Either and/or Or?

In the preface to his book Either/Or Soren Kierkegaard, through the name of another, speaks of a deception. Either/Or is a two volume work, written under three pseudonyms, the Either being written by the aesthetic ‘A’, the Or written by ethical idealist ‘B’, and the whole presented to the reader by its impartial and equally pseudonymous editor Victor Eremita. Either is a series of essays extolling the philosophy of a young romanticist, Or is a series of letters written as a critical response directly addressed to the author of Either. Kierkegaard regularly published his aesthetic works under a number of pseudonyms, saving his own name for his religious philosophy.

Kierkegaard says of his use of pseudonyms that they are more than a mouthpiece for his own views, “behind each pen name lies a “subjectively actual personality””[1], a view that sounds very similar to Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s use of ‘heteronyms’. Over the course of his writing career Pessoa utilised over seventy names, preferring the term ‘heteronym’ to the more familiar ‘pseudonym’, “since they were not merely false names but belonged to invented others, to fictional writers with points of view and literary styles that were different from [his own].”[2]

Fernando Pessoa’s most celebrated book, The Book of Disquiet (a series of reflective vignettes, or Texts), was ‘written’ by Bernardo Soares, who, in Text 193 of that book, says: “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write...I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.” Another of Pessoa’s heteronyms, the poet Alvaro de Campos says “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”[3]

One of the reasons Pessoa, an intensely private man, used heteronyms, was to hide, from the public and from life. But it was also a philosophical stance, as he believed each person to be capable of holding many contradictory thoughts and opinions, and he didn’t want his works to be limited to the one self. Each name provided him with a different voice. He wrote, through Soares: “Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.”[4] And again, Alvaro de Campos: “Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!”[5]

Is Pessoa’s deception then more honest than Kierkegaard’s? Kierkegaard’s deception is most clearly carried out in Victor Eremita’s preface: “I, who [has] simply nothing to do with this narrative, I who am twice removed from the original author.”[6] And again, “I am neither an author nor a professional literary man.”[7] But, like Pessoa, Kierkegaard’s work also contains a confession: “During my constant occupation with the papers [of Either/Or], it dawned on me that they might be looked at from a new point of view, by considering all of them as the work of one man...Let us imagine a man who had lived through both of these phases, or who had thought upon both. A’s papers contain a number of attempts to formulate an aesthetic philosophy of life...B’s papers contain an ethical view of life.”[8]

Kierkegaard seems to agree with Pessoa’s view that a self is comprised of many selves, and that each self may carry within it contradictory beliefs. This, surely, cuts to the quick of what it is to be a human being. We are all of us a mass of contradictions. And the ‘I’, this seemingly singular identity we so stubbornly cling to, is the sum of these contradictions. This can be expanded, I believe, to include the creations of human beings, such as the work of art and the text. (Again this can be extended to encompass the whole body of an artists’ work or the entire oeuvre of the writer.) Why should the work of art or the text be considered to be the work of a single author? Surely a large part of the point of a work of art is to explore and expose these contradictions, these multiple selves.

In his seminal essay on authorship and authenticity, Roland Barthes states “…a text is…a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”[9] Our work is the culmination of all we have read or witnessed or lived. It follows that this is an ever evolving process. And the same, I believe, can certainly be said of the self.

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[1] Howard A Johnson, quoted in his Foreward to the Princeton University Press 1971 paperback edition of Either/Or

[2] Richard Zenith, from the Table of Heteronyms in the Penguin Classics 2002 paperback edition of Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet

[3] Quoted in Richard Zenith’s Introduction to The Book of Disquiet

[4] Text 396, The Book of Disquiet

[5] Quoted in Richard Zenith’s Introduction to The Book of Disquiet

[6] Preface to Either/Or

[7] ibid

[8] ibid

[9] Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

What's it all about?

Last night I watched Wim Wenders new film about late choreographer Pina Bausch at the cinema. It reminded me of how good art can provide me with such pleasure. The film Pina follows the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the dancers that Bausch worked with for the last twenty odd years of her life. The majority of the film shows the dancers performing their contemporary form of dance not only in the theatre itself but out in the streets and landscapes surrounding the area. There are interviews with the dancers interspersed throughout, but during these interviews the audience is looking at the silent face of the dancer whose voice is heard speaking.

The dance that Bausch worked with is very physical. In her ensembles performances there is no clear plot, no direct story or narrative, there is no definitive meaning. Like all successful art it is about nothing, and it is about everything. There is joy, pain, suffering, the intricate interplay of relationships, power, control, love, loss, none of which is explicitly stated, all expressed through movement and the human body and all interpreted by the viewer. It is simultaneously funny and serious, meaningful and pointless, profound and ludicrous, and it is always obsessive.

I am reminded of a scene in the film Factotum, a fictionalised account of the life of Charles Bukowski, where Matt Dillon’s character Henry Chinaski is in the office of his boss and his boss has discovered that Chinaski is a writer and is working on a novel. The boss asks Chinaski what his novel is about. Chinaski replies “Everything.” To which the boss asks “Is it about...cancer?” Chinaski: “Yes.” Boss: “How about my wife?” Chinaski: “She’s in there too.”

