Un Lac

I gave this paper in Adelaide last week, as part of a panel on cinema and materiality. Conference papers can be such ephemeral works of scholarship. You present them to a handful of people, and then, unless they’re related to something else you’re writing, they disappear. But I love Philippe Grandreiux’s 2008 film Un Lac and I haven’t written on it anywhere else, so I thought I’d post it. Enjoy!

In the opening moments of Philippe Grandrieux’s Un Lac, we hear the sharp, rhythmic thwack of an axe. The arms swinging it fly across the screen. Behind the heaving red shape, stretching across the back left corner of the frame are some hazy, grey-green trees, their trunks blurred at the edges, smoothed into the pale sky. A trembling close up of a boy’s face. The camera shudders as if a small earthquake is rippling through the forest. Breathing hard the boy looks up, then begins driving his axe into the tree again, his face heaving back and forth with his breath, while the tree trunk hovers over the screen’s left edge. Then an upward shot into the canopy and the creaking sound of the tree cracking like a seismic fault line opening up and with a roar, the tree falls. The other trees sway, and then there is quiet. The camera moves across the forest ceiling in a quivering arc.

Later, as the boy leads his horse through the deep snow dragging the logs behind them, the camera “walks” too, shaking up and down so that part of the boy’s face falls off the bottom of the screen and moves out of focus as the shot tightens. He turns, a blurry ear, and then darkness. The image moves into abstraction. The crunching of the snow underfoot is loud and steady. The boy’s head moves in and out of the front of the frame, too dark and close to be anything more than a shape, a mass in motion. A jolt. Trees lurch in the background and the boy falls. An innervation of dark lines, a brush of spare branches, appear on the side of a rocky mountain then disappear. The camera tremors and the image is thick with the sound of rapid shuddering. When we see the boy again, he is lying in the snow in the shivering grip of a seizure.

Watching this sequence, I am struck by the force with which the camera and sound evokes the sensation of being in the human body. By this I do not mean to say that Grandrieux presents a haptic image, as is often suggested of this film, but that the shuddering of the camera and the way the sound brings the offscreen space into the image makes visual the energy of the body, and the sensation of being.

In his wonderful book on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze writes, “Colour is in the body, sensation is in the body, and not in the air. Sensation is what is painted. What is painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation, (what Lawrence speaking of Cezanne, called the appleyness of the apple.)”[i] Of course, the appleyness of Cezanne’s apples is not actually the appleyness of apples, but the appleyness of paint. It is the way the material qualities, the thickness, the shininess, the texture of brushstrokes, all come together to evoke the sensation of apple while also presenting the sensation of painting. Cezanne’s fruit are particularly good examples of this idea, because parts of the canvas are often left raw, so that the texture of the linen is visible alongside the texture of the paint. The experience one has standing before them is not just of what has been painted but also of the paint and the canvas.

Likewise, material qualities – of sound, light, shade, colour, camera motion – enable Un Lac to evoke the sensation of being in a body, and to explore themes of tenderness, intimacy and connection with the earth, while making visible the materiality of cinema.

When we speak about the materiality of cinema, what exactly are we speaking about? I’m going to revisit some very basic, primary ideas here, because I think the way materiality is spoken about in relation to cinema can be confusing, and because I want to suggest that questions of cinema’s materiality are linked to questions of medium.

The material of cinema is an immaterial material – a thing that has no solid physical presence, a material whose very nature is visual and (usually) sonic. As noted by Jee Hee Hong, this paradox is assumed in the term “materiality.”[ii] The OED defines materiality as “that which constitutes the ‘matter’ of something: opposed to formality; the quality of being material; material aspect or character; mere outwardness or externality.”  This gestures toward the stuff of the image – format, the grains on celluloid, the pixels in a digital image, glitches, lightness, darkness, those visual qualities that make up what we see.

