by Rod Mengham
The garrison saw no action for years at a time; their lives were captive to a gunboat diplomacy, they rusted for an oiled machine. Internment was what happened here, if not always in name then certainly in nature. They waited, and even when war obliged they waited some more. Langdon became a freeze-frame transit camp, the point of departure for troops heading to France, but departure was delayed: delay became the new marching orders; the marching orders rose and disappeared in cloud.
They waited and the buildings started to fall down. The Infirmary block lasted longest, acting as a Sergeant’s Mess in World War Two, ending as a prisoner-of-war camp. The white cliffs, symbolic front line against German invasion, acquired half a millimetre of irony in history’s reverse topping-out ceremony: five hundred metres of calcium carbonate were surmounted by a thin crust of despondency, the sedimented longings of young-old Germans with only one thing in mind: repatriation. Airborne seeds of comfrey, hawkweed, kidney vetch, greater knapweed, thistledown, came and went. Loose rubble was embedded in moss, moss was embedded in rubble. Voices from the port carried up on the wind, English voices flawed into German by gusts of yearning. The waves drew back like thoughts of home receding into the past.
Langdon distils more waiting time into every cubic inch of downland turf, and more concentrated desire for elsewhere, than any other place on the English shoreline. There is almost no here and now at Langdon. Its own history is a vapour into which past and future alike disappear. If England is rooted in the imagining of its chalk bulwark, then England is as chimerical as a blue bird over the white cliffs. This member of the thrush family is native only to the Americas. The librettist, Nat Burton, sang of the distant Kentish coast he had never seen, as if from long acquaintance. Dovorians now join in the chorus, frequent flyers over this dilapidating stage-set, riding the thermals of port-mythology and homesickness by proxy.
2013
Underworld
When the heroine of Raymond Queneau’s novel Zazie dans le Metro arrives in Paris for the weekend, her sole desire is to travel on the Metro. But the railway workers are on strike and the entire system is closed for the duration of her visit, only starting up again on the verge of her return to the country. Although Zazie is from the rural hinterland, she is no ingénue, and in fact the degree of her worldliness is shocking to all the residents of Paris she has any dealings with. Her mere presence in the city seems to catalyse a whole series of misadventures, transgressions, thefts, confidence tricks, traffic accidents and violent assaults. She becomes the mobile epicentre of urban lawlessness, and her strong, even passionate, identification with the Metro suggests that her irresistible energy and unruliness are somehow expressing a side to Paris that is only with difficulty kept under wraps, kept under control, or simply kept under. In the final episode of the novel, Zazie, along with her uncle and aunt and two sidekicks (plus a jaded parrot), escape from approaching ranks of armed police through the cellar of a brasserie, which connects with a sewer, which connects in turn with the Metro: ‘A bit further on they crossed the threshold of another little door and found themselves in a corridor lined with glazed bricks, still dark and deserted.’44
This subterranean realm, which allows the team of carnivalesque characters to elude the grasp of the authorities, consists of an interlocking series of tunnels, mostly utilising the old stone quarries beneath the streets of Paris, and combining the underground railways with the sewers and catacombs. In Queneau’s account, one system leaks into another, in a series of assimilations. But what these fugitives from the law are evading is in its turn equally protean and deceptive. The menacing squads of police are under the control of ‘Haroun al Rations’, a master of disguise who has assumed several different names and appearances over the course of the narrative, and who has been suspected by everyone else of being the most disreputable, the most perverted, the most unredeemable character of all, as well as literally the most shifty. The two sides of Paris are seen to be almost interchangeable. Queneau’s apparently high-spirited fable is in fact a quite savage reminder of the temporarily obscured, diplomatically neglected, history of Paris as an unparalleled centre of violence. Even the briefest of visits to the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris, will impress on the visitor the sheer frequency of desperate insurrections and ferocious acts of repression punctuating the history of the one hundred and seventy years before publication of Zazie dans le Metro.
