“Taking nothing seriously and recognising our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries.”
Fernando Pessoa
A Well Staring at the Sky
The title of this piece takes its name from a passage in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet;
“We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.”
For me, this quote describes the act of looking at a photograph, at people in the past who are likely no longer with us. I look at them from a time when they do not exist, and they look at me from a time when my existence was wholly unlikely. They are reflections left in the water of the well, and I, for the moment am the person looking in. The portraits in the work are from a single photograph taken in Vienna c.1938. The faces are mixed with images cropped from an aerial view of the Bełżec Death Camp photographed in 1944. History too is a well staring at the sky. Again in the well’s water, we see the sky reflected with some of its stars and all of its gaps. But no gap is truly empty and all the holes in what we call history are full of traces; the residue of a glance perhaps shared between two people.
To see more work from this exhibition, please follow this link.
Connections
Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’:
“Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.”
Tim Ingold, ‘Lines’:
“The line that goes along has, in Klee’s terms, gone out for a walk.”
“Wayfaring, I believe, is the most fundamental mode by which living beings, both human and non-human, inhabit the earth. By habitation I do not mean making one’s place in a world that has been prepared in advance for the populations that arrive to reside there. The inhabitant is rather one who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being and who, in laying a trail of life, contributes to its weave and texture.”
Fernando Pessoa, ‘The Book of Disquiet’:
“To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given. But while doing it the mind is at liberty, and all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks between one and another plunge of the hooked ivory needle. Needlework of things… Intervals… Nothing…
Besides, what can I expect from myself? My sensations in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling… A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained… A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child… Yes, crochet…”
Colour
Each string (in what I have so far called the ‘net’) represents in its ‘cut end’ the end of a path, the end of a life. Each string also represents a life entire as measured by the three fates. Furthermore they could be said, as a group to represent the combination of paths which, at a specific moment in time created one of the many terrible moments of the Holocaust. Also, the image of the whole represents the sum of the snatched visions of the tower at Birkenau (the drawings).
Of the physical appearance of the net, the following quote from Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ is very pertinent:
“I also have my crochet,
It dates from when I began to think,
Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole,
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing,
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.”
The image of the net looks like a ‘dream-catcher’ and in many ways that works in respect of this theme; dreams which many would have had of going back home, trapped in its strings. (There is also the idea of the writes of the telegraph poles carrying messages out of the camp and across Europe).
I was also thinking today about work by two of my colleagues which was very much to do with colour. This made me look at my own work (which is anything but colourful) and the subsequent contrast interested me. It reminded me of a television programme I watched last night about the photographer Albert-Kahn who documented the First World War in colour photographs. When we think of the past, in terms of the war, pre-war and Victorian periods, we think of it in terms of black and white. When we see colour photographs of the First World War they seem to validate reality – the very fact of time before we were born.
In my work there is no colour as such, but it is there, just as colour is there in Black and White photographs.
In the image above, I was reminded of the stained glass windows in the many tombs of Montmartre and Pere Lachaise cemeteries. The lines of the image (of the net) could just as easily be the lead work of a broken stained-glass window; what is missing of course is the colour.
Colour could be a validating factor in this case. Often when we think of the Holocaust or World War One for example, we see them in Black and White (like the cats (although evidence suggests they may have limited colour vision) we saw in the cemetery); we often think of the weather as being dull, grey, miserable, always winter, and when we read evidence of the time that talks of blue sky and sun, it always seems somehow shocking. The following is an extract from Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen.”
“‘…You have no idea how tremendous the world looks when you fall out of a closed, packed freight car! The sky is so high…’
‘…and blue…’
‘Exactly, blue, and the trees smell wonderful. The forest – you want to take it in your hand!'”
When imagining arrival at somewhere like Birkenau, one imagines it being night, or the smoke from the chimneys hiding the sky like a fog. But of course, people would have arrived on beautiful summer days, when colour was abundant.