“In the old days”, he said, “writers’ lives were more interesting than their writing.
Nowadays neither the lives or the writing is interesting”.
Charles Bukowski, Pulp
The printing house is closed during Easter; we all forgot to think about that! This’ll be a problem in terms of getting the texts for the exhibition catalogue printed in time. Alternatively people can get the cover at the opening and then they could return at some point later to pick up the content. That’s not an ideal solution at all. But in any case the covers have to be cut and folded Thursday, and we need to buy the string to sew together covers and contents (if the latter ever gets printed). Friday and Saturday we will put up the wallpaper in the gallery and buy paint for the window frames. Paint Sunday. Dry Monday. Install works Tuesday and Wednesday. We still need a video projector. And despite the best of plans there is always the risk of getting stuck in traffic somewhere, or being met by a stickler in a shop; petty annoyances and project-ending occurrences.
We take a break and listen to some music. Seated on stools in Conchita’s kitchen we discuss the Black Bloc, distorted alphabets, why Cobra art doesn’t work and Ulrik’s old project about pet cremation. He’s discarded his original idea for the exhibition and decided to go for something else instead, something about leather jackets and chandelier crystals. Possibly crystals inside the jacket. We’ll need to go to the market to scout for materials. The others are still sticking to their original ideas; the metro, commodities, solitary sounds, ruined landscapes. With all the loose ends in terms of preparing the gallery, at least some things are coming to a close. We discuss what a possible playlist for the after-party might consist of. The party will be held in the basement below the gallery. Wine has been arranged. Ulrik asks us what our lazer sounds are. The great thing about the Beach Boys’ Kokomo is that it’s about a place that doesn’t exist. We found a pink fluorescent lamp at the market; it has to be part of the exhibition somehow. We’ll need to think about that. If you listen carefully, this is art. Cheap sheeps. Present to me a seven-titted animal. Sales at the pharmacy. Olivia can’t find the eggs she needs for her installation and the wallpaper is coming down in the gallery; we probably haven’t used enough glue; this is a disaster. Conchita kicks out another artist, the ruin-piece; now we’re down to four, and we still keep stepping in the paint. Lightbox, spray paint, wall plugs, wine for the reception, print the letters or cut them in glittery paper? We desperately need a screwdriver.
“What’s that?” one elderly man says to another as they pass the gallery. “It’s nothing”, says the other. So, at least in some sense, we’re ready.
It was somewhat by chance that I met Conchita. We had known about each other for some years as we had mutual friends. One of them was Queenie and she had continuously suggested that the two of us should meet if we were ever in the same city at the same time. We were, Queenie had said, the kind of people who would either get along immediately or instantly dislike each other.
In the spring, some years ago, I flew in as I had to do a consultancy job in the north-western region of the country. Queenie, who was coming along, arranged for us to stay overnight in Conchita’s place in the capital before heading north. Despite Queenie’s worries, Conchita and I got along immediately. She had lived in the country for some 5 years at this point. Herself an artist, she was working at the local center for contemporary art during that period and had a short-lived background in anthropology. For some time I had pondered over mixing anthropology and art in my own work (without much success), and besides some work-related commonalities we shared a deepfelt love for books, cognac, cigarettes and conversation. We talked about various literature at length, about what made writing good, and how more academic texts ought to be like that. Good, that is. It ended up a long night, first in a restaurant, afterwards in her kitchen.
Some 6 months later I received a grant to conduct research about nothingness and meaninglessness. Although I had a relatively clear idea about what to do in terms of carrying out the data collection, I had been grappling with the question of how my eventual data could ever be turned into text. I began looking into how this might have been done in other disciplines, exploring questions such as how nothing for instance could be transformed into an object in an art gallery. These strains of thought had led me to think about Conchita and although we hadn’t really been in touch since our brief meeting earlier that year, I wrote her an e-mail asking whether she would be interested in setting up some kind of collaboration about this issue while I was conducting fieldwork. How would she approach the question of representation as an artist? If it had, for instance, been a question of setting up an art exhibition where nothingness was to be given a physical form, what would she do? I also asked her whether she would be interested in doing exactly that with me during my upcoming fieldwork. Her immediate response was a definite no. She had, just a week prior to receiving my e-mail, promised herself to never curate an exhibition ever again. But then, after some consideration, she said yes anyway, and that’s when our troubles began.