Darren Ambrose, writing of Deleuze’s aforementioned book, defines materiality as “the problems, meanings, intensities and sensations actually happening through the material of paint (or in this case film) itself.”[iii] Rather than using film to put forward a pre-constructed image, the filmmaker gives themselves over to the medium, “surrenders to the matter […] and follows its virtual singularities. By attending to these traits the artist allows it to speak to their “instinct” and then devises a range of practical strategies to bring out these virtualities to actualise them as sensible “possibilities”, as heterocosmic facts.”[iv] The material conditions lead the image.

This is central to Un Lac, and to all Grandrieux’s work. He has said that at times, when the conditions are right and he and the performers are fully present in the moment, he films with his eyes closed, feeling, hearing, sensing his way through space. In an article framing Un Lac through the lens of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1979 article ‘Acinema,’ Rodney Ramdas argues that through this sense driven filming, Grandrieux “eliminates the eye from cinema.”[v] However, I would argue that rather than abandoning the visual, as Ramdas suggests, Grandrieux opens the eye up to the possibilities of sight. By presenting a vision that is fluid, amorphous and disorienting, Un Lac shifts what we define as an image.

Although Grandrieux’s shivering image is frequently abstract, I am hesitant to call it formless, or to say that it is opposed to formality altogether, because although it raises a challenge to conventional form, it nonetheless establishes its own logic and formal boundaries. Just as the work of painters like Cezanne and Bacon re-imagine rather than reject the structures of painting, Grandrieux does not abandon pre-established conventions of cinematic form, but pushes them in an attempt to capture the sensation of life with the machine of cinema. He presents a version of the visual that is uncoupled from thought, so, unable to translate what we see into information we simply see and hear the intensities and sensations that are the matter of the work. This is not chaos. Rather, we are presented with an alternate rhythm, a form built on an affective structure, one that is radical and challenging.

It is for this reason that I think that the question of cinematic materiality is tied up with the question of medium. The question, what is cinema? necessarily comes into play when we ask, what is the materiality of cinema? because the notions we consider when we ask the former – time, montage and the problem of narrative to name a few – are all part of the stuff from which we build a film.

So how does Un Lac consider these questions of medium via materiality?

Narrative paths. There will be no answers, no final gestures, but only possiblities. Look for example, at the image of Alexi (Dmitry Kubasov) that comes toward the end of the musical interlude, the exquisite moment when Hege (Natalie Rehorova) sings Schumann’s op 39 lieder MondNacht. Shot from what feels, in this film of unbearably intimate close-ups, like a distance, his body lies motionless in the snow, out of focus, a Figure (as Delueze writes via Cezanne) rather than a figurative depiction. That his body is still, not shaking, and that the image is placed at this point in the narrative  – Hege sings just after she loses her virginity and steps into a space of desire that will take her away from her family – suggests death. But, after Hege and Jurgen (Alexei Solonchev) row across the lake, Alexi re-appears – just as his father suddenly appeared out of the darkness midway through the film – his body re-animated as if one has turned back the pages in a choose your own adventure and taken a different path. That is one way, the film suggests, and this is another.

Sensation. In a review of The Logic of Sensation, Russell Ford explains sensation like this, “Sensation is not a faculty of the subject but, rather, the mutual limit of the subject and the object, a place in which these two aspects become indistinguishable, such that one can say that in sensation the subject is altered by aspects of worldly forces that are occluded by the perception of constituted objects.”[vi]

Un Lac presents this sensation through the use of soft focus and overexposure, by fuzzying the line between figure and ground, human and world. It performs this sensation by placing us in intimate proximity to the image. For example, in the opening moments we are struck by a hard thwacking sound and a rush of red motion, a red made more intense by the greenish grey behind it. Faced with this force of sound and colour, we sensate (if I can put it that way) because we cannot comprehend what we are seeing. The notion of sensation is extended in the way the film makes visible the invisible workings of Alexi’s body. The film itself enacts the shuddering of his seizures even when he is not having a fit, as though to make seen his hidden internal rhythm.

