FLURRIES
Continued in Dreams (or Dead, Indeed)
Rob Stone
Continued in Dreams is a catalogue essay to an exhibition of works by Daphne Writght in the Frith Street Gallery in 1997. At one point it was titled ‘Small Theft’. It is nearly all lies.
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Continued in Dreams (or dead, indeed)
- Daphne Wright in the unmaking of ready-made meaning.
Two and two is four, said the pupil
Two and two is four, the teacher corrects him Miroslav Holub
Uncouplets
Thomas had faith in continuity. He had a remarkable trust in the idea that somehow, somewhere, all diverging things could be shown to be of a whole. He had written poems, and others said of them that, above all, they made sense. It’s just that there were omissions by them, certain, poetically purposeful, omissions. He could conjure poetry simply by the deletion of the salient clarity in a link between this metaphor and that motif. He burst apart similes and cramped and contracted them. He liked mystery and could make it with an uncoupling or an excision. But, you had to know of Thomas’s belief about the integrity of the universe to able to trust in this. Somewhere there has to be linkage.
He spoke about Shakespeare, often, and of a body of work thought by some to have been unwritable by any one. Not Thomas though. Shakespeare, the Shakespeare that he knew, was the kind of personality against which whose unity, whose whole, sombre emotional maturity, each line of his verse and prose rubbed against the surface of, gained its true metre from. Elsewhere, sewn together and sewing, his Shakespeare made a whole from the incoherable. The dream was certainly the thing for Thomas alright.
Playing games like this, it couldn’t be long before Thomas was going to find God, or surrealism. It was God. Then, safe from the murderous, insulting materialism of the critics and the historians he could dwell on the on the where that holds everything so mysteriously together. A Catholic. He was a Thomist, dreaming God across unpicked, unmade connections, disaffectedly, clerkishly pulling the staples and clips from sheaves of definitions and notes; shuffling all those carded stock accessions once all too complacently thought. It may all still have been surrealism, that, absurdity or satire.
A Scold From Julio (Picasso’s friend) Dear William, Further to our brief telephone conversation. In answer to your question I must reply yes, of course wire has played an important part in my work. I should defend myself in this however. I recognise the point made about the symptomatic nature of artiness. I don’t agree that, what is it you said, the rustication, I think that is it, the rustication of the surfaces of my pieces is somehow quaint. Neither then, in this regard, can I agree that these surfaces signal my lack of conviction in the identity of my art. It is an issue that has never struck me I must admit. I am an old man and perhaps I have an old man’s libidinous concern for the surfaces of things. I feel sure that you too will find a change in your thinking in this direction. As for your damning consignment of the use of wire simply to the role of armature and your further heaping of condescension on the role of such structural facilitators of representation, I should say that I am I suspicious of your motives. I have seen your recent work which whilst in some ways still of course naive, shows the promise of gravity. You are young. I cannot help but notice that your own use of metal extrusions is more suggestively rich than you allow. Simple perceptuality as the aesthetic ambition for sculpture is a great thing, but only one of many other such great things. Wire has its own seductions. It is more than support, it is more than some dimensionally-augmented line drawing and it has a far greater role than in the functionary definition of negative space that you currently ascribe to it. Moreover, you need to place more trust in the kinds of thing that people are capable of seeing in the elements of sculpture. Wire itself can, in fact I’d go so far as to say can’t not, articulate and imply connections between the variously wilful inventions of your audience. Unactualised poetic abundance is, perhaps unfortunately for you, the only constant condition of sculpture. You could give thought to this. You may later be made to appear foolish in too restrictive an intellectual adherence to your own deathly, puritanical theorems. I look forward to our further correspondence.
Yours, Gonzales.
(pp.) Wire From William Dear Ms. Wright, I have passed your remarks and slides on to Mr. Gonzalez as you requested. He thanks you for both. Unable at present to reply himself, he has asked me to do so. I have myself pursued Mr. Gonzalez concerning wire for some time now. He suggested that I direct you to some pieces he made c.1930-4. He regards such pieces, titled Maternity, Woman Combing Her Hair and the like, as poetic essays on the tensile potential of extruded steel. Whilst, as I say, welcoming your engagement with his work, I suspect that he took offence at your comments, no matter how well intended, to the effect that he had not observed the insensitive nature of his use of women as the object of his formal investigations. He will not be able to authorise your use of his name as a reference.
