Vija Celmins

The Path Itself

History is always written from a sedentary point of view, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself.

—Gautama Buddha

According to Bruce Chatwin, there are two hotels in Djang, Cameroon. There is the estimable Hotel Windsor and, across the street, the Hotel Anti-Windsor. Chatwin simply inserts this notebook entry into the text of The Songlines and doesn’t explicitly relate it to the discussion of nomadic cultures in the midst of which it appears, but his implication could not be clearer: If the names of these venerable hostelries mean anything, then the residents of the Hotel Windsor would certainly be tourists, refugees, or colonials—taking shelter under the signifier of their lost or absent homeland—while, across the street, in the Hotel Anti-Windsor, the residents would certainly be nomads, in the broadest philosophical sense—profoundly at home under the banner of negated centrality.

Chatwin’s observation provides the armature for further elaboration—a little narration of Vija Celmins’s early days, rendered here in the mythic manner of Jacques Tourneur. So I offer this little film noir treatment of Celmins’s early progress: Music precedes the images, a European folk melody, faintly liturgical and in a minor mode: then, in gorgeous black-and-white, we catch idyllic glimpses of a Latvian childhood behind the credits—a little girl and her mother sit by the Bay of Riga. They wiggle their bare toes in the water, watching the mild wavelets disappear into the mist; then, suddenly, a sequence of quick cuts to the oncoming Red Army—explosions, low-angle tanks. Cut back to the idyll. Then back to the Red Army and dissolve into Brechtian procession of the refugees in smoky silhouette. A door is flung open. They have arrived in Esslingen under the blanket of the Allied bombardment; first the Russians, then the Americans, more explosions, the roar of bombers, newsreel footage of buildings disintegrating followed by crane shots of the cold, quiet, ruined city. A schoolgirl, with books under her arm, picks her way through the fallen masonry on the sidewalk. She and her friends play soldier in the rubble. She sits, self-absorbed, in a ruined choir and sketches.

Vija Celmins, Drypoint—Ocean Surface, 1983. Drypoint on paper, 186 × 239 mm. Collection Tate / National Galleries of Scotland. Courtesy of the artist and McKee Gallery.

Then, as the credits conclude, we cut to a broad, tropical boulevard awash in morning light. We see her arriving, alone, on the riptide of history. She hauls the baggage of her past up the steps of the Hotel Faraway through its whitewashed portal. From our position in the bright street we can just make her out in the lobby. She is standing at the desk, checking in. Then we are inside a large, somber room with stucco walls; it is full of deep shadow and light slashing through venetian blinds; we hear a key turn in the lock and, as the camera pans toward the sound, the door swings inward and we catch a glimpse of Vija Celmins standing in the door frame, half in shadow, her luggage on the floor beside her.

There follows a time-montage of the years she spends making paintings in this somber room in the Hotel Faraway. She begins angrily, in the expressionist style of the day. She gets good at it and quits in disgust; she looks around her then, and paints what she sees—the lamp, the hot plate, the television set—ominous gray paintings that resonate with dis-ease and anomie. As an antidote to these apparitions of the haunted present, she re-creates talismanic objects from her lost childhood with astonishing verisimilitude, most larger than life, realer than real: her comb, her pencil, her erasers. She places them around the room, leans the comb against the wall.

Then she is sitting on a chair, elbows on knees, silhouetted against the bright window. She is apparently surveying the work she has done to date—and without much satisfaction. Through the open blinds we catch a glimpse of the receding Pacific, as gray as her paintings. Then we hear a door slam and catch a glimpse of her head as she disappears down the stairs. We see her striding across the lobby, tossing her key to the desk clerk without stopping; he catches it with a wink and a conspiratorial grin. Then we are out in the sunlight, off to the left, watching her as she hurries away from us, across the busy boulevard and up another set of broad, white steps. Finally, we see her in full-length profile, leaning against the rail as she autographs the register. She is checking into the hotel Anti-Faraway, without luggage.

