The Passionate Transitory

‘The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge… It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility needed for our journey. In this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.’

- John O’Donohue[1]

An excited curiosity and exploration of imaginative play runs through John O Donohue’s meditations on the imagination and its relationship to form in a work of art. This is a fervent, giddy intoxication with the malleability of everyday phenomena when they are filtered through the fecund landscape of the mind, the imagination, the half-glimpsed wide-eyed wonder of the artistic eye. Dublin artist Rory Morris (b.1981) is an artist who glimpses this invisible quality in the essential and constant materials of commonplace objects. He seems to scratch at an intriguing aesthetic, grappling towards a beauty hidden within objects usually viewed purely through the prism of their functional merits.

Currently in his final year art course at Whitehall College of Further Education in Dublin City, Morris was interested in art from an early age, finding satisfaction in fine pen and ink illustrations. Comic books were the motivation for what was often laborious and detailed work. Having started a career as a graphic designer, Morris withheld from applying to an Art college out of apprehension.  The loss of two family members fixed with a new engagement with the finite quality of life, led Morris to finally leave his job to pursue a career as a full-time artist. A self-styled explorer and reactor, Morris work seeks to retrieve and (re)present the aesthetic of the everyday, documenting and responding to transient, commonplace (and often perceived as inconsequential) materials. He does not work within one specific medium or specific genre; instead he remains open to the potentiality of a diverse ever-evolving practice. Currently his worked is based in a combination of mixed media and print, but he also works in paint and sculpture.

            What attracts him to print is the uncontrollable quality of the medium, those marks made by the plate and ink that cannot be anticipated. While there is an element of control, chance also has a significant role in producing the final form of the work. Within mixed media there is an engagement with those things that are self-descriptive of their function through the familiarity of their physical forms. So, feathers by their weight and texture are useful in implying softness; rocks, by their nature, hardness; and so, these qualities lend themselves well to graphic descriptions. His work finds inspiration in found objects; intrigued by their possible antiquity and unique composition, an idea for the canvas often finds its genesis in the arbitrary. As Morris says, ‘You can find aesthetics in a pile of rubbish, a crack in the pavement (…) or even in a mortgage receipt’. It is through these found objects that the artist’s personality and narrative surfaces. Having discovered a box of the aforementioned mortgage receipts in his parent’s attic, Morris hopes to use these found papers in a future work.  An old mortgage receipt, fragile in its physicality but valuable in its representation of toil and achievement, serve as reference points from which Morris draws upon the power and ubiquity of that which we find in everyday ephemera, while at the same time exploring and touching his own uniquely personal family histories. He points to the antiquity, memorial and physical aspects of the material, and explains that in using these old crumpled papers it presents a rawness and viscerality that no paint can imitate.

While he reassures me that the motives and ideas underlying all of his work stem from an organic place of memory and experience, the end result of his engagement with objects often ends up appearing like a conceptual or abstract meditation. His experiments with various materials often pair distinct and unlikely phenomena; he then documents their dialogue through photography, investigating the fluctuating tension and permutations through which the materials push against one another and evolve. The end results of such experiments are often unknown to Morris, but he is also strict with their completion if they deviate too far from his perceived end result. He is thus both controlled and lenient enough in the working process to allow for the unpredictably of the materials to work themselves into pattern.

 His ongoing series involving chairs is the best example of this process of contrast and control, the dialogue between the natural and the ready-made. Having frozen a black chair in a block of ice, Morris charts the disruption of the object, the violent snapping of the wood as a result of expansion and melting. He documents the corrosion of man-made functional objects by elemental forces beyond our control, an introduction of the elemental to the functional, capturing the unpredictable and mutating forms which emerge. In this particular piece of work, the crude form of the ice slowly gives way to a beautiful contrast of black, arching lines set against white billowing forms. The photographs display an accumulation of soft and hard, tough and momentarily unrecognisable forms, forms which are fragmenting, unravelling, splintering, erupting, disintegrating, wilting and fracturing around one another, a visual poem of mutability and elegant destruction.

