TV in a Pool of Clouds (digital image, 2010) by Truett Dietz

“This particular image is from the pool I learned to swim in as a child. In the late 90s some teenagers had a party there and one of them actually drowned. The pool got sued and ended up closing and has since become overgrown and very eerie feeling. I went back with my brother one day and we jumped the fence to look around. The place had been trashed and much of the furniture had been thrown into the pool. It was early afternoon and that television was just floating so perfectly near the surface. I only had my cell phone camera with me at the time so I took a picture of it, but ended up coming back the next day with my camera to re-take the shot. Last time I saw it, the TV had sunk…”  – Truett Dietz

There is a weirdness in Dipierro’s work that is also in that line of dialogue.  To say, “We’re not here,” is something that can only be true if it means something else.  Because of course they are there.  We can only be where we are.  What the father really means, in that instance, is: “Our car’s not here.”  But if he’d been allowed to say it like that – so matter-of-factly – something incongruous would have been missing.

Luca Dipierro in front of "Foreverland", a storefront he painted in North Carolina

The words were Raffel’s, and they stayed with me, but so did the animation, which was simple and precise, yet full of a strange and frightening wonder.  The characters had heads that looked too real, or not real enough.  An ordinary object, like a woman’s handbag, seemed capable of more than it ought to be capable of.  After I saw that animation, I looked for other work by Dipierro.  I saw that he was working on an art zine called Das Ding, which is German for ‘The Thing’.  So far there have been three issues. Each issue, wrapped in a cellophane envelope, is a beautiful paper object with words and drawings.  They remind me of little dreams; they are always about something, but it is difficult to describe what.  Their characters and creatures often find themselves in trouble, and either they get out of that trouble or they do not.  Or maybe what you think is trouble, for them, turns out to be something else.

You can find Das Ding here.  Below is a conversation I had with Dipierro.

—

Mullany: Can you talk about the title of the zine, Das Ding?  How did you come up with it?

Dipierro: Das Ding is German for “the thing.” I had the title way before I knew what to do with it. When I started making the zine, I thought that it was a good fit, because the word represents a sort of blank where everything is possible, yet at the same time has a very specific and personal resonance for me. I grew up in the Alps, in Northern Italy, in a region that belonged for centuries to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before becoming part of Italy at the end of World War I. As a kid, I was exposed to a lot of German children’s literature: picture books, fairy tales, novels. It was a particular mixture of humor and darkness, a combination of childhood themes and the macabre. There was nothing “cute” about it: the representation of the body was grotesque, coming from the figurative tradition of the Middle Ages. The images I found in these books had an enormous impact on me. They built an almost mythical space, determining all the images to come. I used to like this series of krimis (German detective novels). One of the volumes was called Das Ding. It was the story of a kid who finds a cylindrical object in the trash. He doesn’t know what it is and he tries to find out. It was very strange stuff. So for me “Das Ding” represents the images I care about, both as a consumer and as a maker. Also, German—which is my second language—is for me a language of identity. Not the identity that I have been given, which I questioned very early on, but the identity that, growing up, I tried to reconstruct.

Der Struwwelpeter ("Shaggy" or "Slovenly" Peter), by Heinrich Hoffmann, ca. 1845

Mullany: Would you say a little more about this “second” identity – the one that, as you said, you “tried to reconstruct”?

Dipierro: The cultural identity that one is given is always a center. And I never felt at the center of anything. I always felt the need to be, culturally, in between places. I am always suspicious of cultures, languages, or images that are too self-sufficient. I am interested in transition. I am interested in art that is impure, in forms that are transitional. For example, I find pre-comics way more interesting than comics, because they are not solidified into a genre. And that is why I love illustration, which has been—and still is—considered a minor art: it has an ambiguous nature. It is compromised by the text it is supposed to illustrate, to serve; and it in fact opens, surreptitiously, another text. Illustration has a strange, undeclared autonomy as an art. With my zine, I am trying to approach different forms and to make them mine, to make them collide with “me”—with my limits, that is. And the way I make things mine is to draw them. Drawing has an almost biological status. It’s, ultimately, your hand, the shape of your fingers, your nerves, etc.

An illustration by Josef Lada (1887-1957)

Mullany: I like how you acknowledge the “biological status” of drawing; that it’s partly a function of the power one has over one’s nerves. Do you ever find that an “accident” of the nerves — a slip of the pen, or a willingness to let the pen wander — determines what any one of your illustrations will depict? Or do you know from the outset what each illustration should look like, drawing in accordance with the image you see in your mind?

