#art&experience

[theburnishedopal]

Blue

Blue is people’s favourite colour. It’s the colour of obsession, as told in Maggie Nelson’s wondrous book Bluets. It’s the colour of some pieces of art I saw in the Kunstverein in Goettingen, and it’s the colour of the Conservative party in the UK, who have just elected a new leader. 

There’s nothing like being in a gallery space to set your mind back on track. Experiencing very mild Sunday afternoon blues, I walked five minutes out of the door down to the art gallery on Gotmarstrasse, Goettingen, which I’ve walked past perhaps four or five hundred times, and not visited. The moment I walked through the front door, I luxuriated in the feeling of these old German buildings, with high ceilings, whitewashed walls, glimpses of green-filled rear courtyards through wood-framed windows, and curved wooden banisters alongside wide stone steps. These buildings have seen the Romantic period, have seen Nobel Prize winners and poets and spirited women (which have not often enough been the Nobel prize winners, certainly the poets, although that’s another topic for another day). I was soothed and I hadn’t even set eyes on any art yet.

As it turned out, the exhibition was not great, but the colour play pleased my soul, especially the deep, bright blue. I visited another exhibition (austellung) in the Altes Rathaus, a beautiful building in the very centre of the town. Whenever I go in there I am reminded of how much I like the painted medieval coats-of-arms high on the wooden walls, one representing every village and county in the region, giving the visitor a little idea of its identity and personality. 

Within an hour, I was inspired enough to wish to draw or paint, and got as far as a pencil drawing of Angela Merkel which unfortunately turned out rather more to resemble Hitler. Some left-wing activist could no doubt make a satirical sign out of such a notion, but it was entirely not my intention. Somehow the side parting, the shadow under the nose and the stiff formal jacket contrived to hint that way. I’ve just been inspired by Merkel’s 2019 Harvard address, in which she espouses breaking down walls and not accepting things the way they are, so in fact my will to sketch her intelligent features were in response to her antifascism, but the universe has a dark sense of humour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ofED6BInFs 

[theburnishedopal]

Dubuffet’s Primary Coloured Sanctum

A passage in Rebecca Solnit’s essay “A Short History of Silence”, in discussing various forms of silence and feminist waves of emergence from such silences, references Susan Sontag’s description of male artists choosing silence. Marcel Duchamp and Arthur Rimbaud, for example, chose silence as a gesture of scorn, or transcendence, or departure - but “only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively.” Solnit elaborates, “It’s the quiet some choose after being heard and valued - the antithesis of being silenced.”

In September 2016, I travelled to the village of Périgny-sur-Yerres, outside of Paris, where Jean Dubuffet worked in his 70s in his workshop, now open to the public at certain times such as Paris’ autumnal Week of Culture. It is not any kind of workshop - it is a huge abstract construction of organic shapes in primary colours classic to DuBuffet’s paintings. The space can be peeled back in layers like an onion. The exterior is fabricated from resin walls, painted in white with black outlines. As a visitor I enter through a door into a building shaped a little like a giant tortoises’ shell and pass through increasingly complex chambers, where reds and blues are introduced into the colour scheme. Finally, along with the other visitors, I entered the inner chamber, the core or nucleus of the space, which is decorated (note use of the word ‘decorated’, a traditionally feminine activity; the masculine options would have been ‘fabricated’ - in truth it is both fabricated and decorated) in a much smaller-scale, more intricate design of many manifestations of the organic shapes. These shaped 3D walls are carved out of polystyrene using electrically heated wire tools that DuBuffet designed himself, and outlined in black and painted white, blue, red and yellow. The guide tells us that DuBuffet used to come and meditate in this peculiar inner space, this sanctum (sanctum from the latin sanctus meaning holy) following the mammoth effort it would have taken to create.

What hammered away in my head during the visit was the clarity of the freedom this man had to create his space in as untraditional a way as he liked. Meaning not that he lived in a period where it was possible to do so, but that he had resources freely available to him and the agency to innovate; that he did not feel sufficient self-doubt or uncertainty to prevent him from requesting what he needed to realise the designs in his head, both tool and product; that he was within sufficient psychological, material and political security to singularly pursue and execute an original vision. And not on a small scale; on a large one.

When looking at large scale art we find fewer female artists because the cultural, societal and physical spaces accessible to women exist in smaller quantity than for men. Women subsequently turn inward, work on the small scale, often in the decorative arts; jewellery, textiles, illustration, so called ‘crafts’, arts of exquisite finesse and delicacy; large scale sculpture and painting is made far more commonly by men, such as Turrell, Hirst, Long, Goldsworthy, Gormley.

The DuBuffet workshop demonstrates staggering assurance on many fronts, two being i) that he can get it built, and ii) that he can have such a space for private use and solo meditation. As I peer at the painted polystyrene I ask myself - What did people ask of him? Did anyone ask about the reasonableness, the practicality, the necessity of such a creation? I am curious about these questions because I am curious about barriers both experiential and psychological to achieving art. Such questions would not form barriers to the work’s completion per se, but would introduce seeds of doubt and scepticism into the process, which in the context of unequal division of literal, geographical, conceptual and conversational space across gender, could form the first hurdle at which women are more likely to fall.