Speaking through Water: the texts

Isn't it interesting how memory works . . . I managed to get a hold of Nathalie Latham via e-mail and she very kindly gave me permission to post the text from her show, Speaking Through Water (what I erroneously called Talking Through Water in my review two posts ago -- so sorry, Nathalie!)

Below is her intro and the thoughts people wrote on their papers:

s p e a k i n g t h r o u g h w a t e r

A year to the day after my father’s death, I had a dream where I was shouting and I couldn’t be heard. I had not been allowed to speak at his funeral and, in the dream, had the sensation of speaking through water, explaining why I felt it important to participate in this sacred ritual. No-one could hear me.

In turn, I asked others around me to write a sentence/ thought they they felt had gone unheard. As I was in Beijing at the time, I assumed their concerns would have political content but instead they were like mine : emotional, personal and universal.



TRANSLATIONS in no particular order:

Only do what you can do. Don’t do what you want to do.

At the beginning I gave you love. Now you don’t pay any attention to me. I’m hurt !

At the beginning, someone I liked, now she has already become someone else’s girlfriend. I’m hurt.

I hope my elder brother’s dreams come true.

Mama, please don’t miss your son !

Mama, I love you.

Beijing you have already vanished.

I want to be a full-time housewife for you. We will have two daughters. This will be when I am 35 years old.

Mom and Dad : I will never let you down. I love you !

I want to get into a famous university and earn glory for my parents.

In my horoscope I found out I am star-crossed. I am depressed with my fate. There is no way it could be me… if only this were not true. Hovering around in ruins.

I love my elder sister

I am at a loss. Winter is coming again.

My daughter is extremely cute. But I don’t have much time to take care of her.

Welcome to Home-Art Re-View: a different take

I was supposed to go to an opening last night in Charlottenberg to see the photography show of a friend of a friend of a friend. Charlottenberg is where my grandmother grew up. But neither the photographer, whose work I looked up on the Internet and rather liked, nor interest in my grandmother’s old stomping grounds, or even the opportunity to meet new people, provided enough of a pull. So, I stayed home instead and decided make good on an idea I had had right after lunch, just before I slid blissfully into my post-lunch nap: why not write art reviews about work people already have in their homes? I could start right here, in Abi and John’s flat.

I have been thinking about writing art reviews for a while now as a way to plug back into the scene in Toronto, and to hone my skills, but I’m always stymied by the fear that I don’t have enough of a contemporary theory or art history background to put the works into reasonable context. I’d be shooting from the hip, giving my visceral responses, which is OK when standing in front of the work and discussing it with buddies, but does not cut mustard with savvier art-reading audiences. Have I mentioned how terrified I am of looking . . . well . . . dumb?

But it occurs to me that we spend so much more time with a work when it’s in our home, or in the home of a friend or relative, giving us an amazing opportunity to develop a relationship to the work over time, one that changes daily, rather than the one-shot assessment we tend to make when see a work in a gallery. We become both sensitized and desensitized to the art in our homes. As someone who recently lost all her worldly objects in an apartment fire, and who has quite happily lived amongst the objects of family and friends while finding a new home, I am keenly interested in the objects that coalesce into people’s personal portraits. Lynn Donaghue once made a series portrait paintings that depicted people’s personal objects, and it was amazing how you could put the objects and the person together very much in the same way people’s dogs often resemble their owners!

What I find intriguing about this approach to art reviewing is what it reveals about the people who acquire the works as well. Abi and John may not be artists, per se, but they are savvy art viewers in the sense that they get out and see stuff. But what I love about them is that they don’t give a shit about what is trendy; they trust their gut and follow their noses and surround themselves with objects that speak to their unique aesthetic. In fact, I find knowing too much about what’s going on in the art scene a liability. It tends to form my taste instead of engaging and enriching it (but that could just be my weak and impressionable character). Going to galleries and other cultural events is part of the fabric of Abi and John’s everyday lives, but so is going to flea markets and movies and bookstores and restaurants and other cities and so on. What I find impressive about Abi and John is that not only do they go to shows, but they buy work! And we’re not talking rich yuppies trying to find something that matches their couch. We are talking about people who need to watch their pocket books as much as the next person, but who truly believe in supporting artists and in owning to-live-with pieces that speak to their hearts and their sensibilities.

When work is displayed in someone’s home, its purpose changes. Now housed in Abi and John’s flat, the viewership for the portraits I want to review gets “reduced” to Abi’s and John’s friends, family and acquaintances. And the owner’s and viewer’s relationship to the work changes as a result of context. Will a guest take time to really look at the photographs or think about what they mean in this home context? Do people really consider the work that hard even in galleries? I don’t always, I’ll be the first to admit. And if reading a didactic panel or artist statement is required of me for the full appreciation of a work, I grow even less interested, feeling as if someone else’s ideas are shutting off the flow of direct contact between me and the work. I mention this because I’m interested in what happens to “art” when it moves from the gallery into the home. Does it just become decoration? I don’t think we can say it is always one thing at all times. For me, the pieces come in and out of focus as decoration, as objects that tell me more about their owners, as discrete carriers of meaning, as moments of personal connection to truths and beauties.