One might ask, “Why chairs?” Morris explains, ‘I often substitute people, memories and feelings for objects.’ And like the uniqueness of an individual’s personality, the chosen material often dictates its own path to completion. Chairs, those ever present, intrinsically utilitarian items, are consummate human objects.  When chairs are visible they represent the presence of people, indicative of the way objects are imbued with meaning and history required through everyday use. The Colombian born artist Doris Salcedo works in a similar fashion, taking objects imbued with history and politicising it or using it to dismantle or reignite memories of a forgotten event. The friction between control and chance, between abstract and firm meanings, is a tension that Morris explores throughout the working process. The object belongs in a simplified plane, as the catalyst for where the journey begins and ends. Morris is intrigued by Chance Art and the intangibility of the works of artists such as Andy Goldsworthy, whose art is susceptible to temporal change. Goldsworthy uses materials from nature such as twigs, leaves, and snow, through which the finished work is often absorbed back into that from which it came.

Common Interest

An element of ambiguity and the unanticipated lingers over the work and character of Morris’ objects and photographs. But there remains something perpetually inviting about the work. There is a salute to the melting away of time embedded in the photographs of the chairs whose dense matter eventually succumbs to the pressures of their icy grip. There is an ethereal quality to his work with mechanical cogs which have succumbed to some vapour-like, hazy orbit in space. The solidity of his chosen objects, chairs, cogs and wood, always seemingly dark and sharp edged, coupled with elemental energies, encourages the viewer to reconfigure their binary perceptions of the natural and man-made, hard and soft, light and dark. The everyday, concrete material is re-imagined as an abstract mausoleum of fragility when exposed to the various workings of the elements. The liveliness and space surrounding the familiar material become as important as the liveliness and space occupied within.  Our   journey starts with tangible objects and personal experiences which, taken into the care of the artist, travels between the space of transmutation and out the other side, into a realm of disfigured and eloquent elements. This process cannot detract from the gracefulness of a considered intervention in the dialogue between Morris’ carefully chosen materials. The care of craft and the detail afforded the framing and positioning of the piece is of the utmost importance to the artist. It is this dance between the material and the ephemeral, the controlled and the unpredictable, the predestined and the chance encounter, the mundane and the sublime, the unnoticed quotidian and the eternal unknown, which characterises life, art, imagination, creation, and the fascinating work of Rory Morris.

You can view Rory Morris’ work at the end of year exhibition in Aras Chluain Tarbh (GAA Club) Clontarf on June 22-24

Rory will be attending NCAD in the autumn of 2012

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[1] O’Donohue, J. The Four Elements: Reflections on Nature, (London: Transworld Ireland, 2010)

NCAD/UCD Architecture and Dublin City Council Collaboration

“Thinking is just advanced pattern matching. Human beings are memory-prediction machines.”
Jeff Hawkins


As part of my Masters, I have been involved in a collaboration with University College Dublin Architecture students and Dublin City Council in a proposal to stage an intervention in the Grafton Street Area.

The main focus of the project within which there are three other groups of students running concurrent events on a proposed day in the future (soon to be announced) is to get people to engage in the Grafton street area in an alternative fashion. Grafton street does not have to be viewed as a solely commercial area, rather the groups have proposed some very alternative approaches to engaging the physical/architectural/social civic space.

Without more precise knowledge, I will not try to explain what the other collaborators are up to but I will explain a little about our idea.
We have invented the Grafton Street Game.
For further Information on the theory underlying what we are challenging participants to engage in please check out the blog http://graftonstreetgame.blogspot.com

Method:
The treasure hunt:
The game Consists of 7 posters a clue written on each and introduced by a brief description of the rules there is also a number of stickers mimicking the first poster with its initial clue that acts as treasure. These stickers allow the participants to share their experience with others. The game firstly encourages people to experience Grafton street in detail to learn something of its history and current condition. Upon agreeing to the rules the gamers become complicit – they agree to explore Grafton street abiding by the rules. Upon finding the treasure they are presented with a means to expand the game to shift is dynamics or to let it end. They are now collaborators the fact that they now become authors of the game means that they must consider the games development as a whole. They must understand the game as a simulation and must consider neccesairly the games purpose. They must ask themsemslves the benefit of the games maintenance. It is a simulation...

