THE ARTIST AS A WRITER

Writing Spaces Writing as Transformative, Scholarly and Creative Practice, Brill Publications 2019 pp.141-149

The Artist as a Writer

Esthir Lemi

ABSTRACT

‘The tough and the cute dancer’ started in 1998 as a collection of photos while using the technique of chronophotography, depicting black and white images of dancers on the move. The film was analogue printed, and in 2013 the photographic material was re-worked via the photogravure technique. In 2016, 18 years after the first photos were taken, I digitally scanned and reworked these images into an art book. Ten pictures were selected and have been used as inspiration for nine texts. This work-in project of a visual artist and composer with the lifetime hobby of classical ballet started with a photo-shoot. It has been finalised in the form of a book based on text. This process follows the end of the analogue era in printing via digital technology while at the same time it manifests how an artist can express herself in words or her thoughts will vanish, in the same way memories do if we don’t keep a record of them. On this presentation, I focus on the artistic process of cultivating artistic skills in musical composition, design and embodied cognition that end up in common rules in writing. The author started with the safe move of common space in art that is ‘definition’ and defines nine words significant for her career in the same fashion that nine ètudes do in writing. In this chapter, I present a method I consider as a common ground of all arts for the realisation of these ètudes.

Key Words: Chronophotography, analogue, digital, photogravure, embodied cognition, ètude, composition

1. Introduction

Can a painter use the methodology that she has learned in her studies in order to find common principles in writing? The art book I have just published is such an endeavour. Since artists are always asked to explain their artworks, and some of them are good at both art and mutual analysis1 , there must be something more like inner structure than talent between the two disciplines: visual art and the art of writing. My presentation is about extending this relationship to two more artistic disciplines: musical composition and dance. As my aim is to communicate the material I explore to a bright audience, I believe language is a skill that an artist has as a tool, no matter what their discipline, in some kind of secret programming2 close to poetry. So even if we are not writers, we communicate in words. My point is not that any artist has the skills to write a novel or to create fictional characters and plot. However, words are there for artists to create their personal vocabulary, hence to create definitions. I call this exercise ‘ètudes’ and I consider some similar methodology in all arts. Therefore, the title of my book: ‘the tough and the cute dancer’ refers more to the inner structure (methodology) —TOUGH— and the aesthetic flow —CUTE— that creates a pattern able to adapt itself and develop in time in any material possible. Most important is the communication skill of a secret language, which is probably always based on memory and the way we define images, words and feelings, as well as on our capability to share them in public. Therefore art forms a communicative system, based on our senses. As ‘ètudes’ I define small texts in a three paragaraph length. Each text describes in an open form a definition given as a title.

2. Captioning

In 1998, as a student at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, I started working on a series of chronophotographies of dancers from the Metsis Studio ballet school, where I used to spend my afternoons as a hobbyist dancer. I set up a darkroom in my home kitchen and started reworking these images for a couple of years. I kept it in a messy archive that I came to redefine here and there during the years in my free time. In 2013, I chose a selection of this portfolio and re-worked it in a heliogravure (printing) technique. In 2015, I selected ten images from the whole work and reworked them digitally. It is interesting how my hesitation to consider this work as finished during the last decade made me follow different techniques from analogue to digital and thus to have a record of ‘a threshold’ to a new age, since all of these processes are now considered as old-fashioned; it is really hard to access the material and print it, as it requires vintage equipment and out-of-stock supplies.

When I came to my final selection I had to choose titles. I see this as the moment when the writer inside the artist grows: he/she has to define in words, not an explanation to the picture but more, I think, a word that will function as a link to communication with the audience. I selected nine words that I wanted to define for years. These nine words followed me (I could also say that they guided me) during my artistic life as a professional in choosing directions in ethics. I call this ‘my private vocabulary’. These words are in German, English, Greek and Swedish.

