes were thought, as well as how they were painted. An early proponent of this shift was Achille Etna Michallon, who won passage to Italy through his success in the 1817 Prix de Rome with his picture, Democritus and the Abderities, in which an ancient narrative played out across a wide, sweeping landscape. As far as the academy was concerned, the narrative element was the subject of the painting and the landscape was simply the setting, but Michallon saw the picture in reverse, considering the landscape to be the subject and the narrative to be the setting, the latter simply making his work more acceptable to the conservative judges. The liveliness of the work was due to his newly-adopted method of working entirely out in the open, subscribing as he did to the ideas of the painter, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, who demanded particular attention be paid to how the air between the painter and objects of differing distances affects their colour and appearance, and how this changes at different times of day, so-called aerial perspective. Valenciennes also demanded that a painter perform a number of memory-improving exercises in order that various conditions can be depicted naturally back in the studio. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a pupil of Michallon’s despite being a year younger, was also a disciple of Valenciennes, and he followed in his tutor’s footsteps, visiting the Campagna in 1825. Corot had private means, so did not need to rely on the Prix in order to get to Rome, and perhaps did not have to worry about adopting the same conventions at Michallon to mask his real interest: the landscape. Out in the Campagna, he not only shrugged off the necessity to consider his THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 63 sketches as preparatory work for the setting of a historical mise- en-scène, he barely troubled himself with the Roman architecture that peppered the landscape, worrying only about how the light cast on them was affected by the atmospheric conditions. He was, essentially, beginning to refute the need for a historical subject to occupy a painted landscape, for the work done in the open to be merely a preparatory study for a backdrop; instead, he made the landscape itself the primary interest. Although he exhibited works with subjects from ancient history at the Paris Salons throughout the 1830s, he was also showing numerous works in which no such narrative was added, and by the 1840s, sur le motif landscape painting had risen from the bottom to the top of the French Academy’s hierarchy of genres.

Valencienne’s writing not only had an influence on the technical aspect of landscape paintings, but on the specific locations artists chose to work in. He suggested a number of French forests as being particularly useful for plein air painting, but it was Fontainebleau that Michallon chose from the list, encouraging Corot to do the same. Corot’s three years in Italy were sandwiched between productive periods in Fontainebleau, and it was around this time, the late 1820s, in which the shift from Italy to France took hold, with artists using the small town of Chailly-en-Bière as their base. By the 1830s young artists had stopped going to Italy at all. Theodor Rousseau, for example, headed straight to Chailly-en-Bière, and by the 1840s, artists such as Gustav Courbet had occupied the nearby town of Barbizon. By this time the landscape, sometimes empty and sometimes occupied by local villagers, workers, cattle or other artists, had become the primary subject matter, providing the most appropriate motifs to carry the technical developments that would eventually lead to Impressionism, but subjects that were also considered to be sufficiently interesting in and of themselves. 64 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM

At the same time that the forest of Fontainebleau was becoming a centre for the expunging of overt historical and mythological narrative from painting, it was also becoming a centre of the emergence of historical and mythological narrative in a different field, that of tourism. And if Corot could be identified as the best example of an artist through which developments in painting can, retrospectively, be best seen, his touristic counterpart would be Claude-François Denecourt. Denecourt was a soldier whose final posting was to Fontainebleau, and it was here he remained after being dismissed in 1832. The forest became his stomping ground, and the number of artists occupying it had not passed unnoticed, nor had the emergence of guide books being produced to respond to the forest’s increasing accessibility by train from Paris. He was particularly interested in Jamin’s 1837 guidebook, which – unlike previous guides that focussed on the château – outlined four walks through Fontainebleau’s more wild spaces;1 and two years later he produced his own version, which featured five walks that took in spots that he thought were most useful to artists.2 He initially remained reliant on Jamin’s observations and ideas, and subsequent early guides made use of well-known historical reference points, but soon Denecourt began to take creative control over his subject matter, and by 1842 he was authoring his own ‘sentiers’ or trails, gradually colonising and ordering not only the forest itself, but the manner in which it was documented and experienced. Along his sentiers, he began to name particular trees, rocks or ponds after royalty, generals, writers and artists. Although named randomly, he sometimes claimed that an object’s namesake had been present in some way, passing through or sheltering nearby. He would also give geological formations strange and fantastical names such as Poire des Druides (The Druids’ Pear) or Passage de Cyclopes (The Cyclop’s Passageway). Each sentier thus consisted of a strange constellation of historical characters and ideas, determined only by Denecourt’s whims and fancies. Over the course of his career, he devised sentiers covering a total of THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 65 three hundred kilometres and insisted that this was the best (and perhaps only) way to experience the forest, an assertion that was lapped up by tourists, who by now were flocking to the forest as a result of his guides. The Caverne des Bringands near Barbizon was one of Denecourt’s greatest triumphs. He claimed that a group of assassins hid here during the reign of Louis XV, and it became a popular destination for tourists, resulting in cafes and souvenir shops opening nearby. Subsequent guides would refer to this story as if it were true, and its infamy continues today; you can still eat at the Brigand Cafe, and the cave even became the site of a murder in the 1950s, which added to its notoriety – a grisly truth nestling amongst the lies. Denecourt had redesigned and repackaged the forest as a playground for the bourgeois tourist, initially Parisians, but by the 1850s the visitors were increasingly international and Denecourt was producing guides written in English. Such an increase in visitors inevitably led to the physical transformation of the forest. It was no longer a wilderness in which artists would seek solitude and inspiration - it had become littered with absurd motifs, and trampled upon by noisy and destructive tourists.

The painter, Théodore Rousseau had been a consistent visitor to Fontainebleau since the late 1820s. He had witnessed the transformation of the forest first hand and became increasingly vocal about the damage being inflicted upon it. The first target for his ire was the forest administration, on account of its over- logging. Though the forest had been a significant source of wood for decades, the rate of logging and replanting was accelerating at what he considered to be an alarming rate. Centuries old oaks were being removed and the sites replanted with fast-growing Scots pine, the hardiness and usefulness of which made it extremely popular. Where once there was no pine growing in the forest, by the 1860s 66 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM it would cover a quarter of its area. The second of Rousseau’s bête noires was Denecourt, whom he blamed for the forest’s new status as a playground of the newly mobile bourgeoisie. Grand oaks that had been the subject of (and, ironically, made famous by) artists’ work long before Denecourt showed up were being cut back to prevent clothing being snagged and having their roots hacked up to make paved roads, painted arrows representing his rapidly multiplying sentiers peppered the forest, rock formations were covered in graffiti, fires were being started by careless visitors, and a plethora of natural marvels were being trampled underfoot. Ironically, many of the sights that were disappearing as a result of clumsy (or simply numerous) visitors were the very ones that had been named and claimed by Denecourt himself. Denecourt was impervious to Rousseau’s criticisms, accusing him of snobbery and possessiveness, and casting himself as a man of the people who’d opened up the mysteries of the forest to all. Rousseau was so enraged, that he petitioned Napoleon III through one of his patrons (who happened to be Napoleon’s half-brother) to set aside four specific parts of the forest for preservation. It was a slow process, but eleven years after beginning his campaign, Rousseau was successful. In 1861 Napoleon signed an imperial decree prohibiting not only logging, but any other transformative act, on an area twice the size suggested by Rousseau. As a result, Fontainebleau Forest became the first nature reserve in history. Rousseau’s campaign gave rise to many others in subsequent years, including a bold attempt in 1872 by a group of artists, including Corot, to have the forest reclassified as a national monument. This attempt failed, but over the following thirty years, the size of the protected area gradually increased until it was roughly double in size. Napoleon’s decree went some way to tempering the untrammelled expansion of the tourist trade ever deeper into the forest, and allowed artists to breathe a sigh of relief, but it still represented the beginning of the end of Fontainebleau as a site of artistic innovation. The steady flow of artists making the trek THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 67 there continued into the latter years of the nineteenth century, but the motifs were becoming exhausted and were therefore of only minor use to landscape painters such as Cézanne and Seurat, who began to look elsewhere.

Move 2: Who Owns the (Image of the) Rock Face?

Back in the carpark, I grabbed my camera and went for a walk. I’d stopped at a place called Bas-Cuvier, and as I made my way into the forest I was surrounded by huge boulders sitting singly or in small clusters and stacks. The ground was compressed and there was little undergrowth, clearly the product of human traffic across the entire site. It was deserted now, and there was no noise at all. The rocks seemed to be living things at rest, or things moving and conversing so slowly that their lives are imperceptible to a human observer. Once I’d settled into the strangeness of the site, I began to notice that many of the rocks had been marked, or sprayed with paint. Numbers, letters, arrows, dots, lines and smears, all in different colours and marked by different hands. But they were not names or tags, they were codes representing different modes of interaction with the rocks, different ways of knowing them.

When I got home and looked at my photographs, I saw one of the rocks marked with a blue ‘5’ and another with an ‘M’ in the same paint. The number, it transpired, represents the appearance of the rock on Sentier Denecourt no.53, a trail designed by Denecourt’s contemporary, Charles Colinet, in 1887. Colinet modernised the trails designed by Denecourt, including many of the ‘original’ trees and rocks named by his forebear, and making new ones. From the photographs I took on the day I have subsequently identified the so-called Rock Curiously Detached, the Faidherbe Rock (named after the French general and governor of Senegal) and rocks memorialising the Barbizon School artists Charles Jacques 68 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM

Rock Curiously Detached, Sentier Denecourt no.5, Fontainebleau Forest. THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 69

(engraver and animalier) and Jules Jacques Veyrassat (engraver and painter of rural life). There are references to numerous other artists, soldiers, gourmets and physicians in this part of the forest, through as far as I can tell, they do not form a particular picture or idea when considered as a set. The rocks themselves do not seem to have qualities that reflect particular people or occupations, so – considering none of their namesakes had any real relationship to the rocks (or trees) themselves – it is pretty much a process of tombola nomenclature. The lack of any sort of image, idea or classification system that might emerge through one’s encounters with the rocks makes remembering which one is which, or even where you’ve been while you’ve been walking, even more difficult than if they had no name at all! There areother codifications attached to the rocks though, which allow us to ‘see’ them in an entirely different way…

The dots, arrows, numbers and smears of chalk I mention are, of course, marks made by climbers who come to this part of the forest for the bouldering. Bouldering is, as its name suggests, the scaling or traversing of boulders, and therefore takes place low down and generally without equipment (except, for the most part, easily transportable crash mats). Though the danger is significantly reduced in this particular branch of climbing, the intellectual element is not, with each boulder presenting a specific ‘problem’ (or problems) to be ‘solved.’ In many cases, the problem can be solved in a relatively few moves, but these moves often require a high level of skill not only to enact but even to see in the first place. The reduced level of physical risk involved allows climbers to attempt wilder solutions than they may feel able to do when scaling rock faces without ropes. To ‘read’ a boulder requires a particular skillset that combines the visual, the physical, 70 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM and the intellectual, and often a certain amount of patience and willingness to fail repeatedly until the desired combination of moves solves the problem. The quantity and variety of rocks that are found in this part of Fontainebleau Forest make it one of the best sites for bouldering in the world.

In 2007 I worked on a project with Dan Shipsides, an artist whose practice centred around climbing, and it was he who introduced me to its specific vernacular and technical representation. Dan points to its similarities with art, and in particular how climbing routes have many of the same attributes as artworks: ‘they are created; “authored”; named and dated; consumed; generate cultural currency (come to represent breakthroughs, test pieces, radical departures, re-articulations); assessed and reviewed (3-star ratings); and graded (according to technical difficulty and exposure).’4 In the run-up to his exhibition at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, a day-trip was organised for members of the gallery’s audience to a gritstone formation on the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border of the Peak District called The Roaches. When we arrived, the rock face was dotted with climbers, and as we walked around the base of the formation, Dan pointed out various routes authored by famous climbers as if we were part of a museum tour, and as if we could actually see them, which, of course, we couldn’t. The routes are not marked in any way, they are visible only to those able to read the rock-face in the context of a particular choreography, of how a body might – through a set of progressive moves – perform its way to an identified end-point. On climbing websites, these routes appear as a few vague instructions that would only make sense when one is fully immersed in the process, but Dan has also represented them visually in a variety of ways from something approximating a score (which makes little sense to the layman), to something approximating a drawing (which is much more visually expedient). It is important to note that the routes are not a means to an end, it is not just about getting to the top, it is about how THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 71 one gets to the top. A single rock-face or boulder will suggest multiple solutions to the problem presented, each having a set of variations or modifications that have accumulated over the years. All these solutions and their myriad variations are individually titled, authored, and dated with the year the route was first performed. As we walked around The Roaches, being introduced to Peter Harding’s 1946 climb, Valkyrie; to Don Whillans’ The Sloth (1956) or to John Goslings’ 1969 traverse, The Swan,with its John Yates (1970) and Ron Fawcett (1977) variations, we could barely imagine, never mind see, what is being described,5 and how crowded this seemingly empty rock face actually is. As Ernest A. Baker, himself a walker and climber, pointed out in 1903 when he stood at the foot of Roach End, ‘one gritstone chimney is remarkably like another; the minute differences are to be relished only by the connoisseur.’6

Since Baker spent his days discovering climbs at Hen Cloud and Roach End there have been remarkable changes in access to the landscape and to who was able to cultivate such connoisseurship. Baker was a member of the Kyndwr Club, a group of walkers and climbers from Derby and Sheffield who trespassed on private land within the Peaks. Although tourism was common, with towns such as Buxton being easily accessible by rail, the vast majority of open moorland and the rock formations they contained were owned by private landlords and gamekeepers. Baker documented the Kyndwr Club’s excursions into parts of the countryside that only the wealthiest members of society had legal access to. Run- ins with gamekeepers and tales of trespassers who died of exposure (and whose bodies weren’t discovered for months) pepper even the most humdrum accounts and lists of climbs. In an article that lists a number of graded climbs in the Derbyshire area he points out 72 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM that The Roaches remains more-or-less uncharted territory, that its climbs are ‘hardly well-known enough even to local scramblers, and, besides that, have not yet acquired recognised names.’7 Many of what are now key climbing sites in this part of England were – even without today’s infrastructure – only half a day’s excursion from the most populous of the northern industrial cities, yet on reading some of Baker’s articles, and despite his encouragement to get his readership out into the moorlands, you’d think that they were on a different planet. It was organisations like the Kyndwr Club that began to affect the changes that have led to the kind of access we take for granted today, and even after the club’s closure, Baker continued to lobby for the opening up of the moorlands. In 1924 he wrote The Forbidden Lands, which railed against the exclusive use of the land by the idle rich, arguing that The Pennines should be viewed as ‘the back garden, the recreation ground, for the crowded millions of workers in the adjoining towns.’8 As Simon Thompson points out, disputes over land between the ruling classes and the commoners was nothing new, but a paradigm shift that came in the early twentieth century was that the landowners were no longer arguing with a rural peasantry, but with politicised town-dwellers.

