30 May 2013, Francisco de Corcuera, The Impossible
Existence of a Mathematician
25 July 2013, The Birth of Cinema … and Beyond
Judging by the content and
thinking behind these exhibitions, Rosenfeld Porcini present contemporary art
as an interdisciplinary form; one that is not only open to different fields of
knowledge (i.e Corcuera’s apparent interest in mathematics, architectonics and
cosmic principles) but one that also manifests its energies in matter other
than canvas and paint. Whilst painting is, of course, well represented in the
gallery’s curatorial decisions, this focus is productively supplemented via an
interest in sculpture, video and the presentation of a series of fascinating
performances involving dance and sound art.
Evie Salmon is the perfect
choice of commentator to engage with and communicate this remit. Her work as a
writer is similarly interdisciplinary whilst as a painter she articulates a
corresponding interstitial position via the creation of images that mix music,
psychogeography and synaesthesia. Working in both capacities, she has the
ability to make obtuse links across different bodies of work and turn these
various dérives into productive lines of thought. Thankfully, another of her
gifts is intellectual clarity. It’s so easy for talks of this kind to either
spiral off into vague, theoretical incomprehension or to plunge into
over-simplified condescension. Both of Salmon’s presentations navigated these
dangers well and succeeded in striking the right balance between content,
format and audience awareness. The talks had the accessibility of a good
conversation, the density and detail of a great lecture and the type of
engagement you get with a carefully crafted story.
The session on Corcuera’s
The Impossible Existence of a Mathematician
took as its starting point the various questions suggested by the artist’s own
creative rationale. In the exhibition’s supporting text we are told that his
work expresses an attempt to negotiate a fundamental conceptual tension:
Raised in a strong Catholic background, he has been
haunted by the impossibility of living life by the rigid structures which
organised western religions impose upon the believer. He has endlessly posed
himself the question: can one live life by order and rules alone or will life
itself inevitably get in the way? His paintings, not withstanding their formal
development, have conceptually always illustrated this dynamic quandary.
At
first glance, it’s difficult to equate the abstraction of the canvases with
the personal and highly specific nature of this project. Corcuera’s designs
appear more like idiosyncratic blueprints similar to the imagined geometries of
Archigram rather than motivated heterodoxologies. As illustrations of this
“quandary” it seems that the profusion of harsh angles and perpendicular lines
shows, at best, the dominance of a particular kind of order (mathematical or by
analogy, religious) as opposed to an oscillation between fixity and fluidity.
Salmon’s argument navigated this problem by focusing on the idea of
cartography. According to the gallery’s literature, Corcuera’s family heritage
can be traced back to one Rodrigo de Corcuera, a 16th Century
map-maker. Using the idea of the map as an interpretive tool and combining this
with Corcuera’s emphasis on points of intersection and erasure, she did not
attempt to 'decode' the images but considered their signifying potential as
maps. That’s to say, rather than spuriously reading the composition of a line
allegorically, as either a 'sign' of authority or its converse distortion,
Salmon considered the diagrammatic potential of the abstract images: “What kind
of space is Corcuera mapping?”
Wisely,
Korzybski’s maxim that “the map is not the territory” was kept in mind and the
answer to the posited question was that the paintings represent acts of
intellectual mapping. Salmon argued that
Corcuera used his paintings to represent not an idealised space that one might
wish to step into, but a space of activity in which such a territory is
imaginatively sought. The former concept is very much the domain of H.P.
Lovecraft’s story '
The Dreams in the Witch House' (1933) in which a scholar of
both mathematics and folklore thinks “too much about the vague regions which
his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know”. The story
suggests that certain accumulations of extreme architectural angles in specific
spaces hold the key to “transgalactic” movements: literal pathways to other
worlds, other knowledge and other forms of behaviour. The mirror image of this
text and one that aligns with Salmon’s analysis is J.G. Ballard’s '
Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?' one of his iconic
Ambit 'advertisements' from 1967. Rather
than positing cosmological transformation, Ballard’s cryptic geometry speaks of
epistemological and structural intersection as that which forms the locus of
paradigm shift. The emphasis is not on the transition to a hitherto unknown 'outer space', but a re-calibration of one’s entangled surroundings, the sphere
of 'inner space'. Similarly, Salmon argued that Corcuera offered a comparable
invitation to speculative thought. His stated intention to “chart, to measure,
to embody the very nature of thinking”, (his interest in what he terms 'sobjectivity')
was read in terms of Georges Bataille’s notion of '
the impossible'. Put simply,
this is a striving for that which is desired, a striving in which the deferral that underpins the desire operates as a productive motor. Corcuera’s project is impossible at a
representational level, but it is precisely this impossibility that drives the
work, is depicted in the work and hence constitutes its 'sobject'.
