Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
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Exclusion Zone surrounding Chernobyl, at the heart of which the damaged reactor was sealed in the so-called Sarcophagus. (Many of Robert Polidori’s Chernobyl photographs in his 2003 book, Zones of Exclusion, could double as stills from the set of Tarkovsky’s film.)
The source of recessed light in Turner’s painting does not look natural – especially since everything about the interior suggests that it is a cellar, some kind of subterranean dungeon. It is an emanation of pure energy. It is the annihilating light that the artist, according to D.H. Lawrence, ‘always sought’: a light that would ‘transfuse the body, till the body was carried away, a mere bloodstain’. It is the light of definitive or clinching revelation, which, for Lawrence, represents Turner’s ultimate vision and ambition: ‘a white incandescent surface, the same whiteness when he finished as when he began, proceeding from nullity to nullity, through all the range of colour’.
The picture I remembered seeing was like a representation of Turner moving – or, better, being drawn – towards this beckoning but unachievable vision. It gives visual expression to the same longing for transcendence articulated by Shelley (in 1821, in ‘Adonais’) as ‘the white radiance of Eternity.’
This is not the only way in which the painting seems to be an essay on itself and the way it is perceived.
Our memories of works of art have an existence that is independent of but contingent on the works themselves. The ratio of independence to contingency is perhaps determined not just by us – by the vagaries and deficiencies of memory – but by the works themselves. So it is no accident that this painting has failed to imprint itself on my memory with the precision and tenacity of a Canaletto, say, or a Holbein.
The walls – assuming that the picture reproduced here is the one I saw back whenever it was – are insubstantial. The figures are insubstantial. Nothing is as substantial as that core of molten light. Everything else, all that is solid, looks like it could melt into air. The interior depicted has been painted over a view of a landscape so that it resembles a murky X-ray of how it came into being. The painting is a palimpsest, seemingly containing traces or memories of its own earlier existence. And it’s obviously unfinished, suspended in the process of becoming what it is. The location and setting are neither given nor ascertainable. The title, Figures in a Building (Turner’s or cataloguer’s shorthand?), could hardly be less specific. The exact date of composition (c.1830–35) is unknown. According to the Tate’s online catalogue it is ‘one of several works where Turner seems to be developing a historical subject without any very clear direction, as if hoping a theme might occur as he moved his paints around on the canvas’. Even the artist, in other words, did not know what the picture might be about, working on it in the hope of a revelation that was never achieved.
Given all of this it is hardly surprising that I couldn’t remember the painting clearly – it’s inevitable. Isn’t that exactly what the picture is about, the way that some experiences – of art and life – remain inassimilable? (And, while we’re at it, unphotographable: almost everything that makes the painting interesting is lost in the version reproduced in this book.) For all its haziness the painting is a precise and lucid depiction of two refusals (both of which have their equivalents in Tarkovsky’s film). First, of the world’s inexhaustible refusal to succumb to the means of representation (if it did, we would be faced not with the end of history but with the end of art). Second, the refusal of certain artworks to be reduced to memory. That, I think, is what makes the painting unforgettable.
The painting is no longer on display at Tate Britain. It is back in the vaults where, presumably, it blazes away like the light emerging within it.
2009
The Awakening of Stones: Rodin
I’ve never been directly interested in Rodin, but so many other interests have drawn me to him that he feels, in some ways, a source to which I have been insistently urged. Can an account of the journey towards it serve as a surrogate description of the source itself?
I first read about Rodin in Art and Revolution, John Berger’s book about the Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny. Rodin was an important influence on Neizvestny but before discussing the work of either man Berger offers a general consideration of sculpture’s relation to space.
‘Compare a sculpture with a tree in winter. Because a tree grows, its forms are changeable and this is implicit in their shapes and configuration. As a result its relation to the surrounding space appears to be an adaptive one.’ Berger then compares a sculpture with a building and a machine. Having done that, he is ready to specify the way a sculpture ‘appears to be totally opposed to the space that surrounds it. Its frontiers with that space are definitive. Its only function is to use space in such a way that it confers meaning upon it. It does not move or become relative. In every way possible it emphasizes its own finiteness. And by so doing it invokes the notion of infinity and challenges it.
‘We, perceiving this total opposition between the sculpture and the surrounding space, translate its promise into terms of time. It will stand against time as it stands against space.’
From that point on I was conscious of and curious about sculpture – if only in a vague and passive way.
* * *
I next encountered Rodin in connection with Rilke, who had arrived in Paris in 1902 to write a monograph on the sculptor. ‘I am coming to Paris this autumn to see you and steep myself in your creations,’ he announced to Rodin in June of that year. In spite of the language barrier – Rilke’s French at that time was poor and Rodin had no German – the young poet was as impressed by the master, when he met him, as he was enthralled by his creations. Rilke spent a good deal of time in Rodin’s company, wrote his book about him in a month, and resumed his peripatetic life the following March. Rodin showed little interest in the book but when he read a French translation, in 1905, he wrote warmly to the man who had ‘influenced so many by his work and his talent’. Expressing affection and admiration, Rodin invited Rilke to stay at his home in Meudon. The reunion, a few months later, was everything that Rilke could have hoped for. He found himself not only integrated into Rodin’s busy round of activities and obligations but helping to organise them. It was a logical next step – or, perhaps, a temptingly illogical one – for the poet to become the sculptor’s secretary. The arrangement worked well enough for a while but Rilke soon began to feel over-burdened by his duties. In May 1906 Rodin discovered that the secretary had become over-familiar in letters to some of his friends – and sacked him on the spot (‘like a thieving servant’, as the grievously wounded Rilke put it).
I read Rilke’s book ten years ago, not because of who it was about, but because of who it was by. Actually, the distinction crumbles even as it is made since this unique account of genius by a genius, as Rilke himself told Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘also speaks about me’. If this became even more evident after it was written that is because Rilke’s early exposure to Rodin had such a determining effect on his subsequent career. From Rodin he became convinced of the absolute importance of incessant work, of unswerving dedication to a vocation. It was Rodin, apparently, who advised him to ‘just go and look at something – for example, at an animal in the Jardin des Plantes, and keep on looking at it till you’re able to make a poem of that’. ‘The Panther’ may have been the direct result of this suggestion. More generally, Rilke fought to directly translate what he considered the sculptor’s most distinct quality – his ability to create things – into ‘thing-poems’ (Dinggedicht). This entailed more than just looking; as with Rodin, ‘one might almost say the appearance of his things does not concern him: so much does he experience their being’.
The way that Rodin awakened in Rilke the desire to create poems that were the verbal equivalents of sculptures is quite explicit. ‘The Song of the Statue’, for example, records a longing to
be brought back from stone
into life, into life redeemed.
On his very first visit to Rodin’s studio on rue de l’Université Rilke