One such town-dweller was Benny Rothman, a founding member of the 1931 Communist-inspired British Workers Sports Federation. Rothman organised numerous walks in the wilderness outside Manchester, culminating in what became known as the Mass Trespass. Frustrated by the slow progress made by the (also recently-formed) Ramblers Association, who were lobbying for a Right-to-Roam, Rothman resorted to direct-action. On the 24th April 1932, he set out from Bowden Bridge quarry with 400 fellow walkers, and headed for Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District. Coming from the Sheffield side, a second group set off from Edale, with the two groups arriving at Kinder Scout at the same time. The Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers were THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 73 present as the group arrived and a scuffle broke out. Arrests were made when the Manchester group returned home, and although trespassing was not a criminal offence, six of the group served jail sentences as a result of the action. The publicity that the arrests garnered added to the growing unrest, and a few weeks later 10,000 ramblers descended on Winnats Pass to protest against the lack of access to the land. This was the largest gathering of ramblers in history, and the rally is widely believed to be the point zero moment that eventually led to the post-war Labour government’s introduction of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, in which the Peak District became the UK’s first National Park.9 The 1950s became a golden age for climbing, especially in the Peak District, and many of the classic climbs were authored during this decade, perhaps most famously by members of the Rock and Ice Club, the most skilful and pioneering of which were Joe Brown and Don Whillans. Not everyone was happy with the new arrangements though, and in his autobiography Brown states that even as access to climbing sites was opening up, he and his colleagues would continue to have stones thrown at them by landowners as they were halfway up a rockface.10

Move 3: Who Owns the (Image of the) Land?

During a recent trip to South Africa I met Ed February, a botanist and Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town. His interest in botany grew out of his encounters with plants as a by-product of his primary vocation: climbing. February faced a different challenge in his relationship to the ownership of land than the protagonists of the previous two ‘moves,’ in that he was a black climber during the apartheid era. The systematic dividing up of space in Cape Town along racial lines took away access to many of the sites that older members of his family had enjoyed before apartheid, sites which – it just so happened, of course – contained 74 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM all of the significant climbs on the peninsula. February was also not accepted into any of the institutions that white climbers were part of, most significantly the Mountain Club of South Africa (MCSA). February was one of the best climbers in the country, but his rejection by the MCSA meant he struggled to meet climbing partners with an equivalent skill level to his. Eventually he managed to form a small troupe of talented climbers who were more committed to climbing than to segregation, but he was still denied access to sites around the city as racially diverse hiking groups were outlawed. He would often find himself blanked by other climbers when he managed to gain access to sites he was not legally supposed to be on, and was even denied access to a hospital when he attempted to take his seriously injured white friend, as there was no door through which a white and black person could enter the building together. Despite such humiliations, February persevered, over and over through the apartheid era – along with the other members of his illicitly diverse group – he managed to author hundreds of new, extremely challenging routes on the Cape Peninsula’s most significant climbing sites.11

I met February through a friend, Nina Liebenberg, who knew him because of his work as a botanist. I had come to Cape Town to re-enact an excursion taken by the astronomer John Herschel and his wife, Margaret Stewart, as they explored the Cape Peninsula and hunted for bulbs in 1835. They were establishing a bulb garden at their home in the suburb of Claremont (a stone’s throw from Wynberg, where February would be born 120 years later), from which Margaret would produce a portfolio of 132 botanical drawings over the five years they lived there. When I told Nina about my project, she took me to meet February as a way to find out more about what I might find growing along my route. The route would begin at the site of Stewart and Herschel’s bulb garden (now an electricity substation) in the affluent, high-walled/ electric-fenced Claremont and head across the Cape Flats – which THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 75 were mostly ‘empty’ in 1835 except for the occasional farm but are now occupied by the vast, sprawling townships of Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha – before arriving at the seaside resorts of Strand and Gordon’s Bay. My intention for the project was to produce a portfolio of botanical drawings, much like Margaret’s, but rather than looking for specific specimens I would see what encounters the route generated, and make a set of drawings that represent the spaces I could access and the people I met there. It is an experience of the land something like one of Denecourt’s sentiers, or a route made by a climber up a rock face. February told me that I would see the ‘whole of Africa’ along this route, but the resulting set of drawings require specific information and knowledge to be read this way, just as the previous ‘moves’ discussed in this essay do. As the ultimate destination of the drawings is to be an exhibition, the project attempts to draw parallels between how we experience the world through time and through a set of encounters, and how we experience exhibitions in the same way. On a single surface, there are multiple planes of experience being represented: in and through time, in and through space, and across multiple subjective trajectories. It gathers reference points, encounters and experiences that will ultimately be condensed into a something which has aesthetic and dialogical borders, borders which are arbitrary and not actually real and must be seen in relation to a wider ecology of positions, ideas and flows. The exhibition is a representation of a journey through time, but the exhibition itself is experienced ‘in time.’ The route can be seen as the research for an exhibition, or it can be seen as an exhibition itself.

In travelling this route in Cape Town, it is necessary to cross multiple borders into differently defined zones. The legacy of apartheid is still apparent, and the districts it created still exist in name and in terms of how they relate to each other economically. Formal education does not exist in many of the townships, for example, and is often provided by untrained volunteers.12 The 76 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM

Mfuleni township as seen from Driftsands Nature Reserve, Cape Town. THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 77 lens through which I encountered the zoning was that of the land itself. I did not seek to identify borders that had been specifically drawn along political lines, but in asking people to show me what was growing at various points along the route, the social and economic circumstances specific to each location would inevitably become visible. Since botany was the starting point, one inevitably begins with the key botanic issues along this route. These are represented, so to speak, through specifically zoned conservation areas. Conservation areas between Wynberg and Gordon’s Bay do not appear in the same form as, for example, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, which is a world heritage site visited by millions of people every year. Rather, they are expanses of grass (fynbos) or scrubland surrounded by urban development, where cultivation is forbidden and the fynbos managed and conserved. The management is essentially about ensuring that the borders are not encroached, and that the conservation areas are allowed to exist with minimal interference from humans. The Cape is one of the richest botanic environments on the planet, and there are many species of plant that now exist in only one place, such as in these designated zones, or even in car parks or abandoned brownfield sites. The boundaries of conservation areas are sites of contention as they are constantly under pressure from formal or informal urban expansion. Informal expansion occurs when a conservation area borders with an existing township that is growing, and therefore encroaching on what appears to be ‘empty,’ unused land. With people arriving from rural areas outside the city, or with population growth inside the township itself, clusters of new informal buildings often appear on conservation sites overnight, and their removal can be a violent process. Examples of boundaries such as this on the route I travelled were on the border of Mfuleni and the Driftsands Nature Reserve, and on the border of Khayelitsha and the Macassar Dunes. Formal expansion occurs when a conservation area borders an area in which real estate is valuable and there is money to be made through the sale of new- 78 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM build properties. In these cases it can be cheaper for a developer to build on a conservation area without permission and pay the fines than it is to go through the proper processes. An example of this had occurred on my route on the borders of the Harmony Flats conservation area in Gordon’s Bay. The conservation areas represent a certain paradox in how Cape Town understands itself: the flora and fynbos are an essential part of its identity and heritage, and also represent an image of its custodianship of the land. It needs to be seen to be protecting these things for social, economic and ecological purposes, but the very existence of the conservation areas primarily serves to highlight the social, political and ecological catastrophe of apartheid and of Cape Town’s dramatic economic expansion. The vast townships in the Cape Flats are built on land that is completely unsuitable for human habitation, land that is constantly hit by floods (but whichshould be hit by fires, as fire is a natural aspect of a fynbos-based ecosystem) due to erosion and poor drainage. It is perhaps as absurd that the undeveloped areas of the Cape Flats should be protected from development as it is that there are millions of people already living on it.

On visiting the Bolus Herbarium, the curator, Terry Trinder- Smith, pulled out a number of samples from the collection that included small envelopes of seeds accompanied by botanical paintings of the samples made when they were collected. As he showed us a 1922 painting of a drosanthemum speciosum by Mary Page, he explained that samples gathered for research purposes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had involved selecting plants and flowers that were relatively large distances apart that appeared to be distinct from each other. But as time went on, and samples were gathered from the spaces in- between the old collection sites, it became clear that there was a THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 79 gradation going on, that samples which were once considered to be distinct from each other were actually same species, that there was – in fact – a progression taking place over long distances. Philosopher Manuel DeLanda often talks about the development of language in a similar way. For example, the language of the Roman empire was Latin, meaning that all communication with governmental officials was carried out in Latin no matter what the local language was. After the fall of the empire, this ceased to be the case, and local variations of Latin emerged. Until the ninth century everybody thought they were still speaking Latin until a grammatician, Alcium, was hired to report on the language across the former empire. He found that new languages had emerged, but without distinct borders, so over small distances there did not appear to be significant differences, but taken at larger distances apart they sounded completely different.13 Similarly, a few centuries later, after the Norman conquest of Britain, the language of the elites became French, and the peasantry was left to its own devices. Hundreds of variations of English thus emerged which faded into one another. Towns and villages did not always notice the difference with their immediate neighbours, but taken across long distances, huge variations could be heard.14

This seems like a digression, but it leads me to my final point about the conservation areas, of which there were two opposing positions. One is epitomised by local activist and conservationist Rupert Koopman, who would like to retain and expand these conservation areas before the local ecology is lost for good. The other is epitomised by Ed February, who believes that the local ecology is already lost, that the vast majority of conservation areas are meaningless from an ecology point of view, as they are disconnected from each other; because insects are unable to travel between them, they exist in complete isolation. February described them as ‘postage stamps,’ suggesting that the only reason they should be retained is because of their social and cultural 80 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM value, rather than for ecological or environmental value. He is not advocating for them to be abandoned, but for them to be rethought as museums.

One of my intentions of traveling through Cape Town guided by Stewart and Herschel rather than using a contemporary guide, was that it does not present a particular view or narrative drawn from how the city wishes a visitor to encounter it. It attempts to eschew, as Walter Benjamin would say, banal tourism, producing instead a kind of thought image of the city, much like his own visions of Naples, Moscow and Marseilles. Benjamin sought to understand cities through fragmented experiences, an idea that became known as porosity. It also offers the possibility to devise a sentier that allows us to see something of how the city is organised without kowtowing to dominant narratives. Perhaps by finding pockets of experience that appear as shocks, without smooth transitions, the spaces – and the wider space of which they are a part – will appear differently. There are, naturally, huge gaps in my experience of Cape Town, but at the same time a set of strange minutiae of experience that one might never think to seek without such a map. Certain practicalities aside, it forces a set of encounters and a set of refusals (which are as important as acceptances, which we will see shortly) that reveal certain things about how the city is, how it appears when it isn’t in control of its own story, and who and what a visitor represents to it. Most of the people I met did not know each other, which is not entirely surprising, but surprisingly few had been to the other parts of the city I was planning to visit. Ferbruary’s analogy of the postage stamp plots that are disconnected from each other was not limited to conservation sites, but applies more widely in Cape Town’s urban fabric. One such example is Flamingo Crescent, THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 81 which I visited with Melanie Jackson of the female-led activist group, the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDUP).15 Flamingo Crescent a plot of residential land in the middle of an industrial estate between the suburbs at the eastern foot of Table Mountain and the Cape Flats, created in 2007 to house people living on the streets in various parts of the city. They were given the land, two taps and some chemical toilets and left to it. There was no electricity and no drainage, so the shacks (which they built from whatever they could find) would flood whenever it rained. There were high levels of crime, unemployment and disease, and there were frequent fires. In 2012, Melanie worked with the community to improve the living conditions, and they managed to raise enough money to rebuild the entire block, install electricity and build a small school building. Because they re-built it themselves, they were trained, provided with work, and a degree of community cohesion was generated. There was also an increase in the community’s motivation and a sense of hope. When I visited with Melanie, pockets of hope remain in the block (Cathy Paterson, a community representative who took us round, stated that there was a desire to build a second storey on most of the new buildings), and there is a clear improvement in the day-to-day living conditions, but since the works were completed the community has slumped back to its previously high levels of unemployment and alcoholism, and funding for the school has disappeared, so it is now closed. Aside from the obvious, what was notable about the neighbourhood was its isolation. Like the conservation areas, there didn’t seem to be much possibility for cross pollination, it was not connected to any other residential neighbourhoods.

As we were leaving Flamingo Crescent, we saw a man standing in the neighbourhood’s central meeting area wearing an Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) uniform,16 and thoughts turned to the potential solutions to the issues we’re presented with. Melanie’s 82 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM organisation can provide an isolated boost and an improvement in basic conditions, but the battle for hearts and minds can also be seen in relation to the land along this route. As well as top down organised political movements, such as the EFF, there are many movements of the militant poor that are attempting to produce a political theory built from the ground up. Organisations such as Abahlali baseMjondolo (who also operate in Johannesburg) work with communities to generate ideas and actions to improve their material conditions and political agency, as well as disseminating information about group action. They are strict about who is able to gain access to their networks, so academics, NGOs or other outsiders who bring existing ideologies are generally unable to participate in, or observe, the working groups, however well- meaning they might be. For obvious (and appropriate) reasons, I did not meet any of these groups while I was there, but there exists a network of interconnected hubs which share ideas and generate solidarity. Such groups not only work in contrast to top- down political organisations, but also in contrast to the many NGOs that are active in the city. The most visible example of one of these NGOs was a group called Abalimi Bezekhaya, who work with individuals and communities to convert unused land into micro-farms. These could be relatively large patches, such as wasteland around electricity pylons or plots where development has stalled, or small patches around shacks. This land is cultivated and provides food for those who grow it, but also a surplus that enters a supply chain. Abalimi Bezekhaya trucks stop off at the plots regularly and collect excess vegetables, taking them to a distribution centre in Phillipi where they are put in veg boxes that are delivered to subscribers around the city. This has generated a degree of self-sufficiency and sometimes entrepreneurial spirit in the participating communities. It also generates a network of interconnected small-holdings around the city. Both Abahlali baseMjondolo and Abalimi Bezekhaya create small, partially independent units that are connected to larger partially co- THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 83 dependent networks. The first is seeking to break the status quo at a political level, the latter seeking to enter the status quo on an economic level.