1. Abendfüllend

2. The tough and the cute dancer

3. Παράγωνο (oblique)

4. Weakness

5. Baglæns

6. Execution

7. Numb

8. Å

9. Wir lassen uns überraschen

The order in which I put them in my book is connected with morphology in music and the way I learned to use space and time during my studies. Kandinsky observed this common space in music and art in the beginning of 20th century so the code is well known. I will try to explain how a composer organises development in a musical piece in a way that is similar to creating chapters.

3. The Art of Editing and Musical Structure: From Heliogravüre to Digital Scaling Techniques

We know from program music from the romantic era that a musical idea can reference the title. The connection between this idea and the whole structure through the process is realized via melodic form that is communicated in the course of the composition; the audience follows the thread in transformation and restatement in variations and repetitions. If a title is seen as a definition that will be explained in no more than three paragraphs, then we have an exercise in writing that cannot fail. This process has a similar ‘abstraction’ to music, i.e. to patterns in the morphology of music. When defining the title for three paragraphs and there is no need to narrate a story, any memories and a personal perspective in random order can be easily organised, like drops of oil falling into a glass of water. Due to the three-paragraph limit and the title that consists of only one word, it is impossible to stray from the subject (as it is almost impossible to lose the melodic line in the very first minute). We have cultivated such repetitive modelsthrough myth from the beginning of human culture. Claude Lévi-Strauss analised this phenomenon throroughly. Contemporary theorists in musical perception consider this process of anticipation and repetition as the inner structure in memory where we artists actually project and develop our material. The audiences’ anticipation and the limits in human perception form the rules for the development of the material. In other words, it seems that in every new artistic work we follow the same path, a reworked structure that has been processed through the years, and usually we add the least possible amount of information that functions as the individual signature. The pre-structure is already there, and it is 99% of the work. In my book and first writing endeavour, I decided that the material I had was going to be developed in the form of ètudes. In this way I already had an old recipe, a successful structure to follow which also contains all ‘magnets and attractors’ that keep the outcome well-formatted around one strong ‘agent’ which is the title; the definition; the theme.

4. Lost in Translation: Revealing the Hidden Negation in Meaning?

The process of the nine ètudes consists of a theme that is then expanded upon in three paragraphs. The three paragraph-scheme is the familiar ABA rondo form: A: Beginning/ introduction B: Exposure A: closure Since the time of the prelude is short, the brain remembers and creates a connective meaning on its own. This is how composers use melody, and even if we are not able to follow the melody throughout the whole process, it is still hidden in background. This is also why musical forms such as the sonata, the lied form that we use in songs for centuries, and the fugue have had such successful and broad use. Our brain is constructed in this way in order to follow a piece of information for a short while. In other words, this three-paragraph model of the etudes has a strict structure for a successful improvisation. I originally wrote all nine texts in Greek, as it is my native language, following the above pattern. When I came to translate all the texts, I collaborated with professional linguist in both languages: Greek and English. Interestingly, the English translation not only affected a new perception of the text but also made me look back to the Greek version in order to define and measure the weight of each word in its meaning in the original text. One of the most thorough observations was about the use of negation in contemporary Greek language for a probable reason of optimisation in the fact that we are idle when we want to define something, using antonyms that in our head form the opposite of a confirmation, therefore a negation:

χρόνος άχρονος (time-timeless)

πιστευτός απίστευτος (credible-incredible)

βάσιμος αβάσιμος (founded-unfounded)

In the case of the Greek language we seem to erase from our memory some words (usually of ancient Greek derivation, not given to antonyms) because we find it easier to use one word and its antonym (with a negative prefix) instead of two different ones, without bothering to look for a word which would mean, say, ‘nontime’ or ‘non-believable’. Having realised this inner function of language, with the underlying measure of glumness and entropy it entails, I decided that the first exercise in the ètudes would be to try and find different words for each concept instead of resorting to the convenience of opposite pairs. As far as possible, these words would not be each other’s negative — and if they were, this would be deliberate. This is also a psychological way to defrag one’s memory from negative forms and remove any secondary dramatic elements. For all the cliché of the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words”, I find that when we see an image and recall its description, this entropy is not as powerful as when we translate from one language to another. A picture is worth a thousand positive words. In the case of program music (which expresses an image), the powerful dynamic of emotions functions like a game of such intelligence that it cannot act depressively even if it describes horrors. I believe this is because music, as a structural mechanism and through modulation, avoids entropy by its very nature. Translating from image to text or from image to music contains a gesture that reflects a holistic experience, and this has common mechanisms with the musical mechanisms of modulation. The widespread use of opposites in contemporary Greek certainly reflects the current crisis but also the changes imposed by the needs of communication and simplification and the mixture with other cultures.

