Case study three thesis

Jutta Koether
Jutta is a german artist who lives in New York City.
She is friends withKim Gordon of Sonic Youth.
I wish the perfomances were better that I have seen online.
The question is what is the relationship between performance movement duration and Painting?
Painting as performance as opposed to painting as a artifact of performance.
  Maybe there is a better artist to look at? Laurie Anderson.  Liz Phair. PJ Harvey. David Lynch.

So... not getting any response I have continued to think about why I am interested in painting as performance. The act of making, the solving, becoming is my happy place.  I do not need to have an important idea behind it.  I do not want to do all the work. I want the viewer to have room go draw connections.  I want them to play, dance, or sing their way through a composition. 

Still not sure what the thesis question is but I have looked into
*Cecily Brown, dancing paint through art historical forms?
*Iva Gueorguieva, paint that is so lively that it becomes sculpture and enters the room using the same rythmic articulations used on canvas?
*Arturo Herrera, Is there a connection between play and performance. Are they opposites or are they more alike than exhibition and play? Herrera plays with known images ( cartoons). If you paint/collage/draw a body in motion or fragmented does the brain supply movement connected with sound waves and dance?

Case study 1, Frankenthaler

“I think most things are about ambiguity”

Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract painter. She burst forth on the art scene when she was featured in Life magazine article in 1952. She was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg whom she met at an opening in 1950. Greenberg was arguably the most influential critic in the world at the time. In 1958, she married Robert Motherwell, a well known Abstract Expressionist painter. She does not want to talk about feminism. She does not want to talk her past marriage or about contemporary painters. “There are three subjects I don’t like discussing: my former marriage, women artists, and what I think of my contemporaries.”  She wants to make beautiful paintings and throw beautiful parties. I appreciate the spontaneity of her work, the quickness, the application of paint, and the non-fussiness above the surface. I think I also like her cocky above-it-all portrait from her breakout Life article. The same thing that makes her paintings convincing I see in portraits of her. She is not asking for permission to be who she is and to create her way.

I have tried to curtail this case study to only be about Frankenthaler’s art, but art is influenced, and the way art is categorized is influenced by who you are.  Some question whether Frankenthaler would have been as successful and remembered as big a painter if she had not been exposed and introduced to the art world through Clement Greenberg. Greenberg brought together many artists and publicized their working style. He showed the soak stain paintings to more artists.  “When Greenberg brought the abstract painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953, they seized upon both her technique and the broad, flat expanses of color she created.”  Noland and Morris brought the soak stain method into their paintings.  Frankenthaler and Greenberg traveled all over Europe looking at paintings and painting side by side. It is hard as a woman to feel like you are taken seriously or your work is taken seriously.  Helen Frankenthaler was an attractive woman who made attractive paintings. Women and all artists have to think about how their art will be viewed.  I am still of the age where I have a chip on my shoulder about being taken seriously as an artist because I am a woman.  Make, make, make, marry, marry, marry... Will you make me? Will you marry me? It is not hard to have a chip on your shoulder “At a time when so many younger artists wouldn't be caught using a word like ''beauty'' - except sarcastically“ She was assured enough to partner with powerhouses and carry on her own work.  She pioneered a new way of working.  She is known as Helen Frankenthaler not so-and-so’s wife.  So, note to self,  knock that chip off honey!

Frankenthaler reacted to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by creating the soft glowing soak stain painting technique.  A technique that allowed the surface and the paint to be really flat, quickly applied and open to happy accidents.  I like to think that letting the material do part of the work is a material collaboration. She ushered abstract painting from abstract expressionism to color field painting.  She refused to leave-out the reference to anything observable. “What concerns me when I work is not whether the picture is a landscape…or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is, did I make a beautiful picture?” ''Women, as a rule, tend to tidy up pictures that don't need tidying up.” Her enduring question is, it seems: how can I bring the spontaneity of small works, the genuineness of immediate reactions of color, shape and placement, to a larger scale work? This is a question I come back to over and over. Artists I respect have said that my very small study paintings are more successful than the large paintings done after, but that was after seeing the large ones.  I think large scale says, “look at me, everything in this painting is important.”  That is how artists may look at their own small paintings and how others may view them after seeing larger ones but I do not know if they would have as much power without the big brother to compare to.  Here is Frankenthaler on size, “Size and scope is necessary. You cannot accomplish on an easel size what the message is that you might be able to accomplish large scale.”