Of course we want people to have fun as well, a sort of reclaiming the civic space of Grafton Street. We encourage people to engage in play in a space that is not necessarily designed physically and consciously as a space for festive activity

As soon as a date is announced for the projects to go ahead I will alert the blogosphere. (Cant believe I just used the term blogosphere)

April Showers

As you might be able to guess, these are some of my favourite photographs Ive taken involving rain and its aftermath

These two above and below were taken during a sun shower at Body and Soul festifal 2011. Best festival ever

The last four  were taken in one of my favourite places to take  photographs in Dublin. Being obsessed with urban landscape photography, this area opposite an alleyway on Cathal Brugha Street contains a really grimy scape but the colours and textures of the buildings never cease to excite my eye

The desire to remember: Collecting memory in the work of W. G. Sebald and Tacita Dean

 ‘Memory is similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.’

Alain de Botton 

The representation of individual and collective memory is a subject that has held my fascination for a number of years. The German professor Andreas Huyssen, in his book Twilight Memories, writes about contemporary culture’s obsession with cataloguing memory. He states that ‘[The] past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory.’(Huyssen, 1995, p.3) It is through increasing technological means that modern western societies articulate and maintain individual memories and collective histories. Photographical documentation is often used as an account of human memory, yet an anxiety exists in the relationship of photography to organic memory. Memory and history cannot be accurately reduced to a system of signifiers, partly due to the subjective nature of how we remember events and the influence of established collective agencies. As Roland Barthes says, photographs supplant rather than supplement: ‘The photograph [is] never in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes counter –memory’ (Barthes, 2000, p.91) With particular attention paid to this medium as a process of recollection, I seek to explore the ambiguities presented to individual and collective memory in the work of George Winifred Sebald and Tacita Dean. In exploring their articulation of memory, I want to draw attention to how both artists tease out and question the correlations and practices inherent in the retrieval, and ownership, of memory.

Western culture’s current relationship towards memory was born out of modernity. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs developed a sharp distinction between historical and autobiographical memory. The first is reached through written records and maintained through other types of record, such as photography and festive and commemoration activities where people gather to remember. A person does not directly remember events from a time before they were born and so the memories of past are maintained and controlled by social institutions. Autobiographical memories, on the other hand, are those memories that we have personally created. These memories are in danger of fading unless reinforced by those around us who have shared these past experiences; its relevance is rooted in others. Memories are thus sustained by collective social forces. (Coser, 1992, pp.23-34) Following on from this foundation, Andreas Huyssen  notes that while human memory might be an anthropological given, it is ‘closely tied (...) to the ways a culture constructs and lives its temporality, the forms memory will take are invariably contingent and subject to change’ (Huyssen, 1997, p.2). He sees contemporary culture’s obsession with memory as problematic. Generational memory is on the decline due to the increasing modernization and technological advancements which allow us to take memory for granted. The engagement and cataloguing of historical memory is constructed from and largely given over to reproductive technologies, film, video, photography, audio, while private memory has largely been incorporated into public spectacle. He is struck by the popularity of museums, monuments and memorials as aesthetic and historical expressions, as ways that our culture mark time within the present.

In relation to the work of W.G Sebald I want to explore ways in which memory is collected and catalogued. Sebald’s text The Rings of Saturn acts as a meditation on memory and trauma. The narrator, while on a pilgrimage around Suffolk, crosses time and space, collecting and retelling stories of bygone eras, some that dwell on the rhythmic nature of human death and imposed destruction. For Sebald, a German-born academic post 1945, the issue of collective national guilt and incomprehension regarding the realities of the Third Reich permeates a substantial quantity of his writing.  But I wish to focus on the ways in which he questions how we interpret memory and information, and the mediums they are presented in. Quite a number of Sebald’s novels are juxtaposed with photographs which strengthen or contrast the text’s narrative. These images invite us to consider the implications of particular ways of perceiving and remembering the world.  Themes of time, history, and memory permeate all of Sebald’s work, but I will only reference their inclusion in his celebrated novel The Rings of Saturn, which alludes to the repetitive nature of how memories are preserved and re-enacted.