The veg boxes are delivered to middle-class households in parts of the city such as Claremont, where Stewart and Herschel once lived. The houses here self-isolate themselves with high walls and electric fences. As I walked through one of these neighbourhoods I bought a bunch of flowers from a street seller to give to my Airbnb landlady. Flower sellers have been collecting flowers from the open spaces around Cape Town and selling them in the city since the nineteenth century. This was initially encouraged (to a certain extent) at a governmental level, but in 1890 conservationists began lobbying for protective regulations to be introduced to prevent Table Mountain and other areas from being ‘trespassed.’ These areas were still legally considered to be part of the commons though, so such regulations can clearly be seen as an attempt to enforce a social order.17 Where Stewart and Hershel would regularly collect bulbs for their garden, black and poor flower sellers were forced off common land. Rupert Koopman, himself a conservationist, explained that such laws are similarly enforced today. Poor people who are caught collecting plants for medicinal purposes on conservation areas (they cannot afford western drugs) often face jail sentences, whereas developers or large agribusinesses build on or suck the land dry with little or no enforcement of the law.

To briefly conclude this ‘move,’ I want to return to the idea of the conservation areas as museums conjoined through a desire to preserve an ecological past, rather than through ecology itself, and place it in relation to these other pockets of activity that are 84 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM variously connected to or isolated from networks of corresponding activities. The conservation areas have become closed systems that point to a long disappeared ecology, and what has been isolated is a small section in a chain of activity. But the isolated section no longer behaves in the same way it used to when it was joined to a wider system. These pockets are, to a certain extent, distinct from each other, in the same way that languages or accents became distinct across the lands of the post-Roman empire, or the villages of England, had huge stretches of land between urban centres had their populations wiped out, and the urban centres disconnected from each other. The entropic possibilities are strictly limited within the conservation areas, and the efforts of the conservationists are based entirely around keeping it as it was on this patch, preventing the further loss of local endangered species (there are many species of fynbos, strand veld, toads and birds that exist only on particular reserves). It is not possible for this habitat to behave as it did when the Cape Flats were ‘empty.’ The museumification of the site through its isolation enables us to recognise it for what it is, and consider it in relation to other systems, a link in a different chain, a node in a different meshwork. In her book Curated Decay, Caitlin DeSilvey addresses this very issue through an analyses of numerous heritage monuments. She points out that when something is identified as a heritage site, certain borders are drawn to separate it off from its non-heritage surroundings, and then a process is enacted to slow down its rate of decay. She argues that we should look beneath the surface level of these sites and attend to ‘the way we encounter and apprehend things as they come undone and are drawn into other orders, other systems.’18 We should be ‘locating the threshold, the point to which entropic process is allowed to run,’19 and then we should seek to cross that threshold. She draws on Jeffrey Sasha Davis’s idea of the ‘double erasure,’ when talking about abandoned military sites that have become heritage sites: ‘First there is the erasure of the social life that existed in the place prior to its takeover by the THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 85 military. Second there is the erasure of the military’s use.’20 What is described as military by DeSilvey/Sasha Davis should be seen here as the zoning of the city before, during and after the apartheid era – the social, political and physical violence that was inflicted on the people and the land. The conservation areas are what is left of the land prior to its urban takeover, and they should be considered in relation to the urban spaces they border. This is their function as museums, to draw attention to what surrounds them, as much as seeking to preserve what’s in them. In order to really see these sites, their borders need to be expanded exponentially – the journey to, from and between them is as important as the visit itself.

There Is No Solution to This Problem

In this short text I have presented three ways of experiencing the landscape through encounter. The constellation of Fontainebleau, the Peak District and Cape Town is described as a ‘problem,’ and I have tried to find a route – through three ‘moves’ – that describes it as such, as a route from seeing the land in a plein air painting, to seeing the land as a plein air museum. The first ‘move’ described the plein air painters’ occupation of the forest, which led to what they perceived as its destruction through the arrival of tourists and day-trippers and ultimately its partial protection through royal decree – the sectioning off of an area in which the forest became a monument of itself. The second, described a direct interaction with landscape itself, which results in the drawing of diagrams. These diagrams can be seen as the technical language of a particular community of experts, or they can be seen as a means to access a broader social history. The relationship to the landscape enjoyed by climbers had to be won on a political level, and their way of seeing should therefore be considered as a social phenomenon as much as a technical one. These first two ‘moves’ represent a push and pull between who owns the land, who has access to it, and 86 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM what it can be used for, a push and pull between acts of naming and action itself. They represent aspects of museological thinking as seen through the landscape, in how histories and narratives are formed and claimed, and ultimately what the landscape becomes. The longer and more complex third ‘move’ represented a live museumification. It drew on the previous two ‘moves,’ but also on numerous other direct relationships to the land on the Cape Peninsula, such as conservation and micro-farming, and brought them into contact with the social and political ecology of the city. All three ‘moves’ are linked not only by their relationship to museology, but also in utilising an exhibitionary approach, describing and seeing the world through routes and encounters. It is a problem that can be made to emerge, but not one that can be solved. THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM 87

1 E Jamin, Quatre promenades dans le forêt de Fontainebleau (Four Walks in the Forest of Fontainebleau), (H.Rabotin: Paris, 1937). This guide can be downloaded (French only) free of charge via Google Books. 2 Claude-François Denecourt, Guide du voyageur dans le palais et la forêt de Fontainebleau (Traveller’s Guide to the Palace and Forest of Fontainebleau), (F.Lhuillier: Paris, 1840). This guide can be downloaded (French only) free of charge via Google Books. 3 For the full walk (in French) see the website Fontainebleau Photo, accessed 4 July 2018, http://www.fontainebleau-photo.com/2010/11/sentier- denecourt-n5-rocher-du-cuvier.html. 4 Dan Shipsides quoted in Fergal Gaynor, Various Routes across the Art of Dan Shipsides (The Salford Restoration Office and Castlefield Gallery: Manchester, 2007). 5 For examples of this, see Bloke on a Rope, “Peak Rock/6/The Emergence of Joe Brown and Don Whillans”, UK Climbing, accessed 10 July 2018, https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/set.php?id=741. For an easier example, see “Climbing for the Uninitiated”, The Roaches, accessed 10 July 2018, http://www.roaches.org.uk/climbing.htm. 6 Ernest A. Baker, Moors, Crags and Caves of the High Peak and Neighbourhood (Halsgrove, Tiverton: 2002/1903), 122. 7 Ibid, 86. 8 Ernest A. Baker quoted in Simon Thompson, Unjustifiable Risk: The Story of British Climbing (Cicerone Press: Kendal, 2010), 132. Ernest A. Baker; The Forbidden Lands; Witherby, London (UK), 1924 is also freely accessible through Warwick University’s digital archives at: https://wdc.contentdm.oclc. org/digital/collection/tav/id/2672. 9 A website dedicated to the mass trespass can be found at: http:// kindertrespass.com/. Also see the British Mountaineering Council website: https://www.thebmc. co.uk/a-brief-history-of-the-bmc. 10 Joe Brown, The Hard Years (Phoenix: London, 2001/1967), 42. 11 For more information on Ed February see Greg Child, “Technicolour Darkness,” Outside Online, accessed 4 July 2018, https://www.outsideonline. com/1822696/technicolor-darkness. 12 ‘It looks like a school holiday here everyday,’ said one of our guides, Noloyiso Dlamini, a ranger at the Driftsands Nature Reserve. 13 Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2016), 58. 14 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Swerve Editions / Zone Books: New York, 2009/1997), 195. 15 FEDUP is a subsidiary of the SDI (Shack/Slum Dweller International) Alliance. The SDI Alliance is an NGO that gathers many groups who do 88 THREE MOVES AROUND A PROBLEM bottom-up work in poor communities. See: https://www.sasdialliance.org.za/ about/fedup/. For further info on the development of Flamingo Crescent, see https://www.sasdialliance.org.za/projects/flamingo-crescent/. 16 The Economic Freedom Fighters are a far-left political party headed by Julius Malema. He established the party (which is now the third largest in the South African parliament) after his expulsion from the ANC’s youth league. Its representatives are recognisable as they have a party uniform, which is a red boiler suit. This is worn both on the streets and in parliament. 17 See Melanie Boehi, “Cape Town Floriography”, Société suisse d’études africaines, Newsletter 2, 2016. Also, Boehi’s ‘speculative museum,’ Nowseum, published a wall poster outlining the history of flower sellers in Cape Town, which I saw on Rupert Klooman’s wall. See www.nowseum.com for information on the project. 18 Caitlin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage beyond Saving, (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2017), 18. 19 Ibid. 20 Jeffrey Sasha Davis quoted in Ibid, 88. 89