At this point, the story begins—with this walk across the street into the negation of absence and loss. However we choose to characterize it, if we are to understand anything about Celmins’s career, I think we must understand this odd transmutation. It is an ideological inversion, really, a change in the intellectual weather. It mysteriously distinguishes Celmins’s early evocations of stranded objects from her later more intimate performances of skies and deserts and oceans. I have chosen to characterize this shift as one of status—from “refugee” to “nomad”—because of the available narrative, but just as importantly because of Celmins’s persistent, nomadic alignment of “thinking” and “drawing” and “traveling”—a conflation of activities that aligns her with the two great celebrants of the peripatetic heart and the Gothic line: John Ruskin and Gilles Deleuze. “I see drawing as thinking,” Celmins says, echoing them both, “as evidence of thinking, as evidence of going from one place to another.”

Before drawing any finer distinctions, however, it helps to remember that Celmins’s art, early and late, refugee and nomad, has always made a virtue of displacement and has never found a comfortable niche within the art world’s sedentary fiefdoms of style and territory. In Los Angeles, Celmins’s rigorous grisaille looks “New York”; in New York, its haut malaise looks “European”; in Europe, its blank capaciousness looks “L.A.” It always seems to have just arrived from someplace else. “Odd” is a word you used to hear a lot, but I prefer to think of the work as having a kind of stateless foreign accent. The provenance of its proclivities is irrevocably American, however. In its reductive penchant for replicating the photographic image, its deadpan exploitation of the “artless” all-over, its nonjudgmental affection for the cosmic banal, Celmins’s work appropriates some aspect of every large strategy in American art from Jackson Pollock to Cindy Sherman. Yet it never seems to be quite there, you know, in its pigeon hole.

Even Celmins’s professed affinities seem to lose (or gain) something in translation. She admits, for instance, to an early affection for the reductive, repetitive strategies propagated in the writings of Ad Reinhardt: “No texture, no brushwork or calligraphy, no sketching or drawing,” and so on. And yet, as you try to isolate these privative and iterative qualities in the work, they always seem to cleave more closely to the grainy, hard-boiled minimalism of Samuel Beckett than to the manic spirituality of Reinhardt. Beckett says, in How It Is: “Always the same song pause SAME SONG.” That sounds like Vija Celmins. Furthermore, if one wished to characterize the atmospheric shift from Celmins’s early object-paintings to her later photo scapes, one could do worse than to evoke the sea change that takes place in the French novel between the malignant banality of Sartre’s La Nausée and the cool école de regard of Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur, which is, perhaps, the Parisian equivalent of the transmutation I have been talking about—from the refugee heart to the nomadic eye.

Celmins the refugee is a pure creation of the historical moment, a pebble shot from under its wheel, the anointed victim of political geography and its fluid pulse. She is the epitome of displacement and loss. She is never at home except in memory. And she can never recoup her loss, because at that point, that home from which she has been expelled is lost forever. It is a receding blip in the time-space vortex of geopolitics, spinning into the past. So the refugee is not really a traveler at all but a sedentary from whom the past rushes away. She has been thrown to the edge and declared it the center, although, as she will tell you, she carries her homeland in her head, and given the opportunity to make art, she will celebrate that interiority by infecting the world about her with nameless dread and infinite longing, by building monuments of mourning to what is forever lost, or by cooking up some borscht.

Celmins the nomad, on the other hand, given the opportunity to make art, will celebrate her exteriority by intensifying what is always there. It is a trick that travelers learn. One begins in a state of bemusement at the oddity and eccentricity of each new location and ends in the knowledge that, when time and space move together mindfully across the plain or the page, there is no location. Location is Euclid’s creature, the point of the compass, a fantasy of imperial history and geography that presumes one’s displacement amidst the hierarchies of time and space—the slippage between where you are and where you feel you ought to be—like Ovid exiled to a fishing village on the Adriatic. In the absence of these displacements, the sky, the plain, and the waters vary only in surface incident. A square foot of earth in the Arctic is indistinguishable from a square of earth in the Mojave or in Tierra del Fuego, and Celmins has the drawings to prove it.

So the refugee looks at Vija Celmins’s dislocated, de-historicized performances of the heavens and the earth and the waters rushing away and says, “This is an alienating memento of nowhere, an icon of irretrievable loss!” The nomad, on the other hand, says, “This is a portable recapitulation of everywhere—a living document—the plane of existence intensified and made smooth by having been mindfully traversed, again and again, by having been lived in real time.” It is a measure of spatial duration, of the number of breaths one takes to get, thoughtfully, not from here to there, but from this here to that here, with a pencil or on horseback, on foot or in a Thunderbird, by the extension of consciousness or by traverse of the eye.

