The Fabric of Memory

I have just finished re-reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I love it because it describes the intimate details of a grieving families life, carrying on but never forgetting, sometimes freezing in grief, sometimes running away from it, eventually learning to live with it through happier memories of the one they have lost.
These extracts are examples of the intricacy yet simplicity of Sebold's writing and insight into the human experience. They capture what I want to in a way in my work. Bringing back the sense of touch whilst also being removed from the physical experience of the object. Drawing on our memories and our childhood, and thinking of certain experiences and memories in which we remember a profound depth of feeling. It is sensual. It is nostalgic. It is being human.

Wet laundry: the snap, the yank, the wet heaviness of double- and queen-sized sheets. The real sounds bringing back the remembered sounds of the past when I had lain under the dripping clothes to catch water on my tongue or run in between them as if they were traffic cones through which I chased Lindsey or was chased by Lindsey back and forth.

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And my father would take the thin cotton top sheet and bunch it up in his hands while being careful to keep the two corners between his thumb and forefinger. Then he would snap it out so the pale blue (if they were using Buckley's) or lavender (if they were using mine) sheet would spread out like a parachute above him and gently, what felt wonderfully slowly, it would waft down and touch along his exposed skin- his knees, his forearms, his cheeks and chin. Both air and cover somehow there in the same space at the same time- it felt like the ultimate freedom and protection.

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Extracts from The Lovely Bones (2002) Alice Sebold

Alina Szapocznikow: Emotion, Memory, Sensuality and Abjection

The delicious joys of the mouth! But also, alas, the curse of having a mouth! Filled with the bitter taste of memories one chokes on; a melancholy mouth that neither swallows nor spits things out but continues chewing, dismembering the remembered, in a ceasless grinding motion of the teeth. Imagine a mouth that was both one of infinte joys and of endless mourning. I say this is the mouth of Alina Szapocznikow.

Jan Verwoert

These were the photos which I first saw in Frieze magazine and which prompted me to look at this artist.What strikes me is there sensuality, yet clearly raw and material origins. Are they abject? What I saw in them was undoubtedly what I would want to call 'beauty' and yet on reading about them, it turns out they are sculptures made from chewing gum! It was one of those moments where i thought, 'I wish I'd thought of that'. Verwoert identifies contrasting themes in the Polish artists work:

faecal/oral

body/nature

defacation/growth

repulsive/beautiful

The contradiction of the repulsive and the beautiful is something my own work has been concerned with for some time. After the art event in which I recently displayed my work and the comments I received about my woodblock prints, the theme of the body and nature is something I am determined to pursue.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/28/arts/alin190.jpg

http://www.documenta12.de/fileadmin/img/ausstellung/D_2_31.jpg

http://digitalrightsmanifesto.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/second_version_of_triptych_1944-_3.jpg

http://slowmuse.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/portrait_1952-2.jpg

Szapocznikow's chewing gum sculptures/photographs remind me of physical Francis Bacon forms; melting and yet suspended. Creature-like and yet unrecognisable and inanimate.

Death is not dead: the work keeps it alive.

These words I think sum up for me why I am so pre-occupied with meat as a subject for art. It's something that was so important, so alive and life-giving. For me the idea of eating something so functional that has then ceased to be, is abject, if anything can be abject at all. And in photographs of meat there is still that sense that a heart could beat, a leg could move (its a tension that makes me hate waxworks). And in painting you can re-animate things, and yet these re-animations come from something that can never be animated again. 'The work keeps it alive'.

The work of Bacon and Szapocznikow could also be connected as they both deal with memory and the manifestation of emotion, what Verwoert describes in the article as 'shaping emotional realities'.

http://www.obieg.pl/files/images/120408.jpg

As a Jewish Polish artist who lived through the Second World War perhaps the rendering of emotion was a necessary antidote to her history. Sculptures such as the 'Pogrzeb Aliny' ('Alina's Funeral', above) swirl with a sadness and a history that quietly beg recognition. Its a truth that unfolds to the viewer, such as in Tony Cragg's work which I recently saw at the Lisson Gallery, which owe there melting sensuality to a pre-occupation with the material rather than emotion, but which also gradually reveal forms through melting folds of marble.

http://artnews.org/files/0000050000/0000049482.jpg/Tony_Cragg.jpg

The quality of sensuality is something that draws me to an artwork above anything else I think; the power to affect in you the same emotion as another human being through materials and objects. And perhaps as a woman, recently the work of women artists, and of their exploration of their own bodies and mens as equal and harmonious is something that has drawn my attention.

Szapocnikow is significant as a woman artist:

In the male-dominated society and art world of the 1950s and ’60s, Szapocznikow’s career was marked not only by her traumatic past and poor health, but also by her gender. That she dared to charge her art with such strong affect is significant in this regard. Classified as woman’s work, affective labour – bearing the sorrows (of others) and giving the joys of sex – is traditionally relegated to the privacy of family life and thus veiled from the public eye.

I like that rather, as some feminist art is commonly, albeit perhaps wrongly viewed as a reversal of gender roles, Szapocnikow is giving us a commentary on what it meant to be a woman for her in the time that she lived. It was still shocking because as the article points out, she sculpts emotions that were usually kept behind closed doors (women as sexual beings- who would have thought!) but there is a sincerity and an offering of a shared space in which to share these emotions; a sincerity and a truth.

