For my recent birthday, my sister bought me chopsticks. They are probably illegal. They are certainly very beautiful: ivory, long, elegant, with silver tips and banding, and a silver linking chain. The on dit is that in more interesting times, hosts gave their guests silver chopsticks to demonstrate there were no poisons in the food. Or at any rate, no poisons that would turn the silver black.
There are Chinese hallmarks I can't read. I'd guess the chopsticks were made some time in the last 150 years, but can't be more precise. A hunch would place it about 1910. I'd love to know.
We went to the local Chinese restaurant tonight. Even on a Thursday, Mike's is full. The food's not bad - when Ziang Zemin visited England a few years back, he landed at Stansted and (allegedly) had a takeaway brought to him and his entire entourage from Mike's.
The staff are attentive and friendly. They recognise regular customers, which of course flatters us. Mike, a long time from Hong Kong, suave, diamond stud in his ear, moves among us as easily as a pike through reeds. Tonight, there are maybe 50 covers, of all ages, all white, all casually dressed; they have local accents and don't look rich or posh or intellectual. And all are using chopsticks. We've been coming to this restaurant since it opened. Before Mike bought it about 10 years ago, it was much more pretentious than it is now. And how times have changed. 20 years ago, 10 even, and at least half the clientele insisted on western cutlery. Tonight, the under-10s and the grannies are all using chopsticks expertly, unselfconsciously. This is a minor cause for celebration.
I was tempted to take the fancy chopsticks along to ask Mike to decipher the hallmarks, but glad I hadn't - he was too busy and the lighting was anyway too poor. Mike and his staff are the only people I know who can read Chinese (whatever Chinese language this is) so they're the only ones who can tell me it reads: 'Golden Carp Restaurant: Thieves Will Die a Lingering Death'. When we bought an umbrella stand from him a while back, he started to translate for us the poem embossed on it, which seemed to be exhortatory of courage and altruism - then stopped, saying it was all too difficult: each word in the poem had so much cultural baggage that an English word couldn't represent it, there was a whole history there. How he'd learned this at school, but couldn't put it into English though it was very beautiful... I wanted to hear more about all this but as usual he's in demand, his cellphone earpiece hanging over the ear that doesn't have a diamond: deft, very busy.
I'm astonished not to find anything on Google Image. Perhaps if I spoke Mandarin... if I were techno-savvy, I'd be able to post a photograph here. As it is, you'll have to imagine them. Remember how ivory is coveted for its gem-like purity of colour and translucence, as well as for ease of working. How silver is malleable, forgiving, and how soft its brightness. And think why anyone would want to chain a pair of chopsticks together. Aren't they interchangeable? Is someone going to steal or lose one and not the other? Can't the staff count?
28 June 2007
27 June 2007
Tenebrae (de Waal 4)
If you dare tell it honestly. The chapel. The empty vessels. How you were one yourself. The light faded. Candles brightened. Music went in and out of harmony. Went on forever.
It should have been Easter. They should have stripped the altar.
14 pots. 14 Stations of the Cross. How similar they were, how each concealed something.
De Waal's work enacts individuality and withholding. It seems like endless attempts to identify what makes the unique precious, while valuing what we hold in common. The withholding is what's reserved for mystery, the ineffable.
It should have been Easter. They should have stripped the altar.
14 pots. 14 Stations of the Cross. How similar they were, how each concealed something.
De Waal's work enacts individuality and withholding. It seems like endless attempts to identify what makes the unique precious, while valuing what we hold in common. The withholding is what's reserved for mystery, the ineffable.
Wunderkammer (de Waal 3)
Along the window by the street: 'A line around a shadow' is an assemblage of tallish, thin pots, catching changing light from the window, and reflected in it. Again, there are the marks of touching and - as with some in 'Predella' - adhesions that almost resemble wings, or as if they'd been suggested by a broken handle some time in the distant past.
