Interview: John Stezaker

16/02/18
Interview: John Stezaker

Published in the autumn 2017 issue of Art Quarterly

Marguerite Horner: Bringing the Sublime into the Mundane

29/10/15

Marguerite Horner: Bringing the Sublime into the Mundane

The Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan once said: ‘To bring the sublime into the mundane is the greatest challenge there is’. The sublime, ideas of which are generally dated back to the first century AD, when the Greek critic Longinus wrote an aesthetic treatise on the subject,¹ is largely associated with greatness, awe and something exceeding human understanding or representation. Kant suggests it has the power to transform and uplift, to make human reason transcend sensibility, by confronting it with something at first seemingly incomprehensible.² His focus – as well as that of his predecessor Edmund Burke³ – is upon nature and the divine as sources for the sublime experience, and this can also be seen in contemporary 18th and 19th-century artworks by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, JMW Turner and John Martin.

Marguerite Horner’s paintings might therefore appear to depict the polar opposite of the sublime. Her suburban streets and highways, deserted parking lots, cars, telegraph poles and wires, largely inspired by her experiences of small town America, are the stuff of the everyday – mundane, quotidian, manmade. Yet, with their grisaille palette, fluctuating between being crisply focused and blurred to the point of obfuscation, there is something uncanny about these otherwise easily recognisable scenes. They are familiar, yet strange – estranged. Freud delineates the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’,⁴ as ‘nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’.⁵ He drew a distinction between the uncanny and the sublime, by imbuing the latter with solely positive attributes, ‘rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress’. The uncanny, on the other hand, he classed as those things ‘which lie within the field of what is frightening’.^6,7 This is false on two counts: (i) his interpretation of the sublime is somewhat rose-tinted, since it is often associated, in the first instance, with terror and horror, and (ii) this very process of alienation and repression, which Freud attributes to the uncanny, is what leads to Kant’s transcendental encounter with the sublime.

Consider, for example, the incident with the madeleine in Proust’s Combray. Describing the moment of tasting the known-but-unknown delicacy, Proust writes: ‘…this new sensation having had on me the effect that love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.’⁸ His description is of a form of self-transcendence, an encounter with the sublime, triggered through an encounter with the alienated and forgotten, the known-but-unknown, the uncanny. In the same way, Horner’s paintings serve to trigger a memory. In their veiled state, they seek not to represent, but to signify. They seek to fill their viewer with an essence. This realisation and resultant introspection then suggests that Horner’s paintings have succeeded in meeting the Sufi master’s challenge: a seemingly mundane image, like the simple madeleine, can contain the seed, or essence, of a memory or state, that can lead the viewer to transcend his or her physical being and cease to feel ‘mediocre, contingent, mortal’.

Simon Morley, discussing the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, notes that beauty is static, that we are charmed, seduced and captivated by it, while the sublime transports, moves and dislocates us from our self. He references how Arthur Schopenhauer ‘explored the fissure that lies at the heart of being, and envisaged a self that can in certain situations observe itself in the very act of confronting a fearful inner abyss’.⁹ It is this inner abyss that Horner captures so strikingly in her paintings: a sense of loneliness and emptiness, a far greater and more terrifying phenomenon than anything nature can offer. As Derrida observes, contrary to Kant and Burke: ‘The sublime is not in nature but only in ourselves’.¹⁰ Horner herself speaks of taking inspiration from Jung, when he declared a similar, if reversed, observation: ‘For the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without’.¹¹ She says: ‘In my paintings, I strive to capture the meaningful dialogue between my internal and external realities, which are metaphorically portrayed, by using images intuitively taken from my passing landscape’.¹²

To return to Morley’s notion that the sublime transports, moves and dislocates us from our self, we begin to understand the latent symbolism of Horner’s cars: parked or frozen in movement, they are vehicles of transcendence, transporting the viewer from within to without, from without to within. Her use of blurring, reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s use of the squeegee, has dual effect. Firstly, it suggests transience – a sense of passing by, of motion. Secondly, like the veiling of the greyscale palette, it reduces the image to the bare minimum – the Proustian essence. Richter, speaking of his own use of the technique, says: ‘I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. […] I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information’.¹³ In terms of the sublime, these blurred passages represent what Lyotard terms: ‘a cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented’.¹⁴ They are the physical, painterly manifestation of this fissure.

Derrida, in his essay ‘Parergon’, focuses attention not on the object of contemplation (the work, or ‘ergon’), but on its boundary. He speaks of the need to frame something to prevent it from becoming merely monstrous. Horner’s paintings are full of frames within frames: the grey skies, streets, and parking lots are bisected by bright white road markings, lamp posts, trees, and telegraph wires. In Boxed In (2010), the block of flats is set in a vivid red square, restricting the main frame of reference to a fraction of the composition, with the mundane continuing all around. Within this red frame, a myriad windows – further, smaller frames – push up against one another. Each offers a different (albeit the same) viewpoint, a reflection of the outer world. This segment could be seen from any angle, upside down, it would make no difference. Pixelated imagery, like reflections on the retina, multiple tiny photograms, just prior to being interpreted into a coherent image by the mind. Horner speaks of a constant dialogue between the mark and the inner eye in the process of her painting. The same is true for the viewer as he or she interprets it. Horner is providing just the ingredients – the flour and lemon juice of the madeleine – and asking viewers to reconstruct their own memories – to recognise in the universe without, their own universe within and to confront and transcend this inner abyss. In so doing, she is bringing the sublime into the mundane.

