November Graveyard

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last year’s leaves. won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the heart-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare,
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

Sylvia Plath, 1956

Nina Canell, Nerve Variation, Heat Hang and Soft Stone

Nina Canell, Tapetum Lucidum (Blue Gas No.5)

Nina Canell, Perpetuum Mobile (40kg)

I love Nina Canell’s delicate and ephemeral sculptures. She favours flexible and ‘invisible’ materials in her work such as mist, dust, neon or electromagnetic energy to produce installations of non-finite forms. The materials often change from one state to another, they evaporate, harden, soften; imitating natural cycles of constant transformation.

‘Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

(John Keats, Selected Letters)

Gerhard Altenbourg, Unverwehet, 1972

ANSICHTIG – Durchsicht wird. Geschehen geschieht. Ueber einer lichten Farbigkeit siedelt es sich an, oder ueber einigen grossen Liniengeruesten. Gewusel, erste Kritzelspuren. Es kratzt sich, Kratzel-Erkenntnis. In die Zwischenraeume sintert es. Tupfengewoge. Verringern der Zwischenraeume (nicht die Latten sind so wichtig, die Luft, die zwischen ihnen steht, vielmehr), in die wiederum entstandenen Zwischenraeume hinein werden Haekchen gesetzt, in die Zwischenraeume der Zwischenraeume die letzten Winzigkeiten. Ueberlagerungen, bis ein waberndes Gewoge entsteht. Entstehen des Entstehens, Prozesshaftes. per pedes apostolorum. Es wachsen Raeume von verschiedener Tiefe; ein Flirren, ein Flimmern der farbigen Teile ist das Ergebnis. Gitter. Geflecht. Gespinst. Gewebe. Gezwirntes, Geknuepftes. Schichtungen. 

(Gerhard Altenbourg, 1971, aus : Klar dem Naechtlichen verschwistert)

Ich habe deinen Boden kaum betreten,
ich war von Deinem Himmel so hoch gehoben,
so in Wolken, Dunst und in noch Ferneres gestellt,
dass ich Dich schon verliess,
als ich vor Anker ging.

Du hast meine Augen geschlossen
mit Meerhauch und Eichenblatt,
von meinen Traenen begossen, hielst du die Graeser satt;
aus meinen Traenen geloest,
wagten sich Sonnen heran,
doch alles war wieder fort,
wenn dein Tag begann.
Alles blieb ungesagt.

Durch die Strassen flatterten due grossen grauen Voegel
und wiesen mich aus.
War ich je hier?

Ich wollte nicht gesehen werden.

Meine Augen sind offen.
Meerhauch und Eichenblatt?
Unter den Schlangen des Meers
seh ich, an deiner Statt,
das Land meiner Seele erliegen.

Ich habe seinen Boden nie betreten.

(INGEBORG BACHMANN, 1953)

How do we cope
With the days after a death?
Empty days, nothing left
(No hands, no one to wait for)
Not even a funeral

I see shapes falling inside paintings
Animals and humans, row upon row
Walking toward something
Waiting for something

(Outside the window)
I’m looking for an answer
Me and a million others
(The voices defy nature)
Disbelievers
Deserted lovers
Dear God,
You’d better not let me down this time
(10 000 lives that grieved before)

Cracks in the canvas
Look like roads
That never end.

“For this new work I tried to imagine a catalogue in which I had no choice – an absolute catalogue without room for decisions -something that would direct me withouth choice. This led me to blood: an absolute catalogue, abeit potentially the final days of blood being viewed in such a determined form with the onset of genetic interventions, artifical wombs, and so on.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters contrasts the schematic ordering of blood with the seeming disorder of the stories that surround each bloodline; the external forces of governance, territory, religion, power colliding with the inernal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. I’m interested in exploring the possibility that the chaos in the subjects I document could potentially be patterned or coded as blood itself.

[...]

It’s human nature to look for purpose in everything. The project does question this tendency and consider the possibility of purposelessness. But it also looks at repetition and patterns. It highlights the individual against a background of the non-place – but then through its association with nearly 900 other portraits produced in the same form, it also negates the individual. There is a relentless, machine-like repetition in looking at birth and death and its insistence.

[...]

I still feel vulnerable. I still feel anxious. And I still want to find answers and see as much as I can before I, too, fall from the line.”

Taryn Simon (in conversation with mono.kultur) at Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin