Karine & I were delighted when we saw that the Grand Palais was holding an exposition called ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan”. A pandemic wet dream. Great visual art plus enough space to keep any virus concentrations in the air very low.
Kiefer honors the work of the remarkable German-language lyric poet by integrating his (Celan’s) words and lines and sense and sensibility into Kiefer’s own visual lyric.
We even came back to Paris a little earlier than usual to make sure to see it.
The experience of the show got me wondering all at once about the scope of dance creation. The logic of this wonder is of course complex. In part, I began wondering because I was struck with Anselm Kiefer’s, the show curators’ and Paul Celan’s intention and deliberation, with the venue’s place, placement and statement in its immediate environment. In part, I was struck with the show’s space, volume, size, light, shadow, with the editorial in the in the walls and ceilings, positions, with visual inventions, sculpted models and found objects, with tools, materials, material and immaterial effects… In part, I began wondering because of wider-world references in the show: Kiefer’s effect on Celan and Celan’s lyric world and on the sense of these effects Kiefer. Then there’s my own thinking on art structures in general and on dance structures in particular (see: Move that Cat, ‘Cleitus), thoughts on the indistinguishability of intention and accident (see: Machine de Cirque). And finally maybe a bit more in part than my other in-parts, the effects of a long chat I had with the dancer, choreographer, intellectual Mylène Benoît on why she thinks dance is an essential human need.
Kiefer’s show is a “whole show” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. The neighborhood where it was held was pandemic-appropriate: at the Grand Palais Ephémère, a temporary annex to the Palais, which is in renovation. Ephémère is an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of urban Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that we suspect – Karine and I spent our time in line theorizing – it may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations.
Altogether, the Ephémère space, seeming made-to-order for pandemic times, is also an excellent piece of psycho-esthetic engineering where Kiefer’s art was to best advantage.
But, though accommodating and integrated into the exhibition, Kiefer’s gigantic canvases, life-model jet plane and the blockhouses, its intention and arrangement stands alone, as much a work affecting its showcase as being affected by it. Wherever it travels, and I hope it does travel, it can master its environment.
As spectacle, as in everything else, ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan” works really well.
Kiefer, they say, had a large hand in laying out his homage to Celan.
He left behind a lot of tools, equipment, material and unused applications, back near the coffee shop. As if he meant to keep working, or might be called back for maintenance, he’d tidily sorted it all on shelving bearing up, as Atlas might, the Ephémère’s huge volume of tightly-operated light and shadow.
Kiefer’s a complete painter, an expert in producing line, color and texture as well as in the mechanics of perception. Celan is a complete poet, conjuring the texture & tone of a thought or an idea or of an unsayable image and make the surrounding air vibrate with them.
The first few lines of Death Fugue (Todesfuge), a poem that a great many young people in Germany learn in school, give an idea of Celan’s all-round grasp of poetics:
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends / Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
wir trinken und trinken … / we drink it and drink it …
Lift a glass to the banality of evil.
This “Schwarze Milch” is surely the universal food and mutter of the self-poisoned, the Kluxer, the Bircher, the Q-Anon dope in his basement lounge, the ultra-violent screed of the Turner Diaries, the black-shirt murder-tech who shoots granny in the face because regulations suggest she might be too weak to work before, before … What was that bureaucratic euphemism for mass murder? … Also, it feels like stumbling on Jeff Davis’ autographed copy of Essai sur les inégalités humaines. Also it feels of a certain moment of warm-beer hilarity, also of the joyful anarchy of Chagall, also, also, also… and, and, and…
Step to one side, you are puzzling symbols, step to another and those are recondite words, step away and a grey wall becomes a horizon, white scars change to plaques of chased silver… As the photographer’s very laudable focus on position and arrangement and interior light suggests, photography is technically inadequate to reproducing the breadth of visual experience in Kiefer’s work.
As Karine and I walk around the hangar, looking backward and aside and forward in and out of various levels of perception of Kiefer’s visual pieces and Celan’s lyric, whether it is in or outside Kiefer’s take, it occurs to me that both creators really do operate at the limits of the possible. The tools available to painter or poet are what the one or the other knows about the physics of his materials, tools and techniques, what they know about the physics and psychologies of human experience and what they themselves know about their own physics and psychologies. That’s it.
The painter and the poet’s conventions are the limits of what they can do with what they have at hand with the intention they have.
And I think that what is true for Kiefer and Celan is true for visual and sound and material creators in general.
Whatever works, works.
When I write of “intention” in the process, I don’t mean the “sense” in a “story”, I mean the sensibility they wish the spectator or the hearer or the toucher to experience. As hearer, spectator or toucher, my experience is the creator’s “sensibility” or “intention” through their use of their knowledge and tools and skills on my hearing, sight or touch.
When it comes to dance I break “sensibility” into two step of a typical choreography: creating feeling and encountering.
Whether in dance or sound, material or visual art, I think creators don’t so much share their sensibility as open it for experience.
For me, as artists successful in their intention, Kiefer and Celan enable the listener or spectator to become a “participant” or experiencer of the pleasure of apprehension of their intention – sensibility. The pleasure of esthetic apprehension is the unique pleasure inside the shiver of a loving touch, or, as Karine likes to put it, of l’exquis.