Yours, Tucker.
Lecture on Bee-Telling Ritual – For Christ’s sake what are you playing at? – What? Who is this? – It’s me. – Oh! Ehm? ... What do you mean it’s me? – Don’t give me all that nonsense. – Oh, Hi. – So? What on earth do you think you’re up to? – Be clearer, you’ll burst something. – I mean putting up that, that … that stuff. – Do you mean the beds thing? – Yes I mean the beds thing. – What’s wrong with it? – All those dead chickens hanging up, all that blood everywhere. Do you want everyone to think that were all satanists out here? I’m a farmer not some fucking rune-reader. I’ve got a degree for Christ’s sake. And, I spent two years getting that fucking diploma too. We get European funding for the farm now. We’re modernised. It’s OK for you to go off on your travels and scribbling sketches of home, but what do you think is holding it all together back here? We’ve enough problems with the English as it is, let alone with them thinking that we’re all spending our days reading gizzards rather than the crop forecasts. It’s all bit strong do you not think? – It’s not about that. – What do you mean? – It’s not about that. Rituals I mean. It’s not macabre. They get enough of that here anyway. – Well you could have fooled me. – No. no. There’s blood in it, but it’s just red. It’s just red. From those Giotto paintings. The way that it dribbles out dead straight and that. Or spurts. Anyway, its not about that either. Not really. It’s about, you know, Aunt Margaret. When she, well, you know … well her taking to her bed. – Oh! ... Ahh. Well you could have told someone you were going to be doing this. – Why? How could I know that you’d go all off the handle? – Ah, come on. It’s not surprising is it. And, anyway what are you doing talking about that sort of thing in public for. You’ll have everyone thinking that we’ve got some idiot mafiosa thing going on here. – Ah look, just calm down now. ... Anyway. How is she? Well? – Ah, you’re right. She’s still not there, you know. – Have you told her about any of this? – God no. The Doctor was with her on Friday. He said there’s nothing organic there but she’s not going to be in a hurry getting over George. There’s no reason for her to. There’s nothing really for her to do now, except hold court in that damned room of hers… Sorry. – Is William going to college now? He was worried about all of that last time I spoke to him. – Margaret said that he shouldn’t. – But is he going still? – Well, yes. But you know what it’s like for him now though. – And Ann? What about Ann? That fat fool of hers will have those orchards dug up before she can turn. Has she spoken to Ann? – Margaret’s never let her in. I’m going to try to speak to her about it on Tuesday. Or perhaps your father could? – Make sure that he does will you. Everything with the farm OK? – Ah, we keep her up to date on all of that sort of thing alright. But it’s all so mad. She’s just propped-up up there, you know, dispensing. She’s told things and then she goes off saying things but she doesn’t know what she’s adding up. She’s not out in it any more. She’s no idea about how these things come about. But you know what she’s like. We all know it’s all nonsense but she really hurts William, you know. – Ah, I know. Tell her about all this too will you? Make sure that it’s all kept in the clear. Make sure that you tell her though. Can anyone take it up to the graves?