Our first realization was that our project was not as such novel. Not at all, in fact. Just as with its prominence in literary fiction, Nothing has been a theme in the artworld for some time, and a long series of artists have created works based on the notion, from when the visual zero emerged as a component in relation to the vanishing point to when the group “Les Incohérents” created a series of one-colored fabrics as a cynical remark on abstract art, including First Communion of Anemic White Girls in Snowy Weather (1883), A Harvest of Tomatoes on the Edge of the Red Sea Harvested by Apoplectic Cardinals (1884) and Total Eclipse of the Sun in Darkest Africa (1889).1 And many more works from many more artists appeared since then, some as a parody on art itself and others seeking to make a point about the notion of nothingness, such as Yves Klein’s exhibition “Le Vide” (The Void), opening in Paris in 1958, consisting of an empty gallery and later considered to be one of the first examples of conceptual art (or at least the first to gain wide publicity). And particularly since the 1950s and 1960s, whether through minimalism, avant garde, installation or pop art, artists have sought to tangle and conceptualize Nothing. John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33”, a performance where a pianist sits at his piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without doing anything, after which he takes a bow and leaves; Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery (1969), consisting of a locked gallery in Amsterdam with a note on the door stating “for the exhibition the gallery will be closed”, and Ad Rheinhardt’s Black Pictures series which consisted of repetitions of the exact same black square painting; a series he started in 1960 and repeated for 5 years in an attempt to represent art as “breathless, timeless, styleless, lifeless, deathless, endless”.2
Pondering over these antecedents, Conchita and I have long, rambling conversations about how to approach the setting up of an exhibition, who to contact or invite, where to do it and how to prepare, and whether to do it at all.
When William James originally coined the term “streams of consciousness” in 1890 it was to depict consciousness as something which is not joined but flowing.3 As a narrative device to portray inner dialogue, it has since been used extensively in literature, from Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner to Samuel Beckett and Hubert Selby Jr. For the latter, most notably in Last Exit to Brooklyn, it is not merely a question of the inner dialogue of an individual, but equally of dialogue between individuals gliding together in a stream. The text refuses to present the reader with any “she said” or “he yelled”, but instead allows one to overhear a conversation, discussion or argument through words passing by.
In discussing the interrelation between literature and ethnography, Gabriele Shwab draws on the work of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger in defining literature as an experimental system that has the potential to “generate emergent forms of subjectivity, culture and life in processes of dialogical exchange with its readers”.4 For Rheinberger, experimental systems are “spaces of emergence that invent structures in order to grasp what cannot yet be thought”, what he also terms a question of playing in the dark. Fumbling your way through thoughts, bumping your head into unforeseen obstacles, moving around them, going elsewhere with no clear fix-point in mind. One might draw a parallel from this to the Theater of the Absurd, and the works of dramatists such as Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter. Martin Esslin, who can be credited with defining the term (or movement), notes how many of the people who may be said to have been part of creating the style of the Theater of the Absurd were in various ways inspired by dramatists such as Salacrou, Sartre and Camus who had been writing about the anguished, senseless and absurd conditions of human existence. Yet they differ from these, writes Esslin, in that the mentioned dramatists had presented “their sense of the irrationality of the human condition in the form of highly lucid and logically constructed reasoning, while the Theater of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought”.5 An antecedent to this dramaturgic approach was Bertolt Brecht who had argued for a change in theater entailing a break with the traditional method of seeking to create a psychological link between a character on stage and the audience. The latter had involved a principle of trying to make the audience see or feel the world from the point of view of the actor.
The problem with this, for Brecht, was that if an audience simply adopted the point of view of a character they would not be able to think critically about what was going on. Hence, a certain alienation effect had to be present in theater.6 Eugene Ionesco later held that Brecht did actually not take this principle far enough and that theater had to employ shock tactics in order to truly overthrow and dislocate the spectators’ perception of reality.7 The motives and actions of those on stage had to remain incomprehensible. And similarly, returning again to the question of literature, Gabriele Shwab notes that “texts that appear unfamiliar and strange force one to deal with their otherness and foreignness”.8 The effect of this being that a particular work does not close something down (or conclude) but rather forces the reader to open something up.9 The strength of a text is not necessarily to reveal but rather to afford an opportunity to think.
In Walter Benjamin’s Grave, Michael Taussig cites the following passage from William Burrough’s “The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith”: “Cut-ups? But of course. I have been a cut-up for years … I think of words as being alive like animals. They don’t like to be kept in pages. Cut the pages and let the words out”.10
What I truly love about my own copy of Walter Benjamin’s Grave, which was bought second-hand, is that the previous owner has torn out around one-third of the “Authors Notes” and “Chapter 1”, leaving them almost in themselves as cut-ups, and leaving me playing in the dark in order to grasp what the arguments of those sections might be, or could be, as something is literally missing. On most pages I have absolutely no idea what Taussig is trying to tell me, and that’s what keeps returning me to the text, to the words still left.
I wake up to find that Oz has deleted me on Facebook.
I’m at Conchita’s place around noon. We have coffee in her kitchen surrounded by books, print-outs and notes. She made a sketch for the sign to hang outside the gallery. It needs to be done in a material that can survive being outdoors as heavy rains might still occur, but also one that it is possible to cut into, some sort of plastic probably. She’s in the process of making measurements of the gallery to calculate the potential amount of wallpaper that will be needed, plus the amount needed for publication covers. If rolls are roughly 50cm wide we will need around 24 rolls in total. We’ve both been commenting on Leo’s text during the last couple of days. I like the idea of using Spivak’s notion of sub-alterns to discuss the sub-urbs. So does Conchita, but she worries that he’ll been offended by our criticism and suggestions. We have more coffee, eat a banana, talk a bit about her renovation plans for the apartment and her considerations about leaving the country for good. We have yet another final cigarette and head out to find a minibus that will take us to the central market. Conchita’s been there quite a few times before, so have I, but never to the wallpaper section.