In this sense, Gilles Deleuze characterizes nomad thought and art and travel by their tendency to generate “fields of intensity.” As Brian Massumi remarks, in an essay on Deleuze, nomad thought “does not lodge itself in an edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority . . . it does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of the representation: subject, concept and being . . . Rather than reflecting the world, its elements are immersed in a changing state of things.” Thus, nomad art, as described by Deleuze and Felix Guattari, exploits “close-range” vision (as opposed to the remote gaze) and generates “tactile” or “haptic” spaces—“smooth,” complex expanses that deploy themselves laterally in fractional dimensions that glimmer between plane and volume—as opposed to the rigorous, full-dimensional volumes of “stated-thought” and purely optical space. The primary aspect of this closely scrutinized, fractal space is not unlike that of the differential equation: “its orientations, landmarks and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step—desert, steppe, ice and sea—in local spaces of pure connection.”

Obviously, for anyone who has puzzled over Vija Celmins’s later work, these speculations about “local spaces of pure connection” and “fields of intensity” provide a context in which we might consider its more baffling aspects. Deleuze and Guattari suggest a nomadic rational for Celmins’s translation of the remote gaze into close-range vision via the modality of the photograph. Photographs supply an intellectual mise-en-scène for Celmins’s meticulous articulation of coextensive but conceptually distinct haptic spaces in which the image of nature, the objecthood of the work, and the activity of the artist reflexively signify one another—thus disrespecting “the artificial division between the three domains of representation.”

Most importantly, however, Deleuze and Guattari’s speculations allow us to view the achievements of Celmins’s later work as indicative of something more intellectually rigorous than a mere change of heart or technique. In this context, I think, the transmutation that takes place in Celmins’s work can be characterized as a turning outward—as a moral recalibration of interiority and exteriority—a shift of dimension out of “history” and into its opposite. Deleuze calls this “nomadic flux.” Celmins calls it “real time”—an awakening, as Joyce would have it, out of the “nightmare of history” and the dreamscape of its political geography.

But, of course, as Westerners, we are no more likely to awaken permanently out of the nightmare of history than we are to awaken permanently out of sleep. (We fight holding actions, at best, against the night—conduct rescue operations—snatch images and moments from the great teleological flow—remind ourselves that we live amidst the atmosphere, not in the world.) Further, no work of Western art is ever likely to induce anything so apolitical as a pure obliteration of history—nor would we wish it to. To presume to have banished history from an object as culturally saturated as a work of art would be like insisting that one has never thought about an elephant—and, in fact, “not thinking about the elephant” is about the best we can aspire to: that positive negation. The felicity of the trope of the “Hotel Anti-Windsor” is a signifier in which the august, historical absence of the House of Windsor is colossally present.

What I am suggesting, then, is that looking at Vija Celmins’s paintings is a little more complicated than flinging oneself into the whoosh of nomadic flux. It is, in fact, more akin to gingerly disrobing for a quick, cold dip in a mountain spring. We come to the work of art fully clothed in layers of cultural expectations. I can remember, for instance, walking into an airy, white room lined with Vija Celmins’s graphite deserts and oceans and immediately thinking, “Mmmm. Cézanne meets Shelley,” calling to mind a quatrain from “Julian and Maddalo”:

This ride was my delight. I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

A few minutes later these lines seemed inappropriate, yet I was hardly wrong to think of Shelley in this context. The aura of longing and displacement is never quite affirmed, but never completely absent. Celmins’s work for all its coolness is always haunted by an atmosphere of loss, again, as in Shelley:

See the mountains kiss high heaven

And the waves clasp one another;

No sister flower would be forgiven

If it disdained its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth,

And the moonbeams kiss the sea;

And what is all this kissing worth,

If thou kiss not me?

