Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

Last week I was in New York City and had the opportunity to see two-thirds of the exhibition After Nature at the new New Museum. (The exhibition is opening in stages and the installation of the second floor - the floor which “sets the tone for the exhibition”, according to curator Massimiliano Gioni - was not ready when I was there.) After enjoying the panoramic views of New York from the rooftop I took the stairs down and began the exhibition on the fourth floor. Stepping into a gallery, I immediately encountered a slim woman in jeans and shirt writhing in slow motion on the floor, long hair covering her face most of the time. Perhaps I was seeing the exhibition in reverse, I realized; but it was too late.

Maurizio Cattelan, untitled, 2007 (taxidermied horse skin, fiberglass resin) [installation photograph from site other than the New Museum]

The exhibition’s title, of course, is borrowed from W.G. Sebald’s book-length poem After Nature. Gioni explains that his exhibition “aspires to a similar hallucinatory confusion [as Sebald's writings], a conflation of temporalities, a blurring of facts and fictions - an exhibition as a visual novel or wunderkammer.” In addition to Sebald, the acknowledged guiding spirits are filmmaker Werner Herzog and novelist Cormac McCarthy. Rather than trying to define anything, After Nature seems to spiral outward in multiple directions: “offended sceneries and scorched earth”, “private cosmologies and universes untouched by man”, “ancient traditions and arcane faiths”, and the “bliss” or “madness” we might experience at the end of the world. There are already a number of exhibition reviews online already, some of which point out the exhibition’s lack of focus. But whether that’s a problem or not (a characteristic like “focus” usually isn’t a goal for exhibitions at the New Museum), there are wonderful pieces to be seen, including Maurizio Cattelan’s untitled (2007) comic/apocalyptic horse implanted some twenty feet off the ground into a gallery wall and Robert Kusmirowski’s Unacabine (2008), a replica of “Unibomber” Theodore Kaczynski’s cabin. And then there was the writhing woman, who, it turns out, is one of several performers in Tino Sehgal’s piece Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000).

On the way out, I stopped and bought the eponymous shrink-wrapped exhibition catalog for After Nature ($24.95). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it consisted of a dust wrapper that unfolded to six panels neatly tucked around a Modern Library paperback copy of W.G. Sebald’s After Nature ($11.95). That’s a nifty mark-up for what is essentially a dust jacket. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire book appropriated like this before. The wrapper includes an essay by Gioni and a checklist noted as accurate “as of June 25, 2008″.

[Still from Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, 1992]

Two new exhibitions in New York claim W.G. Sebald for inspiration. The first is the New Museum’s After Nature. According to their website part of the exhibition will be viewable as of July 9 (the 3rd and 4th floors), while the dates for the full exhibition (including the 2nd floor) are July 17 - September 21, 2008. Here’s a blurb from their website:

Departing from the fictional documentaries of Werner Herzog and drawing its title from W.G. Sebald’s visionary book of the same name, “After Nature” unfolds as a visual novel, depicting a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. Bringing together an international and multigenerational group of contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders, many of whom are showing in an American museum for the first time, the exhibition is a feverish examination of humankind’s relationship to nature. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, the show spans three floors and includes over ninety works.

Part dystopian fantasy, part ethnographic museum of a lost civilization that eerily resembles our own, “After Nature” brings together artists and artworks that possess a strange, prophetic intensity. When seen in this context, Zoe Leonard’s giant sculpture of a crippled tree, Maurizio Cattelan’s fallen horse, Reverend Howard Finster’s delirious sermon cards, and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s apocalyptic finger paintings resonate like a requiem for a vanishing planet.

Artists such as Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Robert Kusmirowski, Diego Perrone, and Artur Zmijewski seem fascinated by mystic apparitions, arcane rites, and spiritual illuminations, while Allora and Calzadilla, Nancy Graves, and William Christenberry depict a universe in which the traces of humans have been erased and new ecological systems struggle to find a precarious balance.

The works of Huma Bhabha, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Thomas Schütte share an archaic quality. Their magic realism transforms sculpture into myth-making and gives birth to a cast of fantastical creatures, including sylvan beings, totemic figures, and neo-primitive idols. These elements also find life in Tino Sehgal’s intricate choreographies: for the duration of the exhibition dancers carry out gestures that could be seen as mysterious rituals and states of ecstasy. Recuperating ancient techniques, Pawel Althamer uses grass and animal intestines to produce vulnerable sculptures and puppets to arrive at a new form of storytelling. Other works, like the animations of Nathalie Djurberg, the imaginary maps of Roberto Cuoghi, or the video travelogue of Erik van Lieshout, guide viewers to the edge of the earth, taking us for a walk in the fictional woods of our near future, while expressing a sincere preoccupation for the world as it is now.

The exhibition will include work by Allora and Calzadilla, Pawel Althamer, Micol Assaël, Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, William Christenberry, Roberto Cuoghi, Bill Daniel, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Nathalie Djurberg, Reverend Howard Finster, Nancy Graves, Werner Herzog, Robert Kusmirowski, Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Erik van Lieshout, Diego Perrone, Thomas Schütte, Dana Schutz, Tino Sehgal, August Strindberg, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Artur Zmijewski.