Flow. On the question of what Yvette Biro calls ‘flow’ – the way a film is structured to lead us from one sensation to the next, slowly, quickly, following or refuting the conventions of build up and release – Un Lac encloses us in the snow, the image, the intimacy of the family, almost until the end, when the claustrophobia of winter in the forest is broken with Hege’s newborn singing voice.

Grandrieux has used this technique before. In Sombre, when in the final moments, the camera travels up the mountain past ordinary people watching the tour de france, the sunlight glittering on the film so brightly after all the darkness that has come before it, and the sound of the song, Elysian Fields version of Serge Gainsbourg’s Les Amours Perdues mixed with the slowly ascending camera movement affects a sensation of opening, of expansion, an incredible charge of energy after the close intensity of the film. On the one hand it’s a terribly manipulative trick, but on the other, the obviousness of the manipulation and how far the conventional rhythms of build up and release favoured by Hollywood have been pushed makes it a powerful gesture, as if the intensification of the device transforms it into something radical.

In Un Lac, however, the effect (and the affect) of the technique is different. Here it marks a transition. It’s near the end but not the end, and it gives the film an injection of incredible warmth. For me, this moment opens up a space to read the materiality of the film as immanent. Un Lac’s vision of spirituality then, lies not in the nature depicted, as it does in a film like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but in the way the forest and the family who live with it are bound through sound and image and transformed into cinema. Hege sings, the sun breaks through a gap in the clouds, and the father takes Alexi’s unconcious head in his hands with a look of sublime tenderness. It is not the song that is immanent here, although it’s very beautiful, it is the way it is sung, the way Natalie Rehorova’s voice loses pitch, and when the piano creeps in in (I think) the only moment of non-diegetic sound in the film, falls out of time with its accompanying line. It is the sun and the clouds and the pale bright yellow of the patch of sunlight. It is Alexi, lying still in the snow and the way his father holds him. And in the shot of the father’s hand on his son’s head, you know what the film is gesturing toward. That the spiritual, the divine, resides in us, in the materiality of the world, and in the cinema.

In a fiery piece on the cinema, Grandrieux writes, “The future of cinema is to be free and great and strong, to transmit some of the ‘windy chaos’ that we tend to protect ourselves from, as if we desperately wanted to believe that the world is ordered, reasonable, possible, when it’s exactly the opposite: chaotic, delirious, untenable, driven by the unstoppable force of desire. Beyond will and morality, the world is what we desire, absolutely. And cinema should be considered commensurate with this excessive horizon.”[vii]

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[i] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 32.

[ii] http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/material.htm

[iii] http://www.scribd.com/doc/33310219/Darren-Ambrose-Deleuze-and-the-Materiality-of-Painting

[iv] ibid.

[v] http://lumenjournal.org/i-forests/ramdas-grandrieux/

[vi] Russell Ford, “Review: The Logic of Sensation” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, 4 (2005) 409.

[vii] http://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1423

Can’t give you anything, but love

I met my first Cassavetes moment six years ago in a script writing class.  It was the long and exhausting scene that comes at the end of A Woman Under the Influence and we watched it alongside another brilliant domestic moment, the scene in Network where William Holden tells his wife he’s in love with Faye Dunaway.  Later, I saw Shadows and Faces and Opening Night.  Then I wrote about The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and now his films are stuck under my skin and almost every tiny thing links back to a Cassavetes moment.  This has ruined countless conversations. Everything will be going along swimmingly, stories, jokes, shared wonder at lovely things, and then a word or an image will remind me of Gena or Seymour, wild laughter and endless glasses of scotch.  After that, I’ll gush uncontrollably while the other person’s attention wanes and they begin to wish they were somewhere else.

The other day Cadillac said, in reference to some kind of rot, ‘well botulism is the same everywhere,’ and immediately I was in the dressing room of The Crazy Horse West and Cosmo Vitelli was telling a sinking joke, ‘they got botulism and died!’ and laughing as though the rest of the room were laughing with him.  I’m always urging people to see Cassavetes’ movies, and then worrying they won’t like them and wondering if we’ll still be friends afterwards.  It’s a problem, because I think I might be becoming the very kind of person that annoys me the most.  The person Jonathan Lethem describes in the first part of his essay, ‘Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes’, the one who says, ‘Well quit saying you love me because if you don’t love that movie you don’t love me because I am that movie, that movie is me.’  Oh, help!

