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.

Something I Stole From Nathalie Latham's blog

Forms of love

'Well, do you know,' said the Major, 'it seems to me there is really only one supreme contact, the contact of love. Mind you, the love may take on an infinite variety of forms. And in my opinion, no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death.'

From DH Lawrence's novella, THE LADYBIRD, set at the end of WWI in London. Published 1923.

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/l41lb/

Liz's Salad Recipe

It occurs to me that since I have converted even the most die hard meat eaters into salad lovers, the least I can do is share my recipe. Also, I shudder to think of all my friends who are going without while I'm away. So, here it is. Share it far and wide.

Ingredients

• Romain or mixed greens, but NEVER ice burg lettuce (not even fit to be called lettuce)
• Sometimes I add fresh cilantro but only do it if you love cilantro; it's a love or hate taste
  

then add any of these in any combination, all cut to bite size:

• tomatoes
• cucumber
• fresh or roasted red pepper
  
• pears or mangoes or peaches or nectarines or strawberries or apples
  
• avocado, if in season
• feta cheese (I like it so I crumble a lot in)
  
• walnuts or pecans and/or pumpkin seeds (really, any nut or seed you like)

meat options:

• Chicken marinade #1 - Thai inspired:
  
• fish sauce (3 tbsp approx for 2 breasts cut up into bite-sized pieces)
• balsamic vinegar (again, approx 3 tbsp)
• olive oil (1-2 tbsp)
  
• fresh squeezed lime
• red thai curry paste for heat (I dunno, maybe 2 tsp? Or one tbsp? I like it hot)
• maple syrup. Same amount as paste? Test it. Marinade should be salty, sweet and hot
• Chicken marinade #2 -- Tex Mex inspired
• juice of fresh lemon
• olive oil (1-2 tbsp)
• balsamic vinegar (again, approx 3 tbsp)
• ground cumin (2-4 tsp)
• chili powder (2-4 tsp)
• salt
  
• Pork or beef: same as above

Marinade for an hour if you can. Then sauté and put aside.

Assembling the salad
First, wash the greens well to get rid of any grit.

Dressing and assembling the salad are key to the success of this recipe (along with everything else, of course). First you put all your greens in the bowl and dress by squeezing half a lemon over them, a drizzle of olive oil (a capful even for a large salad) and some balsamic vinegar and salt. Salt is key. Mixed up greens. Then add the veggies on top, then the fruit. squeeze more lemon and add salt to that layer, too. Then add the meat, then the feta, then the nuts. I really am very liberal with the feta and nuts.

DO NOT MIX TOGETHER. To serve, you just dig down. If you mix, everything falls the bottom. (OK, you are all adults, mix if you must, but I will know and will suffer!)

Enjoy!

Baggage -- not all bad

This morning I remembered why I'm here: to write. Also, to take stock. No longer willing to make concrete plans, since my life is evidence of the ole best-laid-plans saw, but definitely wanting to nudge the direction of my life into areas that light my fire, I needed time away in another city to kick me out of my routine ways of thinking and being. Berlin is my new city of nudging in the way Montreal was once that city. When I arrived in both places, I knew practically no one, but both cities have such a strong, warm vibe that even if I'm not actively seeking out new friends, or attending cultural events, I feel surrounded by people I would probably like a lot (I just don't know them quite yet), and the culture seeps into me by virtue of my walking down a street and looking in a window, or people watching at cafés. What I like about unfamiliar cities is what I love about airports and road trips: they are transitional spaces that induce transitory mind states open to potential, to possibilities, to becoming. I always have moments of new seeing in these spaces.

For instance, standing at the baggage claim when I arrived, I marveled at how each person could so easily identify his or her luggage since many of the bags looked identical -- generic black with wheels. Then it occurred to me that we were all like new parents identifying our babies as we press our faces against the glass window that divides us from our babies on the maternity ward. Of course, this image shows just how little I know about being a new parent. Do those rooms even exist anymore? Did they ever? I am clearly not a parent. And, in real life too, standing there at the baggage claim, I watched my own bag go around the carousel no less than 50 times before I thought to check the name tag. Sure enough, it was mine. I had not recognize my own baby.

