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Plural

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Review

Tess Edmonson is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Much has been made of the negligence afforded to early 20th-century Swiss writer Robert Walser’s contribution to modernist literature, both during his lifetime and in its legacy. While authoring seven novels – _Jakob von Gunten_ (1909) most famous among them – as well as thousands of short stories, Walser supported himself in a variety of itinerant, low-paying occupations: bank clerk, copyist, butler. At 50, he checked into the Waldau Sanatorium, where he would remain the rest of his life.

_Looking at Pictures_, New Directions’ eighth book of Walser’s work, is among a number of 21st-century correctives in English translation. The collection consists of short pieces of prose – stories, scripts and critical writing – about art and its makers. Some of these were originally published in German-language journals and newspapers in the ’20s and ’30s, while others survive only in microscript form: an idiosyncratic shorthand Walser executed in pathologically small print on scraps and fragments of paper, an archive of which was thought to be inscrutable for decades after his death.

Among those microscripts reproduced here is “Diaz’s Forest,” written in 1924\. Describing an 1875 canvas by Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, the text exemplifies Walser’s interest in ekphrasis over its conventions. As in a number of the texts in _Looking at Pictures_, he begins by setting the painting’s subjects into narrative, activating them with a contextual fiction. In the forest, Walser writes, are “a little motherkin and her child”; the mother reprimands her child for its dependence. “I swear to you,” she tells it, “as truthfully as I am standing here with you in this forest painted by Diaz, you must earn your livelihood with bitter toil so that you will not go inwardly” (86). This is the first diegetic break, as the subject acknowledges her painter. The second comes as the painting’s leaves “murmur” about “\[w\]hat has been written in this brief essay” – the subjects acknowledge the critic. The effect is that of making indistinct what, in criticism, one takes for granted to be distinct: the artist, the subject, the writer, the reader.

A similar loosening occurs in “An Exhibition of Belgian Art,” whose title might mislead us to expect an exhibition review; its text, however, abruptly does away with the standard methodologies of art criticism, or rather with art altogether. Walser first tells us of the location of the exhibition; then of a coffee he drinks, a dream he remembers. In a conversational tone and with a structural non-sequitur, he asks if we’ve heard of the artist Niklaus Manuel, a 16th-century Swiss artist and dramaturge. He lets us know that Manuel was also a provincial governor in the town of Erlach, where Walser completed part of his military service during World War I. Walser’s cursory descriptions of the works on view –“now a vernal landscape, now a snowy one, now a flower painting, now a picture of a lady” (66) – make it clear that assessing their formal qualities is not the task at hand; this work will inevitably be performed by those whom it interests. “Everything I have neglected to say,” he writes, “can be given voice by others” (70). Rather, it is Walser’s peregrinations around the exhibition proper, the literary digressions that looking at pictures makes possible, that become central to art’s meaning-making.

Similarly circuitous is “Apollo and Diana.” In it, Walser considers Lucas Cranach the Elder’s c. 1530 painting of the twin gods of sun and moon, a photograph of which hangs in the rented room of the story’s narrator. His landlady, unimpressed by the display of nude figures, removes the picture from its place on the wall, leaving it face-down on a table. He reproaches her for this act of “falsely construed morality” (42), insists on hanging the image; she acquiesces, and even offers to mend his pants. The seeming nowhereness of this story– its lack of insight or allegory – points again to Walser’s privileging of the incidental over the willful, the anecdotal over the schematic. And as in “An Exhibition of Belgian Art,” these misdirections give evidence – managing both sentimentality and sarcasm – of the social life of the artwork.

Material considerations are also taken up in “Scene from the Life of the Painter Karl Stauffer-Bern,” which consists of a fictional dialogue between real historical figures: the painter of its title and his patron and mistress, Lydia Welti-Escher, a 19th-century Zurich heiress. In love, they escaped from Welti-Escher’s husband to Rome where, exercising his considerable political influence, the husband has Stauffer-Bern arrested. Both heiress and painter spent time committed to mental institutions; both exited and committed suicide shortly thereafter, within months of each other. In Walser’s script, they appear negotiating the matrices of art and power in which their love is bound up (“It offends and infuriates me to be financially dependent on you,” says Stauffer-Bern).

Walser’s historical fabrications extend equally to the biographies of Watteau (“As I attempt now to sketch his portrait, he seems to me like a wish, a longing” \[124\]); of Van Gogh, whom he concludes must have painted _L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux_ (1888–89) out of love and not for money; and of Aubrey Beardsley, whose life he envisions in detail: “If I am imagining him accurately, he would often lie all day with a graceful and very exact indolence in his luxuriously outfitted bed” (111– 112). But these are fictions that ring true, making possible unconventional modes of engaging with and writing about art. The pages of _Looking at Pictures_ give breadth to the ludic and the miniature, including insights both exceptional and mundane. One hundred years after their composition, released into contemporary art publishing’s thinkpiece economy, the texts’ purposefully limited scope gives way to a kind of linguistic play that has little currency in today’s writing about art. Of Beardsley, he writes: “Among other pages, there exists one by him depicting a burning candle. It may be that never before has an illustrator reproduced the flickering of a candle in so candle-like a manner, so flickery” (112).

Writer

Performance

issue-130-p71-73.pdf

This article reviews Looking at Pictures, a collection of prose by 20th century Swiss writer Robert Walser.

Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures (New Directions, 2015) 

Kenneth Hayes is an architectural historian and a critic of contemporary art.