So, that’s the premise of this “column”. To review the works that live in the homes of people I know. Perhaps to see how the work operates in that context and/or what my relationship is to it. And since I’m here in Berlin, I want to start with two photographs that Abi and John acquired in Berlin, the inspiration for this column in the first place.

Speaking Portraits

When I was in Berlin last April, Abi and John took me to the opening of an Australian artist, Nathalie Latham, whose works I had seen the week before in Toronto at 401 Richmond: a series of photographs in a series of vitrines, depicting Asian metro riders asleep on the train. The works made me stop and look, which does not often happen for me with photography. I did not put those pieces and Nathalie together until I met her in Berlin a week later and told her I was from Toronto, at which point she told me about her show at 401, which, thankfully I had seen and commended her on.

The show in Berlin included a series of photographs as prints and light boxes, and a series of videos and audios, and some booklets. But the piece that grabbed me by the gut and yanked me in was a video showing young Chinese men and women with their faces plunged underwater (we see them as if looking up at them, ourselves under water as well), their eyes squeezed shut, bubbles pouring out of their opening and closing mouths. No audio. Just silence. What were they saying? Were they singing? Were they praying? I noticed a little hand-made booklet hanging from some string on the wall just to my left, so I picked it up and read. The text revealed the deeply-secret thoughts of each “talker”, wishes they could not bring themselves to say out loud, so they said them into the water.

At the show, I asked Nathalie if there was some way I could get a hold of the booklet because the content was so unbelievably heartbreaking. I wrote some of the text down, but I don’t have that journal with me now. I just remember one of the talkers saying something about his life being in ruins but for reasons that seemed so reversible to me, yet not to him. Another talker worried about doing well at school for the sake of her parents. This may not be the kind of profound wish we hold in the west, but it likely has deep resonances for a young Chinese student whose status in her family is tied to her educational successes.

After reading the booklet, I turned around and suddenly the line of large photograph portraits hanging on the wall behind me, inscrutable moments before, now made sense. Each image offered a face obscured by wet paper flattened against the face, on the paper itself some Chinese characters, the written version of each person’s water-spoken secret, now functioning almost like captions for the faces we cannot see. What struck me about these images was how facial expression, which is how we read people, had been replaced by text/graphics, a different way to read each person.

In Abi and John’s flat, these photographs read in a different way. They could be portraits of political activists, their manifestos obscuring their wanted faces. Or, these could be portraits of dead people, their death wishes plastered to their heads as part of a burial ritual. Or, these could be images of lovelorn suicidal cases, their love letters now exposed for all to see.

It’s hard for me to see these photographs with fresh eyes because I saw them first in the context of the video in Nathalie’s show. Still, I’m drawn to these faces that reveal and conceal so much simultaneously. It’s like standing in front of a shut door that hides a room full of everyone's secrets, but you already know them all because you have the same ones. For all that I am denied specific access to each person's specific face, and his or her specific thought, I still relate to the idea that there is person under the paper. I still want to know who is behind the paper and what the paper says. I also think about pattern recognition, how we are programmed to see a face and relate to it even if we have minimal information. Scale and orientation of the paper (portrait vs. landscape), the visibility of the shoulders and chest (suggesting there is a head on top of them) and the trace of hand “writing” all tell me there was/is a human there, enabling me to project not only a person, but what that person might be feeling, thinking, desiring. No amount of language or visual barrier can divide me from them. They feel intimate, knowable, vulnerable and present.

. . . While I am sitting here writing this review, facing a large mirror that reflects the photographs back to me, I realize these photographs are also doppelgangers: stand ins for Abi and John. They are here, living in the living room, while Abi and John are back in Canada.

When I am in this room with these photographs, I have this sense that I am not alone. I also have this sense that I understand something about Abi and John, but not in a way I can articulate in words. Chinese characters provide the perfect metaphor for what I want to express, actually: as inscrutable as they might be on one level, they are like tree carvings that say, “I was here”, or even, “I loved this person”. I love that Abi and John felt compelled to have these photographs. I remember how excited they were at the show by these particular works.

In the same way this re-view offers a portrait of the portraits (as filtered through me), and a portrait of Abi and John (as filtered through me), and a portrait of me (as filtered through my take on the photographs and Abi and John) , and, of course, a portrait of Nathalie Latham (as filtered through all of the above), each of these portraits only tells a small part of our stories, which are always in flux depending on context. But these microscopic and fleeting moments in which we hear our own tiny voices, the way Horton hears a who, are the very moments in which we discover ourselves inside a flower or photograph we love, and in relating to those things, we also express to those near and dear, those who are paying attention, who we are . . . in that moment.


If you scroll down -- http://nathalielatham.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html -- you'll see the work of which I speak. On the 24th image, I'm the gal in pink with rolled up jeans, heading out the door.