Queneau lulls the reader into an acceptance of violence as slapstick, as pure spectacle, as a stimulus to humour in the same way that his linguistic violence, his cutting and splicing of different items of vocabulary, contributes to the overall comic atmosphere of the book. But all this changes in the penultimate chapter, when the illusion that violence can be entertaining and harmless is suddenly and brutally removed:
Stepping over the pile of the crestfallen who constituted a sort of barricade in front of the entrance to the Queen of the Night, the widow Mouaque showed signs of intending to throw herself on the assailants who were advancing with deliberation and precision. A good fistful of tommy-gun bullets cut short this tentative. The widow Mouaque, holding her guts in her hands, collapsed.45
The description of the pile of bodies, of those who have been knocked-out in a bar-fight, is transformed from a scene in an animated film to something genuinely chilling by the use of the word ‘barricade’, evoking all the piles of real bodies left in the streets after the failed uprisings of the nineteenth century. And the apparent transformation of the ‘gentle’ Marceline, the only character not made the butt of others’ jokes, into the anonymous lamp-bearer, who swiftly and efficiently conducts the others to safety at the end, suggests irresistibly a previous role in the metaphorical ‘underground’, the resistance movement of the Second World War:
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘This isn’t the moment.’
The lights came on.
‘There you are,’ said the other gently. ‘The metro’s working again. You, Gridoux take the Etoile line, and you, Turandot, the Bastille line.’46
Marceline’s dispatch and intimate knowledge of underground spaces is reminiscent of accounts of resistance methods employed from one end of Europe to the other during the Second World War.47
But what of the choice of Zazie, the pubescent relative from the provinces, as the heroine of this narrative; what buried history is uncovered by her participation in its events? Consumers of popular Parisian culture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards could not fail to be aware of the figure of the apache, the abandoned, feral child, who roamed the streets in gangs, surviving through a combination of begging, stealing, assault and even murder. The cocky, amusingly precocious apache is a figure of myth, but behind the myth lies a miserable social history of child destitution. By 1848, there were no fewer than 130,000 abandoned children on the streets of Paris.48 The scale of parental neglect was unprecedented, but the children visible on the streets represented only half the story, since even larger numbers of children were farmed out to rural wet-nurses. In 1866, half the children born in the city (around 25,000) were sent away from home to be cared for in this fashion. Many were not cared for at all, but allowed to sicken and die; some were murdered. Either way, large numbers of parents did not expect their children ever to return as burdens on the household income. Zazie, more Parisian than the Parisians themselves, an unsettling mixture of cynicism and innocence, equipped with more survival tactics than the adults around her, represents the return of the rusticated child to the streets of Paris. And her blind and unshakeable attachment to the very idea of the Metro suggests an equivalence between the physical underground and the undisclosed secrets of Parisian social psychology. Underground is where the Metro sits side by side with fear and shame in the psychopathology of modern life. Underground are resources that can be marshalled to undermine the order, efficiency and credibility of institutional control.
2013
The Dream of the Rood
The two figures of Mary and
John, revealed in a beam of torchlight, are arcing away from the figure of Christ like a pair of strung longbows; Mary curving away to the left, John to the right. But the leading edge of each of these bow-shapes is the outline of gathered drapery falling into complex folds. Mary’s right leg – the one nearest the viewer – is not planted solidly on the earth; it is weightless and curving, as if plied by the wind.
Her right hand clasps the left at an impossible angle. The left palm is bent backwards, away from the appalling fact, yet it repeats the angle of St John’s right hand. He gestures towards the suffering of Christ, while she turns away, the dramatic slant of her fingers a literal index of her flinching away from the unbearable.
Mary’s right leg also flexes in a recoil, while John’s left leg inclines towards the object of empathy; yet his eye is seeking out the viewer, while her eye is fixed on what has shocked her so much.