Dyads or A Review of Römerstrasse Car Park for Google Guides Baden | Viamala | Bologna 90 DYADS . The first phase of 2 Part I Part (who would become a close friend) and Helensburgh-born, (who would become a close friend) and Helensburgh-born, 3 The Collectors and a similarly modest work by Paul-Désiré Trouillebert Paul-Désiré by and a similarly modest work 1 the collection was, however, more strongly characterised by their connections to Munich, where Jenny had Jenny where their connections to Munich, characterised by strongly more the collection was, however, Secession, Munich Kunstausstellung at the Internationale visited the trained as an artist. They frequently Exter Julius by in 1901 they bought works where, I am heading over to the car park on Römerstrasse following a visit to the Langmatt Museum in the Swiss town town in the Swiss a visit to the Langmatt Museum following Römerstrasse on car park to the I am heading over and houses the Brown-Sulzer, Jenny and Brown W. Sidney residence of The museum is the former of Baden. Sidney’s and 1901 in home their of completion the art and between built they furniture ceramics, of collection Sidney being success, on the back of their individual families’ death in 1941. Both had become society figures the daughter of an industrialist. The and Jenny engineering company, of his brother’s the technical director – museum modifications for the usual appearing – but animation, suspended state of in a exists museum rehang of the collection took and renovations almost exactly the same as house did in 1930, when final what visitors see is the second of two phases Browns’ one focusses on the artplace. If collection specifically, how and which the couple learned remaining of the first phase collecting, through is little collecting. There what to collect, as much of it was sold fund the second phase. Parisian dealer on their honeymoon in 1886: a small a through made their first purchases and Jenny Sidney Boudin Eugène oil painting by DYADS 91 for cash, and swapping Le 9 during a visit to his studio, and 5 and Camille Pissarro 8 , before returning the following year to pick up works by by to pick up works year the following returning , before 4 Paul Gauguin Paul 7 who was a student of Rodin. In 1908, the first show of Impressionism Impressionism of 1908, the first show In who was a student of Rodin. 6 (1893) in 1909. In 1910, they decided to take a break from from 1910, they decided to take a break (1893) in 1909. In Moret of The Church Sisley’s for Alfred Turc Bain took place in Zurich, which further excited the Browns, and after Viau had controversially pulled all his pulled all had controversially Viau and after the Browns, further which Zurich, took place in excited in the Browns resulting persuaded him to sell privately, auction in 1907, Montag from works Impressionist Renoir, Pierre-Auguste acquiring paintings by Gotthard Kühl, Ludwig von Herterich, Walter Püttner, Leo Putz, Erich Kuithan, Adolf Stäbli, Rudolf Nissl, Nissl, Rudolf Stäbli, Adolf Kuithan, Erich Leo Putz, Püttner, Walter Herterich, von Ludwig Kühl, Gotthard Secession, either members of the Munich All these artists were Kaiser. and Richard Hengeler Adolf Erler, Fritz confident and, following 1904 the couple became more from Scholle. However, Die group or the liberal artists’ had Winterthur, a painter from their friend Carl Montag, where began visiting Paris, of a car, the purchase painters to of French the work introducing circles, in Impressionist was moving Montag relocated. recently had become friends with the collector of artists, museums and, importantly patrons, for the Browns, Swiss one of these trips in 1908, they bought what became the bridging work On Viau. George Impressionism, the painting Curiously, Vallotton. Felix (1907) by the two phases of their collecting, Le between Turc Bain in the and remained Vallotton) of in the eyes (even works in the company of Munich well did not fare collectors, and informed many of the of the young but it opened the eyes collection for only two years, bottom to top. the collection from decisions they made as re-constructed (c.1900) and Figure Carafe Peaches, were collecting Browns’ in the second phase of The first purchases Matisse Henri from ink drawings bought directly Cézanne, three Paul by Edinburgh-trained Glasgow Boy John Reid Murray Reid John Boy Glasgow Edinburgh-trained marble sculpture by Friedrich Wield, Friedrich by marble sculpture 92 DYADS , but they resumed collecting Impressionism in the 1930s, picking up more works by Boudin, by works in the 1930s, picking up more collecting Impressionism , but they resumed collection of Impressionist works in Switzerland. During the war, the collection was used as the war, During in Switzerland. works collection of Impressionist 12 11 (1893) in order to prevent them from moving from private private from moving them from to prevent (1893) in order Twilight at Floes Ice and Claude Monet’s 10 collecting for financial reasons, but quickly changed their minds and bought twelve works including more including more works their minds and bought twelve changed but quickly reasons, for financial collecting Pissarros of the French at the request Montag it was curated into exhibitions by museums, where in Swiss propaganda collecting for a Browns’ in the of the 1920s caused a significant slowdown but the recession government, to buy in order works was to sell eight Impressionist this time, their only manoeuvre During number of years. a Fragonard collections into museums. Jenny believed that regular changes in the ownership of artworks was important changes in the ownership that regular believed collections into museums. Jenny risky that may be) protected collections (however and departing that entering to keep them alive, different life. The couple also supported the end of an artwork’s museums represented them against stasis, whereas works, during this time (he became a lifelong friend), buying and commissioning several Oppenheimer Max had begun describing the 1914, Jenny By widow. Brühlmann’s Hans from works and also obtained several France. They bought more and was selling them off to make way for newfrom work as ‘daubs,’ works Munich their and in a nod towards Degas, and Edgar Camille Corot by and Cézannes, some works Pissarros, Renoirs, in the and Rocks now famous painting, Trees acquisitions, some new first ever Boudins. They bought Cézanne’s significant they had the ‘most War, World of the First the outbreak in 1917, and by of the Chateau Noir Park and purest’ Degas and Cézanne, and also some Corots. and Cézanne, and also some Corots. Degas living for a further twenty-seven death in 1941, the collecting ceased altogether despite Jenny Sidney’s On in stasis. The house and collection was gifted to the collection has remained so for almost eighty years years, as the house being the last descendent of its founders, on his death in 1987. As well A. Brown, John the city by DYADS 93 in ABB is, of course, the family name the Langmatt’s founders, and the union flag symbolises its founder’s roots; whether the British establishment roots; whether the founders, and the union flag symbolises its founder’s the Langmatt’s of this tribute is another matter though… would approve reclassified as a museum, cementing the collection’s status as a singular, static object consisting of permanently status as a singular, as a museum, cementing the collection’s reclassified installed component parts, a furtherwas cast upon it that would no doubt upset the collectors. Jenny ignominy completely indignant about a suggestion that the house be opened to members of public. was reportedly be could it or that, just remain to home her for desire a be simply could it – clear not is case the is this Why in a the art to any form of interaction between objects and a wider public that might result a wider aversion is, and has been for thirtyyears, and it quite clearly exits But museum it now museumification. towards creep to resist. so hard worked out of time, a state that Jenny from is the only photograph I have of the museum building. It exiting, I pose for a photograph in front On the visit, as photography is not permitted inside. The outside of building in style country villa by In a photograph taken reasons that will become clear. the entrance, for flag flying above and has a British after the building was completed) it is positioned 1910 (nine years in around & Moser, Curjel the architects, with hillside picturesque empty, an onto same style, and looks out the in built mansion much larger a to next built photo was taken, a pavilion and set of tennis courts were After the architects’ nothing to spoil the view. in which car park, subsequently been demolished to make way for the Römerstrasse which have the road, over modern look are longer is the viewvilla of an empty hillside, instead everywhere you from No I left the van. (ABB), a huge multinational operating Boveri ASEA Brown buildings, all of which belong to a single company, The Brown robotics and heavy electrical machinery. in the field of 94 DYADS The Industrialists The Switzerland did not have any patent law until 1887. This lack is the only thing that enabled it to keep up any patent did not have Switzerland materialised in the This legal differentiation of Europe. with the rapidly industrialising nations in rest outside them, quite often bringing and technical innovation form of industrial espionage inside patent zones original the into back crossing then and them, altering or imitating machinerySwitzerland, to back ideas and Winterthur For example, in the early 1800s, Rieter family to copyright modified products. patent zones machinery using in their textiles factory, parts for the British spare they were their own began producing effect in utilised the loophole to greater Casper Honegger the full machines themselves. producing eventually and their speed and efficiency, increasing England, in the mid-1800s, modifying spinning-looms from Rüti to build how he discovered in 1866 where to Manchester went Sauer Franz them as his own. then re-branding bringing back the plans and technically impossible in Switzerland, considered embroidery machines that were operations. embroidery into internationally competitive workshops Gallen’s transforming St. Swiss industry was the country’s but the main problem modern on a technical level, kept These developments problem that for solutions to this It was the search its factories. power inability to generate sufficient energy of the loom manufacturers Sulzer, Jakob collection. Johann and Jenny’s for Sidney the resources produced at the steam in 1849 looking Europe around travelled Winterthur, in Brothers) (Sulzer GebrüderSulzer up in the grown who’d Charles Brown, he met 24-year-old Britain engines each country In was producing. to in 1851, and he moved Brown hired Sulzer and had trained as an engineer for six years. London Docklands these Using employer. his previous bringing with him a set of steam engine designs stolen from Winterthur, DYADS 95 designs, he reorganised Sulzer’s workshops, foundries and boiler-making facilities to make a steam engine workshops, Sulzer’s designs, he reorganised engine in 1854. Then, 1867, he built horsepower first three factory the company’s in which he developed year. Exhibition that World Paris in the steam engine, which won first prize valve first the world’s a small family business into world-leading producer in 1871, having transformed it from left Sulzer Brown briefly for a locomotive worked He two-thousand percent. by its workforce of steam engines, and increasing to Maschinenfabrik moving he designed cog-wheeled trains for climbing mountains, before where producer to be his wanted Oerlikon He machinery. into woodworking scrap iron a company that recycled Oerlikon, and he changed its focus to electricity generation, setting up a division dedicated solving next grand project, though, so he drafted in become tired, long distances. He’d of carryingthe problem over high-tension currents from to as ‘Brown’ junior (referred Brown to Britain. and returned son, Charles E. L. Brown, his 21-year-old successfully carrying by within two years a solving the problem on in) turned out to be quite a prodigy, here He followed 75% efficiency. miles and achieving an unprecedented five over current hydroelectric-generated Frankfurt station in Lauffen to the power hydro-electric miles, from runningthis up by a cable hundred a thousand cascading lightbulbs, his display involved Frankfurt, In with no loss of voltage. Exhibition, Electrical from. had come power the the effect of a waterfall, to produce thus imitating where which flickered who was a prodigious Boveri, Walter so he got together with a colleague, felt wasted at Oerlikon, Brown unable to raise the capital until were They company. businessman, and they attempted to set up their own start-up the who provided silk manufacturer, Zurich a Baumann, of Conrad the family married into Boveri 96 DYADS Brown’s Brown’s 13 funds for Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) in 1890. They located themselves in the (then) small town of Baden, of in the (then) small town & Cie (BBC) in 1890. They located themselves Boveri funds for Brown, that would have the collapse of a railway project an economic hit following suffered which had recently which skilled local labour force, readily available a was, therefore, There and Geneva. Winterthur linked it to years of its foundation, five Within building engines and other heavy electrical machinery. BBC put to work a quarter roughly of the population town. residents, a thousand Baden BBC was employing brother, Sidney, was brought in as a technical director, and he married Jenny, the daughter of Jakob Heinrich Heinrich the daughter of Jakob and he married Jenny, in as a technical director, was brought Sidney, brother, the man who’d Sulzer, Jakob of Johan and the brother who was a senior partner in Gebrüder Sulzer Sulzer, in the first place. senior to Switzerland Brown brought business ingenuity, industrial of manoeuvres, of set this of product a is Museum Langmatt the at collection The of them. The flag may be be seen as a representation acumen and – of course espionage, could even those first stolen where but it could also be said to represent of the Browns, an homage to the cultural roots of Baden, the blueprint for industrial development the stolen designs which were designs came from, rule with a pinch of irony. photography’ ‘no imbuing the museum’s DYADS 97 An Aside in the being reprimanded I’m in Bologna for Museum Morandi taking photographs of the exhibits without permission. I am instructed desk and sign a to visit the front for copyright form in exchange a badge that identifies me as This is not legitimate photographer. an unusual rule, of course, but what of is unusual. taking pictures I’m is an exhibition of Morandi’s It a number etchings, and included are which his of copper plates from printed. In editions were various line with printmaking protocol, had published a full when Morandi Part 2 Part One of the significant stylistic elements this film One of Glass. Heart was that Herzog’s cast was made up almost entirely of non-actors, and cast was made up almost entirely was that Herzog’s of their time most for hypnosis under were them of but one all that attempted to establish a set the opening scenes, Herzog In on screen. hypnotic and non-hypnotic states. After the between of relationships Hias (the prophet), central character, to the film’s initial introduction with a number of spectacular shots empty the audience is presented as close-ups of waterfalls and Alaskan landscapes, as well and Bavarian describing is that of the prophet voiceover bubbling mud-pools. The to send listeners, in designed exercise as an it doubles but his visions, back to reality brought are We this case the audience, into a trance. The Main Path Main The at two bridges. standing at the bottom of a ravine, staring upwards I’m section of Gorge, the most notoriously treacherous Viamala This is the standing (at the bottom of I’m where but from passageway, a Roman the view the road), is access to the gorge from a set of steps that allows 1976 Herzog’s Werner an opening scene in from perhaps best known film 98 DYADS edition he would scratch or dent the the original image plate, rendering sufficiently distorted as to make it undesirable. a print made from a in the exhibition are Included been number of prints that have these damaged plates, made from been borrowed which appear to have collections. The prints private from typically beautiful, but are are or dots interrupted heavy marks by that identify them as illegitimate. by this strange I am a little baffled juxtaposition of copyrights, rules and of image reproduction, protocols leaving and put my camera away, the museum without visiting desk. front anomalies. These damaged prints are with a shot of the Viamala, where we witness an encounter between the witness an encounter between we where Viamala, with a shot of the of cluster a and throughout), so does (and lucidly acting is who prophet, acting under hypnosis (and do so throughout). four villagers, who are focussed on an unidentifiable indeterminate point in are Their eyes them of them, and they describe a giant that is coming to destroy front is no giant, them that there reassures and their village. The prophet but points out that this does not necessarily mean the end isn’t at the village’s earthly fire namely a troubles, more predicts He near. and concerned at relieved weirdly, The villagers quiver glass factory. liar a that them tells and bridges, the to up points Hias time. same the The camera pans one of the bridges and a thief other. will run over in the bridges, presumably over running see two figures and we up, of the village. The scene ends, and location switches the direction to the village itself. town, is set in a fictional eighteenth-centuryBavarian of Glass Heart The factory on its glass factory. reliant whose economy is entirely (highly desirable) ruby glass. its signature objects made from produces to neglected he and died, has glassmaker chief the that is problem The or glass- of the ruby glass to any of his apprentices pass on the secret DYADS 99 Their illegitimacy is embedded within their image, and the the mechanisms that produced illegitimate images image. They are inventory existing outwith the artist’s or intentions, interfering with the of the intended image circulation (both artistically and economically) at the their existence. But simply by to same time, they do not pretend be anything other than what they exhibited and traded as they are are, like early illegitimate objects. Much and nineteenth century Switzerland, like modern day China, they set one of authenticity, up two zones which trades on a combination of and verifiable invention ingenuity, links to specific histories or ideas, and the other which is concerned blowers. The village is in a state of existential crisis, as its foundry blowers. rubyThe success. the without glass replicate to attempts repeatedly descends into madness, and takes the village factory slowly owner with him. that I think of Glass two key elements underpinning Heart are There looking up at the twin bridges. about while I stand in the gorge with its single industry, is the allegorical aspect; town there Firstly, for change and, in failing to prepare which is not equipped to weather is the style in which there Secondly, the inevitable, consumes itself. of states two establishment of the allegorythe through delivered, is made to these states are being, the hypnotised and lucid, how that hypnotising his amateur insists Herzog with each other. interact no more them – he says they are actors was not a means to control to trouble suggestible under hypnosis than when lucid – but more the audience does not escape this; Importantly, they ‘are.’ where an effort to place second part of the opening sequence represents over clouds rolling viewers into a trance with soft-focus images of low that climbs up waterfalls and a voiceover landscapes, slow the forest as it begins to out of our bodies. Just raise ourselves gently suggests we 100 DYADS . only with the things themselves of course, the destructive Ironically, made on the plates were marks is and there himself, Morandi by something of the artistic in them in their form various – they are of a degree and style, represent spontaneity one would not normally associate with him. of When I think of these zones to art, I’m authenticity in relation of a cluster anecdotes reminded Condivi by told about Michelangelo reminiscent which are Vasari, and discussed thus of the manoeuvres in the practices still present far, Like most artists, world today. copying, learned by Michelangelo and was such a skilled draftsman, . BBC, and by extension Baden, extension Baden, . BBC, and by 14 was reliant on two forms of sorcery, the engineering ingenuity of on two forms of sorcery, was reliant family Brown The and the business acumen of Boveri. Brown, having industrial development, Switzerland’s successfully rode take effect, we are snapped back to ‘reality’ with a sharp-focus image snapped back to ‘reality’ we are take effect, and in which gorge, the one in which I am standing now, of the rocky placed are We the two states themselves. see an encounter between we are we to the encounters taking place on screen, in relation squarely and then having an out-of-body experience, in and with the movie, body may not be able to quite determine which on-screen though we is ours. The allegory one central conjoined through and the style are motif – the ruby glass, a shimmering substance on which the town an early-industrial up by depended, a substance magically conjured with him. gone and taken his secret who is now sorcerer, stated, Charles E. L. As previously take this tale back to Baden. Let’s in 1890 to establish Brown, there relocated Boveri Walter and Brown result of the was on its knees as a & Cie (BBC). The town Boveri and BBC hauled it back up bankruptcy of the railway company, a quarteryears – around of the town’s – within five again, employing it a monotown inhabitants, rendering DYADS 101 for himself. for himself. 20 This is essentially a fifteenth century artworld of what today version would be called short-selling . Short- traders selling is a method used by when they in the financial markets of a particular the value stock believe to take a order is about to fall. In working with such a wide range working that he was able of subject matter, his forebears by works to replicate to an unusually high standard. he gained grew As his reputation the confidence of collectors, and on works would ask to borrow paper to practice drawing from. would make very copies precise He of them, and then blacken his the with smoke, returning version to the collector and new drawing keeping the original benefitted initially from espionage and freedom to copy and re-sell, to copy and espionage and freedom benefitted initially from and then a second time in 1887 with the newlypatent introduced the up pull to later) years three (founded BBC allowing thereby law, drawbridge behind them. costs over with Boveri argument an BBC after left Brown L. E. Charles kept the company but Boveri and leisure, to a life of travel and retired until of governors who was on the board Brown, going, as did Sidney the newly founders died. In original both BBC’s after years 1935, eleven the company Switzerland, technologically and industrially innovative documented that is well without its founders. It was able to thrive War, World Second in the ‘neutrality’ companies benefited from Swiss a though, following supplying both sides with equipment. Ironically firearms, producing were now who by Oerlikon, decree, government and so British supplying the Allied forces, from prevented were own rifles in their Oerlikon American factories began producing In 1967, a further irony own patent laws. factories, flouting the Allies’ had cut his with whom Charles E. L. Brown saw BBC buy Oerlikon, was part of a general culture This takeover earlier. teeth eighty years companies begin to lose their global of consolidation that saw Swiss 102 DYADS short position, they borrow some short position, they borrow stock and immediately sell it at its When the price (high) price. current they buy the same quantity drops it to the original back and return pocketing the difference. owner, was Michelangelo Unfortunately, often so pleased with himself that discrete, he was unable to remain would find out and and the owner demand his property back. Ironically the proven have this could well in worst outcome for the owner the long run. Another famous incident occurred was in Florence. while Michelangelo completed a marble recently Having di Pierfrancesco for Lorenzo John St. he made a second marble de Medici, market position. Japan and the USA had realigned their industrial their realigned had USA the and Japan position. market constantly re-designing so were bases focus primarily on innovation, the most advanced producing their factories, thereby and re-tooling buying up old economies, on the other hand, were goods. Developing the producing therefore machinery labour, low-cost local, utilising and and was falling behind. was doing neither, cheapest goods. Switzerland and in 1967 BBC had a plan to keep up with the USA and Japan, 1969 they began In in Baden. centre it established a research researching Roche), Roche (now Hoffmann-La with cooperating components for medical equipment, specifically display electronic line with their heritage, BBC engineers began the technologies. In in invented been recently had that technology CrystalLiquid Display They tested all aspects of the design and chemical make-up Princeton. in the technology’s developments and monitored LCD of Princeton’s the technology to re-engineered re-imagined and patents. They then (TN-LCD), LCD Nematic Twisted as the what is known produce their and BBC then went Roche Roche. which was patented by the licensed to manufacture separate ways in 1972, though BBC were This led to partnershipsvarious companies such as with TN-LCDs. DYADS 103 work, this time a life-size sleeping this time a life-size work, seeing the second Upon Cupid. thought that if it marble, Lorenzo to make in order to be treated were it look old, then a higher price could selling it in Rome be got for it by del Baldassare as an antique. So a middle-man, took the Milanese, and buried it to his vineyard Cupid until it took on the appearance of an antique, and sold the backdated Giorgio. San statue to Cardinal then lied to Michelangelo Baldassare got for it, much he’d about how for himself. and kept the difference got the Cardinal later, Sometime a third wind of the scam through in and demanded a refund party, Vasari for the dodgy cupid. return of being short- accuses the Cardinal Casio, who would eventually take over the manufacture themselves themselves the manufacture take over Casio, who would eventually 1983, In Switzerland. costs in to high due Kong, to Hong it move and the Super-Twisted developed Roche, without help from the BBC lab, ruby glass. BBC’s (ST-LCD): LCD Nematic Rather than manufacturing it in-house, BBC licensed their STN- it to be used – initially in applications including allowing LCD, mobile phones and camera viewfinders. And it Gameboys, Nintendo screens flat the in home a finding world, our permeate to continued has , the of Glass Heart TVs. In of computer monitors, smartphones and decent into madness is the ruby glass, a substance of the village’s source , a completely unknown remains it taken for granted, yet whose presence The glass ruby but not mentally. substance that can be grasped physically, and without it everything lives permeates every aspect of the villagers’ performingfalls apart. under hypnosis as a means to The actors are the trance-like state of whole village, collective represent the by about brought crisis, impending the towards head they as mass, The ecology. social and economic village’s the rubythe from of glass loss their inner-states external, attempt to render hypnosis was Herzog’s present, actually aren’t that things feel or see could they that such 104 DYADS 21 Perhaps more appropriate to the appropriate more Perhaps factories, context of the Swiss though, is a financial rather than been Having artistic misdemeanour. court over in and out of the Medici the course of his artistic life thus far, during left Florence Michelangelo sighted and having no judgement of the failing to recognise by his own work. perfection of Michelangelo’s just as he says ‘are works,’ ‘Modern good as ancient ones when they are vanity and it is greater excellent, for their to pursue things more than for what they really reputation but these kinds of men can be are, found in any age, men who pay attention to appearances than more to realities.’ 15 [world view] . It becomes, in time, a way of viewing the world through screens...’ becomes, in time, a way of viewing the world through It that they could communicate with people that others couldn’t see, that they could communicate with people others couldn’t – if somewhat detached – with others but still hold a conversation to what is actually around and still see respond in the vicinity, in 1888, it is their them. Although liquid crystals discovered were that led to them being the STN-LCD through application in screens in everypresent aspect of our contemporary changing our own lives, Esther Leslie says, ‘in what now,’ live ‘We economic and social ecology. might be called a liquid crystal epoch, in which all that happens can be the to a pull this way and that between conceptualised in relation volatile flipping liquid and the crystalline, a the fluid and frozen, states, that is sometimes each at once. The liquid crystalbetween is a chemical form, but it may also be a Weltandschauung very the liquid and solid states are Leslie, fluctuations between For exist as revolutionary stuff of life, on the one hand liquidity might hope , as the dissolving of status quo a new solid state is imagined; asset liquidity or on the other hand, in language of capital , from The liquid crystal display is a literal of trade and labour. to the flow of flattening, and in that sense it is wholly and metaphorical process DYADS 105 the political upheaval that led to the political upheaval from the expulsion of Medici went to first the city in 1494. He Venice, to Bologna and then, briefly, he as he feared keeping on the move of as a result might be under threat On with the Medici. his relations to Bologna he fell victim returning to a municipal law that required him to sign in and out at the city gates, and he found himself with a the means have fine that he didn’t minister, A government to pay. heard Aldovrandi Giovanfrancesco and predicament of Michelangelo’s He took him sanctuary. offered to the tomb of Saint Michelangelo which had been sculpted Dominic, Pisano Giovanni by previously but dell’Arca, Niccolò and then by

