Break…
Newport Street Gallery: Dan Colen
575 Wandsworth Road
On Sunday I was taken to see 575 Wandsworth Road former home of Khadambi Asalache.
The exterior of the property is unassuming. I’ve passed it any number of times without even noticing the National Trust sign hung outside.
For a period of twenty years from 1986 through until his death in 2006, the Kenyan born poet, novelist, philosopher of mathematics, and British civil servant, decorated every room in the house with hand cut fretwork.
The endeavour had a relatively unassuming Genesis. Attempting to disguise persistent damp in the basement dining room, he fixed pine floorboards he found in a skip to the wall. He went on to embellish this and every room in the house with fretwork patterns hand carved from more reclaimed wood.
The place is astonishing and like nothing I have seen before. It is not only a reflection of Mr Asalache’s own Kenyan heritage but also his extensive travels. The walls and ceilings are covered with rough hewn fretwork patterns, broken up with the crude lines, shapes and motifs of equally naive murals. To describe his style as crude or naive is in no way meant to detract from the level of creative sophistication on show. It is simply meant to discribe the rustic quality of the work. You can see the saw marks in the wood. Where misaligned junctions and unevenness are celebrated a contemporary interior might reject as faulty.
It’s an example of someone customising their living space with such idiosyncratic vigour that is hard for most of us to comprehend. I recommend you take the time to pay the house a visit.
What is art?
I studied art, did a degree in it, studied along side some artists who are quite famous now. As writing slowly became my primary focus, creating things that you might considered an “art object” has become less of a priority. I still make things. I have boxes of stuff hidden away, notebooks full of pieces, things I’d like to make when time permits.
One of the reasons for my ambivalence is the feeling art is someone else’s culture. The knowledge you need to engage with and understand art often seems obscured from me. Art is incredibly subjective, and prone to the vagaries of taste, and taste is just fashion. I find myself wondering who sets the fashion?
I often sum up this malaise with “art’s just rich people’s decoration”.
I studied art because at school I was a very practical student, and good at drawing. That ability lead to art school. Actually what it lead me to was an education, not a great one, but enough to make me curious. I wouldn’t be writing if I hadn’t done all those practical things before, which is perhaps why I view my writing in very physical terms.
I haven’t completely abandoned art or the idea of being an artist, but I’m not sure I’ll get over the notion that it’s someone else’s culture.
More recently I came across a documentary about the legendary American graphic designer Milton Glaser that’s changed my ideas a little.
Glaser argues art objects are an extension of the tribal tradition of gift giving. Objects would be exchanged as a way of cementing relationships. Without the exchange of these objects we would be at war, we’d be killing each other. These objects provides a collective experience, tell a story that connects us.
Exquisite corpses
I came across Channel 4’s The Random Spoken Word Competition today. It started me thinking about exquisite corpses. For those who don’t know, an exquisite corpse was Surrealist André Breton’s attempt to introduce chance into his artistic practice.
Breton described it as a “game of folded paper played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration or collaborations.” The now classic example, which gave the game its name, was drawn from the first sentence obtained this way. “the-exquisite-corpse-will-drink-new-wine.”
The judges of Channel 4’s competition “are looking for one piece of writing that imaginatively explores the theme “random” by using language in a rhythmically original and instantly engaging way.”
I wonder if it’s possible to write something that resonates using the exquisite corpse technique? I’ve experimented with the technique on a number of occasions, with varying degrees of success. As a writing technique, problems arise because the form is by definition a collaborative endeavour, you need several people to make it work. It then becomes about the collaborative process, and not what is written.
I once wrote an outline entitled “Exquisite Corpses Of Soloman Bishop”. In it Solomon Bishop speaks entirely in exquisite corpses. To circumvent the need for several people while writing this, I produced Solomon’s dialogue using Tzara’s technique for writing Dada poetry. I cut words from newspapers and magazines, put them in a bag, drew them out at random, and created sentences from the results.
Squad more robots forced adoption.
Lock-in sleeper defend green letters.
Trial bombers nylon contamination.
Interesting statements, full of jarring juxtapositions, that are random enough to be called an exquisite corpse. It’s very easy for this random selection of words to be ignored as meaningless. The question then arises, how do you give the randomness meaning, or more precisely, how do you control the randomness’s meaning?
One way is to give the words context. How do you give them context, by giving them a title that starts a story. “Once upon a time” gets the ball rolling, propelling the resulting exquisite corpse forward sequentially. Another way is more abstract, but grounds the exquisite corpse to something, an idea. Open with a title like. “The exquisite corpse of twenty first century sin” and all that follows refers to something tangible.
More work is needed on this, but that’s a start.
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