On the endless plains of adventure and exile

Of the many pictures filmed by Marcel Broodthaers one of my favourite is La Pluie –shot in the garden of his Parisian home of the rue de la Pepinière, in 1969, during the time of production of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles–. The artist appears in the film sitting at a table that was improvised with a packing box, in front of a sheet of paper and an inkpot and holding a pen with nib, trying to write some text under rain that finally becomes a downpour and sweeps all traces of writing; at the end, when Broodthaers leaves, a printed phrase shows on the screen: “Projet pour un texte”.

In that same garden, curiously, Blinki Palermo had a photo taken together with Oda and Franz Dahlem, the latter holding in one hand the watering can that was used to simulate the downpour (1). The curator of the Cinema Department at the Georges Pompidou Centre, Philippe-Alain Michaud, has labelled La Pluie as a “melancholic and Keitonian gag”, since the artist was trying “in vain to write and transform the text into a drawing. The film emerges after the failure of the narration: it flows like falling water, like ink that thins down on the sheet of paper that writing cannot fix” (2).

Curiously, too, Broodthaers begins his text, called Projet pour un texte –ending with the phrase Projet pour un poisson–, with the assertion: “I hate the movement that transposes lines”.

Claudio Herrera’s drawings emerge, in my point of view, from that deep contradiction between the inability to set a cohesive narrative of the world and from the melancholic downpour of images and gestures secreted by that same world, and our Keitonian presence in its transformation.

“The drawing has an anthropologist’s quality that is very deep-rooted, very sensitive; like manual traces of humankind in the dessert, on an endless plain. The drawing seen in these terms of nearly everlasting adventure and exile builds up an absolute necessity: that of knowing how to carve life in events”, Claudio Herrera was telling Julia Grumbach, his interviewer, at a café in Madrid last year.

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Jean-Pierre Criqui recounts that Piero Manzoni portrayed himself, in May 1961, “examining in absorption his celebrated little boxes. His theatre-like gesture and his pensive air compound an atmosphere that recalls the often-shown topic in painting, of Vanitas. But the trivial and violently ludicrous object of his contemplation – thirty grams of Artist’s Shit “kept au naturel” – makes a rather bad accordance with any grave feeling. Like a Hamlet and a Yorick in one person, Manzoni has left a work tinged with an ambivalence comparable to that image: a mix of beaming phrases and clown-acting where the gravest and the funniest blend inevitably”. The same author reminds us that Cézanne had himself thought of sending a pot of shit to the 1871 Salon, monopolized by the Academy, and that Duchamp wrote “this sibylline equation: ‘Arrhe est à art ce que merdre est à merde’ (Arrhe is to art what shirt is to shit)”.(3)

It has now been found out that the true content of the cans is not Manzoni’s feces, but plaster or cast, the material of copies and duplicates, of simulations.

It is, however, the artist himself who speaks out in terms and words that I believe Claudio Herrera would assume as his own: “In our freedom for inventing we need to build a world that can fit in itself. We cannot, by any means, view a painting as a space to project our mental scenery on, but as our ‘area of freedom’ where we move towards the discovery of our primary images, these images being absolute to the highest degree, that will not be valued for what they remember, explain or express, but just for what they are: being”. (4)

The skin in Claudio Herrera’s drawings has a density and texture similar to that of beasts, it is tight and also tense, as if the outer shield allowed the relief of its highly developed inside muscles.

Painting, art in general, allow us a more exact and accurate knowledge of our perception and of the fabric woven by space and time. Some of the most respected scientists in activity hold that as long as there is no reconciliation between two of the greatest theories of the 20th century, that of Einstein’s relativity and that of the set configured by quantum mechanics, it will not be possible for us to change our current vision of space towards the vision derived from their nature: a sort of fluid continuum (5).

The postmodern aspects in the practice of painting that I find easiest to connect with Claudio Herrera are the following:

       1. Quotation and simulation
       2. The visible incorporation of verbal elements and, less frequently, of scenographic elements
       3. The insertion of a range of meaningful contents having a degree of social commitment and a distance critical of the look of the classical modernist myths, such as the heroic vocation of the Ego. (6)      

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Simon Schama –the author of that prodigy of understanding called The Eyes of Rembrandt (1999), dedicated to the painter of shadows drawn from transposed and mobile lines–, begins his essay dedicated to Cy Twombly, and thus called, simply Cy Twombly, with these words: “I have always thought that twombly should be, perhaps it is now, a verb. It would be defined as: ‘Twombly, transitive verb – fly pensively over an area drawing maliciously evocative lines and signs, landing from time to time with impetuous warmth’. It could also be a noun: ‘Twombly, masculine name – a brush stroke made only by his head” (7).

Subject and verb. The qualifiers, in Claudio Herrera’s case, as in Twombly’s, come from the artist himself. Thus, and to start with, political – however much he proclaims to be an anarchist –; thus, historical –“Weimar’s Republic, the Revolution of the Commune, and the French invasion of Algiers”, he himself lists–; thus “sacred and timeless” and thus, too, “utopian or apocalyptic”.

Here it is mostly text and each text knows its quote. It is not vanity, it is awareness of a location determined by politics, history, utopia and the sacred and timeless parts underlying apocalypse.

The weave and warp of Claudio Herrera’s drawings gets superimposed and combined, it declines its text coming and going from ideas to words, and from words laden with ideas to the image that mixes them up while enlightening them with a new ray as a way of entry and return.

There is room here for almost anything from anywhere. Fragmentary or severed, never finished or resounding. The confusion is as perceptive as it is alive and giving.

A word is not a gesture, it is a word. Different from lines or figures –restless and dislocated–, a word is never confusing or mixed up. It says. And in its statement it keeps quiet or talks about things depending on who is listening (and who does not hear, there is nothing audible here, it is all eyes!, eye territory).

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When I started to think of these notes for my friend Claudio Herrera, I was hearing I am not sure what kind of music is present in his drawings. In any case, I do not know how to define it –surely because of my rational and sentimental difficulties with it–. But, as Simon Rattle, the current Director of the Berliner Philarmoniker, says that something as simple as the passing of music is a colour, that each one has to be challenged constantly and, hence, to look for more colours and, lastly, that passing needs to match the heartbeat and it is not important what music says, but what it wants to say, what it means (8). Like in the drawings and collage from Claudio Herrera.

Mariano Navarro, July 2007

 

Notes
1. Manuel Borja-Villel, Michael Compton, Marisa Gilissen, cat. Marcel Broodthaers. Cinema, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1997.

8. Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, “Simon Rattle. La batuta más envidiada del mundo”, El País Semanal nº 1.605, 1 de julio de 2007.