ON PRECARIOUSNESS

I completely understand Brian Dillon’s discussion in Essayism of the value of the list, ‘for which the technical term is parataxis......But it’s not exactly a frieze of unrelated cells; something or someone must link the discrete elements, make a tick-tock of their tick tick.’  

There is a central paradox in a list. It could topple at any time. Its comfortable order is illusory. With lists there is the attempt to establish a kind of encirclement of free-flowing objects and ideas into a temporary settlement. Lists, for me, are a form of stabilising talismanic narrative. I like to ritualise - but only as a short-lived creative negotiation - before the words loosen up again and ebb away. When I’m about to paint I often spool through inventories of colour in my mind. For instance, the colour pink: 

carmine magenta madder germoline bruise plaster quinquinone rose corinthian puce cornelian peony ruby shocking crimson bubblegum baby.... 

From the list, a preliminary still point, you can tip over into the torrent of painting.

Painter/performer, Jutta Koether in her novella, f, employs lists as a sensory investigation of textures like velvet, coral, an orange, curtains. She uses unpunctuated, similarly prefixed words to describe the effect of a curtain covering a surface,

‘glisten glitter gleam glow glossy glory glass glassing glaced glaizie glazer glaster gleaced gleeding gleaming glimmered glistered glamorous glare gloam glimped gloom gloring glint glish glory glace glanzgold glut glossiness.

The curtain’s shifting appearance in the light is well drawn and there is a pervasive sense of impermanence in this fast and slippery stream of words.

I would cite poet and classicist, Anne Carson as someone whose experimental writing tries to acknowledge ambiguity and provisionality in the world. It is an interesting parallel to how painting is operating as an expressive vehicle in contemporary culture. Poetry and painting are the closest art forms. They share the same kind of intensity. So many things unsaid that live between the lines or in the layers of paint. Ephemeral and secretive. Anne Carson says this well in her recent poetic work Float, which she presents as a loose collective of ‘chapbooks’. (A chapbook was a small paper pamphlet, dating back to early Modern Europe, containing tales, ballads or poems and which was sold by pedlars.) There is something so aptly temporary about this form, an itinerant commodity. The work comprises twenty-two booklet-fragments. Float’s essence is its shape-shifting precariousness. You feel that these poetic chapbooks are the next-most-gossamer thing to painting or oral history. They could so easily be lost, cast adrift from each other. In the chapbook called, Cassandra Float Can, Carson addresses directly the physicality of precariousness, ‘we might imagine that there is, in our minds, one or two beats before a thought forms itself into anything .....something earlier, rougher, more gripped, more frail, more saturated, something that will dry away like the dew or crumble like prehistoric paint as soon as it’s exposed to air, something that - compared to a sentence - is still wild.’

Contemporary poets like Carson, Alice Oswald, Sean O’Brien, Sharon Olds, David Constantine, seize upon the brittleness, frangibility and slipperiness of things in the world. Hopefully, in this consciously haphazard way, the women storytellers within the body of this essay will be similarly improvisational and spontaneous. Rolling out, weaving and interlacing stories.

Ironically, clustering is in a strange embrace with the precarious. The cluster hints at dispersal or exposure. Like the list, the cluster is a refuge from uncertainty. A tiny impermanent gesture, for instance when small paintings or drawings are hung together in random groupings on a gallery wall. Like haikus. Their spatial relationships are often freely executed yet somehow meditative. This can apply to sculpture. When I was in Iceland I saw an amazing ceramic installation by Anna Hallin called Klasi or Cluster (2016) in the Reykjavik Art Museum. It is a dense, subtle, soft-shaped mass of pink balanced figures - plump and improbable, you fear that collapse and fragmentation are imminent; they are infinitely poised.

The writing of Teju Cole, for me is suggestive of the precarious. He engages with a diverse swathe of subjects, - history, culture, politics, literature - and travels incessantly between continents. For example in his book, Known and Strange Things, he writes about a mysterious photograph in Shadows in Sao Paolo. In this piece he says, ‘..in discovering all that can be known about a work of art, what cannot be known is honoured even more.’ This exalts the significance of the unfinished. As he moves on to another narrative, you are always left with the sense of the maverick quality of experience - just as when he sees the magpie, an avatar for the spirit of the writer, W G Sebald, in Always Returning, ‘the magpie, its talent for collecting this and that and its eye for sudden shards of brightness that enliven the ordinary.’ But this is also what Cole himself does beautifully. He celebrates the fragment. In his photo-journalistic book, Blind Spot, Cole moves from city to city. He alights on fragile beauty in what would be otherwise overlooked. In Mantua, he highlights the elegance of two slender blue ribbons ‘calligraphically snicked into a pale surface’ as something delicate holding something of more substance, like children clasping a parent’s hands.

Once, sitting in a wooden hut, on an island in the Swedish Archipelago as a storm crashed outside, I experienced an acute sense of my own fragility. It was not a moment of terror, rather, a frisson, a bit ecstatic, as I thought I might be swept away. It’s a threadbare memory, but still grasp-able. The islands - there are a staggering 24,000 of them - are mostly uninhabitable granite outcrops. They are closely clustered, geological oddments, relentlessly buffeted by the Baltic and will eventually be swallowed up by rising sea levels. I think this memory stays alive because I was born by the sea, it is deep in my DNA and has imbued in me a love and a fear of waves. It’s an impulse in my painting.