Frontality is not all The subversions of scale; H. could get give a little lip on this himself. If you know what it’s called, you’ll know where its front is. At least you’ll know if it has a front. You’ll know how big it is supposed to be or how far away it’s supposed to be or where its supposed to be read from; the proverbially correct distance. This is one of the more profoundly semiotic effects of representational sculpture. No matter how vaguely representational, if there is any kind of possible identification between name and object then there lurks a realm of stories, terrors and spoofs. H. spent his time building monuments as urban points de vue and he knew how a picture worked. He knew about its several dimensions. It’s when you get up close that things start to get prickly. Take Augustus, all seven foot six of him, and wide. Wide like a horse. Civicly pedestalled, his calm, metropolitan demeanour and imperious gaze can be casually ignored. Cast in plaster for student study and left graffitoed and despondent in a chilly hall, or hauled down from his perch and stranded in a gallery of antiquities, then things are different. Stand up close and you’re quickly in a primal world of fabled erotics. Suddenly its not what he wants or owns, its what you want to own. And, fig-leaves and ivy will only provide accent. For this realm, lifesize, it is said, is precisely too small. So close to Augustus, the sensation in the pit of your belly is real enough and no cowardly dismissal of that into some abberant category of mawkish, romantic aesthetic sentiment will do. It is the scale of those cast features that strike with absolute sublimity to the moment of language, when you first ever start to recognise what a thing is and start to be able to recount its qualities in its nomination. That huge first other that you push screaming away from is the object that you first name, and Augustus can stand and transport you back to the nostalgic terror of that place. He will leave you there for as long as you can linger. Of course the imperial and municipal superiorities of Roman statuary can conjure the sense of all sorts of political might, the thought of which could ripple a quease through anyone’s abdomen. Augustus however, in his displaced grandeur, speaks directly to the unutterable libido. The alimentary and the genital can be confused in proximity.
Implied Eclipse (Florence) All this speculative etymology, all this sliding about concerning various modes of the interpretation of sculptural forms leads us to a particular, possibly insoluble problem in the work of Wright’s later period. There is a relationship here. It is an art-historical relationship. The artist’s iconography in these later works, that of wrought, aluminum-foil mountains and tiny, paled, wan herons sat on coloured sweet pea plants, articulates this relationship. On one hand there is the sense created by the scale of a free-standing object, in this instance one in which certain structural elements, the components of the object’s armature, are included in the meaning of the work but included in a further, poetically sculptural role. On the other hand, there are the poetics of the manufacture of sculptural representations of particular geological formations, examples of botanically accurate foliage or figurations of small birds. This is, culturally, a highly mediated, perhaps symbolic and perhaps not easily fulfilled relationship. As a resource in the elucidation of this, it might be worth turning to some aspects of Wright’s own considered historical engagements with some of the conventions of early Renaissance painting .There have been some confusions in the literature over the mythology of the period. The narrative of the thorn-bird and its ritual suicide in casting itself onto the spines of the shrubby flora found around Florence probably derives from the observation of the larders of butcher-birds, birds whose habits include the storage of killed prey on these same thorns. The catches themselves run from insects to small mammals and birds. They are certainly startling phenomena of natural history and such larders were frequently included in the cabinets of curiosities maintained at the time by various theocrats and scholars. These cabinets, in many ways precursors of the modern art gallery, were important as a form of knowledge during the period and had a peculiar function. Often comprised in the relics of saints, the eggs of phoenix’ and such other objects, the cabinets’ role, as a form of knowledge about the world, and especially in each’s individual, formal completeness, lay in the organisation of them not so much in their ability to show the systematic sense of the Universe but in precisely its opposite; the fact of God’s intervening presence in the world, His ability to perform miracles and the vanity of Man’s attempts to understand His ways. In short, the cabinet was designed to instantiate the Mystery at the heart of Catholic theology. This context for the foundation of the myth of the thorn-bird provides telling evidence for the interpretation of Wright’s references to Giotto di Bondone. Let us take the example of a piece by Giotto, the small plaster-work of 1243, Plaster Figure with Leaves (figure 1.). I should say that the attribution of this to Giotto has been challenged and it may well be the work of one of his followers. Nevertheless. This work is one which exists in a definite strand of Giotto’s œuvre. I refer here to those images which deal with the martyring of the saints (figure 2.). In these