17 19 . ‘How, . ‘How, 16 of the screen , a ‘constant ‘constant a , unrest petrified that the flow and freeze of and freeze that the flow 18 the screen and the matter the screen or in what ways, do societies get the phases of matter they deserve, or in what ways do forms of physical matter play into the technologies of a particular time – which would include the modes of thinking.’ Leslie links it to Walter Benjamin’s idea of idea Benjamin’s Walter to it links Leslie in 1983 is the material in the BBC labs Baden What was produced is state. This narrative psychological that has merged with our present , in which the ruby of Glass a global upscaling of the village in Heart state. psychological of the villagers’ glass was the material root struggling.labs, BBC was research successes in its the 1988, despite By forming Asea Sweden, from solution was to merge with Asea Group Its merger in European border (ABB), in the largest cross Boveri Brown funding rapid were Electric, General main competitor, ABB’s history. disquiet that “knows no development,”’ disquiet that “knows embedded within processes of standardisation and globalisation, it is it globalisation, and of standardisation processes within embedded both the matter on the liquid and crystal participated ‘have in something often pegged a activity, frenetic as the rhythm of capitalism, an eternal return, of goods, things, people, labouring liquid agitation, the flow of social change.’ blockage stasis, the freeze, by captured endlessly 106 DYADS . Michelangelo is therefore, is therefore, . Michelangelo 22 perhaps, not only a prototype for perhaps, not only a prototype the contemporary stock trader, for the Swiss but also a prototype engineers of the early to mid 1800s, and Sulzer Honegger such as Sauer, working who were Brown) (through with existing machines and making changes to them, the modifications being superior to the original machines. should be noted, in the It cases of industrial espionage, that many out of thisof the companies that grew global and remain activity still exist today, the companies who whereas players, remained unfinished. Michelangelo unfinished. remained to complete the mise-en- agreed adding an angel and a Saint scène by being, the new figures Petronius, the best on Vasari, to according tomb expansion though the establishment of a financial services arm (another form of sorcery), and although ABB initially chose to modernise by such as the establishment management structures, means of inventive sub-units, they of thousands small independent entrepreneurial succumbed to the expansionist model, buying up existing eventually found and over-extended, They world. the all around businesses during the global economic slump in 1999, even in trouble themselves coming within hours of bankruptcy in 2002 after a company they in an asbestos lawsuit. They in the USA became embroiled owned biggest companies. one of the world’s now though, and are recovered I stand here on Römerstrasse. to the carpark And so to return of ABB: the the immediate presence sides by on three surrounded Brown/Boveri evolving legacy of the offices within which the liquid, on the fourth the confronted side by partnership is managed, and I’m partnership: the Langmatt static, crystal legacy of the Brown/Sulzer century the twentieth The former dragged itself through Museum. . but is bigger than ever without its founders and is not simply still here but also somehow only is it on the same site in small town, Not into our brains. , in our homes, pockets, hardwired everywhere DYADS 107

the photographs. manufactured the original machines havemanufactured long since gone to the wall. tribute to these tales of theft inIn and Bologna, when Florence Switzerland, home I used the photographsI returned to make Museum I took in the Morandi based on aa small graphite diptych When images. composite of numerous the drawing was complete, I destroyed It is material and immaterial. The latter remained fluid only while its is material and immaterial. The latter It congealed it died they when and so, it keep to around were founders much, lead anywhere itself into a solid object, an aside that doesn’t museum appearing only as a faintly graspable, material trace, private sits at the an aside that, counter-intuitively, It’s off the beaten track. of the site, and which images can be formed on surfaces centre the ideas and materials born in of the objects made possible by buildings, objects that contain the ruby glass, that know surrounding ruby glass object own My do. better than we are we who and where on Römerstrasse, my visit to the carpark that I review politely requests stars. Two it is. so here 108 DYADS

James N. Hutchinson, Nature Morte, Graphite on Paper (2017) DYADS 109 110 DYADS

1 Eugène Boudin, Washerwomen on the Bank of the Tourques, oil on canvas (1895). 2 Paul-Désiré Trouillebert, Landscape with River Shore, oil on canvas, (circa 1870). 3 Julius Exter, Marital Bliss, oil on canvas, (1901). 4 John Reid Murray, Moonrise in the Woods, oil on canvas, (circa 1900). 5 Henri Matisse, Three Sketches of a Female Nude, pen and black India ink on paper, (circa 1908). 6 Friedrich Wield, Woman Crouching, marble (1909). 7 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Paul Meunier, Murer’s Son, oil on canvas (circa 1877). 8 Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Bowl of Fruit and Lemons, oil on canvas (circa 1889–90). 9 Camille Pissarro, Pea Harvest, Eragny, oil on canvas, (1893). 10 Camille Pissarro, Chestnut Trees at Louveciennes, Spring, oil on canvas (1870) and Boulevard Montmartre, Spring, oil on canvas (1897). 11 Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösen, “The Origins of the Collections,” in A Home for the Impressionists: The Langmatt Museum (Hatje Cantz Verlag: Ost-Feldern-Ruit, 2005), 34. 12 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl with a Cat, oil on canvas, (1770). 13 The population of Baden in 1888, two years before BBC arrived, was 4215 according to statistics obtained from The Swiss Federal Statistical Office STAT-TAB and published on Wikipedia. Its population had been relatively stable for forty years, having gained only 1000 residents in that time, a steady growth rate every ten years of about 7%. Ten years after BBC arrived the population had increased by 54%, and within twenty years by 130%. 14 In Britain at this time, mill-towns were common. These are towns which rely on a single industry, such as the manufacture of cotton or wool. These towns would have multiple factories competing with each other, though all the factories were jointly vulnerable to fluctuations in demand for cotton or wool. A monotown, which would more commonly be found in a planned economy, such as the Soviet Union, would be reliant on a single employer. Though running in parallel to the former, Baden at this time perhaps has more in common with the latter. 15 Esther Leslie, “Volatile, Liquid, Crystal,” in ed. Petra Lange-Berndt, Materiality (Whitechapel: London & MIT Press: Cambridge, 2015), 63–64. 16 Esther Leslie, “What is Proper to Materials is Proper to their Study”, keynote lecture as part of org. Frances Robertson Material Culture in Action conference at The Glasgow School of Art and Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, 7–8 September 2015. 17 Esther Leslie, “Volatile, Liquid, Crystal”, 64. 18 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (MIT Press: Cambridge, 1991), 196. DYADS 111

19 Esther Leslie, ibid. 20 Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl, (Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania, 2003/1520), 10. 21 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella & Peter Bondanell (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1998/1550), 423. 22 Ibid, 422. 112 113

An Asterism of Absences Four Short Texts Bad Ragaz | Soncino | Como | Chiavenna 114 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES

James N. Hutchinson, Firebird, Graphite on Photographic Print (2017). An AsterismAN of ASTERISM Absences: FourOF ABSENCES Short Texts 115

Flight of the Firebird

The Large Bird of Fire on the Arch (Grand Oiseau de Feu sur l’Arche), more commonly known as the Firebird, is a five-metre- high mirrored mosaic sculpture made by Niki de Saint Phalle in 1991, the year her husband, Jean Tinguely, died. On completion of Firebird, she stopped producing work on this scale for six years in order to concentrate on building a museum in Basel dedicated to Tinguely, made in collaboration with the Swiss architect Mario Botta. Firebird spent the first fifteen years of its life travelling around the world in touring exhibitions until it was seen by the art collector, Andreas Bechtler, in the exhibition Niki in the Garden at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Bechtler was Swiss by birth, but had moved to the United States in 1979 to expand his family’s business. His parents, Hans and Bettie, who lived in Zurich had established a successful company that manufactured heating and air-conditioning units, and used their fortune to build an art collection. They had become friends with Tinguely and de Saint Phalle, and owned a number of works by each. When his parents died, Bechtler inherited half of the collection, and decided to open a museum in his adopted hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. The museum (which would bear the family name) was also to be designed by Botto, so when Bechtler encountered Firebird in 2006, four years after de Saint Phalle’s death, he negotiated its purchase from her estate in order that it be positioned on the forecourt in front of the new building, thus reuniting the collaborators who built the monument to Tinguely in 1997. The Bechtler Museum opened in 2009, and Firebird now has a permanent home. 116 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES

Three years before Bechtler encountered it, and the year immediately following de Saint Phalle’s death, Firebird made a brief visit to the Swiss mountains, where it stood on the same patch of grass on which I stand today. Its short stay here reflects its maker’s relationship with this part of the world. The year after work on The Tinguely Museum was completed, de Saint Phalle’s grandest project, Tarot Garden (1998) opened in Tuscany. It had been two decades in the making, and had begun with a conversation between the artist and Marella Caracciolo Agnelli, who she’d known since childhood but with whom she only re- connected by chance whilst she was in the Swiss mountains recuperating from a lung condition she’d contracted as a result of exposure to polyester, the material she used to make her sculptures. She told Agnelli about her idea for a sculpture garden and Agnelli offered her the land that the Tarot Garden would ultimately be built on. De Saint Phalle continued to work on other projects, but returned to Switzerland for a year in 1976 to design and refine the Tarot Garden, before work begun on it in 1978. Like de Saint Phalle, Firebird was here on this patch of grass in 2003 as part of a recovery process, recovery from the trauma of losing its maker the previous year.