Is it lese-majesté to wonder if de Waal ever worked as a waiter? That homely association of function hovers behind 'A Change in the Weather' (suggesting a dresser) and particularly 'Attic' and 'Wunderkammer' which also rely on our readings of domestic porcelain and how it is used and stored. Perhaps that's a sweeping statement, though I can't be unusual in seeing these associations.
'Wunderkammer' itself stands in the middle of the room, inviting and resisting our attention. This large plywood cabinet, smelling strongly of the plaster and resin in its construction, is stacked like a pantry inside with white plates and dishes, observable on their shelves above and below through narrow vertical and horizontal slits. Again, the placing seems random, but nothing is ever really random with de Waal. One of the horizontal windows was too high for me, probably too high for most people, remaining merely a teasing possibility. The idea comes slowly: how did they get in there, how do you get them out, which bit did he finish last? But then again, the idea of sequestration, collection, order, interiority... When we look through the slits, are we spying on the plates, or are we being permitted a glimpse? They are blameless. The plates are candid, literally.
There are dishes that look like stacked ashtrays, but it's inconceivable that someone as ascetic as de Waal would smoke. There is order, discipline, control - yet the individuality of the plates. These are protestant plates. And our access to them is controlled, orchestrated. We are required to see them in a certain light.
The components aren't objects for possession. Their function is as part of a whole, as part of an installation. It is public art, not rich man's art - or so I thought. Wunderkammer is for sale at £180,000.
And while we're contemplating this, friends of E's wander in and we are distracted. They start talking of house prices, and it feels incongruous while there are these abstract lares and penates all round us.
And back at the entrance, in the catalogue I find a piece I don't recall seeing: 'All you can see', which is described as pots on a red shelf. I don't recall any red shelf. I'd have noticed. So we go back and look, and while I'm detained once again by the exhibits, and wondering what it means, and what 'meaning' is in art anyway - E has found 'All you can see' and is laughing, because there it is: 5 metres up on the wall as you enter the Wunderkammer room, where you can't see it as you go in, and wouldn't have seeen it on your way out if you'd been talking to friends... So it's witty, as the red is bright poster paint red, and you can hardly see the pots way back from the edges of the shelf, almost out of sight, mocking us with their red shelf, the one strident note in the exhibition (after the slightly vulgar gold dabs).
Later, I read how de Waal has no compunction about smashing something he considers imperfect, that that's what porcelain is for, that archaeologists are always uncovering sherds.
Is it lese-majesté to wonder if de Waal ever worked as a waiter? That homely association of function hovers behind 'A Change in the Weather' (suggesting a dresser) and particularly 'Attic' and 'Wunderkammer' which also rely on our readings of domestic porcelain and how it is used and stored. Perhaps that's a sweeping statement, though I can't be unusual in seeing these associations.
'Wunderkammer' itself stands in the middle of the room, inviting and resisting our attention. This large plywood cabinet, smelling strongly of the plaster and resin in its construction, is stacked like a pantry inside with white plates and dishes, observable on their shelves above and below through narrow vertical and horizontal slits. Again, the placing seems random, but nothing is ever really random with de Waal. One of the horizontal windows was too high for me, probably too high for most people, remaining merely a teasing possibility. The idea comes slowly: how did they get in there, how do you get them out, which bit did he finish last? But then again, the idea of sequestration, collection, order, interiority... When we look through the slits, are we spying on the plates, or are we being permitted a glimpse? They are blameless. The plates are candid, literally.
There are dishes that look like stacked ashtrays, but it's inconceivable that someone as ascetic as de Waal would smoke. There is order, discipline, control - yet the individuality of the plates. These are protestant plates. And our access to them is controlled, orchestrated. We are required to see them in a certain light.
The components aren't objects for possession. Their function is as part of a whole, as part of an installation. It is public art, not rich man's art - or so I thought. Wunderkammer is for sale at £180,000.
And while we're contemplating this, friends of E's wander in and we are distracted. They start talking of house prices, and it feels incongruous while there are these abstract lares and penates all round us.
