Giotto e Compagni au Louvre

Giotto, The Preaching of St Francis to the Birds, c. 1298

If I could have a say in how I will return in the next life, I think I would like to be a bird in a Giotto painting. As my American friend said of the two in the air on the predella of The Stigmatisation of St Francis of Assisi, they are like feathers falling out of the sky. They are weightless, carefree, and standing before them, nothing else matters.

Giotto, The Stigmatization of St Francis of Assisi, c.1298

The most precious moments in the room of paintings in this small exhibition at the Louvre, are those that make up the intimate details, the everyday lives of Giotto’s figures. The Stigmatization itself is wonderful for its sumptuous gold, its very odd perspective, the gentle saint receiving the stigmata from Christ, the richness of his robe despite it being in brown. But the three scenes from the life of St Francis along the predella are exquisite. Their beauty is in their quietness, his humility as he receives recognition from the Pope, the simplicity of the saint feeding the birds, all of whom are looking towards him, in motion towards him. It is true that the perspective is curious, especially in the first and second panels. In 1300 Giotto still did not understand, or rather, he was still working out how to account for the distortions that need to be incorporated so the work can be seen looking up and at an angle.

Giotto, The Dream of Innocent III, 1298

But what is so touching in these predella panels is the quietness of St Francis as he raises the foundations of the falling church, genuflects to Innocent III, as he feeds the birds. These scenes are peaceful, they are human, and they depict St Francis as a figure with an inner life. Even if we do not see the expression of emotions in these particular images, the realism of the figures reassures us that he and the other figures have them. While the altarpiece has always been celebrated for its realist depiction, especially since Vasari trumped it in 1568, what is most notable today is how the predella images are like moments out of time, not in the grand narrative of St Francis’ life as it is usually told. As much as the greatness of the venerable St Francis is remembered — as Vasari would have it — the beauty of the altarpiece also lies in the intimacy of everyday gestures.

Seated Figures of Two Men Holding a Sword, St Paul and St Julian ? 

I was also captivated by a small piece of green/grey paper on which are two metal point figures, two men seated holding swords. The Louvre claims it was done by Giotto, but like most of what is attributed to him, we can’t be so sure. Giotto was always on the move, always on the way to the next commission, even before the last had finished. Often he would leave the “compagnia” to finish the works, or indeed, to paint them from scratch. Because the whole notion of the artist was so different in his day, Giotto neither thought of himself as an individual genius, and neither was his place in the Italian trecento anything like that of today’s artists. I know so little about attribution of works from the trecento, but I do know that this delicate metalpoint has all of the intimacy, humanness and immediacy of St Francis with the birds and as he receives the order before Pope Innocent III. In this small metal point with white highlighting, the two men sit close together: the scene is so immediate that we can feel the tension between them. The man on the left is not so sure, his hand on his sword. The one on the right is more confident, his robes textured and nuanced by the white highlights, done with a brush. This is a small scene in which great things are being discussed and we are allowed into the moment for a brief look. Similarly, it’s not simply the two figures that are marvelous here, but the paper itself is breathtaking. It doesn’t really matter if this work is done by Giotto or not because the paper that is  over 700 years old is a work of art in itself.

Giotto, The Crucifixion, 1335

And lastly, the colours. This is, of course, my attraction to Giotto and later Renaissance painting, especially in Florence. This exhibition shows that Giotto, even though he was working in what might be called the pre-Renaissance, has begun to use the colours which he has taken and developed from his one time master, Cimabue. The Berlin Crucifixion not only has the same gentle movements that we see in the St Francis altarpiece, but the robes of the figures are resplendent: pink, red, blue, with the highlighting and shadowing in their corresponding opposite. Giotto is one of the first Italian painters who really understood how to use colour. He understood that colour was instrumental to the movement of the painting, to the definition and characterization of the figures, and in the Berlin Crucifixion, to the story being told as the characters gather at the base of the cross. Not to mention the fact that Giotto is one of the first to paint skin tones in anything other than green and grey, an important factor in the realism that is often attributed to his works.