5. Creating a Digital Order According to the Performative Process of Analogue Time

The ètude technique has an ABA structure. At the same time, it is accompanied by a picture that shares the same title. The pictures are the origins of these texts and titles, as both were created to describe, explain, and form a unity with them. As soon as I presented the whole project to the editor and her team, a new organisation of the structure began; a digital one. The shape of the book also required a re-organisation of the material. The team’s decision was that the entitled ‘Backwards’ text, which came with two pictures whereas all others had one, should go in the middle. In this way, in terms of macrostructure the 5th text mirrored the first half of the book against the other half: The process of reading the book is like climbing up from etude 1 to 4, reaching the “peak” at etude 5 and unfolding 2 pictures and then going downwards in order to read the other four. The theme of the first four is performance situations— preparation and on-stage. After the 5 th etude there is a slight change of subject and the focus is on the post-performance state of an artist. Each page is a diptych: first you read the text, then you unfold it to see the picture and then you fold it back on itself to turn the page and reach the next text. On the 5 th ètude the reader has two pictures to unfold. One is the analogue picture and the other is the same image printed in heliogravure and mirroring the analogue one. In music morphology this layout is known as ‘retrogade’ or a ‘cancrizans’ path (stemming probably from poetry), and is what gives this art-book its symmetry. During the illustration process another decision was made which was crucial for demonstrating the sixteen-year process of reworking the same material and its laboratory processing, and pointing to the tactile information of the originals. The cover looks like the back of the prints (scanned and re-worked), so that the closed book suggests much about the contents and materiality of what lies inside; this book is an object that opens and invites one to see the other side in four stages:

1. Upon approaching the covers, which embody the back of the original tactile prints, the reader gets an inkling of the performative work carried out in the laboratory.

2. The reader unfolds the diptych-like pages in order to connect the text with the picture. This creates a pause, a semicolon (;) in time, giving time to the reader to assimilate the text before the picture is revealed at the reader’s own pace.

3. The central text comes as a peak pont as a position, a context and a title (with the thematics of performance preparation and performance stage divided in a 4:1:4 pattern); after this peak, a cadence follows.

4.The final text functions as a closure.

Epilogue

In this chapter, I presented the process of writing my first artist book. I proposed a technique I called “etudes” for writing small texts constructed in three parts based on the context of defining the title. I have chosen eight one-word titles and one phrase as nine definitions that have followed me throughout my career. I tried to explain these titles according to my experiences on stage. Moreover, I based this process on ten images I took while working on the subject of chronophotography and corporeal movement. I worked on this material using extreme handcraft techniques that are seen as vintage these days, so I consider the form of the book as a manifesto of this process; a last survivor of its era. I have chosen to represent this project in the digital age as a work in process of a book, as I believe that through this nine-etude approach I preserve the ideal of the holistic model in art.

Notes

1.David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (NY: Thames and Hudson, 1987); Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (NY: Badlands Unlimited, 2013); Jack Flam, Matisse on Art Revised edition Documents of Twentieth-Century Art (L.A.: University of California Press, 1995).

2. Abraham Moles and Joel E. Cohen, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1969). 3. Jelena Hahl-Koch, Wassily Kandinsky und Arnold Schönberg. Die Briefwechsel (Munich: Taschenbuch, 1999). 4.Απόστολος, Βενατσές. Σύγχρονες Ερμηνευτικές Προσεγγίσεις στη Λογοτεχνία. (Athens: Εκδόσεις Επικαιρότητα, 1994).

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