The Christ figure is both an emblem of pain and an elegant displacement of pain, the two sinuous curves formed by upper and lower body implying the condition of grace that will outlive this episode. Christ’s head is encircled not simply with thorns, but with a blue fillet that intensifies the powdery duck egg blues and greens of the background, an expanse of heavenly luminescence above a barely acknowledged strip of earth.
This wall-painting, almost a line drawing applied with fine brush, is modest in size but overpowering in expression. It can be found on the badly lit east chancel wall of the church of St Mary, Brent Eleigh. This well-preserved but unassuming building in an obscure part of Suffolk houses a masterpiece. The name of the village proclaims an event – conflagration (‘brent’ means ‘burnt’) – that would have prompted renovation and the skimming of a fresh layer of plaster above the high altar.
The hypothetical rescue operation is the most likely scenario for the commissioning of a small but definitive representation of the church’s patron saint; at some point between 1280 and 1330, a visiting specialist would have spent a couple of hours plying his stock in trade, but at a certain stage of this process he would have realised that time and place had fallen away, that a routine depiction of transcendence had managed to transcend its brief; wherever this imagery recurred, it would only work if it managed to convince the viewer it might be the prime instance of its subject matter, its quintessential expression. The more obscure the place – the more local its reality – the more completely it would be translated into universal meaning. At the same time, the narrower the viewer’s experience of the world, the greater the force of gravity exerted in that world – in every one of its local details.
At Brent Eleigh, these details are still observable in the surrounding landscape. The most direct route from Lavenham is along paths set with thorn-trees and oaks. In summer, the tower of Lavenham church is seen breasting the high fields of grain, its pale stone catching the sun, its white and red flag of St George stiff like a medieval pennant in the breeze. The wind rolls through everything, far and near: in the instant shiver of the poplars, in the leisurely swaying of the ash. Only the low-lying clover is motionless. The light glances through a field of barley and turns the oak leaves into photograms, each leaf bearing the x-ray shadows of other leaves behind it. In winter, when the quince is still on the branch, the way is through snow-bound-fields under a snow-heavy sky. There are stew ponds each with a thick roof of ice, and sloes to harvest with freezing cold hands.
Mary’s hair is loose on both shoulders; her skirt and cloak fall to the ground and form rolls as stiff as crepe paper. The four wrists of Mary and John all point to the left, the direction in which Christ’s head is inclined. There is nothing to distinguish the style of their garments, one from another, nothing to distinguish gender except hair dressing.
Christ’s crown of thorns is both a torqued decoration and cruel band made from rose stem or bramble. The disposition of the holy body expresses both atrocity and finesse at one and the same time. The arms, thighs and chest are powerful, the slim waist almost svelte. With both Mary and John, the looping of cloth between shoulder and waist frames and focuses the action of their hands.
There is nothing but cerulean vacancy behind the three figures. The press of the crowd, the jostling to and fro, the cacophony of jeers, laments, prayers – all has melted away. For John and Mary, there is no one there but Christ and themselves.
In the figure of John, even the small muscles of the right-hand palm are defined. He is a little taller than Mary, who is bent backwards out of true slightly more than he is. Only the cross is straight and unyielding: a tree dreaming of continued growth ever upwards, breathing in another world entirely, another quality of light and air.
2014
Doris Salcedo and the Philosophy of Furniture
Beds, chairs, tables, doors, dressers, cabinets are not to be found in the work of Doris Salcedo, but there is a continual and compulsive production of un-beds, un-chairs, un-tables and other kinds of un-furniture, that both remember and dis-member the commonest, the most generic articles of furniture in daily use. My use of the ‘un’ prefix is intended to catch an echo of George Bataille’s concept of ‘l’Informe’ – the formless – as defined in the ‘Critical Dictionary’ he included in the Documents project he edited in 1929–30: ‘A dictionary would begin from the point at which it no longer rendered the meanings of words but rather their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective with a given meaning but a term which declassifies, generally requiring that each thing take on a form.’49 Salcedo’s frequent practice of dismembering furniture and breaking it down into sections, then mismatching the sections to create furniture equivalents of the exquisite corpse, threatens to remove meaning from objects by declassifying them; wrenching them out of one form without supplying another, since the hybrid condition they end up in leaves them suspended in a state of formal hesitation.