Giotto, St John the Evangelist, c. 1320

Giotto is important today, at least he enjoys notoriety and draws crowds at the Louvre, because modernism has resurrected him. His turn to realism, his fascination with colour, with the human stories that unfold outside of the grand biblical narratives, all of these concerns are embedded in art especially in the early 20^th century. And so, even though I kept thinking how much better Giotto’s paintings look in Italian churches, there’s something fitting about doing battle with the crowds on a Friday night at the Louvre to get a glimpse of these exquisite masterpieces.

Un, Mani Soleymanlou au Théâtre du Chaillot

Un de Mani Soleymanlou

Because I book so far in advance, as I take my seat at the theater, the first thing I usually do is try to remember what prompted me to buy tickets for the performance I am about to see. But my motivation for seeing last night’s performance, Un, by Mani Soleymanlou was clear from the minute the lights went up on this one man show. Soleymanlou is an Iranian living in Montreal, a city he arrived at via Paris, Toronto, Ottawa. And his one man show is all about him: who is he? what is his identity? is it given by his passport? The traditions of the world he was born into? The one that educated him? The one he lives in? Growing up surrounded by my father’s collection of fine and not so fine Persian carpets, I have always been fascinated by Iran. And having been in motion all of my adult life, questions of home, exile, and whether the two have anything to do with the peripatetic motion of being a wanderer, are lifelong preoccupations. I knew why I had bought the ticket to Un.

In presentation, Soleymanlou’s performance reminded me of Spalding Grey’s Swimming to Cambodia — the images of which I still carry in my mind even though I saw it 30 years ago in an Adelaide Festival of Arts. Soleymanlou plays every part in his play, his story, of the young boy who left Téhéran, moved via France to Canada in exile from Iran of the Ayatollah to join the Iranian diaspora, and over the course of the one hour performance, the adult who goes back with his mother to “the homeland”. The story itself is somewhat standard: the exile searching for an identity, torn between lands, cultures, traditions, cuisines and of course, languages. Soleymanlou takes solace in other exiles, always yearning for a home he did not know, or one he has not yet found. Even though we have seen and read this story over and over again, the reality of his individual synthesis of the familiar questions, and his narration in different languages to create vivid images in the mind of the spectator, was convincing.

For Soleymanlou, the vast cultural richness, the dense political histories, the ancient traditions, the language, the cuisine, the beliefs of Iran, all of them have been caught in the crossfire, as he puts it, of the battle for oil. His picture of Iran is fascinating because it is taken from both inside and outside, neither here nor there, just like his expressions of what it means to be in the diasporic community in Canada. And perhaps the most impressive element of the show is Soleymanlou’s movement around the languages – English, French, Farsi, Arabic – between countries, between characters. As he shifts in and out of identities, the expectation is that an identity will reveal itself somewhere in the breaths that he nevertheless doesn’t allow himself to take.

Un de Mani Soleymanlou

People often tell me I am a nomad, and I once thought of myself as an exile: brought up in a culture in which there was no place for me. Over the years I have come to understand why I am neither. I am no exile because I chose to leave Australia, and to call myself nomadic would be to ignore my deep sense of attachment to home, and to the place from which I leave and to which I return at the end of my travels. The world has changed since I left Australia for a job on a cargo liner in 1986. If for no other reason than we live in a world where “international” is a valid response to what, for many of us, is that very complicated question: “where are you from?” After all these years, I still carry an Australian passport, I live in Paris, I work and pay taxes in the United Kingdom, and my intellectual work usually focuses on things German. So, like Soleymanlou, I live between languages, cultures, across geographical borders.

As I watched and listened to Soleymanlou, I saw and understood from a different perspective how different that sense of displacement is for each of us, depending not on where, but on how and why we left. Soleymanlou describes an emptiness, a sense of something missing, a solitude that must be filled, an emptiness given him by the country from which he was forced to leave. His emptiness and solitude are reflected in the fact that he sits on a stage surrounded by empty seats. He is both the actor and the spectator in his own life, a life in which there is ultimately, no filling in of the gaps. I don’t have that emptiness. I have a plenitude that is characterized by the richness of the world that I have chosen to inhabit, a world that gives me what Australia never could. And at the same time, I take Australia, it’s landscape, the sun, wherever I go. At least, that’s the lifelong search: to complement the international world I live in, I am always looking for places that rhyme with the memory of the world from which I began, but to which I no longer belong. I long to have that memory resound as it is mimicked by a somewhere else, in a different octave, on a different horizon. And that's the difference: for an exile like Soleymanlou, there is no image, no memory, no sound, because there is no land beneath his feet, from which to begin the search for an echo.