On Dean’s part, her work seeks to investigate, connect and interpret memories of historical facts or circumstances while she remains at a safe distance. With particular attention to the way she accumulates memoirs of a specific action or time, I will address the series of works which reference the memory of disgraced Golden Globe competitor Donald Crowhurst. She illustrates that there is always an alternative way to remember an event and that details are often overlooked - in this instance, for example, we can choose to regard Crowhurst’s tale primarily as the personal tragedy of an inexperienced voyager lost at sea or as a duplicitous man who, in the face of mounting personal debts, chose to misrepresent his progress in the competition. Her approach to collecting information through film, text and photography is emblematic of our culture’s method of cataloguing and maintaining various overlapping systems of representation and history.

Both author and artist challenge a passive relationship to time and memory when signified through an attachment to photographs, museums, films, and catalogues as a means of recollection.

Sebald is equally intrigued by the sites where memories of memories are collected and packaged for consumption. Throughout the pilgrimage in Rings of Saturn our narrator continually visits museums, old buildings, and sites of remembrance such the Maritime museum, Somerleyton Hall and the memorial site of Waterloo, all which lead him to remember the ghosts of destruction past. The museum like Somerleyton Hall serves as a place where memory is gathered and categorised to the point where ‘one can never say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist.’ (Sebald, 2002, p. 36) Upon viewing the panoramic installation of the Battle of Waterloo, our journey man further comments, ‘[This] is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and we still do not know how it was.’(Sebald, 2002, p.125)  Photographic images in Sebald’s texts are a central feature of his study of the relations between memory and representation. The juxtaposition of the novel with numerous documentary-style photographs serves to tease out the reader’s assumptions regarding the reliability of mutually supportive media.

 Sebald had a clear understanding of the power and manipulative qualities of photography as documentation, noting that the ‘written word is not a true document after all [and] people let themselves be convinced by a photograph.’ (Sebald, 1997, p.106) There is something quite ambiguous about the nature of the photographs within The Rings of Saturn. Photographs from various origins are non-descript landscapes containing no real landmarks, people, or details, and we rarely seek confirmation that it is the true representation of the landscape. The ambiguity of these images refutes any attempt at authenticity. With other images, such as the painting of the Battle of Sole Bay, the narrator remarks how the piece ‘fails[s] to convey any true impression of how it must have been...’ adding to the belief that images fail to accurately portray the past. (Sebald, 2002, p.77) Though they fail to truthfully reveal the past, we confidently surrender to technology the task of remembering. The problem arises, then, how do we accurately represent history? We cannot. The actual is always in some way permeated by individual and collective imaginings retrospectively. Perhaps instead we must pay attention to the details and seek out the coincidences and connections between facts and inventions as Tacita Dean does. When speaking about place (but easily related to the process of memory) she says ‘[it] can only ever be personal...always connected to somewhere in our autobiographies- future and past. The description of the place will always reside in the detail’ (Lerm-Hayes 2007, p.420)

Sebald had a collection of shoeboxes filled with photographs and postcards to fuel his patchwork tapestry of the past. This obsessive collecting is manifested in the life and work of Dean also: accumulating and archiving has consistently been a system within her work. Her collections comprise elements of the ephemeral, whether the clover collection from her youth or the lost details and borrowed memories of a time and place. Her written style closely resembles Sebald’s text and photo assemblages and Sebald’s themes of history and memory also feature strongly in her film, text, and photographic work. While Sebald’s work gently queries the institutional means of storing memory and the authority of photographic evidence, Dean’s approach to memorial is presented on a smaller, more personal scale, stating ‘everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time’ (Newman 2003, p.1) Dean engaged in an experimental investigation to take on the tale of Donald Crowhurst’s disastrous voyage at sea. As part of a larger meditation on the sea as representing the time and space of the unconsciousness, she sought to dismantle and heal the cultural memory of Crowhurst held by the collective public as a man who cheated and lied when disclosing the coordinates positioning him as frontrunner in the Golden Globe boat race. ‘For many Donald Crowhurst is just a cheat who abused the sacred unwrittens of good sportsmanship but for some it is more complicated than this, and he is seen as much as a victim of the Golden Globe as the pursuer of it’ (Dean, 1997, p.19) Crowhurst, an inexperienced sailor in an untrustworthy trimaran ran into difficulties while at sea. A fear of failure and financial ruin led to the subsequent forgeries of his position. Trying to maintain logs of his actual position versus his forged co ordinates eventually led him to madness. The solitude of space and time at sea reduced reality and the present to an illusion, and he committed suicide by jumping overboard. The search that that the artist performs, the recovery of something lost, of a vanished boat, and ultimately the ghost of a lost sailor, can only be recovered in memory alone.

