June 25, 2013
This is why I spoke of ‘absurd genius,’ genius that man, whether he likes it or not, has in common with the plants – and willy-nilly, unless he throws himself into confusion by his own act, the man who has it must in some way be absurd – and without pride of flowering.
This is my method of waiting, and my anguish disgusts me, since it is hardly likely that plants set themselves such problems as would exhaust and etiolate them. To be aware that within oneself are such mysteries is not conducive to comfort. If I tried to unravel this skein, where should I be? I mix the paste in which I get stuck.
The spectacle of nature which should distract me plants me more firmly in it. Moreover my refuge is a park where once I planned to make my actors move. Its setting superimposed itself on those I used. Their trees grow entangled. Their brambles overlap. Their thickets part. The Beast appears.
Who can daydream and pay enough attention to his fences to forbid any access to his domain?
The truth is I am lost in it.
– Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being
Alexx Shilling, Arthur Kell and I have encountered the garden, or vice versa, as we bring the VOLKERKUNDE/ANTHROPOLOGY SUITE into its next stage of fruition. This encounter with Bavarian ecology is half-unexpected…we began by looking at humans, and we are now spending our time with plants and very small animals.
The project began in Vienna in November in the human specimen archives of the Ethnography Museum. The larger body of work is preoccupied and curious about the ways in which human societies (and States) create boundaries between humans, and police those boundaries… Terms like “anti-miscegenation” and “homophobia” are a vocabulary for separating humans, categorizing humans, and policing humans. How are we contained? What constricts us? From whom – and what – are we separated?
What is this difficulty of being?
I think that’s why I’m currently so obsessed by the snails. Their segregated chambers contain a continuum of one single body. They slip through constriction. They experience containment and restriction of form in truly profound ways. I held in my hand a single snail and two empty shells. One bigger, one smaller. It investigated both, putting its head into the open chamber of each.
(Ah, that we could carry our whorled homes on our backs. Unless we do… We choose our own restrictions, our own containers, and sometimes they fit, and sometimes they done. Some of the greatest human pain is the suffering of the shell that does not fit.)
We work all day here in this garden – it’s now a formal place but originally it held vats of wax for the candle factory, in long even rows out in the sunlight. Now, it is a lurid green of Bavarian spring, a chartreuse, under bleak black skies. It rains all day, and it’s cold, and the garden is filled with snails and slugs and the bright jolts of poppy (Mohn) and Lythrum (called “loosestrife” here). Everything is molten – mud, bodies.
Just beyond the garden walls, the neighboring buildings are the former SS headquarters, and Gestapo headquarters, and Nazi torture facilities. The tall green walls themselves separate us from what lies beyond. And here we are with what lies within. Within the walls, of course, and within everything within the walls that hold us. As three artists working together in five different disciplines, we converse with ourselves and each other and intersect the project itself in a prismatic manner…individual bands of light, somehow simultaneously one and other. Creating is quite compelling when separated by discipline but collaborating across, reaching across and through and under and over. Not segregated. Something else.
Containing us is this garden…a shell we carry on our back. Outside us is the memory of terror. We crawl through it.
I resonate with Cocteau’s lines, “he throws himself into confusion by his own act.” And the willy-nilly of profusion. It’s all in the balance between the two, the confusion and the profusion. Release and containment. What we place ourselves inside.
Etoliate means to become pale through the exclusion of light. The skies are cold and black. The snails and slugs wind their way though the mud. It’s beautiful here, in the cold and dark and green willy nilly.
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