Photo by Gordon Parks for Life magazine 1952.

The bay 1963

My goal is not to work with color alone. I like the squishiness of paint. I like the hand of the artist visible in the application. I do like the spontaneity, quickness the non- fussiness, openness to interpretation and yes the beauty of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings. She talks about color only working in space, ''Color doesn't work unless it works in space,'' she says, launching one of her favorite subjects. ''Color alone is just decoration - you might as well be making a shower curtain.''

Explaining the artist/s approach.
Helen is educated and aware of art history.  Her early Bennington College work referred to cubism.  She created her own style in reaction to the abstract expressionists action paintings.  The freedom from rendering of form and the dependence on a brush was established through her soak stain method. First she diluted the oil pigment with turpentine and poured onto unprimed canvas. This creeping flow of color and bloom of oil was at times manipulated with soft brushes to guide the flow but not to establish the initial shape.  She has kept with the non-objective soak stain method for her entire career.  She has switched from oil to acrylic and water on unprimed canvas.  Frankenthaler was also a part of the printmaking renaissance of the early 1960’s.  She created work at many print shops including, Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island and Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

Explaining the artist's intentions/ideas.  

Frankenthaler was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg.  She had to have been influenced by his writings and theories about painting.  Greenberg, in short, stated that painting should use painting to understand the motivations and limits of painting.  He introduced Frankenthaler to the galleries and artists who were the most influential during their marriage.  They also toured France and Italy together looking at and discussing art.  They painted together.  Having a critic for a lover to constantly engage with art ideas had to have solidified her understanding of her own place in creating her own ideas.  Art is often a solitary affair.  Making art and being in a relationship with a critic may have been more like a polygamous affair.

Frankenthaler wants to make beautiful paintings. She spoke of beauty as the goal of her painting often.  Wrestling with the formal ramifications of this quest sustained a very long and productive career.  Her work suggests spaces: interiors sometimes, landscapes often.  She makes small works on paper and heroically large works.  She is interested in the materials.  She has stripped down the elements of art to color, shape size and placement.  “My pictures are full of climates,abstract climates, and not nature per se, but a feeling”  This is enough to suggest many things but reveal little definite content over and above beauty and materiality.  

Explaining the artist’s use of materials.

Helen Frankenthaler is most known for her large-scale soak-stain paintings. November 1950, Greenberg escorted her to a show of Pollock's work at the Betty Parsons Gallery. ''It was original,'' she says of Pollock's work, ''and it was beautiful, and it was new, and it was saying the most that could be said in painting up to that point - and it really drew me in. I was in awe of it, and I wanted to get at why.''

Her reaction to the why was eventually to put an unprimed cloth with some charcoal sketches on it on the floor and poured diluted oil pigment into puddles.  She said that she immediately saw a connection to the watercolors she had done plein air.   Getting to the immediateness and the spontaneity of large gestures on large surfaces.  The surfaces are flat the pigment is soaked into the fabric not sitting on top. Frankenthaler seems obsessed with flatness.  Her most successful prints are lithographs, a planographic print.  They look and feel very much like her paintings.  The surface of lithographs do not have the plate marks or incised lines of intaglio prints.  The colors created with touche on stone feel very much like watercolor.  The drying of the oily ink creates tide lines. Touche made marks suggest the bloom of oil stains on paper or canvas as well.

Frankenthaler draws with color.  Drawing to her is creating space not lassoing a shape.  She is using line as a delineation of one thing next to another an edge that well placed creates shape.

In the 1980s she slowly started adding just a bit of thicker paint.

“To acknowledge an osmosis of the past and present around you and go naturally creatively free: Head heart and wrist; to be in control enough to not be in control at all. To have a dialogue with the work and to let yourself go in relation to it. Paintings don’t lie they have their beautiful working order just as nature itself has” “If you have a real sense of limits then you are free to break out of them.”

Explaining the artist’s process and key issues.

Frankenthaler works on the floor pouring liquid color then dragging with brooms, sponges, and fingers.  Her issues are beauty and ambiguity.  She is concerned with the placement of shapes, light, depth, beauty, color, form and perspective on a rectangular canvas.  She balances the magic of direct experience with limits of educated experience.  She works on the floor but thinks of paintings as rectangles on the wall.  Once she sees the paintings on the wall then she cuts down the image to work as a painting. Everything in her life experience affects her art. “One IS one’s work and one’s work is one’s self.”