“After Nature” is made possible by the Leadership Council of the New Museum. Major support provided by David Teiger. Additional support provided by Kati Lovaas, Randy Slifka, and the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund.

The second exhibition occurs across the East River in Brooklyn at a place called Jack the Pelican Presents. It’s a collaborative exhibition between artists Tyler Coburn and Sebastian Craig called Ghostwriters and it runs only from July 10 - August 10, 2008:

Detail from: Christel Dillbohner, Itinerary for a Walking Tour Through East Anglia

I have wanted so badly to read the newly published book Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. I have moved it from desk to bedside to couch and now back to desk. And you may ask yourself (to quote the Talking Heads): What is the problem here? Why isn’t he reading this wonderful book?

Recently I wrote about the reader-friendly books of the Everyman’s Library, which encourage long-term relationships. Searching for Sebald is, shall we say, a horse of a different color? On my home scale the 632-page soft-cover volume weighs in at about four pounds. Thank goodness it appears to be well-made. The sewn binding hasn’t cracked (yet), and it has French wrappers, which I have come to increasingly appreciate in oversize soft-cover books (like in the new Penguin Classic Deluxe editions). I would quibble with the choice of Bembo as the text typeface, and here’s the problem: a book this heavy is going to sit on the desk or on my lap, placing it farther from my usual reading distance. It may be my aging eyes and graduated lenses, but Bembo strikes me as too thin and delicate to be comfortably read from much distance, so I find myself bending over this book like a scribe.

I’ll be honest and say that I’d rather be reading this in a multi-volume set with a slipcover. After all, the book is nicely divided into four sections entitled Shoeboxes, Webs, Weaving and Dust. I realize that would undoubtedly affect the price, but at the deeply discounted prices available on-line hovering around $26, Searching for Sebald book is already one-third the cost of several other considerably slimmer academic books on Sebald. I’m ready to pay more for a book I can actually read.

Is this a complaint? Well, the book’s format certainly has provided an easy excuse to procrastinate. For the moment, I’ll just continue to dip into Searching for Sebald in short spurts. Last night, for example, I discovered one of the book’s discrete surprises hidden away after page 387. I thought I was opening up an ordinary gate-fold, but when Christel Dillbohner’s Itinerary for a Walking Tour Through East Anglia (the original is a drawing on waxed mulberry paper) is fully spread out the illustration is nearly 45 inches long and extends over six pages. Dillbohner’s daunting, but entrancing Itinerary, which resembles a palimpsest more than anything else, serves as an apt metaphor for the way I am approaching this book.

Christian Boltanski, from Gymnasium Chases, 1991 (photogravures)

In an interview with Christian Scholz, published in the new book Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald, Sebald talks about photographs and their role in his books. At one point he speaks about the experience of looking at family albums that one has not seen for decades.

Normally you’ve already leafed through these albums as a child, in complete naiveté; you had no term for history, no concept of history; you didn’t know anything about the Third Reich; you didn’t know what role your parents might have played in this historical phase, what position they had. You just aimlessly leafed through these things. And then you left them in a drawer without paying further attention. When you pick them up again, lets say as a forty-year old, after a period of twenty-five or twenty years, then the whole thing has something of a negative revelation. Because in the meantime you have learned what history is. You know what happened.

You know what happened. What Sebald is pointing to here is not foreshadowing, the hinting at the outcome. He’s saying that we are implicated in history once we know what happened. That he could never look at his family’s photographs - or at his family - the same once he knew what had happened. (Sebald often suggests that portraits and viewers engage in a visual dialogue.) Sebald uses foreshadowing when he begins The Emigrants with a photograph of a graveyard. But by the end of the book, as the four quiet stories each conclude with their own private nightmares of despair and death, the dead are staring back at us from their photographs.

Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera…..the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long.

The visual artist that I immediately think of is Christian Boltanski. While his work is frequently in the form of memorials to victims of the Holocaust, his work is also about memory itself. In 1991, Boltanski made a particularly haunting portfolio of twenty-four photogravures published by Crown Point Press under the title Gymnasium Chases. The images depict the 1931 graduating class of the Gymnasium Chases, a Jewish High School in Vienna. Our frisson as viewers comes partly from foreshadowing the fate that awaits these students as we connect the dots between …Jewish…Vienna…1931. But Boltanski goes beyond relying on us to connect the dots. He smudges around with the portraits until their distinguishing features are encased in shadow. The students smile or stare back at us while we helplessly watch their faces turn to skulls, which makes it that much easier for us to superimpose our own features on the face of death as if we were suddenly able to foreshadow and witness our own death at the same moment.