David Claerbout, Kunsthalle Mainz

David Claerbout, Oil Workers (of the Shell Company of Nigeria)
returning home from work, caught in the torrential rain (2013)

In Mainz a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to enjoy a private viewing of the current exhibition of video works by Belgian artist David Claerbout. In their insistence on the power of time as a subject in and of itself for video, the works reminded me of those by Steve McQueen. But while I am always disappointed by McQueen’s exhibitions, Claerbout’s was innovative and provocative, especially as they interacted with the medium’s capacity to visualize time. Each of the handful of pieces in the exhibition presents as a series of still images, and then, over time, we recognize the slow unfolding of a narrative. Whereas in Steve McQueen’s films and videos the narratives are predictable and often looped, Claerbout’s are focused and goal oriented.

David Claerbout, Riverside, 2009

Each of the pieces in Mainz is, in some way, about isolation. In Riverside, 2009 a young man and a young woman on two adjacent screens appear to walk towards each other through a rugged landscape. However, they never meet in a single image. There are several moments when they almost meet, but they never do. The young man hurts his hand, he is bleeding, we want the woman to come to his rescue, she never does. Rather, each is left to inhabit his and her own reality, even when the other is always present in imagination, if only in our imagination, not theirs.

In Oil Workers (Of the Shell Company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013), a piece made specifically for the Kunsthalle Mainz, we approach the piece that takes up the whole of one wall, with colonialism on our minds. We feel sorry for the workers and assume, because they are in Nigeria working for a multinational company they must be poor. Poverty is, of course, the general disposition of workers in Nigeria. And yet, they are lined up, well-clothed, completely in control of the gaze throughout the length of the video. Their line of sight follows that of the camera and, by default, ours as the camera moves around them in slow motion. Simultaneously, the water flooding the street increasingly becomes the focus of the film images, creating a churning, a nausea in us as we, not the workers, lose our balance before the image.

David Claerbout, Arena, 2007

Water is everywhere in Claerbout’s videos: he is obsessed with water, reflections, isolation, separation. Water and the camera together, isolates us from them, the characters in the images. The people are isolated from each other, even when there is more than one in a frame. In Arena, 2007, even the spectators to the basketball game are isolated, usually because they are all looking directly at the camera. Their relationship is with us, looking directly into the camera, or rather, with the technology that films them, not with each other. They never speak to each other or interact in any way. This particular image is also soulless – the colours are glaring, the image highly saturated, making the people plastic, vulgar, brash, and their world uninviting.

David Claerbout, The Quiet Shore, 2011

In this piece in particular, we see Claerbout engage with different types of perception: looking at the camera, the camera looking at the subject, our awareness of our own placement as viewers, our ideological perception – of the Nigerian workers – the actual processes of looking. And the nausea we experience as we follow the camera around the water of the flood creates a physiological, corporealization of vision. While the effects he creates in Oil Workers (Of the Shell Company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain are more transparent - the use of multiple different techniques at the same time to create a simultaneous pulling away and lateral movement that creates physical discomfort, there are other pieces such as The Quiet Shore that frustrate us because the logic of the piece is not revealed through looking. What looks at first like a narrative proves to be many stills taken of the same scene at the same moment but from different places around a beach in France. As we watch, we only ever see part of the piece: we think we are looking at photographs but we are not looking at photographs, and some shots appear to stay longer on the screen than others, perhaps this is an illusion. Similarly, we want to know how he has determined the placement of the people, especially because some reappear at apparently different places on the beach, but perhaps it is at a different time? Among other of its complex narratives, The Quiet Shore reflects the inadequacy of the human eye to the knowledge we seek in images. 

Copyright of All Images: David Claerbout