Some have criticised Frankenthaler for being formulaic and not pushing beyond a specific style.  These same people may take issue with her talking about beauty in painting.  They may not like the ambiguous content.  They may not like her posh style and her upbringing.  They may not like that she is unwilling to be a spokesperson for women.  Helen Frankenthaler was a painter who painted, continued to paint and to deal with issues about the elements that create a beautiful painting with no apologies.

Helen Frankenthaler White Portal, 1967 Lithograph 30 x 22 inches Artist's proof.

References

Art 103 Gallery,  “Art 103 Content 08 part 1 Fhas01 Helen Frankenthaler” film, Youtube video, 0:57-1:37 (August 30 2012).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9kfufFMRvg

Beyond Print: The Kenneth Tyler Collection, “Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Tyler: a 25 year collaboration” (February 21, 2012). Accessed Online

https://tylerblogs.com/2012/02/21/helen-frankenthaler-and-kenneth-tyler-a-25-year-collaboration/

Ruth Fine, Helen Frankenthaler Prints. 1993 Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 11-29.

Gagosian and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, “NOW: HELEN FRANKENTHALER: Line into Color, Color into Line,” film [2016], Youtube video, (October 4, 2016).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h35AJ2cn72Y

Jon Mann, “How Helen Frankenthaler Pioneered a New Form of Abstract Expressionism.” Artsy Editorial (September 29, 2017). Accessed Online

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-helen-frankenthaler-pioneered-new-form-abstract-expressionism

Portland State University, “Helen Frankenthaler at Portland State: Q & A, 1972,” film [1972]. Youtube video, posted November 22, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00A1R06tLa8

Deborah Solomon, “Artful Survivor” New York Times Magazine, (May 14, 1989). Accessed Online

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/14/magazine/artful-survivor.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=3

Charline von Heyl
Cecily Brown
Dana Schutz
vanessa prager- figure heavy paint pink
Albert Oehlen
Michael Raedecker
sarah dwyer
Amy Sillman
Helen Frankenthaler

Mary Abbott

joan mitchel

Jusith Godwin
Franz Ackermann multimedia collage
Perle Fine
Dexter Dalwood perspective collagy painting like hockney brutal red
Grace Hartigan

Ethel Schwabacher

Lee Krasner

Jutta Koether- with sound performance

grace munakata

iva gueorguieva- with sculpture

http://notesonlooking.com/2012/06/iva-gueorguieva-from-child-to-adult-too-soon-on-the-conversation-art-podcast/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7501btB1uwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7501btB1uw

Case Study, Thesis proposal 1

Laura Owens

b. 1970

• Born, Euclid, OH

Lives and works in Los Angeles

Education

1992

• B.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
• 1994
• Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME
• 1994
• M.F.A. California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

What is necessary to provoke a painting practice?  I saw Laura Owens talk recently and she intimated that an installation of a series of paintings is at once one painting and installation art.

How do artists take the pressure off, just a bit to allow the creative process to happen. Owens states that she is “never not aware of the pressure”. It is always there, but how does one invite play and questions into the work so that a painter can concentrate on the "how".  

Owens stated that for her painting is not about the "what" but the "how". If it is about the "how", then how much does the "what" matter.  How much does the content matter to the artist’s or market’s concerns. For that matter, is market concern the same as cultural concern.

Artists may need to have a “wake up” moment. For Laura Owens it was the destruction of Cal Arts campus. At that point all of the graduate students had to ask themselves, “Are you in or out?”

How much of art life is just the act of fully engaging in the selfish yet manipulated art world.

If you make a painting and no one sees it is it still art?  What if I said there was a painting but covered it up (like that artist that put his shit in a can, and like Owens created the nesting doll painting for the Whitney Biennial). Is Owens' collaboration with family a conceptual act or an act in materiality?

Epigraphs

These are my contenders for summative quotes from this week’s group of readings to stand as epigraphs for this course.

“We need to invent fire once more, to settle down once again to the job of appeasing the body’s hunger.” Camus, p 140

“If (s)he is hungry for bread and heather, and if it is true that bread is the more necessary, let us learn how to keep the memory of heather alive.” Camus, p 142

“His long stubbornness has more meaning than his revolt against the gods.” Camus p 142

“Death lies not

in not being able to communicate

but in no longer being understood.” Pasolini, p. 333

“Yeah (I have to admit),

I’m in a state of confusion, Miss.” Pasolini, p 349

“The point was to humiliate a humiliated man...illness.) Pasolini, p 351

“Action is a WE not an I.”