For me at least, a reaction this powerful seems possible only with photographs. Thanks to a casual reference that Alex Ross made recently on his blog, last night I pulled down a CD to play. Steve Reich’s 1988 piece for string quartet and recorded voices called Different Trains struck me as the musical equivalent of the enterprise that both Sebald and Boltanski were undertaking. Reich’s piece, which is a kind of musical documentary, weaves recorded voices of three Holocaust survivors into the train-like sounds of the strings. Remembering childhood train rides in America between his divorced parents, Reich says: “I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.” Different Trains is a strong piece, but for me the effect of voices could not compare with the chilling effect of photographs. Maybe this is simply that our culture privileges the visual or maybe it is something deeply rooted in being human.

This is the first of what will be several posts as I slowly - and rather randomly - read Searching for Sebald, the new 632-page book that is a goldmine to anyone interested in Sebald.

…the museum and the gallery are those spaces where obscurity may become the condition for enlightenment. [Brian Dillon, writing in Waterlog]

I have never been much good at skipping stones across a pond. Nevertheless that is the image I had in mind when I thought of writing about the monograph Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition over the course of three posts - here, here, and now here.This final post deals with the visual artists in the monograph, although several, due to the hybrid nature of their works, have already been mentioned in the post on the poetry of Waterlog. (There are also additional illustrations in that same post.) Keep in mind that I am not reporting on the exhibition itself (which I have not seen), only its manifestation in the form of this monograph.

In the books of W.G. Sebald, the twin powers of nature and history overwhelm whatever pretensions and inadequate defenses mankind can muster, inevitably bringing insignificance, loss, and death.The only lasting power that mankind itself wields is destruction - a destructive attempt to dominate nature and a endless knack for self-destruction in the form of war. For the most part, the artists in Waterlog choose to meditate on our dialectical relationship with nature rather than with history. Marcus Coates is the only artist to address, even if obliquely, mankind as an agent of destruction. As I have mentioned earlier, his project Britain’s Bitterns circa 1997 Population - 11 Breeding Males is an elegy to England’s bittern population - and by extension the animal kingdom - brought to the level of near extinction by human encroachment.

In a gesture that is both playful and quixotic, Alec Finlay throws poetic life buoys to the city of Dunwich, an important port during the middle ages that became completely lost to storms and erosion over the course of centuries and now lies underwater. His project The Sunken Bell also included a number of color photographs by Guy Moreton of ruins, flooded marshes and other reminders of the power of nature. Simon Pope’s project The Memorial Walks, which was part installation and part performance, involved the selection of landscape paintings from area museums which were displayed draped in black and only occasionally unveiled.

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Unfortunately, there isn’t much that any publication can do to adequately translate video art onto the printed page. The film stills and short descriptions included in Waterlog give only the most skeletal sense of intriguing works by collaborators Alexander and Susan Maris and by Tacita Dean. In Alexander and Susan Maris’ video piece Silentium, Arvo Part’s composition Tabula Rasa provides the background music for their exploration of two key places in the life of composer Benjamin Britten: his long-time residence at Aldeburgh and the later residence in Horham, which he took up in order to find respite from the noise of air force planes flying overhead. Coincidentally, Linden at Selfdivider has recently written an evocative post about the landscape that Britten and Sebald shared:

The desolate melancholy of Aldeburgh’s landscape is the backdrop against which Peter Grimes, a fisherman, loses his mind; the same gray landscape of Suffolk’s sea coast also causes the narrator of The Rings of Saturn to lose all his bearings, slipping into a catatonic state of total immobility.

Tacita Dean is represented in Waterlog by two works, only one which was included in the exhibition. For Waterlog, Dean created a video on Sebald’s close friend the writer and translator Michael Hamburger, who died earlier this year.

Unwilling, perhaps unable, to talk of his past and his migrations, most especially fleeing Nazism in 1933, [Hamburger] talks poignantly, instead, of the apple trees in his garden…

Sebald had written his own lengthy profile of Hamburger on pages 175-190 of The Rings of Saturn, including two grainy photographs of the interior of Hamburger’s house. Stills from Dean’s video show scenes which clearly reference Sebald’s photographs.

Tacita Dean, still from Michael Hamburger

From The Rings of Saturn

Dean’s second work in Waterlog is a welcome reprint of a photo and text piece on Sebald which I have written about earlier. As far as I know, until now this work could only be found in a slim volume entitled W.G. Sebald as part of a boxed set of seven softcover catalogs produced in 2003 for an exhibition of Dean’s work at the Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The version in Waterlog is not only a complete reprint of Dean’s fascinating piece on Sebald, but it also contains a brief Postscript that she added after the French publication.

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Consisting largely of newly commissioned works from artists, the exhibition Waterlog is a clear indication of how Sebald’s writing can be inspirational material for artists in many media. As the exhibition’s successor in print form, Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition does a fine job converting the exhibition into a book that is can stand on its own. I only wish that Waterlog included a full exhibition checklist, which would have documented the contents of the show. Waterlog (London: Film & Video Umbrella, 2007) can be purchased from the London-based contemporary art book distributor Artdata via Abebooks.
Simon Pope, from The Memorial Walks