Dipierro: I generally start with what I want to draw, which is less an idea in my mind than something outside of me, in the world. If I just move the pen on the page, nothing happens, or at least nothing that interests me. All art that really excites me is figurative. My drawings are essentially realistic—even when I’m making a dog with hands or a man with paws—because it’s always about a dynamic between me and the object. The object passes through me and becomes lines. I like to think about the art of drawing as an inventory of the visible world. That’s why I never get tired of drawing. It’s like walking down the street and looking at things and enumerating them in your mind. I can get pretty obsessive about lines. There is a neurosis of the right line (Flaubert’s “mot juste”). The lines can become right also because of “a slip of the pen,” of course. There is a dumbness sometimes in the hand that only the pen can overcome. I am happy with a drawing when it stops being still and something happens in it, moves.

From a work in progress called "The Pencils," by Dipierro

Mullany: I am vaguely afraid of even the most pedestrian objects in your work — the pile of shoes in the above illustration, for instance. How would you describe the role your own unconscious plays in the creation of your art?

Dipierro: The unconscious plays a huge part, without any attempt on my side to make it speak. No matter what you do, obsessions pour out. What I can do is work the surface of my images, almost like weaving, and when I obtain a certain texture, that’s when the obsessions start to circulate and organize themselves into a coherent alphabet. But when I look at my illustrations, I don’t see only “me.” There are a lot of different elements. I don’t want to make perfectly smooth things. It’s more like a drain where all these different elements get caught: unconscious, technique, mistakes, ideology, clichés. For example, I am aware that a lot of my images come from a book that I worship, Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais. I feel so close to the vision, the cartography of Gargantua, disproportioned, stretchable, that I consult it all the time.

Illustration (ca. 1854) by Gustave Doré for Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais

Mullany: There’s a satirical element  in the German and French illustrative tradition that has influenced you.  And yet you don’t strike me as a satirist.  The most recent issue of Das Ding, for instance, depicts consumption and flatulence, but in a way that is divorced from any social reality that would be easily recognizable.  Is it fair to say that your primary concern is with mortality?

Dipierro: Mortality is definitely one of the primary concerns. And flatulence too. In fact all the miseries and joys of the body. But before anything else, what I am interested in is the comic—the comic representation of the world. Raymond Queneau said that whenever the narrator starts to laugh about death, we have a comic narration. As an artist, I am concerned with death because I am concerned with laughter. All my life I have found myself battling against the idea that truth is serious, that truth doesn’t have anything to do with jokes. Personally, I don’t believe in or care about any truth that doesn’t come from laughter. When you say something through laughter, you also say, Do not believe this. The laughter I mean is not just “funny” and often is not “funny” at all. It’s a way to take the objects of the world out of their inexplicability, and turn them upside down, play with them. My only way to think about a coffin, to show a coffin, and ultimately to understand and accept the idea of a coffin, is (for example) to show an acrobat jumping out of it.

From Issue 3 of Das Ding, by Dipierro

Mullany: Does this mean then that death, to you, is not merely death?  An acrobat jumping out of a coffin, for instance, is an image that invites interpretation.

Dipierro: For me, death is the ultimate blank. It negates language and at the same time multiplies the possibilities of language. I love acrobats because of what they do against gravity. Gravity, in a certain way—being a law of physics—is on the side of death. When I was a kid, I saw this circus acrobat who walked on a thread and brushed his teeth, shaved, smoked a cigarette, read the newspaper. I love the fact that he acted normally, doing very common things, as if he were on the ground. It wasn’t important what he was doing, but where he was doing it. In the same way, I don’t put meanings or symbols in my images. I just make them and combine them and move them. After they are released, they become part of a symbolic discourse of course, but I am only a spectator of that. It’s what I do in my animated films, which is the medium I feel closest to. I take relatively simple objects (coffin, shoe, tree, horse) and place them out of context, reverse them, change their attributes, in order to de-familiarize them.

Still frame from the animated film "Us," by Dipierro

"Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me" by Mark Leidner (Factory Hollow Press, 2011)

I was on the Internet when I first saw the cover of Mark Leidner’s new book, “Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me”.  I can’t remember what site I was looking at when I saw it, but I stopped for a minute, my hand on the mouse, which in turn was on the mousepad, which in turn was on the desk on which my computer resides. Two questions occurred to me, either at the same time or one right after the other (which made them seem to have occured at the same time).  They were: ‘Do I like this?’ and ‘Why has Mark done what he has done?’  Depicted was lower Manhattan, circa 1970, with the twin towers in the background – not fallen, but destined to fall.  And beside them, in mid-leap, a collage-style cutout of an NBA baller, made to appear as though he would imminently throw down a dunk at the unlikely height of those two very towers.

The answer to the first question was easy: yes, I do like this.  But the answer to the second question was not.  Which made understanding my answer to the first question the opposite of easy.  If I couldn’t figure out why he had done what he had done, then knowing why I liked it remained a mystery.  Which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily.  Do we always need to know the reasons we like what we like?