images, against the backdrop of those distinctively Giottoesque exaggerations of floral features in the landscape, we see the divine rays, the golden wires radiating from the deity or His angelic representatives which give evidence of martyred status in making the stigmata in the hands and feet of the individual concerned. This is important in Wright’s later work, as a literary motif, in the way it suggests a pinning of the saint both to the Mystery and to the integrity of the support of the picture plane, the stuff and substance of the image as a devotional object. The importance of the pin, realised as a wire fastening is something as it were lost or hidden in Giotto’s plaster piece of 1243. The pinning activity of the thorn-birds and their theological role in the cabinets of curiosities provide a social and cultural meaning in this work, one which we can see further inflected by the exaggeration of scale in the foliage attached to the figure. The pin is an implication here. It is unseen. It is a theological suggestion of mortality and Mystery. However in the popular culture of the early Renaissance, the pin might be ascribed a range of meanings built around the fact of this authorised version. A parallel might be drawn to the current folding and wearing of particularly coloured kerchiefs to signal certain, possibly unsayable cultural preferences. There is a further realm of potential meanings structured around an already complex and coded form of theological emblematics. Wright’s involvement in all of this generates a level of disputation of meaning. In the work Indeed, Indeed, the use of a particular floral device, ivy-leaves, to impart a scale to the venous rock formations she has constructed (made by gluing together rolled pieces of aluminium foil as if in the infantile making of a first pot) were of a size to suggest that these are indeed of the precisely too-small scale of boulders rather than mountains. Importantly, Wright removes this ivy detail from the exhibited work. It is a scale only known in the biographical footnotes of the work; such as this. It is a deletion. Importantly too however, the reference is actualised in the exposed wires which hold the tiny circling birds above the rock formation, which are now clearly mountainous. Miniature to monolith, the wire here rephrases the relation of the viewer to the object, perhaps now closer to that of Augustus with all his implications. What the wire also achieves, and this is something important to this period in Wright’s work, is the conjuring of a realm of potential, iconographically motivated recognitions. Whilst it may be possible to delineate a framework of competences in the interpretations of such suggestions, it is not possible to control or to be precise about them.
Forgery and Flannery (Anonymous Crumpled Note Signed Joseph) Have this, I found it. ...but these are the more recent ones. I had to pass on some of the things I was up to. It was just after getting off the boat. Marcel had been getting up to all sorts of things. Shocking the natives with moustaches and urinals. I’d been doing some paintings of the new bright lights on Coney Island but soon found myself bored. It is difficult to throw of your teachers and Fillipo was always rather, well obsessional I suppose. You meet all sorts of people in New York, some from home, but nearly all of them from somewhere in Europe fancying themselves as aristocracy or somehow otherwise bohemian. There is a woman here, Freya. She has good parties and is at least easy going when it comes to the alcohol. Another, Ray, whom I think I met in Dessau once, has set himself up as an avant-garde society portraitist. Anyway, where was I? Yes. I’d been making these montage pieces. I thought that they were quite interesting. They weren’t quite like John’s where you read off the bits he’s stolen from the press. Do you remember when he was working for that magazine, making Hitler look an arse? You could read those just like a epigram. And, they weren’t like Raoul’s . He was finding those wooden heads and had screwed clocks and bits of writing to them. I never thought much of that constipated metaphysical stuff. Such balls. Too stagy and precious. Reminded me too much of home I suppose. No, these were a little different. I’d been out in the rain and there was all this glistening rubbish in the gutter; tram tickets, newspapers, cigarette ends. I gathered them all up and started to make a kind of maché from them. They were discrete objects. Flat usually, and they sort of glued themselves together. But they were still objects even if they looked like pictures. They were objects made of signification, that’s it. They didn’t exist apart from the meanings involved, but you couldn’t see the meaning. The signs and meanings were inside and outside. They were on the surface too and the fact of their being structural, part, you might say of the armature, that was on the surface as well. Are you with me? Integrated, that’s the word. But I had to stop doing them. The New York police you know. When does your aunt expect to…
Fondly, Stella
Listen: A Charm From Thomas His non-sense is not vacuity of sense: it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it. ‘The Jumblies’ is a poem of adventure, and of a nostalgia for the romance of foreign voyage and exploration; ‘The Yongy-Bongy Bo’ and ‘The Dong With the Luminous Nose’ are poems of unrequited passion – ‘blues’.
T.S. Eliot ‘The Music of Poetry’ The Third W.P. Ker Lecture, delivered at Glasgow University, 24th February 1942.