There are lots of reasons why I love Cassavetes so much.  I love his openness and the way his films ask questions and then answer them with more questions.  I love his images, the way he lets the frame become an abstract blur of hair and limbs when the characters come too close to the camera and how he lets the camera be curious, swooping after the characters as their bodies try to somehow express some terrifying primal feeling.  I love that he is so articulate about the inarticulable, that he gathers up all the things we feel but can’t put into words, and makes the film — the lighting, the composition, the camera movement —convey them.  Those myths you hear about him being an amateur director and a kind of idiot savant are bullshit.  I can’t think of another director whose images reflect so precisely the sensation of the character’s world.  There’s not a chance you can pull that off by accident.  Nor can I think of one who had such acuity about blindness — the way we so often fail to listen, fail to know what other people are feeling, fail to understand what it is they want.  Cassavetes loved Nicholas Ray, and I can see a shared commitment to communication in their films.  Just as Ray used the frame as a visual mirror of inner conflict, Cassavetes’ camera enacts the messy emotional binds his people are in so that we can feel how they feel and experience, just a little, what it is to be them.  Look at the lens flare in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.  It marks the frame so frequently and with such deliberate placement — how many times does the flare obscure Cosmo’s face?  — that it has to be telling us something, leading us to some realisation about this doomed man, this creator whose only art is a series of distinctly un-titillating strip shows.

And what about the way his camera bestows such dignity on his characters, even in the most undignified situations.  I’m thinking of Florence in Faces as she urges Chet to kiss her and Margarita in Love Streams, dancing slinkily with her daughter’s lover, two women whose youth has long past but whose desire and longing for love has not.  These scenes could so easily be played for the grotesque, for laughs, they’re scenes that in front of another camera could be unbearably mean.  Watch how respectfully the camera follows Mabel as she careens around the living room at the end of A Woman Under the Influence.  Cassavetes refuses to say, this woman is crazy, she’s nuts!  He doesn’t judge Nick either, when he gives his children beer and hypes Mabel up instead of calming her down.  They’re all just people, and sometimes they act foolish and lose their shit and upset everybody, but isn’t that what living is all about?

I could keep going.  I could describe Meade Roberts stunning performance as Mr Sophistication, the extraordinary dialogue in Love Streams, the beauty of Shadows.  But I’ll stop.  I’m taking Cadillac to see his first Cassavetes film on Wednesday.  I hope he likes it.

 

Blue Valentine

As Public Enemy reminded me last Wednesday night, don’t believe the hype.  I was hoping the hype when I went to see Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance) and I left disappointed.  Blue Valentine is actually a good film, but it isn’t ‘Revolutionary Road for generation y’ (The Vine), it doesn’t have ‘an ingenious temporal structure’ (Slate) and nor is it a confirmed tear-jerker.  Cadillac and I left dry eyed, and I’m not convinced it’s because we’re heartless. (I sooked all the way through Where the Wild Things Are.)  A few references have been made to Cassavetes but I feel like these comparisons miss the mark.  Cassavetes’ relationships are loose-ended and the dynamics between the characters messier.  His peripheral characters are as fleshy as the stars — relationships never happen between just two people.  There is wonder and discovery in a Cassavetes marriage and nothing ever really ends, it just goes on breaking, the pitch rising and falling as everyone struggles along bitter with drink and false laughter. While Cassavetes puzzles over what a marriage might be, Cianfrance knows.  This is it, he seems to be saying, watch it and weep.

