Lost in the sand

I've been on an Irish culture kick over the last month: first the film Kneecap, then Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance and then Arán & Im, a performance in which Manchán Magan talked about the origins of Irish words while making sourdough bread (very tasty). Magan is the author of Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape so there was a lot that evening of relevance to this blog. However, I'm going to focus here instead on my fourth Irish cultural event, a trip today to Matt's Gallery to see Remnant, Willie Doherty's new exhibition of black and white photographs and video footage. There were foggy woods (see below), dead leaves and branches, empty streets, blank walls, peeling paint, stains, graffiti, broken bricks and roadside puddles. The videos (shot in Derry, Donegal and by the River Boyne) also showed a moon seen through bare black boughs, a stretch of fast flowing water, rocks slowly dripping and flat waves covering and uncovering a small stretch of sand.  

I've not really kept up closely with Willie Doherty's work since discovering it many years ago when I first got into Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, who were also combining landscape photography with text. The curators note that images like the one I've included above resemble his early work, but instead of having text imprinted on them - words like 'undercover', 'shifting ground' or 'the other side' drawing links to recent political history - Doherty installs them here alongside three videos that contain relatively little movement and words read aloud by Stephen Rea. In the course of this monologue he says things like "fear trapped in the gaps where men and women were displaced" and "the living and the dead side by side" and "all traces lost in the sand, absorbed into the sea". It is all pretty gloomy, but Rea's quiet voice made me want to keep listening.

The gallery has copies of an interview Doherty did with Tim Dixon and I'll end here by quoting something interesting in this about the woods he photographed.

These forests which sprung up all along the border, [are] usually in places where the land is not really of any great agricultural value. These forests were planted, I don't know when they started really, probably sometime in the seventies and eighties. And they're kind of horrendous because they're just very generic pine forests, which are planted in rows and not really maintained or looked after very well, so they become a bit of an eyesore really. But significantly, at least one of the people who was assassinated and then buried by the IRA in the early seventies, one of 'the disappeared', Columba McVeigh, whose body has never been recovered, was buried in a remote border area somewhere between a bog and one of these forests. So it has a significance in that respect, and the first section of one of the strands of dialogue in the work refers to a figure who's dead—a kind of ghost who talks about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lagoon city

I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book Venice: City of Pictures. Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new, interesting details. For example, he cites a book about Tiepolo I've not read, written by Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxendall, which describes the ceiling of the Gesuati, painted in 1738. The surrounding roofscape reflects and absorbs light and 'Alpers and Baxendall seem to have spent days observing the resulting fluctuations in illumination, such as occasionally visible 'moving ripple of light' bouncing up from the waves of the Canale della Giudecca, the wide expanse of lagoon that lies in front of the church. There is also 'an electrifying occasional five minutes in late afternoon when the sun is low enough in the west both to shine direct through the west windows and to reflect back strongly from the east wall on which it falls.'' Venice has been painted by countless topographical artists but here is an example of the way light and the cityscape transform even the art inside its churches.

Paul Klee, Lagunenstadt, 1932

I could talk here about some of the landscape paintings Gayford discusses by Canaletto, Turner, Ruskin, Whistler or Monet, but instead I'll just features this one by Paul Klee, because I particularly like it. Klee's visit was 'the most fleeting of all the artists chronicled in this book' - just a few days in the autumn of 1932. Lagunenstaft (Lagoon city) 'is in its modest, whimsical way one of the most perceptive of all the vistas of this most painted of places.' The confusing city streets are conveyed by those rectangles at the bottom. Above them 'a few higher and more separated trapezoids' probably represent the structures around the Piazza San Marco that Klee described as 'a unique creation in stone'. And above and beyond these are the water and the sky.