“That is a real problem of every philosophy or history: How it is possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it [history] couldn’t have happened otherwise? Arendt p. 56

“ Where Hannah Arendt, for example, is able to fluidly cross between German, French and English she will still miss aspects of the intricacies of other languages, as does English within her interview.”

Arendt refused to be filmed for the interview [at home]?  I know I hate being seen on film, especially seen and heard on film because it causes a jarring encapsulation of a thought precisely to the words spoken NOT necessarily what was meant or what was understood at the time, between those people.  Truth is NOT the understanding of each word in itself or in its sentence but is somewhere in truth in time and may come around again to the truth.  Do writers believe more or less in the infallibility of a word.  There is always a translation between thought and words.  The language you use is indicative of the way and place and time in which you are reared.  Of course I do not understand what you are saying but can get a glimpse of it, a mirror reflection, an echo of the silence that points to a direction of communion if not communication with the other.

Prometheus in the Underworld:

P 139

Choose hell over quest for beauty because get caught up in the delusions of tyrants and madmen. And don’t realize until you are already on the path- wait what have I done? “Who shouted, it was the sun, Slapping Chen, NO HOPE”

“I took my place i the queue shuffling toward the open mouth of hell. Little by little, we entered.  At the first cry of murdered innocence, the door slammed shut behind us.”

P 141

“...blind justice does not exist, that history has no eyes, and that we must therefore reject its justice in order to replace it as much as possible with the justice conceived by the mind. This is how Prometheus returns in our century.”

We are in a new century. I’m afraid that western politicians have forgotten the horrors of war; they seem to be flirting with war for the glory and status like a bully picking a fight that they “know” they can win.  Eventually the bully gets knocked down- either by the pipsqueak who has nothing to lose and plays by different rules or by a bigger bully.  Hermes mocks Prometheus, “I am amazed that, being a god, you did not foresee the torment you are suffering.” “I did see it,” replied the rebel.”

Artists are the rebels.  Artists can accept this challenge from the Prometheus.  

“I promise you, O mortals, both improvement and repair, if you are skillful, virtuous, and strong enough to achieve them with your own hands.”

P 142

“...any mutilation of man can only be temporary, and that one serves nothing if one does not serve the whole man.”

Bernie over Hillary.  Hillary tried to feed the body first, to be a pragmatist,  to be reasonable.  Bernie was virtuous and strong but not skillful enough to take on the machine of shuffling civil servants en queue to Hell.

Mass incarceration, public education, health care.

Arendt, last interview

P 53

“See, this is not a nation-state, America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time to understand the simple fact which, after all, they could know theoretically; it is this country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin from the from the same... There are no natives here.  The natives were the Indians. Everything else are citizens and these citizens are united only by one thing and that's a lot: that is, you become a citizen in the United States by simple consent to the Constitution.” republic

P 54 Constitutional crisis of a head-on lash between the legislative and the executive offices.

Greatest danger of tyranny is of course the executive. A republic not a democracy- in order to preserve the voice of the minority and the plurality of opinion. TYranny could be the majority- majority rules but there is always opposition.

“I felt the Gods were lacking as long as there was nothing to oppose them.

Lucian, Prometheus in the Caucasus”

Opening quote from Prometheus in the Underworld

P 55

“They took it because they didn’t have any other framework.”

Why we suffer fools.  Because they are foolishly willing to lead even if they know there udea is not going to work.  Willing to fail, but try, Churchhill-  Democracy is a failure but it is the best I can find.  

P 56

We don’t know the future- too many contingencies.

Action is a WE not an I. Tyrants and Zealots act for a foreseeable future.  The future is not known, living to be remembered or to dictate the future is not a worthy goal because you sacrifice the now and the integrity of basing your actions on what IS knows.

“This shows that things were still alrights even if they were wrong because bureaucrats (like McNamara) still wanted to learn from what happened even if it is “not pretty””

P 57

Political will to dominate and to “believe the image” not succeeded (1973) because “Maybe I'm mistaken, but I feel perfectly free in this country”

Rene Char (mis)quote-

“Notre heritage n’est garanti par aucun testament.”

Accurate quote-

“Notre heritage n’est precede par aucun testament.”

“We are entirely free to help ourselves wherever we can from the experiences and the thoughts of our past.”