Without a mention of Tom Waits’ moody song of the same name, Blue Valentine looks back as the relationship between a just past young and worn out married couple reaches its close.  The film has a dewy pink and blue colour palatte and a gently shifting camera perspective that reflects Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams)’s rocky grounding.  This is a love that is out of whack from the beginning.  The two meet while Cindy is trying to extricate herself from a coupling with a thick-headed jock, who we see giving her a thuggish, condom free banging on a dorm room couch.  He comes inside her and she washes herself out with water.  She’s either naïve or hopeful here, but I would’ve thought a medical student would realise this isn’t a safe method of contraception.  She meets Dean, and Dean is everything a boy in love should be.  Sweet, funny and a mean singer, Dean is also blindly romantic.  He adores Cindy, and when she discovers she’s pregnant they make a trip to the registry office and leave man and wife.  I thought the child was clearly not Dean’s, but Cadillac argues that this is vague.  In any case, Dean is a boy so in love he sacrifices his own life for Cindy and inevitably ends up an angry, frustrated man.  Dean’s arc is true, but there is a false note to Ryan Gosling’s performance.  His Dean seems to be two irreconcilably different people, or maybe it’s just poor styling.  His younger self looks and acts like an extra member of Grizzly Bear (who made the soundtrack) while his older style is an irony free filling-station wife-beater.

It’s Michelle Williams’ performance of Cindy that is the best thing about the film.  I’ve liked Williams since she played the only spunk in Dawson’s Creek, but I’ve never noticed what a tremendously physical actor she is before now.  There is a startling honesty to her movements.  Her shoulders are rigid and slightly slumped, and her hands are busy, making breakfast for Frankie, pushing her hair behind her ears.  She moves with the purpose of someone who can’t stop for fear of collapsing. On an overnight getaway to a lurid couples hotel, she showers herself with a frightening physical panic, wiping her hands over her face over and over as if she wants to wash herself away while Dean tries to engage her in sex.  Later, drunk and flat on the floor with her husband lurching desperately over her, she clenches her fists behind his head so tightly you can feel her nails cutting into her palms.  At the end of the film, she stands by her parents kitchen sink, one hand hanging like a on her hip like an anchor, her face blank and closed.  It’s this that’s affecting about Blue Valentine, the perfectly rendered image of a not yet middle aged woman so completely spent.

Hopscotch

I’m about to give up when I hear Cadillac calling out.  He’s found it.  White glinting marble, the names etched into it so that from a distance they’re hidden.  It’s plain (which is at it should be) and clean and new-looking (which is a surprise).  Under his name is a hole.  A sagging rose, stalk like the crooked ribs of a lost umbrella, juts out.  The hole is stuffed with messages, metro tickets, pebbles and tiny keepsakes.  So many people leave metro tickets for the dead that I begin to wonder if you need one to pass into the afterlife.  On top of this precious trash is a torn page with a hopscotch drawn on it in blue biro.

It’s a gesture to Julio Cortazar’s most famous book — one of the titles on my top five blow-me-away book list.  I still remember how I first read it, in tiny bursts that suited its brief, skittering chapters, on the ferry between Circular Quay and Kurraba Wharf.  It’s slow though, this book, with its lurching population and crowded happenings.  Everything is detailed, each buttonhole, nail and twist of the mouth.  The characters feel one thing and then another and we share every capricious moment.  There are the digressions, the expendable chapters that slip in between the narrative ones — slivers of reportage, jokes, wordplays, letters, the writings of the fictional Morelli, and affairs not covered in the plot.  As the hero Oliveira states, ‘There’s no such thing as a general idea.’