Places, Strange and Quiet

As a film maker Wim Wenders has been somewhat hit and miss. Early works, such as Alice in the Cities were remarkable, and mid-career Paris, Texas beautifully shot and enigmatic, whereas the more recent Until the End of the World is truly awful, badly scripted, badly acted, unconvincing, confused, sprawling and self indulgent. Even Wings of Desire, which I used to rate as one of my favourite films, upon a recent revisit I found to be problematic and a little awkward, containing moments of true poetry and deeply resonating beauty but coupled with elements of farce and ridiculousness. But I still rate his work interesting enough and his grasp of the visual strong enough that when hearing he had an exhibition of photographs at the Haunch of Venison in London I thought it would be worth a look.

Spanning the duration of his film career Places, strange and quiet is an equally hit and miss affair. Some of the images are striking but many are simply average. The strength in most lies in colour, bright and bold primary colour. But the misses are such that when he does produce a successful composition, such as his shot of a street corner cut neatly into three bands of colour - the right hand third is red, the top third of the rest is bright blue, and the remainder a sandy yellow, you feel it is merely the happy accident of an amateur.

The photographs are large in scale and considerately spaced throughout several rooms. One of the best images is of an empty outdoor stage in front of which lies row after row of bright red plastic chairs, a palm tree growing out from the middle of them to the right of the image. Another is of a disused and delapidated ferris wheel standing alone in a wide expanse of waste ground, misty low hills on the horizon. On the opposite wall of the gallery is the same ferris wheel seen from the other side and close up, through which a tired looking housing estate can be seen in the background. One of the strongest technically is of an old car in what could be a desert or simply a quarry with a dog standing on the roof. The dog is a pure black silhouette, wild and threatening. This is one of the few photographs in the collection to inspire an emotion other than melancholy.

The subject matter comprises mostly of abandoned places and forgotten things, objects that have seen better days and lost their usefulness. Some suggest narratives, such as the woman in the red dress standing before military battlements and the wall pockmarked with bullet holes that have since been painted over in red (Wenders is obviously drawn to red). But most are simply mundane. Many, unsurprisingly I suppose, have the sense of film sets about them, stumbled on accidentally by an opportunistic collector of images. There is no accompanying information, none of the photographs are provided with titles or indications as to where they were photographed, but it is clear that these images have been collected over a long period of time and from all corners of the globe.

I'm not saying Wenders' photographs are bad, I have seen plenty which are worse and one or two of them are exceptionally beautiful, I just wonder if he would have been given such a large and prestigious exhibition with the interest that this garners if he didn't already have a reputation as a respected film director to back him up.

Nothing Much Happens

I am rather fond of films in which nothing much happens. Police, Adjective, by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu is such a film. In it the main protagonist, a policeman by the name of Cristi, spends most of his days alone, outside in the cold, desolate urban Romanian landscape, following suspects and attempting to be inconspicuous. The case he is on concerns a teenager suspected of supplying hashish to his school friends, a petty crime, but one which carries a potential prison sentence of seven years. Cristi is troubled by his conscience. He sees his target as just a kid who smokes a bit of pot, who poses no harm to society, but Cristi's superiors want the teenager arrested.

The majority of the film shows Cristi in silence pursuing his victim along city streets a discreet distance behind, hands in pockets, head hunched, long grey shots where nothing much happens. When he is not walking Cristi is standing outside buildings, smoking cigarettes, waiting for his target to emerge. We discover his character through his movement and body language. Other scenes show the drudgery of the Police offices, meetings Cristi tries to avoid, paperwork and bureaucracy he can't avoid. It would be tempting to describe Police, Adjective as Kafkaesque, because it deals with bureaucracy, but that would be too easy. This is not as sinister as Kafka, merely bored people going about their daily routines, keeping busy with meaningless tasks because that is what they have to do to earn a living.

Our hero attempts to delay the inevitable sting operation by trying to prove the kid is not the supplier, it’s his older brother, who is out of the country at the moment, and they should await the brother’s return before acting, but in a crucial and brilliant penultimate scene where Cristi faces his Captain and his conscience we learn through a Romanian dictionary the meanings of the words ‘conscience’, ‘law’, ‘moral’ and ‘police’, and Cristi is finally convinced he has no choice but to carry out the sting. Police, Adjective is a beautifully shot, superbly paced study of absurdity and bureaucracy and the traps in which we all allow ourselves to be placed within our ordinary everyday existence.

Why?

On the 7th August 1974 Phillipe Petit walked a wire stretched 450m, 1340ft, or 1/4 mile above the ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, an illicit act which had taken many months of careful planning and the help of several accomplices to achieve. After 45 minutes and 8 crossings of the wire suspended high above Manhatten Petit stepped back onto the roof of one of the Towers to be immediately arrested. One of the arresting officers, interviewed straight after the event, was noticably moved by what he had witnessed and admits on camera that although illegally carried out he thinks it to have been an astonishing and wondrous act.

