Singing Reality

31 mei 2010 There are films that I remember as narratives and books that I look back on as though they were films. There are works of art that I recall as layered poems. And there are poems I think of as short films.

Work that transcends its genre belongs to the sort of art that I most prefer to look at or read. I suspect that these works didn’t come about because the artists intended to cross the borders of genres, but more through a desire to shake up ideas like a feather pillow. You find yourself in a pillow fight, the pillowcase gets torn and the feathers float around you like snow. Later on you are not certain whether you saw the snow in a cinema or if you read about it. Or did you actually walk around in it? The fact is that it really doesn’t matter any longer. That snow goes on whirling around in your head.

One work of art that whipped up such a storm in my mind is an installation by Mike Nelson, To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft (1999). H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American author who wrote tales of horror and fantasy and science fiction. His sombre narratives might have taken place in the space that Nelson created. Nelson shows a room with holes in the wall and ferocious scratches on the walls. The violence that this space has been subjected to has the effect of sudden light in a dark room; your eyes have to adapt to it and it takes a while before you realise what went on here.

Entire corners of the room have been hacked away. It is as if an animal had struck out with its claws to escape, with the marks reaching a height of about one and a half metres. The highest scratches form a horizon in the room, above which the claw-marks cannot reach. You can see and feel how the creature has sketched its own size and height with this line. Like someone singing a sustained high note that gives you the shivers, this line rips through you. I continue to be astonished that an outburst of rage can bring about such a sharp focus.

I used the image in my poem ‘Take a Subject to Make the Whole Thing More Alive’ to illustrate the control-freakery of Dutch cultural policy and politics:

Now we’re going to employ a little imagination.
The effect is beautiful.

We exchange a few ideas like a beast
tearing at the panelling in a room
with its claws. Rage a straight line

high as the claws can reach.
Sadly we can’t escape it.

In publishing this poem I didn’t have any doubts about whether I was entitled to borrow the image. The work is something I experienced myself. It is more than an artwork; it has become part of reality and of myself.

Less aggressive but no less radical is a work by Bojan Sarcevic that I saw a number of years ago. It was a period when I was puzzling a great deal about what to produce. I already doubted my ideas before I had tried them out. I saw artworks fail before I’d made them. Meanwhile not a lot of work got done.

Sarcevic’s film shows someone driving a car in a city. The windows are misted over. With his index finger the driver is tracing the contours of buildings, which appear on the window. Meanwhile the car continues on its way. A network of vertical and horizontal lines takes shape. You see more and more of the city through the finger-thick lines that the artist draws on the car window. But it also becomes clear that the drawing is failing as a record of what it depicts, getting in its own way the more it goes on. None the less it is a superb drawing, exactly because of all the ‘failure’ inherent in it, an ongoing failure through which it comes into being.

For the 41st Poetry International Festival I am compiling a programme of artists’ films, which – like the work of Nelson and Sarcevic – have shaken up my thoughts. They are artworks that transcend their genre. They have the force of a poem that can be read time and again and which always reveals a new layer. One example is The Girl Chewing Gum of 1976 by John Smith. What you see is a London street scene. A girl is crossing the road and a trailer appears on the screen. Meanwhile you hear the voice of a man who sounds as though he is directing the scene. “Slowly move the trailer to the left . . . and I want the little girl to run across . . . NOW. Hold that trailer there. Now move the trailer on. Right. Now I want the old man with white hair and glasses to cross the road. Come on, quickly!”

Slowly but surely, it turns out that the directorial voice was only added to this street scene later. Nothing remarkable happens. People cross the street and a tram drives past. But the maker of this film has raised himself to the level of director of reality. It makes you laugh to see the white-haired old man suddenly hurrying up as though he is obeying an order. And it is poignant too, when you realise that reality escapes us as we watch it. The make-believe director embodies our vain desire to get a grasp on things.

Finally a memory of a film by Marcel Broodthaers: La pluie (Projet pour un texte). The artist is sitting in the pouring rain at a small table writing with ink on paper. The letters he writes are being washed away by the downpour. The man is getting soaked to the skin, but he goes on writing. It doesn’t bother him at all that his words are not eternal. What he writes exists.

Like the artists I intend to present, he sings of reality. They make reality sing. This article was written on the occasion of the 41st Poetry International Festival Rotterdam. Maria Barnas is the curator of Singing Reality, a programme of artists’ films which will be shown at several locations in the Rotterdam City Theatre.

At 16.00 hrs on Monday 14 June, Maria Barnas will show parts of the films and elaborate on the choice of her selection. In conversation with Renske Janssen, curator of the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Arts, she will discuss the relationship between language and visual art. This event is Dutch-language.