The patch of grass is in the spa town of Bad Ragaz, where an outdoor sculpture festival established by the art-collectors, Esther and Rolf Hohmeister, has been held every three years since 2000. I am here in an off-year, but there are many sculptures that have become permanent fixtures, so it is possible to get a sense of the scale of the festival. Unlike the comparable Skulptur Projekte Münster, there is no easily accessible archive or catalogues, either in the town or online, so it is only through a brief mention in a news report on swissinfo.ch that I even know that Firebird was here. There are no pictures of it, and when I write to the Hohmeisters to enquire, they reply simply stating that they ‘miss’ it, without confirming whether it is or isn’t the sameFirebird as now resides AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 117 in Charlotte. The description sounds right, however: ‘a mosaic of tiled mirrors perched on an arch in the spacious garden of the spa’s grand hotel,’1 so I choose to believe that it was here. Perhaps it faced the mountain behind the Grand Hotel Hof Ragaz that Jessica Duncan climbed when she stayed here for four days in early September 1854, passing the convent at Pfäfers and ending up at the ruin of Wartenstein Castle; perhaps it wished to make that climb itself and fly away from the top of the mountain and across the border to the Tarot Garden. I make that climb now, and should I ever find myself in North Carolina I will visitFirebird and show it a picture of the view. 118 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES

A 2015 replica of Piero Manzoni’s Basa Magica – Scultura Vivente (1961) in Piazza Piero Manzoni, Soncino. AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 119

Piero Manzoni is Not Here

This is a picture of a replica of Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work, Magic Base – Living Sculpture (Basa Magica – Scultura Vivente). The original version was made of wood, two years before Manzoni died at the age of 30. This metal one was made in 2015 with the permission of the Piero Manzoni Foundation, for Piazza Piero Manzoni in Soncino, the town of the artist’s birth. Speaking of the original version, Manzoni stated that whomever, or whatever is placed on it automatically becomes a work of art, but in photographic documentation of it, it is rare to see it occupied by people or objects, except in demonstration images in which Manzoni is standing on it himself. Following the first one, he made a second version in Copenhagen, this time made from metal with a more cubic shape. He made a third plinth work the same year, Base of the World (Socle du Monde) which is ‘upside down,’ as if permanently supporting the entire world.

The square in Soncino that bears his name was built in 2015, the replica Magic Base being made specially to adorn it, and it represents a gathering of absences. The most obvious absence is Manzoni himself, who died forty years before the piazza was constructed and had therefore been without a monument in the town of his birth until now. This long absence could be attributed to Manzoni’s own absence from Soncino during his short artistic lifetime, which was entirely spent in Milan. He had no formal artistic training, instead gaining experience by throwing himself directly into the Milanese art scene, mixing with artists of the arte nucleare movement and hanging out at Arturo Schwarz’s Bookstore-Gallery. Despite this, his first public exhibition was 120 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES actually in Soncino as part of a group show in an unusual local annual event, The Market Fair and Contemporary Art Show (Fiera di Mercato, Mostra d’arte), which took place in the halls of the town’s castle, the Castello Sforzesco. It was a trade fair for farm equipment, supplemented by contributions from local artists, and Manzoni showed a set of recently completed paintings – including Papillon Fox and Domani Chi Sa – in the fourth edition in 1956. Despite being from Soncino, a review of the event in which his work was singled out for praise describes him, exotically, as a Milanese painter. He was seen as being elsewhere even when he was alive.

The replica Magic Base is a problematic representation of Manzoni, and only functions on a superficial level. The original object was both a conjuring trick that ironically referenced art’s supposed magic, and a critique of art’s economic function. The pedestal remarkably changed anything placed on it, whether object or person, into art; but this was only a temporary change of state – the occupant remained art only for the period of time they were in contact with it; once removed, ordinariness was restored. Contact with the pedestal generated a ‘living sculpture,’ the aliveness not necessarily being performative in the sense that the person was, themselves, a living thing performing their aliveness (as opposed to a not-alive bronze statue, for instance), but a process of being art and then no longer being art: artness as a temporary presence. It is the object of the plinth that does this, but as we will see, it’s not a work about plinths in general, it’s about this plinth, Manzoni’s plinth. Much sculptural work that was being made elsewhere in the world at the same time, and I’m thinking here of works that were gathered in the seminal exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, involved the objects being shown off plinths. These objects essentially stepped down from their museum pedestals and entered the same space as the viewer – everything and everyone stood on the ground together. AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 121

Manzoni appeared to be inviting viewers to do the same thing in reverse, stepping up onto a plinth in order to enter the same space as the artwork, or to see the world from the position of being an artwork. It appears to generate self-selecting readymades that exist temporarily as art, but not art in general: the form may change, but all that is ever produced is Manzoni’s art. The person who places the object, or themselves, onto the plinth does not become an artist or an artwork in themselves, they just give Manzoni’s work form. Even though the form of the work fluctuates over time, the plinth – and the work itself – remains stable. Manzoni’s sculpture is the plinth and whatever is placed above it – like the objects in Primary Structures, his object is placed on the ground, but it looks like a plinth and is named as one. But the institution of art has not imbued this plinth with magic powers, Manzoni has. It is the institution of art, however, that has granted Manzoni these powers, powers that have not, in fact, been granted to the majority of people who will interact with the plinth. This is the paradox and the irony inherent in the work. He knows it is his plinth that is ever present, that the plinth will spend the majority of its time unoccupied, that it is his plinth that is the object of ‘value’ – not only as an art object, but as inventory (it appears empty in official photographs of it) and however much the plinth appears to shift its artness onto whatever occupies the space above it, the conceptual and institutional gravity is always downwards.

So although the Manzoni Foundation has given the plinth in the square in Soncino its blessing, it is no more a Manzoni work than the square itself. It seems odd to me that an artist whose work was centred around a set of paradoxes relating to what an artist could do simply through the act of naming combined with a reliance on the traces of the body that produced it (see also Artist’s Shit and Artist’s Breath) would be memorialised by placing a replica of one of his works in a newly built piazza that bears his name. I cannot decide whether its emptiness, its multiple absences, would have him turning in his grave, or rolling around with laughter. 122 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES

Interior of the former Casa del Fascio, Como. AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 123

Sick Building Syndrome

I am peering through the glass doors of the former Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy. It is evening time and the building is locked up for the night. I am trying to find a suitable angle to take a picture of the direttorio (boardroom) on the first floor, the back wall of which is partially visible from where I’m standing, but the evening sun makes it difficult. After a couple of minutes of fumbling, a guard appears and tells me to move on. This building is now a police station, and photography of the interior is not permitted.

There were thousands of Casa del Fascio in towns and cities across Italy and its colonies prior to the second world war. They housed local branches of the Italian Fascist Party, and around half of them were built specifically for this purpose. This one in Como was designed by Giuseppe Terragni, and is considered a masterpiece of rationalist architecture. The nearby tourist sign does not state the political origins of the building, instead comparing it to a Renaissance palace and to a cathedral. The only occupants other than the police who are mentioned are ‘democratic parties and of various associations [sic],’ who used it between 1945 and 1955. Every last detail of this building, though, was designed to express its political allegiance, to achieve synergy between architecture and occupant, to produce a single structure that was itself a physical embodiment of Fascist identity and ideology.

A few examples would help. Firstly, it sought to establish a direct relationship with the mass, both in terms of a crowd in its immediate vicinity, and with Italy as a whole. Regarding the former, the building’s entire ground floor could be opened up to become part of the square in which it is located, so those gathering as part of a rally could freely move in, out and through 124 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES the building. Regarding the latter, it utilised materials from all over Italy, whether traditional materials extracted from mines and quarries or new materials being used in the automotive and aeronautic industries, thus ‘gathering’ the entire nation into the very fabric of the building. Articulating a single Italian identity, rather than a collection of disparate regional ones was key to the Fascist project. Secondly, it sought to place bureaucracy in the service of action. It did this through its use of glass, which represented (and enacted) transparency, one could always see what the bureaucrats were doing. Terragni also designed chairs for the office workers that made them feel, and appear, as if they were always just about to stand up. Administrators must not be made to feel nor seem comfortable, since Fascism was supposed to remain in a perpetual state of revolution. Thirdly, it was designed to reference the classical proportions of Imperial Rome, thereby placing Mussolini as the central figure, a contemporary Augustus, with whom he increasingly identified. And it was theever- presence of Mussolini that was the central trope of the building’s decorative displays.2

Photographs of Mussolini in his various guises (soldier, journalist etc.) appeared all around the building in its early years, mainly in predictable didactic displays that included extracts from his speeches. In the boardroom, however, there was a much more eccentric, almost absurd image, in which Mussolini appears as the only figurative element in an abstract mural by local artist, Mario Radice. Radice’s mural filled the entire back wall of the boardroom, and was built up of rectangular wooden sheets of various colours and thicknesses. A photograph of Mussolini (they were always photographs, never paintings) loomed out of one of these rectangles, cut off below the waist and slightly larger than life-size. Positioned directly in front of him was the long boardroom table, with chairs all around it except at the end at which Mussolini appears, meaning he is always there to oversee AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 125 the meeting. After the Second World War, all images of Mussolini were removed from the building, and the mural was also ripped out. However, following a retrospective exhibition of Radice’s work in Como in 2003 (fifteen years after his death), it was proposed that the boardroom mural be reinstalled, but without its figurative element.

Despite the absence of Mussolini’s image in the mural (replaced, oddly, with the Como coat of arms), and indeed anywhere else in the building, the Casa del Fascio remains infected with ideology, from its origins to its materials and its proportions. It has an elegance and a presence in the square, and is a dazzling example of the International Style of the time, but these attributes are simply a mask: the absence of obviously fascist imagery does not make the building no longer fascist. Without the fascist imagery it is, perhaps, more dangerous than it would be with the fascist imagery, as it is more difficult to confront its structural ideology. Ironically, the far-right Lega party proposed in their 2018 manifesto to repurpose it as an art museum3, but they carefully refer to it as the Palazzo Tarragni, rather than as a/the Casa del Fascio. I say ironically, because this seems to me to be the best way of confronting and challenging its ideology. No doubt the Lega party see it as a positive monument to their own ideology, but the opportunity for contestation their proposal offers should be grasped wholeheartedly. To demolish it would be negligent, as its destruction and absence would be too stronger a symbol, and to put it to a general use such as it has today lets it off the hook, but the potential for the contents of the building to act as an x-ray machine, to draw out the sickness of the building, to make its ideology visible for all is surely too good an opportunity to miss. This way, it can be addressed, critiqued and extrapolated into a wider societal context, allowing a certain insight into the invisible forces and structures in play around us every day. I doubt, somehow, that this is what the Lega party have in mind, though.

126 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES

A Memory of a Sculpture Made from Memory

I am in the Italian town of Chiavenna, near the Swiss border. There is a site of great geological importance here, which is known as the Marmitte dei Giganti. Its noteworthy features include some ophiolites4 known as Chiavenna Green Stones, a number of peculiar holes in several rocks that have been made by water and grit spinning off the glacier above them, and a set of unusually smooth rocks that have been rolled naturally into almost perfect spheres. There are also centuries-old carvings in the rock faces surrounding the quarry5. Despite discussing Chiavenna in her travel journal, the strange phenomena dotted around the Marmitte dei Giganti are so conspicuous by their absence, it seems unlikely that Jessica Duncan actually spent any time here. She mentions only the presence of Hornblende and Serpentine, which, she says, accounts for the presence of asbestos. She does not mention gypsum, which is also found in this area, the presence of which may explain why Diego Giacometti was using the workshops in Chiavenna to make the plaster casts for the busts made by his artist brother, Alberto.

Alberto Giacometti was born in the hamlet of Borgonova, but his family relocated to nearby Stampa when he was three years old. Stampa is 16km east of Chiavenna, on the Swiss side of the border, and Giacometti was raised speaking a local Italian dialect. When asked his nationality, he would famously state that he was from the Bregaglia Valley, rather than Switzerland. As part of his refusal to acknowledge his national identity, he eschewed exhibiting his work at the Venice Biennale until he was 55, when he represented France, which was where he lived at the time. Six years later, in 1962, he showed in the Biennale a second time, but AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 127 this time he had a solo show separate from the national pavilions. In 2017, Carol Bove made an exhibition in the Swiss Pavilion based on Giacometti’s show for France sixty-one years earlier, an exhibition that seems to further highlight Giacometti’s refusal.6 He was resident for most of his professional life in Paris, but would return to Stampa every summer to see his mother. His work was deeply bound to his family, and to Diego in particular. The first sculpture he made from life was a bust of his brother while the two boys were still living at the family home, and two of his final sculptural works were also busts of Diego, this time made from memory, the so-called Chiavenna Heads. His brother cast plaster versions of the Chiavenna Heads in the aforementioned workshops so that bronze versions could be produced at a later date. Diego worked as his assistant and model, and although they knew each other intimately, Giacometti claimed not to recognise Diego when he was ‘copying’7 him. However, the curator, Patrick Elliot, suggests that Diego’s features were so etched on the Giacometti’s mind, that in other portrait works, different sitters would often end up looking uncannily like the artist’s brother.8 Giacometti produced a number of busts over his life, and they exemplify two specific preoccupations, the artist’s battle withscale , and his battle to achieve closure on an object. In terms of the former, he was always attempting to reproduce his sitters as they appeared in his field of vision, rather than their actual size, so for a period of time they were getting smaller and smaller until by 1940 the heads were smaller than a thumbnail. In terms of the latter, he was constantly struggling to declare a work finished. For a four- year period beginning in 1935, he was destroying and remaking the same work over and over again, so there are very few objects from this time in existence. Later in his life this manifested in more unconventional acts, such as painting a number of bronze sculptures in his 1962 Venice exhibition just before it opened, without informing the collectors he’d borrowed them from. 128 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES

Giacometti was an important influence on me in my late-teens, and I took the train from Liverpool to London in the autumn of 1996 to see his retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA). When I read Jessica Duncan’s travel journal and saw mention of Chiavenna, I took my old catalogue down from the shelf to see whether the heads were included in the exhibition. Only the second of the two heads was there, but it is described by (the previously quoted) Elliot, who was one of the show’s two curators, as ‘among Giacometti’s greatest and most moving achievements.’9 The photo in the catalogue shows the head – as it does with all the work in the exhibition – in a photographer’s studio, but although it is a good photo, and although this was the only practical way of representing it at the time, I wanted to see an image of the object installed in order to remember what it felt like to see it. Just as I was about to contact the RA, I spotted what I hadn’t known twenty years ago, that the exhibition had merely toured to the RA, and was in fact a collaboration between Kunsthalle Vienna and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA), both of which had hosted the show before it arrived in London. Thinking that I might get a more holistic view of the exhibition by seeing the records in Edinburgh, I got in touch with the SNGMA, and booked a morning in the archive.