I bought Hopscotch on the back of a single prose poem.  ‘Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch’ was a set piece in my high-school English class, and I ripped it out of the book and stuck it in my diary.  I still think about it often but I’m not sure I’ve ever understood it.  In the collection there were other tales of ordinary things that take on extraordinary meaning — tubes of toothpaste, hairbrushes, hammers.  Under Cortazar’s inky fingers these objects are politicised and used to make sly digs at the drudgery of being a good citizen.  Hopscotch too, is full of these odes to the everyday.  ‘The sun began to hit Oliveira in the face sometime after two in the afternoon.  Besides the heat, it made it very hard for him to straighten out nails by hammering them on a tile on the floor (everybody knows how dangerous it is to straighten out a nail with a hammer, there is a moment when the nail is almost upright, but when you hit it with the hammer again it gives half a turn and pinches the fingers you’re holding it with; there’s a quick perverseness about it all), stubbornly hammering them on a tile (but everybody knows that) stubbornly on a tile (but everybody) stubbornly.’ (page 228) That pesky nail.  Like the thrumming of the hammer, the phrase beats stubbornly.  The frustrating rhythm, the repetition of the word ‘hammer’ and the turned phrase doubling the feeling of trying to straighten the nails.

Hopscotch is full of humour and Cortazar pokes fun at everyone.  The main characters, a group of multicultural bohemians, are drawn lovingly and then gently derided for their intellectual indulgence.   There is a brilliant moment not far into the main narrative, where Oliveira wanders through Paris in the rain.  ‘“Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity,” Oliveira repeated. “But Jesus, I’m going to get soaked,”’ (page 99) To avoid making the puddle in his shoe any worse he slips into a piano concert given by one Berthe Trépat.  The programme is absurd and the old man who introduces the concert describes each work with sycophantic admiration.  ‘The Three Discontinuous Movements by Rose Bob, one of Madame Trépat’s favourite students, had their start in the reaction aroused in the spirit of the composer by the sound of a door being slammed shut, and the thirty-two chords which made up the first movement were the resulting repercussions of that sound on the aesthetic plane;’ (page 101) And on it goes in this bubbling spirited prose, without pause, the musical patter of the language driving the book on.

In Argentina, Cortazar’s writing is everywhere.  He left at 30 and spent the rest of his life in Paris, but he is Argentinian, and that, it seems, is what counts.  The café he frequented in Buenos Aires advertises the fact, and his books are sold at newsstands.  From afar, he spoke out against military dictatorships in Latin America, but I think there is more to why he is so celebrated there.  Perhaps his writing reflects back to the people of Buenos Aires just how they’d like to see themselves.  His characters are intellectual, artistic, cosmopolitan.  They are frequently blind to their own self-indulgent naivety, but this is laughed at gently, and besides, a little misplaced ego is better than becoming a product of the state.  And perhaps he captures a certain mood that is not unlike the tango, passionate and reserved at the same time, the rhythm more like a march than a dance, pulled and stretched at will.

Towards an Elegant Solution

An old review of the Peter Cripps’ exhibition that was on in June. I wrote this for a competition that I didn’t win, so I’m putting it here. Yay! for blogs and their publish buttons.

On entering the main gallery at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) for the first part of Peter Cripps’ retrospective, you are immediately made aware of the space. Large panels of masonite and dulled mirror stretch around the walls and up across the ceiling, forming a curved space inside the rectangular room. The unevenly hung planks draw attention to the height of the ceiling and the narrowness of the gallery. This work, Another History for H.B and R.L (1991) was re-fitted around ACCA’s unusual shape, and it reveals the surprise of a gallery being so long and thin. It’s like an aerated tunnel – standing inside you feel the curve arching over your head, but the gaps let you see into the beyond.

Cripps is a curator as well as an artist and so space, and the interplay between work, gallery and spectator, is vital to his installations. The human scale of Field (1970-2010) and Construction Series (1974-1980) invite the viewer to engage with the works as if in conversation. Field is a collection of spindly wood and brass tripods. Standing the height of a tall person, the legs are crowned with slender brass rods and neat rectangular mirrors. These reflect the viewer’s face cut through with brass. Like dysfunctional surveyors tools, they are sturdy, yet unbalanced, and the tension created between the graceful piping and the heavy wooden legs is unsettling.