A book’s meaning is most acutely recognized when the book’s contents are considered beside its title.  The same applies, I think, to a cover.  That is, if the cover art and the title of a book can work in tandem, they reveal something about each other that might not have been seen had they remained apart.  The title, “Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me”, is unusual in that it doesn’t make immediate sense in conjunction with the image to which it applies.  That isn’t to say it isn’t a good title – I think it is – but rather that a moment or two must elapse before its strange logic begins to disclose itself.  What is meant by “Beauty Was the Case”, let alone “Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me”?  Who are the “They” that are doing the giving?  And what does the phrase mean when applied to a scene that came to be associated with so much pain?

There is a track by Snoop Dogg, on a record he made with Dr. Dre in the early 90s, called “Murder Was the Case“, in which Snoop, smooth and melodious as ever, intones, “Murder was the case that they gave me.”  This was the lyric that sprang to mind when I saw the title of Mark’s book.  Whether Mark himself was inspired by this line – changing it only slightly, but radically, to come up with his title – I don’t know.  But remembering this line gave me a way of thinking about his book, and its cover; a way of seeing what I think he is trying to do.

One of art’s virtues is that it allows us to re-imagine the world according to our own experiences or designs.  What Mark has done here is what we might call re-imagining.  Where there would be ‘Murder’, there is now ‘Beauty’.  Where there would be an act of terror, there is now an act of surreal grace.  Such work is bold, even dicey, as it uses humor to invoke a serious and public trauma.  But this only makes the fact that he has succeeded more impressive.  And he has succeeded, for, despite its whimsy, the cover ultimately reveals itself to be in earnest.  There’s something comic about the man with the ball, skying over the city, but as a gesture it’s gentle; it is a wish to put the towers to a different use, to give them a different end.

steve jobs

Lucian Freud died Wednesday.

I like his paintings because they’re beautiful in a strange way.

I like this portrait he did of Queen Elizabeth II, at the Queen’s request.

"Queen Elizabeth II" (2001) by Lucian Freud

I like the dignity here, and also that there isn’t any flattery other than the flattery that comes from being painted by someone who is trying to see in you what cannot always be seen.

There’s not much to it, but for some reason it’s funny. Also a little unsettling. I realized I was laughing not so much because it’s comedic (though it might be) but because it’s absurd. There’s hardly anything in the drawing, yet it succeeds as a complete work, whole in itself: are we being watched? Should we be afraid that we’re being watched? Should we laugh at the fact that we’re afraid of being watched? Shrigley could have included more in the way of subject – the figure of a person, a building – but would doing so have improved the work itself? He must not have thought so. And I agree, though I’m still intrigued by the reason why he must not have thought so.

Terms like ‘minimalism’ can be inadequate because of their tendency to collapse the complexities of individual works into one brand, or genre. But they can be useful too. I want to describe Shrigley’s drawing as an example of minimalism because doing so helps me form a question that otherwise might lack context: what is the relationship between minimalism and self-restraint?

The reason I ask that question is this: when I look at Shrigley’s drawing, I’m struck by the impression that he was inordinately conscious of the markings he was making on the paper with his pen; inordinately, in comparison to artists who aren’t working in the minimalist vein.  Whether this impression is accurate, I can’t say; I don’t think it’s true across the board; I’m convinced that all artists are conscious, at some level, of the choices they’re making, that they’re always discriminating.  Yet I imagine Shrigley thinking, ‘should I stop now? or now? or now?’ as if his conscious mind was more ready to censor – to restrain himself – than the minds of more lavish, full-blooded kinds of artists.  Perhaps he wasn’t thinking this at all. Perhaps the drawing is the result of a quick, offhanded sketch he only realized later was a finished work, in need of nothing more.  Or perhaps it’s the result of some other thought process I haven’t imagined.  Still, its minimalism evokes for me the idea of restraint as an artistic virtue.

The artist who restrains himself too much is, no doubt, self-defeating.  In the context of fiction, Lily Hoang recently described the benefit of doing the opposite – of “over-writing.”  Matthew Simmons, in the same spirit, writes, “Pile on the muck until the muck becomes the point and the muck becomes the beauty.”  Good advice, I think.  A wonderful thing about art: you can dramatize truth in opposite ways.

Here are some more drawings by Shrigley:

Here’s a bootleg version:

——

Banksy does The Simpsons…

I.

"West Side Highway" (1977) by Mitch Epstein

This picture was taken in 1977.  Its effect, for a long time, derived mainly from its symbolism – from what its juxtapositions suggest about modern life.  A man rests on a cot beside a large American car, close enough to the city to be involved in it, but far enough from it to be associated with his more natural or uncivilized origins; he is, somehow, both heroic and pathetic. The looming towers of the World Trade Center represent (with the other buildings) the idea of city itself.  They seem to have been intended, by the photographer, not to remind us of what they are specifically – the World Trade Center towers – but of what they are generally: archetypes of ‘cityness.’