Salmon’s
most recent talk on
The Birth of Cinema… and Beyond proceeded using a similar methodology of gentle but incisive
deconstruction. It began by looking at the exhibition’s main statement of
intent:
A virtual idea of cinema existed many centuries
prior to the actual invention of the medium. When people entered a church in
Catholic Europe or a noble palace, they were confronted by paintings from the
Old and New Testament, or well-known scenes from
Greek mythology. Calling upon the oral
or written accounts of the complete narrative in question, they could elaborate
a virtual film from their own imagination. The understanding and appreciation
of the artwork was therefore an active experience.
Here
the exhibition pitches itself as an intervention in the debate on cinematic
pre-history. Conventionally, this is a narrative that constellates around the parallel
developments of Edison, Muybridge, the Skladanowsky Brothers and the Lumière Brothers, amongst several others. The development of film as a medium
and art form at this point is seen to amplify the potentiality of the moving
image whilst cinema takes the nomadic exhibition of this material into specially
designed halls of consumption. However, this
fin de siècle ground zero is built upon a long history of the image
that is connected to media other than celluloid and nitrate film. The
development of devices such as the
kinemetoscope, and the
zoetrope date back to the mid-19
th Century whilst the magic lantern dominated public shows
and private séances throughout the 18
th Century.
Richard Stanley tells us that Athanasius Kircher
described the basic principles of projection in his
Ars Magna Lucis et umbrae (1646) while the use of the procedure to ‘conjure’ demons goes back even further. In Stanley's account, sometime in 1540 the
goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini had an encounter with shadow, light and smoke magic in the
ruins of the Colosseum. In his papers he describes it as a carefully organised
spectacle using images of various sizes, (no doubt amplified due to the
acoustics and architecture of the space).
This
lineage takes us to the period of the earliest paintings included in the Rosenfeld
Porcini show, particularly those by Giovanni Lanfranco ('Aeneas fleeing with his family from Troy in
flames') Ferrau Fenzoni ('Christ nailed to the cross') and Andrea Michieli
('David and Goliath'). The problem with hypothesizing their inclusion in the
history of cinema is that the latter form pursues a line of development via
various types of moving image projection. Cinema is born out of and plots a
historical line that is proximate but nevertheless parallel to that of
painting.
In
her talk, Salmon engaged with this issue with an efficient focus on the notion
of painting as a representational mode that is able to approximate if not
manifest a virtual moving image. She made a very interesting parallel between
the lines of focalization used in static compositions and the manner in which
these guide the viewer in a 'narrative' around the paintings. Coupled with the
point in the exhibition literature regarding the elaboration of recognised
mythic scenes, this arc of the discussion put forward a convincing argument for
an aesthetic understanding of the
persistence of vision. Persistence of vision describes the mechanism of the
moving image whereby its smooth kineticism is made possible due to the
perception of an afterimage on the surface of the retina. Salmon’s argument was that this physiological persistence, essential to film, finds parallel in the
cultural persistence of resonant icons, thereby permitting the narrativization
of certain paintings at the point of (ap)
perception.
This
fascinating opening salvo continued into a second strand that looked at the
engagement with cinema and film on the part of contemporary artists such as
Gideon Kiefer and
Fatma Bucak. In a discussion of Kiefer’s surgical imagery in 'The Solemn Moment' (2013), Salmon offered cinema’s solemn moment as the cut,
the edit; the point of invisibility that sutures the frame and thereby
generates significance. These points lead to some of the most interesting
comments of the talk. Offering the gallery itself as a kind of cinema, Salmon
presented a brilliant reading of the mounting of the canvases as the site of a
productive system of juxtapositions in excess of any direct cinematic content
in the frames themselves.
The
talk concluded in the final room of the gallery in which Antonio Joli’s 'Campo
vaccino' faces Bucak’s video installation 'Blessed are you who come'. Here Salmon expertly drew together the various
strands of the discussion. The layout of the room brilliantly exemplified the
proceeding point about parallel developments but also foregrounded the imagery
of the ruin that had been to a lesser and greater degree present in most of the
other works of the exhibition. This motif was discussed in relation to Walter
Benjamin’s famous passage from '
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936):
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing
on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under
the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our
comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it
manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns
and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad
stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came
the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a
second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly
and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow
motion, movement is extended.
This
is one of Benjamin’s most utopian pronouncements and it’s often used (rightly)
to make a convincing case for the formal specificity of film, particularly
within an evaluative critical context. Salmon acknowledged this but also drew
upon the painterly influences that structure Bucak’s composition. At this point
is would be easy to conclude on a note of formal relativism: everything is
cinema and everything is painting. However, Salmon instead chose to invoke video as a cardinal concept. Meaning 'I see', 'video' pleasingly brings
together the ideas of the visual and the epistemological as to 'see' means, of
course, to perceive and also to know. The point made, then, was that the
historical parallelism between painting and film need not be antagonistic or
evaluative but needs to be understood in terms of dual specificity. The
exhibition highlighted the extent to which the representational mediation of
the visual sphere marshalled a range of techniques that shape the consciousness
of the consumer in the act of vision.