Construction Series shares the lightness of the brass and mirrors. Along one wall, makeshift forms made from toilet rolls and cheese boxes poke out of the gallery walls like blind hands. Cripps gives these discarded everyday objects a new life, delighting in their forms and shapes. There’s a playful link here to the cars children make out of empty tissue boxes with toilet rolls for wheels, but Cripps takes away all allusions: the objects are presented in and of themselves. On the opposite side of the room is a line of small mirrors, placed so they tilt toward the ground. By celebrating the discarded and making the useful uncomfortable to use, Cripps questions the relationship between functionality and objecthood.

Two works that explore this exchange directly are State Library of Victoria Commission Proposal (1991) and Display Culture for H and d.M and R.M (2010). The first, a never realized sculpture designed for the lawns of the State Library of Victoria, looks like a wardrobe or three-paneled display case. Drawers tilt open, but they are false ¬– just the shape of a drawer without a cavity. There are glass-fronted shelves but these too are useless, the glass fixing their emptiness. Display Culture is a large wooden structure that looks like a storage system with an arch in the centre. Made of untreated marine ply, it could be found stretching along a wall at one of Melbourne’s bars, filled with knick-knacks, records and wine bottles. Here, it stands opposite a wall of butcher’s paper that has been faintly marked with squares. Cripps admires the work of Sol Lewitt, and these delicate geometric drawings are a lovely homage. The squares line up with the back end of the boxes so that the drawing is a two dimensional reflection of the sculpture – a mirror image made without mirrors. The closed back of the units shows off all the natural irregularities in the wood grain, and the uneven rings, rough fibres and pale reddish colour give this piece a warmth that is absent from the rest of the show.

Towards an Elegant Solution is the first full scale retrospective of Cripps’ career, and the exhibition will be shown in three parts, each running for two weeks. A large collection of essays that explore Cripps’ historical and theoretical context accompanies the show and it’s an illuminating guide to the spare, intellectual work. This is a much quieter show than some of ACCA’s previous retrospectives – the past two years have featured video artists Lyndal Jones and Richard Billingham – but if you are willing to give the works time, to puzzle over them and play with them, they reveal an elegance, which, in true minimalist fashion, is the solution.

An Apology

When I started out on this trip, I thought I’d blog.  I imagined sharing all the exhibitions I’ve seen and having time to think about them intelligently, in words.  But as you can see, I’ve been so busy doing that I haven’t had time to reflect.  I’m sorry.  In apology I offer you this photo I took at the Getty Centre, where I saw an astounding show of photojournalism.

And one of the other Venice, the one with muscle men, skateboards and blinding sun.




I will be back properly soon, I promise.

My Lolita

In the May edition of ‘The Believer’, there is an essay by Namwali Serpell on Lolita.  There is a strange possessiveness we feel about books we love, and when someone else claims them as their own we rile up – after all, Lolita is MY Lolita.  But Serpell writes for ‘The Believer’ and because I love ‘The Believer’ almost as much as I love Lolita, I’m happy to share.  Serpell writes joyful prose and as I read her words, I longed to read Nabakov’s again.

My love affair with Lolita is different to Serpell’s.  I’ve never written an essay on it, and the one time I had the opportunity to do so, in a year twelve English class I demurred, opting instead for The Catcher in the Rye.  I felt then, that to write on Lolita would be ruinous.

Lolita was not the first book by Nabakov I read, and I came to it rather oddly by way ofAda.  In my mid teens I had a lazy practice of choosing what to read by grabbing books at random off the library shelf.  I first stumbled on Vonnegut this way, when my lucky dip landed me with Slapstick.  I didn’t understand a word of it and it left me feeling so hollowed out I’ve never dared read Vonnegut again.  (That’s the danger of reading too widely at fourteen.)  But I liked the unwieldy Ada – it was a fat hardback copy oozing that sour smell of old library books – and so I read more Nabakov, his short stories, and then Lolita.

