This is the story of an Artist.
Our paths crossed some years ago. “The artist must avoid thinking as a writer”, said Cezanne, that’s why I will be telling her story.
From time immemorial, the Artist had a Project. She would tell a bit about it, from time to time; everyday, the project would grow in her mind, gaining some details or losing a piece, until blurring with her. She would bring it everywhere. Every fragment of her existence travelled with her, in suitcases, notebooks, pockets, homes, gestures: without even realizing, she was keeping a record of her life.
“Tell me something about your Project, how is it going?”, I used to ask the Artist, occasionally, but her answers were always elusive. She described it to me as an interrupted speech, a letter never opened, a survival shelter; she would tell me about the objects, about how she could identify people within every seemingly inanimate element in her collection. She and her belongings were mixing up; not in her memory, though, in her real life, in the need of giving shape and consistency to human relations, to their frailty, not to let them wearing thin and break in time.
The Project only existed as a drawing. On the paper sheet, the Artist’s space was already filling up.
I kept asking questions on it for a while, I wanted to understand –damn analytical mind!– but my requests were always unfulfilled.
I realized the time had come when, one day, in the mail, I found this list:
SLEIGH BED, LATE 19th CENTURY. Shelter
DISHES. instability, precariousness and powerlessness
WOOL YARNS. Every stitch, a thought.
BROKEN BEDSIDE LAMP. But it still enlights.
TABLE DIRTY WITH PAINT. Used to paint at night.
QUAIL EGGS. Pureness and beauty.
LIGHT BULB. The bulb stays on even in daytime, as in Bacon’s paintings.
SELF PORTRAITS. Hedonism, narcissism, hommage.
WOODEN PALLETS. The art of scrapping.
WOODEN BOXES. Moving, being nomad. What you forget is sometimes found again. In the boxes and among the boxes.
SOIL. There’s no wood without soil. The soil is contact, is a bare foot, is pressure.
CARPETS. You need genius to fly.
FLOOR LAMPS. Dim light. Intimacy.
WHITE SHEETS. Purity, cleanness, good taste.
METRONOME. The metronome is the objectification of rhythm. Rhythm regulates breathing. Feeling the rhythm isn’t just dancing, it’s becoming second nature to the rhythms of the Universe, being One. Having rhythm is, conclusively, listening.
WOODEN PLANKS FROM SCAFFOLDINGS AND CONSTRUCTION SITES. The search for balance, always unstable. Scars and wounds are never smooth, they are hazardous terrains, old attics, bumps.
A HUNDRED PHOTOCOPIES ON WHICH: the photostat as raw material, of no value par excellence, non-original, on which you can scrap, sketch, underline, rip up.
LETTERS IN FRENCH. Paris. If you are careful you can hear voices.
LETTERS IN ITALIAN. Communicating in writing. A letter is an old habit overcoming the barriers that a direct gaze can set up.
PEOPLE WHO WROTE ABOUT ME. Putting oneself on the line by hiding.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS (an artist I love). To call oneself an artist is always unpleasant. It’s better being than being called. Every artist has his tutelary deity, figures to identify with, that opened the same paths before. Louise as a friend, though never personally met. Louise loved to break plates and wouldn’t let enemies’ gaze pass her through.
SARAH LUCAS (another artist I love).
CARMELO BENE. Carmelo, suffering and creation. Bene had a magnanimity that only a few can get.
W. CHURCHILL. When a lady once accused him of being drunk, he answered “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what's more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”
COLLAGES WITH NEWSPAPER SCRAPS AND MY BELONGINGS.
NOTES ON READ AND UNREAD STUFF.
HEBREW WRITINGS CLIPPINGS.
CLIPPINGS FROM 1950’S LIFE MAGAZINES.
CLIPPINGS FROM 1950’S GRAZIA MAGAZINES.
A BOOK WITH A FRANCIS BACON INTERVIEW.
A BOOK I’VE READ IN PARIS, BY C. ANGOT, ABOUT AN INCEST.”
I rushed to her. “Are you ready?”, she asked me, grabbing the handle of the heavy metal door shutting the space.
What welcomed me, once I had finally crossed that threshold, was a feeling impossible to define.
A room! A whole room! The walls entirely covered – in wraps, letters, pictures, images, postcards, pages, everything overlapping, impossible to be read, but so clear and intelligible at the same time.
Then, the scarves: started, but never finished, “every stitch is a thought,” the Artist told me, “they’re all my Winters. Maybe, one day, I will stitch them together. Yards of thoughts.” The stacks of plates on the bed were what unsettled me the most. “That’s me,” the Artist said, “See? It only takes a sudden move, a distraction, and I break into million pieces.”
The floor was bumpy, when I pointed that out, the only answer from the Artist was “Sure, would you find it easy to pass over other people?”
It felt like having stepped into the Artist’s mind, in its stratifications and labyrinths, among the things to keep and those to be discarded.
“But… how did you manage to retrace all your memories like that?”, I asked her. “Easy: these are not my memories. This is my life. All my handholds, my lifelines, my survival kits.”
Still bewildered by that experience, while heading home, in my mind, these words by Walter Benjamin, that, for a long time, kept company with my reasonings, reemerged.
“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