The Giacometti exhibition was a significant undertaking, and the archived material includes everything from the organisational to-and-fro, to a moving interview with Giacometti’s surviving siblings, Bruno and Odette, as well as correspondence, essays and plans for the catalogue. There were many photographs, some of which were taken by Elliot himself during a research trip to Stampa, and some of which were of the works that would appear in the show. These photos were for the purposes of research or to be published in the catalogue though, and I was unable to find any official documentation of the exhibition when it was installed at any of the venues. There was, however, a set of what AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 129

I assumed to be unofficial photographs of the exhibition when it was at the SNGMA, possibly taken by a member of staff when the galleries were closed. They had been printed at a retail developer to a standard size and are unlikely to have been taken with a professional-grade camera. The show is installed but empty of visitors, except for a woman in an outdoor coat who appears in a number of the pictures, and who I assume is a member of the photographer’s family. As a set, the pictures seem to be attempting to project a sense of what the exhibition feels like, rather than focussing on individual works nor offering the opportunity for a full recreation (either in the memory or in real life) – they are a personal response, probably intended only for the photographer’s use. For my purposes, they are simultaneously useless and perfect. I didn’t see this version of the show, so they have no direct mnemonic function for me, but they completely encapsulate my hazy recollection of the objects I encountered in London. The distinctive shape of Bust of a Man (Chiavenna Head II) meant I was able to make out a silhouette of it in the background of a photo of a 1958 painted portrait of the artist’s mother. I could then use this photo to locate the sculpture in the exhibition space, which helped me find a second photograph of it, again in the background, and again only in silhouette, but from a different angle. I took some quick pictures of them with my phone, such that they could accompany me on my trip to Chiavenna, and then packed up the archive material.

I can’t say what seeing professional documentary images of the Giacometti exhibition at the RA would have done for my memory of it. By buying the catalogue I may have allowed myself to forget what the show looked like, and now I simply remember the thrill of heading to London to see the work in the flesh. I likely did not even think of it as an exhibition, but rather an experiencing of Giacometti’s work in the flesh, and in this sense the studio photographs in the catalogue only reinforced the works’ distance 130 AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES from me. Even though I did not see the exhibition when it was in Edinburgh, and even though the photographs in the archive represent someone else’s memories of it, I feel they come closer to satiating my desire to give form to the sensations I felt when I was in the works’ presence. Perhaps they also put me into something approximating the space Giacometti found himself in when his hands and eyes were infected with his own memories of his brother as he was trying to render other sitters’ faces, or when he was feeling an ongoing sense of in-betweenness that drove him to spontaneously re-work his old sculptures.

Giacometti was staying in Chiavenna when he learned he had cancer. He had been unwell and, according to his youngest brother, Bruno, it was a relief for him to know.10 His entire family knew already, and although he did not, he was aware that there was something he was not being told. His relief was perhaps drawn from the potential for resolution, a resolution he had been unable to draw from his work. It is appropriate that the Chiavenna Heads were made entirely from memory and that they carry the town’s name with them, as there seems to me to be a certain purity in their relation to the other busts he made during his lifetime: the memories that were forcing themselves into his other works finally expunged the sitters who were preventing them from being fully realised in themselves, and they also experienced some kind of relief. AN ASTERISM OF ABSENCES 131

1 Dale Bechtel, “Art Takes Over the Streets of Bad Ragaz”, Swissinfo.ch, accessed 15 June 2018, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/art-takes-over-the- streets-of-bad-ragaz/3347626. 2 See David Rifkind, “Furnishing the Fascist Interior: Giuseppe Terragni, Mario Radice and the Casa del Fascio,” Architectural Research Quarterly, Volume 10, Issue 2, (June 2006): 157-170. 3 Hannah McGivern, “Italian Far Right wants to turn Fascist HQ into mega-museum,” The Art Newspaper, accessed 15 June 2018, https://www. theartnewspaper.com/news/italian-far-right-wants-to-turn-fascist-hq-into- mega-museum. 4 An ophiolite is a piece of oceanic plate that is exposed above sea level, usually as a result of the closing of an oceanic basin. 5 See Chiavenna Tourist Office’s description of the Marmitte dei Gaganti (in Italian), accessed 12 June 2018, http://www.valchiavenna.com/it/itinerari/ Marmitte-dei-giganti.html. 6 It should be stated that Bove does not agree with this hypothesis, and Giacometti’s absence was not the intent of the pavilion’s organisers. However, I find it difficult to disconnect Bove’s citing of Giacometti’s works,Women of Venice, from the fact that they were made for the French Pavilion, rather than the Swiss Pavilion, at which Bove is showing. 7 Giacometti used the word ‘copying’ when he was working from life. 8 Patrick Elliot, “Alberto Giacometti: An Introduction,” in Alberto Giacometti 1901–1966, ed. Toni Stood & Patrick Elliot (National Galleries of Scotland: Edinburgh & The Royal Academy of Arts: London, 1996), 23. 9 Ibid, 25. 10 As stated on page 8 of an interview with Patrick Elliot in the archive of Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

132 133

From Art Objects to Art Things The Broken Artworks of Mark Landis and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini Brescia | Laurel 134

Mark Landis’ 2010 copy of Charles Courtney Curran’s Three Women (1894), Laurel. FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS 135

During the spring of 2011, I spent three days in a small apartment in Laurel, Mississippi with Mark Landis, a man whose life had recently taken a turn for the worse. He had been the subject of a number of international newspaper articles that had characterised him as an art-world fraud, a forger who’d been fooling museums with fake paintings and drawings for the best part of twenty-five years. But Mark’s story is more strange than it is sinister. He is a gentle man with a difficult mental condition, who has lived on his own since the death of his mother, and did not believe his activities were causing any damage.

Until his story became public, Mark spent his days making copies of pictures he found in auction house journals, and when he was happy with the results he would get in touch with various museums, primarily in the southern states of the USA, to arrange a meeting. On his arrival, he adopted an alter-ego – most commonly a Jesuit Priest called Father Scott – and attempted to donate his work to the museum’s collection, telling them that his mother had recently passed away and that the work was part of her estate. It is not clear how often this ruse actually worked, and on the occasions it did, how long (if at all) each museum took to recognise it as inauthentic, but Mark managed to keep it going from the late 1980s up until the end of 2010. Since these 136 FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS pictures were copies, and since he pretended they were authored by well-known artists, it seems like a straightforward case of forgery. However, what separates Mark from other forgers is his lack of loathing for the art world; he loves art and has no desire to unmask it as some sort of sham. Rather, he saw himself as a philanthropist without financial means, and viewed art as a way of honouring his parents, who he felt were overlooked during their lives in favour of people who were wealthier and better connected than them. When I met him, he was very depressed about what had happened; he felt humiliated, and believed that his days of meeting with museum curators were over. He understood that what he’d done was wrong, but didn’t appear to recognise what exactly the problem was, pointing out that the museums still had a ‘nice’ object, even if it wasn’t what they thought it was.

Leaving aside the obvious issue of deception, there was also a fundamental problem with the quality of the work, primarily as a result of the production techniques. One method involved printing out the picture at life size, fastening it to a board, and working over the top with various inauthentic materials, such as acrylic paints, oil pastels and even pen. The second was a more successful technique, involving an ad hoc light box and the fast flipping of paper that helped him make a sketch with a good likeness, that appeared relatively spontaneous. Ultimately though, any likeness he managed to achieve would always be let down by the materials, and would only be able to fool inexperienced registrars. When I visited, Mark showed me around thirty paintings and drawings he’d been working on before he was unmasked in the press, and said that I should take them away with me, as he no longer had any use for them. I have, amongst other things, a Mary Cassatt, a Marie Laurencin, an Egon Schiele, a Louis Valtat and a version of the painting by Charles Courtney Curran that dealt the fatal blow following Mark’s visit to the Paul and Lulu Hillard University Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana. In the months following my FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS 137 visit, I took the pictures to a museum in Glasgow and another in Manchester, where they were looked at by members of curatorial and acquisitions staff, and it was only during the process of handling the objects in the company of experts that their thingness started to become apparent to me.

This was several years ago, but Mark returned to my thoughts while I was standing in the office of Piero Cavellini in Brescia, Italy. Piero was showing me the work of his father, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1914-1990, referred to as Cavellini from here on in), and a particular set of objects caught my eye, as they appeared to be carrying out a kind of reverse-Landis manoeuvre. Cavellini trained as a painter but in 1947, after a tour of a number of Parisian museums and artists’ studios, and a visit to the home of the Brescian collector Pietro Feroldi (where he saw work by Modigliani, de Chirico, Carra, Matisse, Morandi and Cézanne, amongst others), he began to doubt his ability as an artist but was enlivened by the possibilities of collecting. He and his brother expanded their father’s corner shop, and before long it had grown into a highly profitable department store, allowing Cavellini to ditch painting and begin his collection. He began by purchasing works directly from young Italian painters, such as Renato Birolli, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato and Emilio Vedova, before venturing into the Parisian artworld where he bought work by artists such as Hans Hartung, Gustav Singier, Édouard Pignon and Pierre Tal-Coat and finally expanding Europe-wide, buying from Asger Jorn, Óscar Domínguez and Willi Baumeister. Many of these artists were those who he felt he could never compete with in their own disciplines, and who had driven him from making to collecting. In 1949, Feroldi sold his entire collection to the Milanese collector, Giani Mattioli, making Cavellini the most 138 FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS important collector in Brescia. Throughout the 1950s, Cavellini built up one of the most comprehensive collections of post-war European Art in Italy, lending works by Birolli, Vedova and Antonio Corpora to the first Documenta in 1955, and exhibiting 180 works from his collection at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1957.

Cavellini’s collection remained fluid, and he began selling old works to fund purchases of new work, adding Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, David Hockney and Joseph Kosuth from abroad, and Italians Mario Merz and Alighiero Boetti to his stock. At the end of the 1950s though, having spent ten years navigating networks of patronage and mediation, it occurred to Cavellini that art history is simply a fictional construct, that it is a material that can be shaped and manipulated like any other, and that he was now more interested in examining the process of historicisation from the position of an artist. He initially attempted this through a form of appropriation, recreating works by Picasso, Morandi, Braque and de Chirico as wooden postage stamps up to two metres wide, or using torn up versions of his own, older paintings to make collages. He then began smashing old works and displaying them in crates, the smashed up work being visible through the slats. So far, so safe, but later examples of this methodology from 1970 saw him utilising his collection, works 283 and 294 containing destroyed objects by Giuseppe Capogrossi and Alberto Burri respectively. In the same year he made a set of works he called his Proposte (Proposals), in which he cut works by Léger, Klee, Miro, Campigli, Mondrian and Lichtenstein into squares and numbered them, seemingly re-presenting them in kit form. He refused to confirm whether he was cutting up original works or reproductions, thus both highlighting and compromising his position as a collector. When I visited Brescia, I encountered Proposta N.17 in the office of Cavellini’s son, Piero, in which a Morandi painting has been cut into twelve squares. The moment FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS 139

Detail of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini’s Proposta N.17 (1970), Brescia. 140 FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS

I saw it, the same feeling returned to me as when I sat with the museum curators in Glasgow and Manchester looking at Mark Landis’ objects.

Although Landis and Cavellini produce their work with different motives, and from opposite sides of the institutional divide, the objects themselves seem to act as asymmetric membranes1 at the establishment borders, offering complex and dangerous passageways to the opposite side on which they began. What we appear to be seeing when we look at them is a glitch in the flows of materiality that keep the art world functioning. This glitch takes form as a shock, which reveals the social relations that in turn support the material flows. One is an act of extreme self- destruction that occurs at a structural level, and the other a failed act of self-production that occurs at a material level.

Cavellini earned his stripes as a collector, and played a key role in the careers of those artists he bought from through the development of his collection and lending to the right institutions and exhibitions at key moments. It was known that he owned the works that he appeared to be modifying and re-authoring, so although I am not convinced that Proposta N.17 utilises an actual Morandi, it ultimately doesn’t matter whether the destroyed works were genuine or replicas. Even if the genuine paintings were being held in secret, suddenly to re-emerge one day, and even if there are no genuine versions of these paintings at all, his status as a reliable custodian of works of art had been completely compromised. At a superficial level, it might appear to be an act akin to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 work, Erased De Kooning Drawing, but the comparison is valid only to highlight the extreme dissimilarity between the two acts, for the manner in which Cavellini and FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS 141

Rauschenberg obtained their material could not be more different. It is a remarkable act of self-harm on Cavellini’s part, since despite it being a critical gesture that attempts to bring into focus the modes of behaviour that are available or unavailable to those occupying particular positions within the structure of the art world, it puts him in direct conflict with every other occupant of the entire structure, opening the very real possibility that he would spend the rest of his life operating in a vacuum.

Landis perhaps had less to lose. He never had establishment credentials, and was relying on the inevitable excitement that small museums would feel on the emergence, seemingly from nowhere, of a potential donor. Unlike Cavellini, he had limited direct experience of objects equivalent to the ones he was copying, and did not have the patience to develop sufficient command over the materials required to produce works that were able to hold their own in themselves, resorting as he did to simple shortcuts, such as tracing, and using coffee to falsely age paper or board. It was Landis’ unusual nature and left field motives that were the key to wrong-footing curators, as the works perform very differently in and out of his company. When I first met him and he showed me his work, I was disappointed that they weren’t ‘better,’ but after spending some time with him, and coming to terms with the scale of his activities and desires, the apparent poverty of the objects began to recede into the background. This poverty quickly resurfaced when I brought them out in front of museum curators, but it was in these situations that I began to understand their function as props that enabled Landis to generate a kind of short- lived social ‘hit,’ which inevitably developed into a full-blown addiction. When Landis sat in a curator’s office, he could not, for obvious reasons, claim any authorship of the object itself, nor of the mechanisms that brought it into his possession – if the object is a hopeless forgery, then that’s the fault of either his mother or the auction house, rather than his. So in that sense, it didn’t 142 FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS matter whether the curator believed the work was genuine or not, as long as the meeting was enacted cordially and professionally; and it also didn’t matter whether the object was accepted, directly declined, or even disposed of after he left. It was through the encounter, which was taking place at the institutional border, in which the structures of patronage exploded into view.

