(disclaimer: this essay is not to be confused with the review of the show to follow in next month's ArtReview)
Two delightful children, Conrad and his younger sister Sanna, visit their grandparents on Christmas Eve, and on the journey back to their parents, darkness falls on their mountain pass. They become lost and walk the crags and crooked rocks. They are obviously in danger, but Stifter does not call attention to this menace, instead letting description of the landscape simply absorb the children. The tenderness with which the children are treated in the story -- by their grandparents (presents and kisses), by the loving description of the care Conrad and Sanna show for each, and by Stifter’s crisp and exact prose – make their vulnerability and presence on the mountain terrible. The result is not suspense exactly, but instead, you sense that something sweeping and monumental is at stake in the lives of these children. Throughout the trouble, the surface of the mountain echoes with the occasional tone of the village church bell, relaying the promise of the savior on Christmas as hope but also and more importantly, I would argue, demonstrating the odds against the little ones. It is an invocation to care for their safety. The bell is but a din on this thick snow, but its harmony is as loving as Conrad’s embrace of Sanna in a cave for their mutual warmth.
I speak of Stifter because the tone of the church bell somehow made it through over a century to register on my skin as I watched a contemporary video project, Guido van der Werve’s new project at Marc Foxx, titled simply nummer twaalf, 2009 or number 12. In the video, I found myself observing another vulnerable figure in a treacherous landscape, van der Werve himself wandering alone far from civilization on the regenerating but still burnt surface of Mount St. Helens and along San Andreas fault, with its hard scrabble creosote bushes and fine gravel paths. Instead of the church bell in Rock Crystal, however, van der Werve’s punctuations come from a piano of his own creation made of a chess set. When each off kilter note hits the soundtrack, a chess move notation appears on the right side of the screen. While van der Werve has never heard of Stifter (I asked him), I feel that his piano and its off beat tone somehow relates to Stifer’s tone. What the tone means is what interests me about the work.
From the details of the piece, we come to an understanding of the tone. Van der Werve starts in a chess salon (the same salon that Duchamp and Fisher frequented) where he is playing chess with an orchestra playing a set behind him. It is a long shot, but soon transitions to the artist in a small shed, staring off moody into space intoning apparently hard facts about nature. One observation is about the multitude of the stars and how overwhelming the number is, how a human could never list even a fraction of them if they said the names, one by one, through their entire lifetime. Another observation is about music, how only stringed instruments can reach perfect tones while pianos are all out of key, that they are tuned basically only according to how a piano is supposed to sound like and not against any mathematically or physically correct tone.
The camera then picks the artist up in its frame as a tiny figure, insignificant on the rough terrain. When we see the artist small in the landscape and hear the tone of the piano hit, the conclusion seems to be that humans are themselves out of tune and only measurable to themselves, that they are rather paltry and insignificant curiosities who survive only according to the logic of strategy, according to the logic of the chess set. Van der Werve, the dour artist, walks the walk of humanity, clumsy in its attempts to fit with a cosmic scene of upheaval, violence, and elemental sweeps that can brush it away in an instant and without any conscience.
This bleak outlook is very melancholic, as if blocked by a buildup of black bile in the body, and van der Werve is hardly the first to take this stance on cosmic insignificance and elemental danger. Nor is he the first to describe humans as out of tune with the world or as playing some sort of Russian roulette chess game with the natural world. In fact, there is a certain mood with which nummer twaalf, 2009 is presented that is off putting but familiar in contemporary art -- its lack of energy, its grumpy Northern European ennui. Van der Werve does not take to the seismic fury and danger of nature, for instance, with the verve or resolve that someone like the poet Robinson Jeffers pursues it, where the will can assert itself, although to ultimate futility, in way that is positive. Neither does van der Werve’s piece offer that there is particular much to live for in this world of cold facts and humans out of tune with their surrounding.
And so I thought of Rock Crystal and how its picture of humanity is different. I think the story is poignant because it is part of the Romanticism that van der Werve has adapted to contemporary life in his work, but striking in its contrasts. The first thing I noticed, for instance, is that it is impossible to care for van der Werve’s fragile, vulnerable adult body in the way that I care for the children in the Rock Crystal. He has done nothing to endear himself to me. He’s just gloomy and alone – his assertion of insignificance leads to exactly that. I can’t get sentimental about van der Werve like I can about the children.
I love that the word sentimental comes up. Also, I love it that you could argue against my point by saying “What is significant about the children, why should they have any precedence in the landscape? When it comes right down to it, they are alone too, they are lost in an uncaring universe, they are infinitely tiny in the face of the stars and they are out of tune?” And I would say we care about them and we believe we are more in this landscape than chess players because we are invested in it, we have a history in it that guides us, we can choose care and be cared for. We have a stake in things that requires our energy, that requires our services.
Van der Werve’s ennui does little to assuage our grief or promote our happiness. It promotes what it claims is a bald, raw truth about nature and seems to claim that simply presenting this truth is a virtue. It misses the point. We are supposed to employ facts, we are supposed to use facts, not just depressingly reconfigure them on the chess board and hope we make it. The tone from the chess piano is an interesting but inferior tone. That’s why when the Rock Crystal bell chimes -- the bell affirming vulnerability and fragility but reminding us that vulnerability comes from investment, history, caring, engagement, -- it is a proper bell, a bell that though foreign amongst the rocks and the caverns and the shards of ice, is in tune with things. We are not bestial anomalies in the world. Humans are stringed instruments and not pianos. We are the habit of the world and have purpose in the world. Our lot is not moody displacement but engaged dwelling.