The picture still succeeds this way.  Art depends on internal order for success, and that order, once achieved, can’t be undermined or taken away, even if the subject a work depicts is destined to be changed by history. This picture contains feats of composition that make its appeal – as a representation of a modern human predicament – difficult to ignore. And yet, due to the singularity of the World Trade Center towers (and the trauma now associated with them), this appeal might become secondary, a context in which we recall an event the artist did not and could not have foreseen.

When I first saw this picture, in an art book in a used book store, I didn’t process it as a work of art.  My eyes immediately went to the towers, not for reasons that had to do with the aesthetics of the picture, but because of the psychic precedence any image of the towers holds for me.  I wanted to resist the photographer’s intention that the buildings be seen generally (rather than specifically) so that I could dwell on a feeling that had nothing to do with the picture, or that only had to do with the picture by chance. It was as if I was taking stock of my mental health as it pertains to the memory of September 11th.

I don’t know anyone who died in the events of September 11th, but I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about what was happening.  This isn’t remarkable, but the fact that it isn’t remarkable is.  It’s indicative, I think, of the intensity and singularity of the trauma, and it goes a long way to describe the influence trauma can have on the way we experience art.

II.
The documentary film, Man on Wire, tells the story of the Frenchman Philippe Petit, who, in 1974, walked between the twin towers on a high-wire.

Though the film wasn’t made until 2005, no mention is made in it of the events of September 11th, because, as the director James Marsh explained, “What Philippe did was incredibly beautiful…It would be unfair and wrong to infect his story with any mention, discussion or imagery of the Towers being destroyed.” I mention this not to agree or disagree with Marsh’s decision, but rather because the decision itself resulted in a piece of art that, in one way, isn’t unlike Epstein’s photograph; both works involve the towers in such a way that the fate of the towers, while unknown or unacknowledged by the respective artists, cannot be entirely extinguished from the consciousness of the contemporary viewer. We look at the photograph, or watch the film, knowing what is to happen at this specific locale at a certain point in time; and even if we are able to banish the knowledge from our conscious mind, it still exists in our subconscious.

The result, I think, is a kind of haunting that inhabits the intended meaning of the work. (By intended meaning, I refer to what the work communicates if we exclude from consideration the fact that the towers collapsed). In Man on Wire, for instance, we are moved by the story of Petit not only because what he did was bold and unlikely, but because he did it in a place that, for many of us, is a specter. In other words, it is almost impossible to experience this work solely in terms of its intended meaning; the physical appearance of the towers is too closely bound to the tragedy in which the the towers were involved.  Yet if we are able to incorporate the sight of them into the particular piece of art in which they appear, they lend to that piece a special gravitas. In the least, they evoke a sense of mortality and pathos.

III.
Below is a photograph by the Finnish artist Jari Silomäki.  It belongs to a series called “Weather Diaries,” in which texts are combined with images to create a strange sort of journal, one in which the personal, the natural, and the political coexist.

Finlandia Hall, three hours after the collapse of World Trade Center.

Here, a snapshot of a concert hall in Finland is transformed by the text that accompanies it.  There is an ordinariness to the picture that suddenly becomes eerie when seen in conjunction with the event to which it alludes.  The cold-looking weather becomes mournful, knowing.  The visible becomes an evocation of the invisible.

This picture belongs to a discussion that includes the previous two works because it reveals, in an inverse way, the same thing the others reveal – how certain historical events can influence, even overshadow, what we are meant to be looking at.  Here, we might see Finlandia Hall, but only until we finish reading the text.  Then we don’t so much see it as see through it – we are a given a different kind of access to a specific memory.

This is why Silomäki’s project is important: for the way it creates a space to deal with trauma. All his pictures in “Weather Diaries” (you can see more here), encourage us to see the world with inexperienced eyes, by which I mean eyes that are not numbed or tired – eyes that are not, in a sense, our own.  We can become so accustomed to encountering traumas directly (through our own memories, as well as through the social construction of our world [media outlets, the internet, etc.]), that we forget the benefit that comes from encountering traumas indirectly – from remembering them when we are not expecting to remember them.  This isn’t an endorsement of surprise or shock as artistic technique, but rather an endorsement of art as revelation.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: "Man on Wire", "Weather Diaries, "West Side Highway", art, documentaries, James Marsh, Jari Silomäki, Mitch Epstein, Philippe Petit, photography, twin towers, World Trade Center ]]> http://bigother.com/2010/07/05/there-and-not-there-the-world-trade-center-towers-in-art/feed/ 5 edwardmullany images_f09