And back at the entrance, in the catalogue I find a piece I don't recall seeing: 'All you can see', which is described as pots on a red shelf. I don't recall any red shelf. I'd have noticed. So we go back and look, and while I'm detained once again by the exhibits, and wondering what it means, and what 'meaning' is in art anyway - E has found 'All you can see' and is laughing, because there it is: 5 metres up on the wall as you enter the Wunderkammer room, where you can't see it as you go in, and wouldn't have seeen it on your way out if you'd been talking to friends... So it's witty, as the red is bright poster paint red, and you can hardly see the pots way back from the edges of the shelf, almost out of sight, mocking us with their red shelf, the one strident note in the exhibition (after the slightly vulgar gold dabs).
Later, I read how de Waal has no compunction about smashing something he considers imperfect, that that's what porcelain is for, that archaeologists are always uncovering sherds.
26 June 2007
Attic (de Waal 2)
In the next room, there is an installation in the ceiling, like an open trap door. Pots are arranged round the opening as if in a pantry, almost out of sight, but neatly arranged, packed tight... It is called 'Attic' and makes me laugh. It is like that, and not like that. The hidden lives of pots. The pots on the edge of your mind. The higher pots. The unneeded pots. The pots you call down at times of crisis, when great numbers of family arrive for weddings and funerals. They are white, pure, unreachable. We can look up at them from this distance on the ground and desire them. And of course, the word 'attic' conjures Greece and the history of decorated pots, which these are not. They deny decoration, though they have touchmarks. We clothe them with our imaginings, which they shrug off.
On the floor further along is 'Register'. I wasn't taking notes, so this is only a hazy recollection. In two long black containers - again, thick IKEA-ish walls - arranged in close parallel, the pots stand at ground level and we look down into them, their emptiness. Some, if not all, have a very shiny glaze. They fit their trough, though the sizes vary slightly. Again they are whitish, very plain. There is ribbing inside: it's the first time we've been allowed to see inside the pots, but now we can't see their outsides.
Why 'Register'? An account. A list. A calibration. A pitch, a lexicon. A noticing. I can't get it right in my head. They are contained, and withheld from us. They are singled out for attention, and we look at each one: tick, tick, tick. We move round it, seeing how the light plays on them; at one angle it looks as if they are holding water. It is shallow of me, but I think of a trough of plant pots. I'm not thinking of schoolchildren, or types of discourse, or even of pennies dropping, but of geraniums, winter, potting sheds, the smell of the leaves, the texture of them rough on the hand, and how they make your hands smell. I look again at the pots and they are white, innocent, empty.
And I notice how scuffed the floor is, needs stripping and resealing. Or else you can think: it's textured, marked, touched by all the feet of art-lovers, and the reluctant lovers of art-lovers, and the culture-vultures and posers and critics and pilgrims that have passed this way.
On the wall opposite are a pair of cubic cabinets, set up almost like a stereoscope. You can't see both properly at once when you are close to. The exteriors are white, the interior a slightly silky dark sludgy grey/green/blue which reflects a little light. And right in the back of the boxes are more cylindrical pots: tall thin, short fat, white, creamy, pale yellow, some with cracked rims from firing, some - possibly all - marked with a brush of gold. It feels devotional, these are like candles at a shrine, and the gloss of the walls reflects back the ghostly forms of the pots when you get them at an acute angle. As you approach the boxes with your face, they absorb sound; they are a micro-climate. The pots are withdrawn from the world. What is this piece called?
Along the ramp, echoing the movement of the step but way up the wall, is 'Rill'. This seems the least subtle of his titles. It is a run of little pots on a dark shelf, with a step part way along, and the light bubbles off the shiny surfaces and different colours, and it gives a pleasing sense of running water. Again, one longs to touch them, and the title supplies the idea of filling them with water at varying levels, and tapping them for the ringing sound. As I said, I am shallow.