Notes

1. Longinus, On the Sublime, available online as part of the Project Gutenberg, EBook #17957, trans. by HL Havell, 2006, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17957/17957-h/17957-h.htm (accessed 11 October 2015)

2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1790, trans. by JC Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911)

3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

4. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, 1917-1919, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp219-252, p220

5. Ibid, p241

6. Ibid, p219

7. See also Jessica Wren Butler, ‘What is Literature?: The sublime/uncanny as a conceptual framework for answering the answerless, and the problematic quest for certainty,’ essay available via academia.edu (accessed 11 October 2015)

8. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, 1913-27, ed. and annotated by William C Carter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), p51 [my emphasis]

9. Simon Morley, ‘Introduction: The Contemporary Sublime’ in The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Simon Morley (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press: 2010), pp12-21, p16

10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’ in The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Simon Morley (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press: 2010), pp41-46, p44

11. Carl Jung, Collected Works of CG Jung: The First Complete English Edition of the Works of CG Jung, vol. IV, 1953, ed. by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler and trans. by RFC Hull (London: Routledge, 2015) p1482

12. Personal communication with the artist, August 2015

13. Gerhard Richter, Text. Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, ed. by Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009) p33

14. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ in The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Simon Morley (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press: 2010), pp27-40, p36

Images:

You wont find it by yourself 

2013 

oil on linen 

50x50cm 

Barrier 

2014 

oil on linen 

50x50cm

Void 

2011 

oil on canvas 

50x50cm 

Boxed in 

2010 

oil on linen 

50x50cm

All © the artist

Interview with Adeline de Monseignat

17/11/14

Adeline de Monseignat: interview

Adeline de Monseignat: Home
Ronchini Gallery, London
14 November 2014 – 17 January 2015

Dutch-Monagesque artist Adeline de Monseignat’s work is greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny. For her current exhibition at the Ronchini Gallery she has created a large-scale installation exploring childhood memories.

Taking the exact measurements of the bedroom in which she grew up, she has recreated the space using the red-and-white striped awning from her family home as the walls and her old blue-and-white striped bed linen.

Nestled in the bed – which itself is surrounded by partially built walls, comprising material-wrapped bricks and oddly angled mirrors – is a family of what the artist refers to as “creaptures”. Now recognisable as De Monseignat’s motif, these glass spheres filled with vintage fur call into question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects.

This particular arrangement pays homage to Louise Bourgeois’s marble sculpture Cumul (1969). The installation is strangely claustrophobic, at once familiar and strange – indeed, the epitome of the uncanny.

Studio International met De Monseignat in her south London studio a few weeks before her exhibition to see the work in progress and to talk about some of the ideas that inspire her.

To watch the video of this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/adeline-de-monseignat-home-creatures-ronchini-gallery

Review of Astrid Svangren at Maria Stenfors

19/03/14

Astrid Svangren:

before me: I roll in the snow/ rotating/ raveling/ turned/ twisted/ to an expression of instance


behind me: peonies/ disassemble/ loosen up/ breaking down/ collapsing


beside me: enfleurage/ ointmentlike/ perfumed solids/ without body/ engulfed/ collected/ to a given


under me: loose materials/ mishmash/ knocking/ beating/ leaf buds/ opening/ chlorophyll/ watercolor/ unfolding/ fold in


over me: froth of sugar/ corals/ sea anemones/ jellyfish/ seasnails/ all is viewed/ lulling/ as long as it lasts

Maria Stenfors

14 March – 26 April 2014

Swedish-born, Copenhagen-resident artist Astrid Svangren (b. 1972) is not one for short titles. The above poem serves as both the title of the exhibition and as the title of each of the seven works within. And actually it describes them better than any other combination of words I might seek to contrive. I can but try, regardless.

Candy coloured sheets of plexiglass hang like barriers, separating one world from another; one dream’s landscape colliding with a fragment of the next; a window; a mirror; a wall.

Blue: like the ocean, inscribed with the words of the poem-cum-all-purpose-title, scratched and scuffed, graffitied, distorting what lies on either side.

Pink: daubed with candlewax and cellophane. Like sweet wrappers or confetti. The ground upon which a painting has been born. Look a little closer and maybe it’s not as enticing as it seems. Is there something awry in this gingerbread house? Was it the scene of a tussle? Of something more angry and violent? Are the stains and substances not what one at first perceives?

Black and white: hung flat against the wall. Like a net curtain, there’s the desire to lift a corner and peak through the window. Black scrawls and red splashes. Again we pause to question whether we’d actually want to see more, were we able. Two pink silk crescents at the top: horns or lingerie, either way the suggestion is of adult play…

…which involves, perhaps, the cascade of ostrich feathers hanging nearby?...

…themselves mirrored by a tumbling down of yellow silk and horsehair, cellophane and elastic strings. Each work takes something from the last and passes something on to the next. There is a narrative being woven, albeit with breaks. These fragments – each from a story of their own – come together to tell an overarching other.

And fragments from each are hung out to dry on the frame in the neighbouring room. Dried lemons, hair grips, Japanese silk, balloons, metal wire, tights, sponge, beads… Domestic yet strangely uncanny, an unknown magic or voodoo. Again, drawing you in to peer curiously, but then that recurrent uncertainty: Will I like what I find?

At the farthest corner, a mirror reflects it all back. Daubed and scratched, smeared and painted over. Standing too low to be seen into without crouching. Black roots reaching into the ground – that which persists, stubborn and resilient, or that which takes root afresh, striving forth towards a new existence, the next life, reincarnation? The caterpillar becomes the moth. Or is it the butterfly?

Who is directing this tale? The dream or the dreamer? The artist or the viewer? all is viewed/ lulling/ as long as it lasts.

Images:

Installation shots © the artist and Maria Stenfors