So I think I was right to think of Shelley and just as right to reconsider his relevance, because the manner in which Celmins’s drawings first evoke sublime romantic melancholy and then negate it constitutes part of their meaning (as does the manner of their evocation and subsequent negation of auteurist notions of cubist space). The works exist in real time, after all. Their arousal and subsequent frustration of romantic and modernist expectations parallels our growing cognizance of the intervening photographs—of the frail cultural membrane these photographs seem to impose between the plane of natural imagery and the field of the artist’s marks.

Gradually, once we have “remembered” that membrane, the memory of the photograph begins to function in our awareness as a kind of two-sided scrim, preempting any identification between the natural world and Celmins’s marks, while elegantly externalizing the analogical nature of their fractal mechanics. This burgeoning awareness, I think, leads to the inescapable conclusion that it is the photograph (and not the object or the image or its reference) that constitutes the critical content of Celmins’s work—and, further, that it is the memory of the photograph that facilitates Celmins’s seamless conflation of romantic iconography and modernist studio practice into a distinctly postmodern celebration of the exteriority of the image.

In a sense, Celmins brings us closer to the world by moving us further away. Her faithful replication of the photographic images of nature attenuates any comfortable modernist presumptions we might make about her work; just as certainly, our gradual realization that the focus of Celmins’s activities is the photograph and not the image of nature attenuates our access to the domains of sublime romantic melancholy: however much the work seems to honor, on first glance, the romantic grail of seeing nature plain, on second glance, its subtle evocation of the photographic surface quietly but resolutely deflects any projection of ourselves through it and any tendency to subjectively “identify” with it.

Conversely, even though the cropped and focused, black-and-white photographs that Celmins uses as sources do, indeed, endow her work with the ominous grisaille, the horror vacui and the aura of romantic melancholia are deflected as well. Celmins’s deadpan rendition of the photograph denies us any clue, or image or mark that might humanize the “character” of this melancholia and allow our theatrical participation in it. Consequently, whatever soliloquies the paintings might portend remain, at best, only exquisitely immanent.

Furthermore, Celmins’s almost suboptical adjustment of the photographic image to the smooth plane of her work has the effect of freezing it, of denaturing its surface at a single level of articulation that emphasizes the blunt, single-point focus of its photographic provenance. The image seems to invite it, but we do not feel free to move outward or upward or inward into those complex fields of incident that from Turner to Pollock have signified the ominous, boundless, proliferating “otherness” of Edmund Burke’s “Terrible Sublime.” Standing before Celmins’s drawings and paintings of the heavens, for instance, we find ourselves imaginatively immobilized by the “frozen” image and denied that cosmic expansion cited so often by Pascal as one of the proofs of the existence of God:

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her lofty and abundant majesty . . . Let him behold that blazing light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let him see the earth as a mere point in comparison with the vast orbit described by the sun; let him wonder at the fact that that vast orbit is itself but a faint speck compared with that described by the stars in their journey through the firmament. But if our view is to stop short there, let the imagination pass beyond; it will sooner cease to function than will nature to supply him material . . . try as we may to enlarge our notions beyond all imaginable space, we will yet be conceiving mere atoms in comparison with reality.

Conversely, before the ocean and desert images, we are denied that vertiginous swoon into the microcosmic mysteries of the image that Ruskin evokes in his classic exposition of the “picturesque sublime”:

What we call seeing a thing clearly, is only seeing enough of it to make out what it is; this point of intelligibility varying in distance for different magnitudes and kinds of things, while the appointed quality of mystery remains nearly the same for all. Thus: throwing an open book and an embroidered handkerchief on a lawn, at a distance of a half a mile, we cannot tell which is which: that is the point of mystery for the whole of those things. They are merely white spots of indistinct shape. We approach them, and perceive that one is a book, the other a handkerchief, but cannot read the one or trace the embroidery of the other. The mystery has ceased to be in the whole things, and has gone into their details. We go nearer, and can now read the text and trace the embroidery, but cannot see the fibers of the paper or the tread. The mystery has gone into a fourth place, where it must stay until we take a microscope, which will send it into a fifty, sixth, hundredth or thousandth place.