On the floor further along is 'Register'. I wasn't taking notes, so this is only a hazy recollection. In two long black containers - again, thick IKEA-ish walls - arranged in close parallel, the pots stand at ground level and we look down into them, their emptiness. Some, if not all, have a very shiny glaze. They fit their trough, though the sizes vary slightly. Again they are whitish, very plain. There is ribbing inside: it's the first time we've been allowed to see inside the pots, but now we can't see their outsides.
Why 'Register'? An account. A list. A calibration. A pitch, a lexicon. A noticing. I can't get it right in my head. They are contained, and withheld from us. They are singled out for attention, and we look at each one: tick, tick, tick. We move round it, seeing how the light plays on them; at one angle it looks as if they are holding water. It is shallow of me, but I think of a trough of plant pots. I'm not thinking of schoolchildren, or types of discourse, or even of pennies dropping, but of geraniums, winter, potting sheds, the smell of the leaves, the texture of them rough on the hand, and how they make your hands smell. I look again at the pots and they are white, innocent, empty.
And I notice how scuffed the floor is, needs stripping and resealing. Or else you can think: it's textured, marked, touched by all the feet of art-lovers, and the reluctant lovers of art-lovers, and the culture-vultures and posers and critics and pilgrims that have passed this way.
On the wall opposite are a pair of cubic cabinets, set up almost like a stereoscope. You can't see both properly at once when you are close to. The exteriors are white, the interior a slightly silky dark sludgy grey/green/blue which reflects a little light. And right in the back of the boxes are more cylindrical pots: tall thin, short fat, white, creamy, pale yellow, some with cracked rims from firing, some - possibly all - marked with a brush of gold. It feels devotional, these are like candles at a shrine, and the gloss of the walls reflects back the ghostly forms of the pots when you get them at an acute angle. As you approach the boxes with your face, they absorb sound; they are a micro-climate. The pots are withdrawn from the world. What is this piece called?
Along the ramp, echoing the movement of the step but way up the wall, is 'Rill'. This seems the least subtle of his titles. It is a run of little pots on a dark shelf, with a step part way along, and the light bubbles off the shiny surfaces and different colours, and it gives a pleasing sense of running water. Again, one longs to touch them, and the title supplies the idea of filling them with water at varying levels, and tapping them for the ringing sound. As I said, I am shallow.
Difficulty
Reginald Shepherd has a terrific post on difficulty.
One thing that intrigues me is how we are beckoned over that threshold of difficulty, particularly the semantic difficulty of some post-modernist work, when neither sound nor shape helps us through the multiple meanings of 'meaning'. There is an element of trust here - that the reader's time will not be wasted. The poem can look like a random pile of words. Sometimes critics can encourage trust (Vendler's essays on Jorie Graham), but what is it that tempts us out onto the ice when we're on our own? There isn't one answer of course, but I'm aware that sometimes I'm just tempted to go flip-flip-flip through a magazine: that looks random, facile, boring whereas someone like Ron Silliman might encourage me to slow down. Not that I read wholly for meaning - I love formal qualities! Maybe I haven't read enough po-mo, or more likely I'm just incurably shallow.
Oh, and
One thing that intrigues me is how we are beckoned over that threshold of difficulty, particularly the semantic difficulty of some post-modernist work, when neither sound nor shape helps us through the multiple meanings of 'meaning'. There is an element of trust here - that the reader's time will not be wasted. The poem can look like a random pile of words. Sometimes critics can encourage trust (Vendler's essays on Jorie Graham), but what is it that tempts us out onto the ice when we're on our own? There isn't one answer of course, but I'm aware that sometimes I'm just tempted to go flip-flip-flip through a magazine: that looks random, facile, boring whereas someone like Ron Silliman might encourage me to slow down. Not that I read wholly for meaning - I love formal qualities! Maybe I haven't read enough po-mo, or more likely I'm just incurably shallow.