“It’s like heaven and hell”, she says as we move through the endless rows of small paths and alleys, “you can find everything here, but it’s impossible to know exactly where and how long it will take”. We roam around at random for a while before asking a shop-owner for directions. Shortly after we locate the “wall-paper street”. Dozens of small shops lie side-by-side, all crammed with wallpaper in all shapes, colors and sizes. Our vantage point is to find a pattern with small flowers but all we see are grand flower patterns wherever we go. After half an hour or so we reach the end of the street. We have a cigarette and buy some meat and mashed potatoes from a vendor. We need to look through all the shops once more, even more meticulously this time around. And finally, in what seems to be the messiest of all the shops, we find two types that we sort of like, and which would fit well together. One has small yellow, beige and green flowers, the other is a sharp yellow with rows of yellowish spots. We ask the owner how many rolls he has of each and he disappears into a mountain of wallpaper rolls in search of the two types. One by one he throws them down to us and we collect them in two piles. It takes a good while and a lot of rolls end up in the piles. But there are not enough of either one.
Conchita remembers seeing the sharply yellow version in one of the other shops, so we buy the ten rolls available where we are and go to the other shop, where we buy two more. At that place we also find a large flower patterned version in white and glitter. It doesn’t completely fit with the other, but we agree that in a way that in itself fits the principle. We also agree that we forgot to think about how to transport 24 rolls of wallpaper back to Conchita’s apartment.
i’m getting annoyed. now my left ear’s plugged or smth. how r u doing? unplug it! i’m good, have just met athos from the three musketeers. will go by the doctor tomorrow before we start drinking. i’m sure we can cure you if the doctor can’t. where did u meet which athos? in the park close to where i live. 9 april park. yeah i know where that is. the skatepark? and who’s athos? i mean what kind of athos? one of the musketeers. he had a great costume. yes but i mean this specific athos, who is he? have no idea, i think he was russian, now alcoholic/insane/athos. i see. btw the old russian movie 3 musketeers is the best i have seen. i didn’t know there was a russian version, lets watch it some time. gladly but i doubt we can get it with subtitles. not that u won’t know the story. we can. i think i’ll be able to follow the plot. yeah, very likely. otherwise i’ll bring athos
to be honest i’m starting to feel too miserable to be glad about anything, but still. how r u?. have a terrible hangover, drank cognac with the artist-group until 6 this morning. i see. yeah i didn’t go to my office today either. are you still ill? yes. it’s dawning on me. what i did. i don’t even know what happened to the paintings. i threw them on the stairs hopefully Hakuna took them. what?! oh you don’t know anything about our fight? no. sorry. ok. what happened? can’t right now. sorry. no worries, hope you are ok. physically fine. sorry to hear. yeah me too
was calling you i think. at about 6 and just now. yes, i heard it at six but didn’t want to get up. and i didnt hear it now. yeah i didn’t sleep all night. i mean. really? i went to sleep after that and woke up at 11 or smth. there were things after you left. can’t type. will ya come over?. i thought u said something about noon today yesterday. yes, i think i did. i have to spend a few hours packing i think. did you get in another fight with Hakuna? almost. kicked him out twice. tato left on the street. cant type once again. left on the street? what does that mean. will you come over after packing?. toldya can’t type. i have to be at the gallery around 16/17, will let you know when i’m done packing (need to go out and buy some stuff). ok. chances of seeing you today are obviously slim. but anyway it was fun yesterday and all ended well. Hakuna is on his way from gldai already. hehe, you always get in a fight after i leave. (where he stayed at Byron’s cause i kicked him out, etc.). will be glad to see you if you manage. yeah u always miss all the fun. yeahh. naaa it wasn’t really a fight. just a long process of kicking him out and him coming back again. anyway he doesn’t really remember anything and all’s well. he seemed a bit stoned already when i came. all is perfect in my state of denmark. i think it as just absinthe. was. didn’t see any weed last night. not that i looked for it. well, absinth alone can do the trick i think. that he/she/it can, especially 3 of them
havent you gone to bed yet? no. well done. ccant atalk rigjht now\. lol. can even attatck. am unesleep unhaired. haha, ok. and tpoo durnk. and almosyt als[pee.nyway.talk yto ya tomorrow. am pissed aoj tyop of that. aggresivebut non able to spell. unable probably. androwhatever. go to sleep. it’s daylight. it’s all Hakunas fault. anyway. hes asleep in my room and im beng stupid heer. anyway. sorry. no worries. will call you tomorrowe. today i mean. yes, do that. okm hope ai w9ill go to sleep. jesus. no I won’t its already dayu, igjht but at some point I will. anuway. judging from your spelling i think you will able to. will call you when i wake upo hopefull;