Arnulf Rainer/Victor Hugo, Surpeintures, Maison de Victor Hugo

Arnulf Rainer, Van Gogh Series (Enough of Overpainting says Van Gogh), 1977

I have often seen Arnulf Rainer’s paintings in my peripheral vision in museums in Germany especially, but never spent much time with them. Peter Kubelka’s film however is a different story. Annette Michelson first introduced the film to me as “the most brilliant film ever made.” Arnulf Rainer (1960) has no image recorded on its film material, but instead the light creates a flicker effect on the screen, the sort that has today has me warn students who may be prone to epilepsy. Arnulf Rainer is film at its most brilliant because it is, effectively, a phenomenological experiment that reduces the medium to its most fundamental components: light moving in time.

It may be my enthusiasm for Kubelka’s film that has always left me luke warm in front of Rainer’s paintings. But the exhibition of drawings and overpaintings at the Maison Victor Hugo new perspectives on his work were opened up, and I am now even beginning to like it. And what was perhaps most enjoyable about the exhibition was the opportunity to see Hugo’s drawings and sketches in their originals. The title of the exhibition, Victor Hugo: Arnulf Rainer, Surpeintres only indicates half of what the exhibition contains. As well as Rainer’s overpaintings of Hugo’s sketches and drawings, as I say, there are some exquisite Hugo illustrations. In addition, examples of Rainer’s other overpainting series – van Gogh, Odillon, Corot, Friedrich — are also included.

Victor Hugo, Paysage, 1850

The images that engage with Hugo’s drawings do fill the first two galleries. Typically overpainting is a visual discussion of reflections, doubled images, interstices, revisioning, crossing out. It is a form of graffiti that effaces what lies beneath it, and in so doing, turns what it over paints into a secret. Apparently, all of these issues are inherent to Hugo’s drawings. His interest in landscapes emerging from a horizon, dreamlike cities in the throes of dissolution, all become exaggerated by Rainer’s “revisioning” of them. There are also images in which Rainer is clearly inspired by Hugo, and takes off from where Hugo left off, making it difficult for us to determine where one begins and the other ends. In these images, a work of struggle between two artists, what might be understood as an obliteration of the master (Friedrich, Corot, but also Hugo) and his era, his world view, becomes a “co-authored” and there are now two masters, two eras, two world views.

  

Arnulf Rainer, Untitled, 1998-99   

In the first rooms, Rainer’s typically aggressive and sometimes violent aesthetic comes together with Victor Hugo’s more gentle, reflective and intricate drawings and ink illustrations. There is an anger towards the originals, but then as I wandered through, looking at more and more of the images, I found inspiration, and even a tenderness towards Hugo’s drawings. In all of them, there was a very passionate relationship between a whole series of images, reproductions of images and reproductions of reproductions.

Arnulf Rainer, Sans Titre, 2000

Victor Hugo, L'Hermitage 1855

Rainer also turns Hugo’s works upside down and back to front before he overpaints. And even before this, Rainer makes a laser copy of a reproduction of the Hugo drawing or ink wash presumably found in books. Rainer deliberately keeps the elements of his process obscure, but I did keep thinking, if only I knew where Rainer found Hugo images, then another layer of meaning would emerge. But I was left thinking about an anonymous reproduction of a reproduction, in itself a form of repetition, being transformed into a manipulation and appropriation that somehow becomes so far removed from the original. And then, when we thought level of respect for the original couldn’t sink any lower, we notice that the reproductions are crooked on their backgrounds. At times Rainer enlarges the prints, to completely distort the original. And yet, at the same time, as I say, it accentuates everything about Hugo’s drawings.

Arnulf Rainer, Serie Friedrich, 1979 

The relationship to other artists’ work is completely different, particularly, when Rainer turns his hand to overpainting Corot and Friedrich paintings. In these examples, his brush not only appears to flay all respect for the master, but it takes on ironic and satirical proportions. On one image by Friedrich, Rainer writes his initials in red like a piece of graffiti over the face of the most revered of German painters. Like any piece of graffiti, Rainer’s disfigurations are also enhancements that draw attention to that which they erase.