Oh, and
To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, “Why am I being told or shown this?”- that's how I've felt on the few occasions I've read a Kooser poem. I didn't realise he was 'difficult'!
de Waal (1)
Went with E to see the exhibition at Kettle's Yard. I knew nothing about de Waal: what follows are crude first impressions.
The first piece you see right by the gallery door is 'A Change in the Weather' - a large frame of shelves with small cylindrical jars lined up along them. Packed close, but each stands in its own space. They are no more than 3" high at most. Made of thin porcelain, pinched at the rim to make it even thinner, their dimensions vary, and none of them is straight. They lean, fingered and dented, impressed by a rectangular tool - each touched, individual. And the colours range from deathly white, through palest greys and blues, to steel, with glazes dull or high, and they sit there on their thick shelves each in their allotted station, the sizes and colours seemingly randomly arranged. The title suggests English skies. It's all muted, subtle. Though the range from darkest to palest is wide, and sometimes similar colours sit together and sometimes not, the overall effect is to average it out. It looks so random it must have been carefully considered.
We can't see inside the pots, we can only imagine the care and difficulty of wrapping, transporting, unwrapping, arranging. I imagine gallons of bubblewrap. I imagine each pot with a numbered sticker underneath. I wonder if they get dusted. I like them: their individuality, their collectiveness, their insistence on a different same. I like the changing colours, the misshapenness, the 'chosen' air of each with its own touchmarks. I like that their function is to stimulate thought and response, though they are suggestive of measures of things, shot-glasses, rations.
I wonder what the title means, whether I'm supposed to think of anything but the sky and the grey light of England under cloud. Whether it's a celebration of plenitude, amplitude, sufficiency. It doesn't seem to be about excess: it is restraint. The shelving, being thick, seems to emphasise this. It could have been thinner; it could have been wood, rather than painted white. Both E and I think of Morandi, and 'arte povera'. It seems to work within the same register of restraint.
What I don't notice is that there are twelve shelves, that the first has 31 containers, the second 28 and so on. There is one for each day of the year. Yes, it is enough.
Examples of Edmund de Waal's work here: NewArtCentre
The first piece you see right by the gallery door is 'A Change in the Weather' - a large frame of shelves with small cylindrical jars lined up along them. Packed close, but each stands in its own space. They are no more than 3" high at most. Made of thin porcelain, pinched at the rim to make it even thinner, their dimensions vary, and none of them is straight. They lean, fingered and dented, impressed by a rectangular tool - each touched, individual. And the colours range from deathly white, through palest greys and blues, to steel, with glazes dull or high, and they sit there on their thick shelves each in their allotted station, the sizes and colours seemingly randomly arranged. The title suggests English skies. It's all muted, subtle. Though the range from darkest to palest is wide, and sometimes similar colours sit together and sometimes not, the overall effect is to average it out. It looks so random it must have been carefully considered.
We can't see inside the pots, we can only imagine the care and difficulty of wrapping, transporting, unwrapping, arranging. I imagine gallons of bubblewrap. I imagine each pot with a numbered sticker underneath. I wonder if they get dusted. I like them: their individuality, their collectiveness, their insistence on a different same. I like the changing colours, the misshapenness, the 'chosen' air of each with its own touchmarks. I like that their function is to stimulate thought and response, though they are suggestive of measures of things, shot-glasses, rations.
I wonder what the title means, whether I'm supposed to think of anything but the sky and the grey light of England under cloud. Whether it's a celebration of plenitude, amplitude, sufficiency. It doesn't seem to be about excess: it is restraint. The shelving, being thick, seems to emphasise this. It could have been thinner; it could have been wood, rather than painted white. Both E and I think of Morandi, and 'arte povera'. It seems to work within the same register of restraint.
What I don't notice is that there are twelve shelves, that the first has 31 containers, the second 28 and so on. There is one for each day of the year. Yes, it is enough.
Examples of Edmund de Waal's work here: NewArtCentre
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