A film, directed by James Marsh, Man on Wire, uses interviews with the protagonists, contemporary photographs and film footage, and reconstructions to tell the tale of the heist like build up to Petit's incredible wire walk. I recently watched Man on Wire a second time, the first being last year at the cinema when it was initially released. It is a beautiful film of a beautiful act.

In the film Petit, a street performer from Paris, refers to himself as "a poet conquering beautiful stages." The word 'death' occurs frequently throughout, Petit says the act was "framed by death". As does the word 'passion'. "If I die," he states, "what a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion." There is a fire in his eyes and a seemingly limitless energy to the man as he tells his story. Those close to him are visibly touched by the experience, a number of them weeping at the recollection. His girlfriend of the time, Annie, says "everyday was a work of art to him", and his American accomplice, Albert, says of when he saw Petit practising on a wire "he had an ageless mask of concentration...he became a sphinx." A childlike joy and a childlike seriousness pervades the group of collaborators.

The images of the wire walk itself (there is no surviving film footage, only photographs) are so intensely poetic, the fragility of this tiny human being surrounded by the vast expanse of air and the enormity of the steel and glass of the Towers themselves, that the first time I saw the film I thought to myself 'no matter what I produce in this life as an artist I will never create anything so profoundly beautiful as this act.' One of the most common questions Petit has been asked regarding his wire walks is 'why?' Why does he do it? Why does he risk his life for something so apparently pointless? His answer to this question is an answer only a true poet or artist would offer or maybe even understand. His answer is simple: "There is no why."

Someone Needs To Tell the Upper Echelons of the Art World That There's a Recession On

I found this essay in a notebook the other day, written back in December. Although publishing it here highlights my inability to keep up with the 'now' of electronic media, the issues it discusses are still pertinent and will remain pertinent for some time to come.

Someone needs to tell the upper echelons of the art world that there's a recession on (America's gallery giants open British front in the modern art 'arms race', the Observer, 12th December 2010). As in all walks of life this seems to be a recession only for the poor and already underprivileged. While the rich keep on getting richer the gap between the celebrity artist and your average artist keeps on getting wider and wider. An increasing number of millionaire artists hang out with billionaire gallery owners as the majority can't afford to focus solely on their practice, second jobs taking up more of their energy and time.

I thought all this big art market stuff had disappeared along with the fading memory of the over-rated and overblown YBA's to be replaced by a new generation of quieter, more serious, introspective and interesting internationalist artists (see Chris Townsend, New Art from London, Thames and Hudson 2006). But no, it seems commercial galleries such as Gagosian and Pace, and owner/dealers such as Jay Jopling and Dasha Zhukova, continue to increase their revenue from and control over the art market, snapping up more 'name' artists for their 'brands'.

Although this can be said to be good for those few living artists who benefit (the Martin Creeds, Zhang Xiaogangs and the Keith Tysons. It is worth noting that many of the artists these dealers are dealing with are dead (Bourgeois, Rauschenburg, deKooning, Rothko) and many of the living ones aren't short of exposure (Koons, Hirst, Emin, Gilbert and George)), the question is: is it good for art? Is it even about the art? For although some of these galleries do put on some good shows (one of the most moving exhibitions I have seen in the last couple of years was Richard Serra at the Gagosian in Kings Cross, London) I do wonder about the motives of those involved.

Too much of the contemporary art world is about being seen and being seen to be seen in the right circles. There is too much emphasis on the opening night and not enough on the art. I am sure the galleries I am discussing won't be suffering from the impending cuts to the arts budget, whereas said cuts may prove to be the end of the line for many grass roots and artist led initiatives. The question I wish to pose with regard to these circumstances is: how should we artists respond to the challenge of this inevitable crisis?

Into Eternity - Communicating with the Future

The film Into Eternity, a documentary by Scandinavian film maker Michael Madsen, explores the Finnish nuclear authority's efforts to deal with their rapidly accumulating nuclear waste. Their plan has been to bury it deep within Finlands ancient bedrock. The facility, lying 500 metres underground at the end of 5kms of tunnels, is set to be completed early in the 22nd century. It is designed to safely contain the radioactive waste for the 100,000 years that it will remain hazardous. The film maker addresses the viewer as a voice from the past, our present, with a message for an imagined civilisation far in our future, a warning to stay away from this place, to leave the ground and its invisible dangers undisturbed.

The first challenge of the facility is to design something which will last more than ten times the length of anything human beings have previously built. The second and more difficult challenge is how to communicate the danger of the place to an unknown and unknowable future civilisation. In the last 100,000 years many civilisations have risen and fallen, many languages have been developed and lost. How do we communicate with a society of which we can predict nothing? That our own will still be existing 100 millenia from now is unikely. Any warning we leave, if the people then are anything like us, is likely to be ignored, dismissed as superstitious nonsense. They will dig regardless. How can we convince them to leave well alone?

The film states there is probably only 100-150 years worth of uranium supplies. Nuclear energy is a finite resource. Something which can provide energy for such a short span will have consequences far further into the future than we can project. Why mess with something we cannot possibly control? Into Eternity with its long slow panning shots of endless tunnels and stark blank laboratories is a beautiful, poetic, terrifying and very real warning to us here and now.