In the early 1970s, I lived in the Dominican Republic for a year while my father worked on the startup of a ferronickel plant in Bonao. The plant’s smelter was fuelled by Venezuelan oil, shipped in by tanker from ports less than a thousand kilometres south across the Caribbean Sea. This tidy arrangement fell apart on October 16, 1973, when opec raised the price of oil by 70%, which instantly made it uneconomical to process the energy-hungry ore. The newly established smelter and the mining operations – in fact, the entire town site, with its large white-and-pastel-painted courtyard houses, leisure centre and model school – were rendered obsolete virtually overnight; expatriate workers quickly returned to their homes around the world; newly built buildings were shuttered and left to moulder, and the hopes of local people to hold stable, lucrative jobs were dashed. Ana Alenso would undoubtedly recognize this profoundly destructive and wasteful event as a distant reflection of the catastrophes repeatedly rained upon her home country of Venezuela by its resource extraction economy. Her recent work is dedicated to understand- ing and exposing the paradoxical cultural condition of growing poverty in the nation with the world’s largest proven reserves of oil.

In a single-room gallery, opening directly from the sidewalk, the artist installed a system of scaffolding both functional (it offered the means to climb to a second level within the relatively tall space and thereby gain novel perspectives on the sculptural assemblage) and symbolic (inasmuch as it signified a chaotic, perpetually unfinished project). From the gallery’s entrance, ramps rose to a low platform that supported an empty, green oil barrel held at an angle of about 15 degrees off the vertical by a system of ropes and pulleys. Although raised above the floor, the barrel appeared something like the nadir of a spatial vortex, as if the last drops were being extracted from an all-but-drained source. The barrel functioned simultaneously as a unit of wealth, a signifier of resources and as a sculptural volume. The artist’s statement reveals that the installation’s overriding form alludes to the infamous El Helicoide building in Caracas, a huge, multi-tiered construction built around a natural mound known as Roca Tarpeya. Inaugurated in the late 1950s as a drive-in shopping mall, the exorbitant, ziggurat-like project was left unfinished due to political indecision and inertia, and, since its abandonment, it has been put to various nefarious uses, from squatter settlement to headquarters of the repressive Bolivarian Intelligence Service. While the form of the scaffolding may reference the spiral Helicoide, the barrel makes it possible to recognize the installation’s spatial schema as resembling a particular exemplar of modern sculpture, Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist _Development of a Bottle in Space_ (1913).

The artist festooned the crude scaffold spiral with several discrete interventions seemingly designed to exhaust the means by which a sculpture installation may be supplemented: video, in the form of a small monitor that rewards the viewer for climbing to the second level; audio, in a recording of the trading patter at a commodities exchange, emanating from the barrel; movement, in a lump of asphalt displayed on a rotating platform near the entrance; by reflection, in a mirror that provided the base of a found-object assembly of hand tools that resembles the iconic teeter-totter structure of a pumpjack; and through drawing, left on the plastic-clad walls after a public discussion. Each of these inclusions merits more analysis than is possible here, but it is the video that best exemplifies the artist’s discursive, even didactic, intentions. Composed of found footage and running for just 3 minutes and 15 seconds, it collages together phantasmagorical scenes of a television game show in which paper currency is blown into a transparent chamber containing a contestant, archival footage of an environmental disaster at an oil pumping station, and a plaza full of people looting a shipment of flat-screen televisions, seemingly only in order to wantonly smash them on the ground. These images are bluntly overlaid with graphs depicting oil consumption levels and prices. The artist has sampled the broad array of social and cultural ills that accompany the unearned wealth that flows from the ground, and in doing so, demonstrates the perpetually disrupted, unfinished modernity of a nation grown both corrupt and dependant on a volatile international commodities market.

In effect, Alenso has invented a powerful sculptural idiom, one that might be described as a disenchanted version of the _Tropicália_ that has been referenced or represented in this space on other occasions. She makes work deliberately shorn of the ’60s movement’s exuberance and drained of its famed vibrant colour. Her sculpture reduces the informal vigour of naive art to a brutal aggression that nevertheless seems to gain in spatial interest. In doing so, she recalls the unlikely amalgam of Surrealism and Bauhaus formal- ism that strongly influenced post-war art throughout South America, but renders it with an acute awareness of contemporary macro-economic contradictions that verge on theatre of the absurd, and pursues a staggeringly direct material economy that shows up the high modern love of industry as just so much chrome fetishism. It is not by accident that this exhibition took place in Berlin, nor that the artist studied at the Bauhaus. Indeed, the industrial lamps incorporated into the installation cast harsh rays of light on and through the diaphanous scaffolding and various other perforated materials, producing shadows that vividly recall the \_Light-Space Modulator \_ that László Moholy-Nagy built at the Bauhaus between 1922 and 1930.

_Tropical Curse_ presents a deep cultural analysis of the precarity, social disorder, environmental damage and general profligacy that natural bounty seems to bring in its wake, especially for countries of the Global South. Alenso takes a gimlet-eyed look back on the Venezuelan experience of modernity and at the same time peers forward to the all-too-foreseeable consequences of her nation’s resource dependency. The artist has rendered a strange, tropical depression in a small room far removed from her home; she clearly expects it will develop into a hurricane.

issue-130-p69-71.pdf

This article review’s Ana Alenso’s exhibition Tropical Curse at Kinderhook & Caracas in Berlin, presented from Nov. 7 – Dec.5, 2015.

Ana Alenso: Tropical Curse

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