So when I say that the experience of “Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan” made me wonder about dance, I mean that it crystallized the thought that, whatever the appearances or rhetorics, Whatever works, works, is not the convention in movement art, in dance and dance performance.
Why is this? Especially when so very many movement creators nowadays come to performance from the visual arts?
It’s not because movement art is not the same in intention as other creative endeavors. Dance & dance performance creators are bending their efforts toward l’exquis, too.
I can see three probable reasons for the resistance to Whatever works, works.
In the first place, I think it’s the science in cognition and perception that puts off movement creators. Not just because it’s “science”, of course, but because of the type of science that’s involved. Whereas creators such as Anselm Kiefer don’t think a second about tricking your perceptions, for movement creators the biases of cognition and the heuristics of perception are seen as stage “magic”, or “conjuring”. Magic is for amusing the audience during intermission, not the main performance.
Movement creators aren’t alone in their prejudice against applied cognitive science. The fine hypnotist-conjuror Éric Normandin, known as Mesmer, pleads with audiences to understand that many important aspects of daily life are determined by combinations of structured, predictable gesture, body attitude acting on identifiable human cognitive processes. For instance – this is me, not Mesmer – the ability operate deception, the foundation of consumer capitalism, is based on a thorough understanding of human physics – they take people by the throat to get them participating in great delusions of status, needs and feelings … But reasonable people spend their time trying to “debunk” his art and, most significant of all, nobody “believes” Mesmer.
And then there are real work conditions - the tools, needs, knowledge, competences, skills and habits developed to pursue different areas of creative endeavor. Learned on the job or at school, they differentiate creators working in the same field and in different fields. Anselm Kiefer wouldn’t be much of a painter if he didn’t have some grasp of how a human eyeball processes a thing in its environment or the various possible symbolic content of colors and shapes. Equally, a highly educated person, such as composer-musician Pierre Godard, partner with choreographer Liz Santoro in le principe d’incertitude dance company, couldn’t do much music making without at least some sense of how the ear hears and mere flesh reacts to sound. Godard, not surprisingly, is educated in finance and physics. Choreographer Santoro, educated in linguistics, is the only choreographer I know of who openly uses identified cognitive processes in her creations. I think the consistent and solid esthetic success of her pieces owes a lot to her formal grasp of cognitive processes, that is, of how her spectators participate with the world around and the other humans in it.
Finally, I think the absence of a clear sense of what Dance, capital D, does, and what need or needs makes movement creators reluctant to adopt Whatever works, works in general and human physics particularly.
It’s pretty much my experience that contemporary dance and performance-dance creators limit themselves to concentrating on a particular sort of experience rather than focus on its finality. The may “show” a thing à la Heidegger, open up or evoke a tissue of confrontation-response or sensation or practicing “happening theory” where careful observation of human physics and an eye for the natural development of the relations between performers and performers and spectators and performers bloom and develop. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking here of Ashley Chen’s brand-new Distances, a remarkable (and successful) “portrait” of a random crowd – or open up or evoke the tissue of human confrontation and response – of Elisabeth Saint-Jalmes’ Abri-Trou , “Sheltering-hole”, a sound-sight-touch installation at Le Générateur, June 2021, and of Catherine Diverrès’s Blow the bloody doors off (2016) or Joann Leighton’s People United (2021) or Aina Alegre’s R-A-U-X-A (2020).
Otherwise, creators and audiences seem to believe that dance, dance performance – is mostly about “expression” and/or passing “meaning” – storytelling. They assume, with some exceptions, that movement felt from the story they have to tell is sufficient unto itself. I’m thinking here of a very recent experience of really enjoyable performances by three small troupes at the Théâtre Etoile du Nord’s Plateau Partagé work-in-progress program, which included a question-answer session after each performance. The works were: Portraits# (Selfies) a tightly conceptualized and executed performance-dance piece by Rebecca Journo; Ahotsak (which we could title “my memory of memory of Guernica”) by Ziomara Hormaetxe, a deft and unique mix of break and contemporary dance; and Margaux Amoros’ A Cru (“Raw”), a truly sophisticated exploring of her trio of dancer-dancer-musician through movement during which music and movement played switch-switch-come-together as they explored each other. Hard to explain, Amoros’ choreography, but believe me, it worked well on me. In each of these, the dance cast a “spell” that was the key to success with spectators. But the creators seemed unready to talk about how that dance-movement might affect spectators. When asked what effects her performance was meant to have on spectators – personally, I was struck with terror – Rebecca Journo was rather taken aback and not prepared to say “yet”. Ziomara Hormaetxe was surprised when asked about her original mix of styles – very striking and absorbing. As for Margaux Amoros’ absolutely hypnotic piece, the audience mostly wondered if they had “got it right” in saying the piece was “about” joy.
The lack of a clear finality – or a sense of the cognitive processes involved in Dance – often makes for a disturbing disconnect between what performers are doing and what experience they are creating for spectators.
There is of course nothing wrong in any of this. But I think a clearer understanding of how dance works within human physics to invoke its unique sensibility would both make for more consistently successful dance pieces and, at the same time clarify why dance is, as Mylène Benoît, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, says, as necessary as affection.
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