The Turin Horse, dir. Béla Tarr, 2010

When I saw Béla Tarr speak at the Centre Pompidou a few weeks ago he was off next morning to the première of The Turin Horse (2010) in Italy. On my way home from seeing this film tonight, I couldn’t help wondering what happened in the Q & A after an Italian screening of The Turin Horse. My experience of Italians at such events, any event, is they love to talk. Béla Tarr’s latest film has no more than a dozen lines of dialogue in two and a half hours, and does not exactly open up the way for general chit chat. The Turin Horse lies somewhere between bleak and apocalyptic.

The plot, if only just a plot, is sparse: a man comes home with a horse, his daughter takes off his boots and clothes, she makes “dinner” — boiled potatoes— they eat them with their hands, stare out the window, sleep and have very little to say to one another. Next day, she dresses her father, they check on the horse, she gets water from the well, they drink a glass of water. And on it goes. Day after day for six days, there is nothing that resembles hope or a better tomorrow in Béla Tarr’s avowedly final film. The one consistent element of this dirge-like film is the sound of the storm that rages outside the father and daughter’s mud home. On day four (of six days) the angry father decides it’s time to pack up the cart and move away from the entrapment of their home. So we watch the young woman struggle to lift the trunks and their other belongings (including the potatoes of course) onto the cart. She then has to push the cart while the father with his dead arm and the horse that won’t eat are pulled along by her. We watch as the threesome disappear over the hill outside the house. Then just as the horse’s ears have disappeared forever, the three figures turn around and come home again. Needless to say, we never know why they left in the first place, nor why they change their minds. On day six even the storm passes and the sound is returned to silence. Simultaneously the oil lamps go out and the couple are in darkness. They try to relight the lamps, in vain. Thus the film ends, with the two not even eating their boiled potatoes, sitting at the table in darkness and silence.

But what happens is never the point of Tarr’s films. Rather, the camera watches sometimes from afar, sometimes in closeup, as the two go through their daily routines, getting dressed, drinking water, feeding the horse and cleaning out its stable. Life inside the home is a Walker Evans image come to life. There is nothing in this home: they have no books, no color, no plants, nothing that lives, nothing that could be held onto for emotional fortitude. Nothing. And yet, like an Evans photograph, the place is spotless, well-cared for, no doubt because there is little else to do out there in what seems to be the middle of nowhere. 

The film’s aesthetic is, unsurprisingly, gorgeous. And the moving camera we saw Tarr develop in his earliest films from the 1970s, and take to baroque extremes in Werkmeister Harmonies (2000), has become controlled, and measured in The Turin Horse. In the early films the wandering camera is restless, always in motion in a Pennebaker-like cinema vérité, but here in The Turin Horse the camera is constrained by the dolly on which it moves.

While I am not convinced an aesthetically gorgeous film can always successfully contain a scene and life as desperate as that of the country people in The Turin Horse, it seems to work. Or rather, it’s the gorgeousness of the film that keeps us there, immersed in the tedious, never-ending routines and rituals of a daily life. While the poverty striken life of water and potatoes with rags for clothes couldn’t be more removed from that of our own lives (the man next to me was drinking a can of coke), we are mesmerized and keep watching because of the beauty of Tarr’s images. Thus the film unrelenting keeps us, once again, in the middle of the descent into hell, a milder version of which we are familiar with from his earlier films. And perhaps this is exactly the point: The Turin Horse reflects the routine and entrapment of daily life as we know it, only with the color and accoutrements stripped away.

If this is not the point, it’s difficult to say what it might be. The father and daughter are given no history or context, and the relationship between them is not dwelt on in any way. All we know is that we would not want to be either of them. Against a black screen, the film opens with a voiceover telling the story of Friedrich Nietzsche who saw a horse being whipped in Turin and the event precipitated his breakdown. But when the image of The Turin Horse appears showing the man with the horse, there’s no suggestion they might be Nietzsche and his horse, or even, for that matter, that Tarr’s film characters might be related to the myth in any way. I don’t think it is possible to say that the film is about a particular historical moment, in Hungary for example. Because other than the language of the dozen lines of dialogue, the father and daughter could be anywhere. What I can say is, even if the motivation is not to show the hopelessness of the human condition, The Turin Horse's stretching of the cinema to narrational and narrative limits is justification enough to make it a must see for cinephiles like me.