In the case of Ruskin’s model, however, although we are denied that vertiginous swoon into the image, our peripatetic relationship to Celmins’s actual works in the gallery is closely analogous to Ruskin’s description of our approach to the open book on the lawn—that progression from distant perception of the book as a single object, then up to and through the image of the text to the physical components of the watermarked page; like the text of Ruskin’s book, Celmins’s verisimilar surfaces ultimately function as transitional signals as we move toward the image then effect a phase-shift that takes place as we are turned away from the plane of the object and into the flat field, or, in Latvian, the pļava of the artist’s activity.

So when we consider Celmins’s source photographs as content, it helps to remember that all the promises that Vija Celmins’s work make, and consequently break, the photographs keep. Where else does one go but to photography for subjective iconography? Emotive imagery? Nostalgic atmosphere? Sublime Nature? Formal transcendence? Icons of personality? Atmospheric melancholy? Catalogs of loss? Communion with the dead? Certainly the artist went nowhere else in 1965 when, in a miasma of homesickness, she scoured the junk shops, secondhand stores, and yard sales of Los Angeles for evidence of her war-ravaged past—buying up “war books and tearing out little clippings of airplanes and bombed out cities—nostalgic images.”

And certainly nothing other than an awareness of this pathology could have given Celmins the heart and mind, in 1965 and 1966, to forge four amazing little paintings out of that bundle of clippings—paintings that, taken together, constitute, at least for me, the real narrative of that metaphorical “walk across the street” described earlier in this essay. Each modest canvas (16 × 26 in. or thereabout) portrays a warplane in sensuous grisaille—viewed from slightly above and exquisitely situated in the rectangle. Three are American bombers, flying high and to the left—one bomber is relatively intact, one is on fire, and another is breaking up in the air—the fourth is a German plane, posed on the airstrip, facing the right edge of the canvas. (The direction of the airplanes indicates, I think, that Celmins is looking at them from the north, from Latvia. American images are viewed from the south; so Allied planes in the European theater are portrayed flying from left to right.)

At any rate, all of the airplanes seem to be simultaneously tight upon the picture plane and alive in pictorial space—immobile, dry, and inaccessible to us yet still frighteningly present in that antique moment. Thus, for the first time in Celmins’s work, history stops (without disappearing) and real time takes over; and these modest paintings remain, in my estimation, four of the earliest and most courageous embodiments of an incipient postcolonial ethic—insisting as they do that however “healthy” it may be to seal off nature and the past from the neurosis of subjective appropriation, it is both damnably foolish and hysterically pretentious to distort or abolish or deny its visual traces.

Here is the distinction, simply: What makes a Cézanne Cézanne’s is the difference between the natural, historical configuration of Mont Sainte-Victoire and his painting of it. What, on the other hand, makes a Vija Celmins Vija’s is the difference between the photograph of the ocean and her drawing of it. The prospect of the ocean at the moment that the shutter clicked remains available to us, but exterior. And it is exactly this thoughtful decorum with regard to the visual aspect of nature and temps perdu that distinguishes Celmins’s covenant from the denial and subjective revisionism that characterize the “separate peace” with history that was negotiated by such high modernists as Matisse and Hemingway.

Finally—if a brief divagation into “Sighcology” can be forgiven—we might theorize that the photograph itself, cherished and scrutinized by the artist, objectifies her loss and subsequent desire, and that the painting made out of it objectifies the subjectivity of the photograph, investing it with an undeniable exteriority. In that attenuation of desire, the painting transmutes the empty loss of the refugee into the full absence of the nomad—diverting the angst of history into the intensity of real time.

In this view, the four little paintings from 1965–66 mark nothing so millennial as a personal conversation but, rather, the beginning of the artist’s ongoing, mindful, physical commitment to perpetually redeeming the present. We will never awaken permanently from the nightmare of history—and we may, if we dream at all, awaken one morning reconstituted as refugees, but day after day, over and over, as Celmins succinctly puts it, “I just go into that little gray world and draw my way out.” In this manner, she patiently deflects the dark rush of history as it pours out of the deep, gray mouth of the photograph—of all photographs—and resists the vertiginous gravity of the past that simultaneously sucks us back in. She turns time sideways—redirects the rush of the past into the present and our free-fall back into it—deploying a fragile veil of lateral gestures in real time across the portal through which it ebbs and flows—transforming that black hole of history into a surface—a nomadic plain of a thousand thoughtful traverses—a proliferating, human analogue of the slow dance of geological time.