 The past is past. Its presence is ruined and is available to memory only on the understanding that the memory itself constantly collapses into an immemorial from which nothing returns, ever. The past is not present in the present as if it were ‘recalled’ in the sense of revived (Nancy, 2003, p1)

Using the commemorative functions of photography, film, and essays Dean was further inspired to produce a number of further works, including the photograph Teignmouth Electron 1999 , and the film works  Disappearance at Sea 1996 and Disappearance at Sea II. Deans does not so much suppose to illustrate a specific  historical memory but rather highlights the nature of time within the infinite space of consciousness (represented by the sea) where memory functions. The fate of Donald Crowhurst is an instance where an extended time spent without the distinguishing features of a landscape or the support of other individuals to locate ones temporality results in the loss of any coherent concept of chronological narrative and memory.

The wreak of Teignmouth Electron

Donald Crowhurst

Both Sebald and Dean play with the ideas of memory spread across time, an intricate texture of personal memories and collective history. Both artist and author employ the technological achievements of the twentieth century, film and photography, to map the various complexities of representation and memory. The media of photography and film provide an opportunity not only for what can be shown but also to give evidence of that which can no longer be seen. Sebald’s mundane landscapes and Dean’s lingering shots of a moored, rusting vessel penetrate the disappearance of the past, and a desire to recapture the true representation of past. Their artefacts are connected to the absence of any remembered or represented narrative within. Sebald’s purposeful contesting of image and text reminds us to question the production of these shared images and their evidential claims to supply accurate information. Huyssen reminds us that the way in which our culture thinks about time is far from natural, even though we may experience it as such (Huyssen, 2005, p.8). The plurality of perspectives provided via social media like Twitter and camera phones cannot contribute to a coherent narrative of say, the realities of the Arab Spring revolts. Such media can only serve to feed the expanding contemporary development of spectacle. The indeterminate features of the ways we gather and process memory is in danger of becoming increasingly mediated and abstract.  This progression leads to the erosion of subjective authentic experience. Sebald had an acute awareness of how memory predetermines how we engage with our present. In a newspaper article fittingly entitled The Last Word Sebald sums up the importance of our relationship to memory

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn't be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered - not from yesterday but from a long time ago. (Sebald, 2001, [82 lines])

Bibliography

·         Barthes, R. (2000), Camera Lucida, London: Vintage Books

·         Botton, A, (2001) The Art of Travel, New York: Pantheon

·         Coser, L, (ed), (1992) Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

·         Dean, T. (2003) Seven Books, Germany: Steidl Publishers.

·         Huyssen, A, (2005) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York: Routledge.

·         Jaggi, M , (2001) ‘The Last Word’ in, The Guardian,  London:Guardian News and Media Limited. Available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities.highereducation [accessed 30 January 2012]

·         Lerm-Hayes, C, (2007) ‘Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W. G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys, and Tacita Dean’ in, Patt, L (ed), (2007)  Searching for  Sebald, Los Angeles: The Institute for Cultural Inquiry

·         Nancy, J, (2003) ‘The Taciturn Eternal Return’ in Dean, T, (2003) Essays, Germany: Steidl Press

·         Newman, M, (2003) ‘Salvage’ in Dean, T, (2003) Essays Germany: Steidl Publishers

·         Scholz, C, (1997) ‘But the Written Word is Not a True Document’. A Conversation with W.G. Sebald on Literature and Photography in Patt, L (ed), (2007) Searching For Sebald, Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry.

·         Sebald, W.G, (2002) The Rings of Saturn, London: Vintage Books