And in that moment, instead of feeling frustration because I had stood there for so long, I laughed. I laughed because the waiting had already happened so there was no getting that time back. My fire in Montreal happened and there is no getting my stuff back. Relationships have ended and there is no getting that love back. But I still get to walk out of the airport into a new city where my heart and mind are free to think about time and love in any way I wish.

And then, sometime down the road, after becoming familiar with this city and learning to recognize the landmarks and cultural cues that once eluded me, I get to come home again and see my old world as new again.

Perfect-temperature coffee

For those of you who know that I like my coffee ON FIRE, I am thrilled to report that Germans, at least the ones at this café, serve their coffee as hot as hot can be. And it was not just a fluke. It happened twice! I didn't even have to ask! Now that's a sign of civilization. Bliss.

Berlin Day Two

Day one was my taxi ride from the airport with a driver whose only English amounted to “Canadia” and “ice player,” and whose Spanish amounted to “Sangria!” and “Cuba libré!” and whose French was a Spanish word he tried to pass off as French. And yet we still managed to make each other laugh and to find Abi’s flat. If you want to have a conversation, there’s always a way . . .

Then, I’m in the downstairs of Abi’s building wondering how I’m going to get my 48 pound suitcase upstairs when a man my age appears on the stairs, sees my predicament, and automatically grabs my bag and starts climbing. Turns out we live on the same floor. His name is André. His English, of course, is great!

Then I’m in Abi’s flat, and for the next 20 minutes I’m giggling my ass off as I wander through its two-large, beautifully furnished rooms flooded-with-light; then out to the perfect little balcony that faces a row of gorgeous buildings with more perfect, beautiful balconies, each one overflowing with flower boxes and chairs people actually spend time sitting on to stare back at my building and smoke and drink wine (ok, not sure if that’s what they do, but it’s what I imagine they do). Then back to the kitchen where I find a small red fridge stuffed with assorted delicious cheeses, proper European cold cuts, fresh mixed greens, three kinds of yogurts (we don’t even begin to know what yogurt is in Canada) and a kitchen table profering three different kinds of chocolate and a bottle of red wine . . . I am going to be very happy here for the next month. Abi has spoiled me rotten. I LOVE that woman!

I want to move here, IMMEDIATELY, only I want to move in here, with Abi’s stuff. My mind is already calculating how to get her to buy things for my future flat here, the one I will certainly buy within the year, the perfect Liz-Berlin flat in which I will write my novel, make many bodies of paintings, and live out my days speaking German, drinking wine on my balcony, and becoming the Berliner my grandparents never got the chance to finish (although theirs would have been a much more opulent life, but I think I have at least tapped into the ethos of it, if not the wealth).

Last night I spent time at one of my favourite cafés from my last visit and e-mailed and chatted while I ate potato and sausage soup. Let the suffering end!

Then I came home and ate mounds of passion fruit yogurt and granola and watched a DVD of The Mighty Boosh (You Tube it. It’s inexplicable and deeply, deeply funny).

This morning, a wonderful run by the canal (which Abi's flat is 3 blocks from) and around and through Gorlizter park and back down Abi’s old street (where she was renting when I was last here) and then through the Turkish market, which is open every Tuesday and Friday. Bought some tomatoes, cucumber and feta there on my way back to the apartment after the run.

Then, lunch with Eric. This is what lunch should be: spinach pasta filled with ricotta, maché and some other green I did not recognize that Abi left for me, topped with market tomatoes and a dressing Eric made (olive oil, dijon, lemon, salt), a plate with cold cuts, olives, three kinds of cheese and slices of fresh, sweet peach. Bowl of mixed nuts, too. Eric was my seat mate on my last transatlantic flight to Berlin last April. He’s a New Yorker who now lives in Berlin. Got his passport last year because his father was a German Jew. Eric is a journalist. Eric Marx: how great a name is that? Might meet Eric in Mitte tonight (cool arty area where many galleries are located) for the English language movie night at a bookstore, but it means taking the U-bahn (metro) and I’m still slightly afraid of that. The ticket machines baffle me. And the rule-bound Germans scare me even more. So, depends how brave I feel. And how tired.

Will post my pics so far to Flickr. Check my link on the right-hand tool bar. And a deeply felt thanks to Wade for loaning me his amazing camera for this trip. It is making ALL the difference.