The specific content of Salcedo’s work requires us to think of formlessness in relation to homelessness. Her sculptures are homeless three times over, whose first home is the class of objects to which they should conform, and whose second home is the domestic setting where such objects are always found. After their deformation at the hands of Salcedo, these relics of furniture are transplanted to the art gallery, where at first glance they seem out of place, even despite the rapidity with which we adjust to admit the anomalous and the untimely to the scenes of contemporary art. Salcedo’s works are perhaps even more definitively out of time than they are out of place. They include found materials imprinted by time; indeed, positively encompassed by it; but different materials react differently to the passing of time – some are more impressionable than others – and the grafting of one onto another may produce temporal bewilderment. Time is of the essence in all her work, such that the amount and quality of time the viewer devotes to it is measured against the different timescales involved in its composition: both the sedimented time attached to its various materials and the metamorphic time of its fabrication.
It is worth asking, what is the nature of the time that is attached to these objects? They come to us, dragging behind them various histories of attention, but chiefly the knowledge that the bulk of their materials have been subject in the past to a form of contemplation different to how we see them in the present. For the most part, the materials salvaged from items of furniture have belonged to everyday objects so familiar, so taken for granted, that the only form of attention we can muster on their behalf is that of habitual recognition; either that, or we are likely to overlook them entirely. At the most, our intimacy with their shapes and surfaces, with their look and feel, is so repetitious in character that no single moment of their presence in our lives, no particular memory of them, is likely to stand out. When they have been the setting for crises or turning points, our minds push them into the background.
Our furniture accompanies us more frequently than practically any other object in our passage through time. And we may give it a lifetime’s use; even several lifetimes’ use. Chairs and tables, beds, chests and dressers are p
assed down through generations; we all possess objects that have outlived other lives, perhaps several lives. One thing is certain: our furniture will outlive us.
And the forms of these objects have lasted much longer. What has changed less than the form of a chair in the last four thousand years; of a table, a bed, a bath, a door, a dresser? The phenomenology that centres on these objects: the attitude of a seated body towards a table; the sequence of muscular actions we undergo to sit and then lie on a bed; the slight resistance of an opening door; none of this has altered very much in thousands of years.
In this context, Salcedo’s sabotage of the object, her breaking and re-setting of its materials, like bones that have to be splinted – and there are bones attached to wood and cement in several Salcedo works – is not even primarily a physical break, the sign of an event in space, a change in the substance of the object, but more importantly a temporal event, that cleaves apart the space of the living from that of the dead. The damaged object has no further use to the living, and belongs with the departed.
This is irresistibly reminiscent of the ancient funerary practice of burying the dead with broken grave goods, including broken furniture. An unbroken table speaks to the living of the experience of living, even during its posthumous existence beyond the death of its first owner. A broken table cannot resume its place among the living, and so belongs with the dead. So much of Salcedo’s work speaks to the living about the dead, while it also speaks to the dead about the mindfulness of those who have survived them.
I have always sensed this obligation of mindfulness in my first-hand observation of Salcedo’s work on several occasions during the last ten years, but I felt possessed by it during a period of three months over the summer of 2013, when I curated an exhibition that had at its moral and political and aesthetic centre a micro-version of Salcedo’s major installation Plegaria Muda. This work has multiple units, but the main constituent of each unit is a pair of wooden tables. A significant number of the hybrid objects in Salcedo’s work of the last two decades have utilised sets of chairs and tables. This powerful use of metonymy – employing motifs that do not merely symbolise social relationships but which are materially involved in them – provides the most concise expression of the bond between the individual and the social unit. Single chairs evoke and stand in for single persons, while their being placed around a table is a primary instance of what draws the individual into the social group. In the work from this period, strange versions of both chairs and tables were forced into unnatural and disturbing combinations.