William Forsythe Company, Sider au Chaillot

Sider was like nothing I have ever experienced or seen before. Of course, it is recognizeably dance, but beyond that, there is little for the audience to hold onto. Forsythe takes dance beyond anything we know, anything recognizeable, placing out of reach any hope of identification with the narrative and narrational logic for which the human body is usually a vehicle, or the logic that usually enables identification of and with the body. Every movement, every gesture towards rhythm, tone, coherence, all is ruptured, thrown into a vertiginous disarray that frustrates, enervates but never disappoints its audience. If Forsythe's earlier work invoked the protocols and vocabulary of classical ballet only to subvert them, Sider does away with any reference altogether.

The Chaillot website announces William Forsythe’s latest choreography thus: The “intricate patterns of [Elizabethan theatrical] speech are communicated to the performers via the soundtrack of a filmed version of a late 16th century tragedy. The adherence of the performer's actions to this vocal score instigates disquieting configurations of incongruous musicality that underscore the drama's themes of analogy and obscuration.” I include the quote because I would never have known that the discontinuous, fragmented and always unfinished movements were in fact inspired by the spoken text of a of a filmed version of an Elizabethan tragedy, which was in fact Hamlet. We were sitting too far back to notice the in-ear microphones that fed this text to the dancers. But even now I know it, I can’t say that it gives me any more insight into what I saw, heard and experienced at Chaillot last night.

I don’t know much about the Elizabethan theatre or the Courts that I assume were deconstructed in Sider, but I do know the music from the period. And I know that it is music in which the form cannot shift or change, ever. The harmony can explode if neccessary, but the form remains constant, a fortress, whose walls and dictates must be observed without choice. I also think of the perfection of the elaborate 16^th century garden with its emphasis on symmetricality, formal, one could say, scientific complexity. While pleasure might take place in the garden, its architecture is as rigid as the social forms of those who designed it. All this is shattered in Sider: any resemblance to form has been set asunder. There is no base line, nothing for us to hold on to, at least nothing that might resemble the narratives that help us make sense of the world, and our place within that world. The stage of Sider was overrun by chaos and disarray. Nothing cohered, nothing made sense, and just when I thought I was beginning to grasp what was happening, the rug was pulled out from under me. Anne and I laughed as we climbed the magisterial staircase of the Théâtre National de Chaillot, and I announced that I thought it was going to end when a male and a female dancer found each other under a cardboard sheet, and in one of the few moments of human interaction, they slink off the stage together. But no, of course, this is the Hollywood ending to a piece of choreography that couldn’t be further removed from the manufacture of dreams. True to the non-logic of Sider, the end was not really an end, but rather, the place it happened to stop.

Other than the fact that the dancers kept their same costumes throughout the performance, the only constant was the use of the huge cardboard sheets as props. Of course, the dancers made the handling of the sheets look effortless, but I was in awe of the dexterity and diversity of their use, knowing how awkward cardboard of that size actually is, thus recognizing the intense demand of the dancers' movement. At various points the cardboard sheets were made into fortresses, at others they became shields against each other as enemy, weapons, drums to be beaten. And then the dancers used them to create the semblance, or the beginnings of rhythms: they kicked the cardboard to make loud repetitive noises, dragged a sheet across the stage for the sound of the wind, or dropped it to create that of an axe slicing through wood. The cardboard sheets were also the sole connection between the dancers, though usually as that which separated one from another. In perhaps the only tender moment in the performance, they hastily built a house in which to hide, though from what it was not clear. And at times the one male dancer who was not in the guise of a creature from another era, another planet, or reminiscent of another life form slid like an eel behind a sheet, only to have his protection ripped away. 

A friend from Frankfurt had told me about Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt in the 1990s when I was writing my dissertation on light in German cinema. My friend had said then that Forsythe’s company sculpted its mise-en-scène in light. In the 1990s, the use of light was no doubt different from its use in Sider but it’s true, the low-hung bands of fluorescent light, dictated by the same digital sounds as the bodily movement, contributed to Forsythe’s challenge to what constitutes dance. At one point, the lights were turned off altogether and we were left listening to dancers and cardboard making mysterious gestures across the stage. In its integration, or amalgamation of sound, light, text, movement, Forsythe’s work is about as close to a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk as anything I have seen in my lifetime. And so, it’s not simply a reframing of everything we understand dance to be, Sider is experimental art at its most cutting edge.