I bought my first copy in 1996 at the Electric Shadows Bookshop.  It’s a green spined Penguin with a fragment of Balthus’ Girl and Cat on the front.  It cost $14.95.  I still have this copy; the spine is peeling off at the bottom front corner and the cover is torn.  I hate this cover.  I tried to amend the image when my photography class was given a book jacket project.  I attempted to recreate the apple, that moment before Humbert’s first dangerous fulfillment.  ‘She sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit.’  The results were disappointing.  My friend, pale skinned, moody and a product of too much Smiths, was no nymphet (although she has her own allure) and the light was wrong.  I imagined Ramsdale bathed in a late summer glow, all yellow and warm and drifting slowly into night – instead, my camera stared into the cold winter sunshine of an endless middleclass mid-afternoon. But as Serpell points out, Nabakov never wanted an image of Lolita on the cover – every reader will have their own downy nymphet under their eyelids.

Since that first well-thumbed copy I have acquired others.  I have Serpell’s cover, the second International Vintage edition of 1997, with the knock-kneed legs and blown skirt, and I have the first International Vintage, published in 1989, which sports the same Vanity Fair quote, ‘The only convincing love story of our century’ scrawled in handwritten font around a blurred photo of a girl holding a bicycle, her toes alluringly pointed inward. (Daily, you can witness this vulnerable stance on the pages of The Sartorialist).  I have some other Penguin editions, one with Shelley Lyons glancing over the top of her heart shaped sunglasses under the words, ‘The greatest novel of rapture in modern fiction’, the plain orange re-issue and the silver spined butterfly.  I also have a copy of the original Olympia Press edition, not the first but the fourth printing, made in 1959 in two volumes with that plain cover of the most perfect green.  Damien gave it to me for my 29^th birthday, and it is possibly the best present I have ever received.  Ryan has a copy I covet, a hardcover with a banned book stamp marking its flyleaf.

Nabakov’s prose is always fluid, but in Lolita, it sings.  It rolls and rumbles, and underneath the tragic Humbert’s purple prose there is Nabakov laughing at the sounds of a new and other language.  English was not his native tongue and perhaps it was this, the ear he had for the sounds of a strange language that let him write so freely – punning, rhyming, and twisting words to suit his flow.  Every description hurtles forward, the words tumbling after one another,

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called ‘sage brush’ appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

It’s a celebration of language – lyrical, humourous and bleak in turns.

Serpell writes of the surprise at discovering the horror in her favourite paragraph (it is the one in chapter 32 that begins like this: ‘I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise…’) only after several re-readings.  Swept up in the beauty of the words, she finds she has somehow missed the disquiet.  For me, the horror is there from the beginning.  It is there in Annabel’s parents, the ‘bald brown Mr Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness)’, in Humbert’s first marriage to the chubby, stubbly Valeria, and in the pudgy girl prostituted by her parents.

Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provencal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept.  It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll.

A bald doll.  As if the preceding description wasn’t stomach turning enough.  John Updike must have admired Nabakov’s visceral descriptions of the flesh, the grotesquery of the body that is both repellant and desirable in all its sticky glory. It is Lolita’s innocence amidst all this grime that makes her so intensely appealing.

Of course, the true horror is that this state of grace can’t last.  With his terrible love, Humbert pulls Lolita into his pain.  ‘You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.’  Every time I reach this line I’m swamped by the same sensation.  It’s like having pulled a billy-kart up to the top of a gravelly hill, and now teetered at the top, you get in and look down.  There is a moment there, reins held, feet tucked away from the wheels, where you could stop, but of course you push off and slide skidding, skin scraping off knees, down the dusty slope.  The horror grows, and for me culminates just before Serpell’s beloved page,

There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on – a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face…that look I cannot exactly describe…an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration – and every limit presupposes something beyond it – hence the neutral illumination.

And Nabakov goes on to remind us, ‘that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child’.  A child so destroyed that her ache falls outside the bounds of language.  I always see here Lolita’s soft face with a painfully old expression, that particular helpless exhaustion of unhappy adults hovering over the face of a child.  A heartbreakingly clear image slipped into a baffling barrage of silky words.  It’s this that Nabakov does so well, and why I love Lolita.