It is a truism to state that all artworks exist within the institutional, political and contextual frameworks that bring them into existence and into (or out of) view, whether they address these frameworks directly or not. But even taking this into account, Landis and Cavellini’s objects carry with them a very particular form of excess. In the case of Landis’ objects, as well as suggesting that they are not forgeries at all, I would also say that they are not even art objects – that Landis is neither a forger nor an artist. On the other hand, Cavellini operated as both an artist and a collector, but reneged on his responsibilities as each in order to enact his critical project, taking the risk that the establishment would not (could not), let him back. In both cases, as a result of this performed excess, what we see when we are looking at the matter at the centre of each controversy, are not art objects, but art things.

Because of the situation in which the matter announces itself, it is natural that those encountering it should want to examine it in- depth. This simultaneously reveals and obscures what the matter really is, and furthermore – through the act of examination itself – provides a degree of the excess required for these art objects to become art things. The newspaper articles disclosing Landis’ activities provide scientific evidence that his objects aren’t ‘real,’ such as a close-up of a pixelated print under a microscope or photos of the pictures under UV light, which reveals bleaches in the FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS 143 paper, but this evidence only reveals how far away from them we are as we put them through these processes. As theorist Bill Brown explains in his famous essay, Thing Theory, it is only when we turn away from matter do we find things. It is by following – rather than examining – the things themselves, that we begin to understand what they are and what work they perform, and how this can lead to ‘new thoughts about how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relationship to other subjects.’2

Landis’ things are ‘bad,’ or broken, because they are not ‘real,’ and Cavellini’s are ‘bad,’ or broken, because they are ‘real’ (or could be). The scientific examination of Landis’ work not only proves that they aren’t ‘real,’ it also proves that they aren’t fakes, because fakes surely couldn’t be this wilfully poor – it simply establishes that we have to look elsewhere to find out what these objects are. It is perhaps also why it proved impossible to raise a legal case against Landis, as it was difficult to identify materiala loss to the aggrieved parties, and claiming reputational damage would simply be an admission of incompetence. The same kind of examination of Proposta N.17 may rule it out as a ‘real’ Morandi, but this would not help us establish whether there is a ‘real’ equivalent or not, and if there is, what has happened to it. Works 283 and 294 and previous Proposte have shown Cavellini’s willingness to use actual objects from his collection, so if N.17 were to be produced by his own hand, it would simply be an extra layer of excess that provides more questions than answers, and thus more tracks to follow. 144 FROM ART OBJECTS TO ART THINGS

1 Zygmunt Bauman uses the term ‘asymmetric membranes’ to describe the nature of national borders controlled by wealthy nations, and the establishment of additional border controls at other countries’ exit and entry ports. Such borders tend to block those who are victim to global forces beyond their control, allowing exit but protecting against ‘unwanted entrance of units from the other side.’ Zygmunt Bauman, "Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty", (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2007), 50. Bauman notes that he, in turn, borrowed this phrase from Ulf Hedetoft. 2 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry, Vol.21 No.1, Things (Autumn 2001), 7. 145

Sidhe Vicious Bolca | Eigg 146 SIDHE VICIOUS

Bealach Clithe (top) and Cathalaidh na Marbh (bottom), Eigg. SIDHE VICIOUS 147

Had the two photos opposite been taken using a 35mm camera, I would have been fretting about having them developed, in case they revealed a ghostly apparition I was unable to see with my own eyes as the shutter clicked. They are pictures of burns taken on the island of Eigg, at Bealach Clithe and Cathalaidh na Marbh, along the stretch of road between the primary school and Cleadale, places where, in local folklore, lone travellers (as I was when I took these photographs) may encounter the grimmest of all Sidhe. Appearing in the form of a little old lady, this particular Sidhe would be washing the shroud of the traveller who encountered her, in preparation for his immanent death. She is one of many Sidhe who shared the island with their human counterparts, but is the only one so specifically described. The Sidhe were believed to have been thrown out of heaven at the same time as Lucifer, but not deemed bad enough to be sent to hell. Instead, they were despatched to an intermediate world parallel to that occupied by humans, living in a state of perpetual in-between-ness. The islanders claimed that the Sidhe would occasionally intrude on human affairs to negative effect, primarily at times of transition such as Beltane, or during the birth of a child (a baby born disabled was said to have been swapped with a Sidhe, the ‘perfect’ version existing in the parallel Sidheanan world). 148 SIDHE VICIOUS

I was staying in Sweeney’s Bothy on Eigg, and as I walked back there after taking these pictures of the burns, my thoughts turned to a cave just outside Bolca, in the Province of Verona, called the Grotta delle Anguane. Bolca’s economy is heavily dependent on the nearby Pesciara lagerstätte, a fossil site containing the remains of tropical Eocene fish and plants, considered a national treasure by the Italian government. The fossilisation process that took place there is interesting due to an unusual combination of factors: the specimens all died in con-catastrophic circumstances over many years; they sunk intact to the seabed, which was soft, allowing for a number of layers to build up through time; and the water was so salty and so lacking in oxygen at that depth, that the dead fish remained undisturbed by other organisms that might normally feed on their remains. This has resulted in samples that have been preserved in remarkable detail, including significant (sometimes entire) non-skeletal parts, and also in such abundance that they are still being mined today, almost five hundred years since botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli first made reference to them. It has been said that on their discovery they were believed to be the remains of the last supper, although the general hypothesis until the late 1700s was that they were evidence of the Great Flood. Since the 1600s they have been highly collectible, appearing in various wunderkammern and other public, private and royal collections all over Europe, culminating in a dedicated museum which opened in Bolca in 1996.

Eigg, of course, has also seen important paleontological finds, most famously a plesiosaur skeleton unearthed by Edinburgh geologist Hugh Miller during a field trip in the mid-nineteenth century, and like Eigg, the geology of Bolca is also formed of volcanic activity. Over the week I spent in Sweeney’s Bothy, I found myself thinking more and more about Bolca, despite having only been there for a single morning. The modes of encounter and the natural histories of each place not only intersect so vividly with their cultural SIDHE VICIOUS 149 histories, but also with the natural and cultural histories of each other. In both places, as a tourist, one is encouraged to traverse the evidence of volcanic eruptions, and it is on descending into the limestone canyon on the western side of the basalt ridge at Bolca that one encounters the Grotta delle Anguane.

Anguane are Veneto’s equivalent of Eigg’s Sidheanan. They appear in female human or semi-human form, are mainly around water and – particularly in the province of Verona – wash the clothes of the villagers in the streams in which they are seen. Unlike the Sidhe, Anguane are not portents of doom, being seen more as a representation of an earthly bond inaccessible to humans, so the villagers of Bolca would perhaps not approach the Grotta delle Anguane with the same trepidation that a traveller might hold as he passed Bealach Clithe or Cathalaidh na Marbh on his way to Cleadale. The Anguane’s hold on the locals’ collective imagination was broken by the onset of the Counter-Reformation, which sprung from the Council of Trent (1545-1564), an event that coincided with the first written documentation of the discovery of the fossils at Bolca. The Anguane, along with other magical beings, were seemingly banished to the caves by Cardinal Carlo Borremeo during the Council’s third phase, where they would co-exist with the mysterious newly-discovered images that had appeared in the stratified limestone. The Grotta delle Anguane thus represents a strange and potent container of mythology, superstition, religion and science, the fossils being images of a time the villagers were unable to imagine, the Anguane being apparitions that gave form to a world that doesn’t exist, an imaginary world being discredited by a religion attempting to modernise and organise in the face of challenges from Protestant Reformers, a religion continuing to saturate the science of the site for at least a further century – the deep belief of the Council yet to encounter the deep time of the Scottish Enlightenment. 150 SIDHE VICIOUS

Like the Anguane in Bolca, the residents of Eigg have, on many occasions, found themselves banished to the caves that form an important part of the geology and subsequent culture and economy of their island. In Scotland, holding Catholic Mass became punishable by death in 1560, the year Borremo was made a cardinal, and two years before he convened the final phase of the Council of Trent. A letter to Mary Queen of Scots was the only attempt the Council made to implement its Counter-Reformation in Britain, but although the attempt failed at an Establishment level, the islands were already resisting Protestantism, primarily because the clansmen continued to assert their independence from the Crown. On Eigg, the locals held illicit services in a cave on the southern face of the island, which became known as Uamh Chrabhaiche, or Cathedral Cave, the large rock formation on the left-hand side being used as the pulpit and alter. Like the Grotta delle Anguane, Cathedral Cave is at the base of a volcanic rock formation, on this occasion the pitchstone An Sgùrr inselberg. A similar tourist walk to that in Bolca takes in An Sgùrr, Cathedral Cave, and a third site on the southern coast, St.Francis’ Cave, more commonly known as Massacre Cave. In 1577, a serious dispute between the islanders and the MacLeods of Dunvegan lead to Eigg being invaded by the Skye clan. On seeing the approaching boats, the islanders – knowing they were at a severe disadvantage – retreated to St. Francis’ Cave, which has a tiny entrance obscured by a waterfall, but an interior that could fit all 365 of them within it. The MacLeods searched Eigg for three days, but were unable to find the islanders, apart from an old woman who refused to impart their whereabouts. As they were sailing away again they saw a lookout, who’d prematurely left the cave to check whether the coast was clear. The MacLeods returned, tracing his footprints to the cave. They diverted the waterfall, piled up kindling at the entrance to the cave and set fire to it, killing all those inside by asphyxiation. Like the fossils of Bolca, the skeletons of the dead islanders remained remarkably intact for many years. In 1788 SIDHE VICIOUS 151 the Reverend Donald MacLean visited the cave, observing that the bones appeared fresh, the skulls intact and the teeth still in their sockets, and a further six decades later Hugh Miller reported seeing human bones during the same trip on which he found his plesiosaur. In 1814, Walter Scott visited and took a skull as a souvenir to display at Abbotsford, but further tomb plundering was prevented a few years after Miller’s visit, when the remaining bones were gathered by Lawrence Thompson, Eigg’s then proprietor, and – much to the anger of the island’s residents – given a Protestant burial.

Although one does not encounter human skeletons when visiting the cave today, its narrow entrance and dark, damp and foreboding interior commingle with its history to provide sufficient spinal chills the deeper one progresses into it. On my visit, perhaps to offset the potential disappointment that may be felt by the contemporary dark-tourist who expects something akin to the Paris Catacombs, an example bone had been placed next to the entrance of the cave, presumably as an aide-imaginaire. It had been juxtaposed neatly with a blue hardhat, possibly signifying that there are health and safety lessons that can be learned from the events at Massacre Cave. On the day I passed the burns at Bealach Clithe and Cathalaidh na Marbh, due to the season, there thankfully did not seem to be sufficient water flowing to adequately wash a shroud, even for a magical creature, so I’m reasonably confident that Eigg’s bean nighidh Sidhe won’t suddenly appear when the digital photographs are printed in this book. If there is a ghostly apparition visible in the pictures, though, please don’t get in touch to point it out, as it’s likely only you who can see it… 152

One Drop of Water Contains as Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm James N. Hutchinson

Copy Editors: Frances Stacey and Lesley Young Project Curator: Siobhan Carroll All images courtesy of James N. Hutchinson and Collective. Design: Sarah Tripp Typefaces: Garamond and Folio

ISBN: 978-1-873653-23-4

Copyright for the texts belongs to the author © 2018 Publication © Collective, 2018 All rights reserved

Collective City Observatory 38 Calton Hill EH7 5AA t: +44 (0)131 556 1264 e: [email protected] www.collective-edinburgh.art

One Drop of Water Contains as Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm forms part of Rumours of a New Planet by James N. Hutchinson. This project has been commissioned by Collective through the Constellations Programme, a series of off-site, research-based commissions that aim to bring people together to develop ideas and partnerships. This programme of commissions includes discussions, screenings, and walks, providing opportunities for artists and audiences to engage with Collective’s locality and consider new ways for people to work together.

The title of the book is extracted from Jessica Duncan’s notes on Alexander Rose’s Lectures and Conversations on Geology and Mineralogy, lecture XVIII.

A version of the text, From Art Objects to Art Things was published by Künstlerhaus Dortmund as part of the exhibition, Thingness (2016), curated by Nina Nowak and Gaby Peters.

A version of the text, Sidhe Vicious was published on The Bothy Project’s blog (http:// www.thebothyproject.org/blog/sidhe-vicious/), Feb 2017 153

Thank you to Collective: Kate Gray (Director), Lori Anderson (Head of Development & Enterprise), Ben Callaghan (Operations Assistant), Siobhan Carroll (Head of Programme), Emily Chandler (Operations Assistant), Eric Hildrew (Head of Marketing & Communications), Georgia Horgan (Operations Assistant), Eleanor Jones (Exhibitions Trainee), Lara MacLeod (Retail Manager), Katie Reynolds (Producer, Learning), Frances Stacey (Producer, Participation), Alison Thorburn (Bookkeeper) and James Bell (Producer, Learning until September 2017).

In addition to all the staff at Collective, the artist also wishes to thank: Nicky Bird, Piero Cavellini, Freda Cupido & Roderick (Manenberg and Flamingo Crescent, Cape Town), Julie-Ann Delaney (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), Noloyiso Dlamini (Driftsands Nature Reserve, Cape Town), Ed February, Godfrey Fitton, Yolande Hendler & Bunita Kohler (Community Organisation Resource Centre, Cape Town), Melanie Johnson (Informal Settlement Network / Federation of the Urban & Rural Poor, Cape Town), Rupert Koopman, Mark Landis, Nina Liebenberg, Carina Lochner (Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers), Nwabisa Majali (Wolfgat Nature Reserve, Cape Town), Karen Moran (Royal Observatory, Edinburgh), Nina Nowak, Cathy Paterson (Flamingo Crescent, Cape Town), Gaby Peters, Amy Porteous, Frances Robertson, Dan Shipsides, Ross Sinclair, Kirstie Skinner, Rob Small (Abalimi Bezekhaya, Cape Town), Terry Trinder-Smith (Bolus Herbarium, Cape Town), Lesley Young, and the essential wider support of The Bothy Project, Chapter Thirteen (Benjamin Fallon, Kirsteen Macdonald & Lesley Young), Künstlerhaus Dortmund and The Glasgow School of Art. 154