I would like to think that there is an element of this truth to my photographs of old fashioned lingerie nestling within its sensual folds objects that bring to mind for me notions of the maternal and the stereotypical identifying female forms. The light in the photographs enhances this, bringing forth a nostalgia about how these objects should be viewed, why they have been put together, and what the story behind them could be. Second-hand lingerie must have a fascinating tale to tell, and yet is something quite abject to think about (such as when you see second hand bras in a charity shop- is there a market for these?!)

Szapocnikow is not afraid to sculpt sexual bodies. She particularly seems to have a pre-occupation with the mouth (again this reminds me of Tony Cragg who reveals facial profiles in his melting masses of material):

Mouth eats Mouth: a high of sheer oral pleasure.

Going back to the chewing gum Fotorzezby; the way she describes the creation of masticated sculptures in itself is alluring, and the way she connects this with memory is really interesting. I want to heighten this feeling of memory in my own work, and have been exploring this through the use of stains, which more recently have come to stand in for missing and yet suggested part of the body. The idea of dis-membering and re-membering fills my head with ideas. The close connection of all this to the body, ie. creating these sculptures with her own tongue, saliva, teeth creates a truth and bodily connection that makes the sculptures/photographs ever more appealing and at the same time marked or dirtied. But who says that spit, shit, sick etc. have to be negative; it's all bodily experience.

The article reveals a more humourous and again equality-promoting side to Szapocznikow's work, for example Rzezba Lamp VI:

Penises can be bananas can be nipples can be lips...There's no law against bananapenisnipplelips. Having them breaks no taboo...


...the erection is even freed from its representative function as a phallic symbol to reveal, jubilantly, how when put to good use, a penis can be fun for everyone.

http://www.obieg.pl/files/images/160305.jpg

I just love the way this is phrased, and it seems to be in line with an idea that Helen Chadwick's book 'Effluvia' introduced. That we are all just meat, living physical bodies, and the roles that we assign ourselves are simply mental assignations, perhaps dictated by physical ability but nonetheless we are all, whatever gender, whatever size or shape, made up of the same stuff. And Szapoczinkow's dis-membering and re-membering of the body allows us to discover 'new couplings' and also I believe to remember the enjoyment of the natural coupling for which humans were intended, not just for necessity, but for pleasure.



Jan Verwoert, Frieze Magazine, Issue 129 (March 2010)

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/mouth_to_mouth

"There's lots of vagina in our work..."

There's lots of vagina in our work, but it is not about vaginas. Rather, we are inventing a new form language radiating a female power which cannot be conveyed in any other way at this time...These images are universal, for they are about being a human body in the world...a holy body: which knows, thinks, pains, remembers, works, imagines, dreams, yearns, aspires, and which may not be violated. As women artists we are presenting a image of woman's body and spirit as that which cannot and must not be colonized either sexually, economically or politically.

Faith Wilding

"Sexual Politics"

This is a term I have come across in many of the books around the subject of art, feminism and women artists. But what do the author's mean by it. Is it a universal term with a universal meaning?

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

I recently went to the Arshile Gorky Retrospective at the Tate Modern (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/arshilegorky/). It re-affirmed for me why he is one of my favourite painters.

Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia

http://vvoice.vo.llnwd.net/e12/art-as-salvation.1935487.40.jpg

Garden in Sochi

http://johntimmons.com/art103/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/gorky.jpg

Drawing

http://www.camjap.gulbenkian.pt/Gallery/%7B10279c21-0d5e-4db5-b6b0-0f936254e8a0%7D/97783e3f-0ebf-4c3e-bc93-c41f32729be4.jpg

Waterfalls

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/06autumn/images/taylor_fig2large.jpg

Betrothals

http://www.martinries.com/images/AG_TheBetrothal-1moca1947.jpg

Examples of Pomegranates in Painting

The pomegranate is historically significant and this has been reflected in painting. It has significance in the Christian culture, as well as others, and it's symbolism stretches back to Greek mythology even.

Salvador Dali, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, (1944)

http://en.academic.ru/pictures/enwiki68
Dream_Caused_by_the_Flight_of_a_Bumblebee_around_a_Pomegranate_a_Second_Before_Awakening.jpg

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine (1874)
http://www.auburn.edu/~keirscm/britlit/rossetti_proserpine.jpg


Sandro Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranate (1487)

http://www.ccn.yamanashi.ac.jp/~morita/Subjects/phenomene/IMAGES/boticceli_pomegr.jpg

Hearts and Pomegranates: The Object of Femininity

Capturing the Heart

Imprints, Memory and Nostalgia

Blood Stains

Tea Stains

Maternal

Obviously alot of people may see sexual connotations in these images. But this was not the intention as I feel I need to highlight for my work overall. I decided to put these things together because i have been using both meat and nightgowns separately to explore sensuality. After the influence of Helen Chadwick i have combined the two and think the sensuality is heightened even further, bringing out other ideas; particularly for me the evocation of a kind of maternal feeling. I think the photos are rather beautiful and mix two very strongly symbolic objects; the heart symbolises life, bringing it outside the body tranforms this into an idea of past life, memory and vulnerability. And these ideas are nestled within an ultra feminine object, sexualised but also comforting, making the overall effect beautiful, but also repulsive i suppose. These images also tackle the ideas of hollow skins that i have previously been concerned with looking at nightgowns and plasters. The heart set within this ornamental skin lends a new life and also nostalgia to the images. I also feel, like with the plasters, that there is a child-like feel here, perhaps stemming from the idea of maternity i think these photos convey, and from the naivety of putting two symbolic objetcts together. i like having this child-like sense to my work and its something i'm going to try to more wittingly create.