“ Every human being as a thinking being can reflect as well as I do and can therefore judge for himself”

“ the only thing that can help us I think is really to rephrase left you and to always mean to think critically period and to think critically is always to be hostile. Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules General convictions exedra.

“ That is,  there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous Enterprise. I think non-thinking is even more dangerous.

Calvinist, student centered classrooms, teaching for liberation, ability to think at all is a freedom that balances justice.

P 60

“First of all a totalitarian dictatorship is neither a simple dictatorship nor a simple tyranny. I analyzed totalitarian government what is the new form of government that wasn't known before I tried to enumerate its main characteristics. One characteristic is entirely absent from all tyrannies today and that is the role of the innocent the innocent victim. Under Stalin you didn't have to do anything in order to be deported or an order to be killed. You were given a role according to the dynamism of history and you had to play this role no matter what you did. No government before has killed people for saying yes period usually a government kills people or tyron's kill people for saying no. Now I was reminded by friend that's something very similar has been said stop by some Chinese many centuries ago namely that men who have the impertinence to approve are no better and they Disobedience will pose. This of course is the quintessential sign of totalitarianism and that there is a Total Domination of men, by men. “

“The great Political Criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter.”

Arendt quote Brecht

Undermine the “greatness” of evil.  If he is a clown he will remain a clown no matter how many millions of people he kills. It is the ruling class allows a small crook to become a great crook. To undermine this you must keep your integrity by remembering your old way of looking at such things and laugh at the clown instead of fearing him.

Pasolini, tr. Stephan Sartarelli. A Desperate Vitality

P 331

“- I am like a cat burned alive crushed by a tractor trailer’s Wheels home by boys from a fig tree, But with 8 of its nine lives so left like a snake redo used to a bloody pulp a half-eaten eel.”

So many connections

The cruelty of man is without limit but nature, truth, justice are limited.

The pretty fiance that pulled the legs of the mosquito

The cat that ate her young.

Gassed prisoners

Crushed under a machines wheel

Tortured by innocents

There is not innocent bystander

From a fig tree- fig and grapes and heather

Liberty and beauty corrupted by the unlimited indifference of men

To kill

To kill without thinking

To kill as part of a machine is the same- not questioning, not critical not finding your moral compass for yourself

P 335

“How little it takes to shrink his snarl to the sulk of a mama's boy on death row .”

Like Arendt’s quote of Brecht laugh at the fool to undermine his power to perpetrate evil.

“Neo capitalism has won and I'm on the street as a poet, ah [sob] and as a citizen [another sob].”

America is a republic made up of citizens who consent to the constitution.  If Capitalism wins then we are no longer citizens just cogs in the wheel of the tyrannical machine steered by the dictatorship of the majority of the ruling class.

Capitalism is the rallying cry of the right.  Democracy is the cry of the left.  Isolationism and Nationalism is the cry of the alt right.  Freedom and Equality is the cry of the alt left.  There is opposition, but is the opposition creating such a rumble that a citizen cannot think?

Struggles when you know you will loose but you resist anyway, not to get somewhere but because it is the right thing to do according to your truth:

“A fascist victory! Write, write. Let them know (them!) that I know:

conscious as an injured bird that gently dies but never never forgives.”

“He took move it to his side and like a cracked skin up there in the world that precede life laid his hand on his head and altered the curse” whacky voice to text  353

“You shall descend into the world, be innocent and kind, faithful and fair;  you shall have an endless capacity for obedience, and an endless capacity for rebellion you shall be pure. For this I curse you”

“My God, then what have you got to show for yourself?...

“Me? -

Me? A desperate vitality.”

Is this a why bother statement?

Away from nihilism

Desperate vitality I know that it is hopeless (none of us are getting out of here alive!) but live fully nonetheless- is this absurd or spiritual?

BE HERE NOW

DO WHATS RIGHT (NOW)

Silence

Silence

I am going to compare the inhuman in the 4 works assign for this discussion period.

Starting with Camus’ Between yes and no I would like to point out the idea of the inhuman.

The first inhuman On page 30, “If it is true that they only paradises are those we have lost, I know what name to give the tender inhuman something that dwells in me today” suggests an otherworldly state. The second inhuman is an animal like state. This animal otherness is first made visible in the description of the canary yellow Lions on the wall of the deserted cafe,page 31.  The animal like state is brought up again on page 33, “this animal silence makes him want to cry with pain.”  The Arab Cafe owners eyes staring at him from the corner is an image repeated and made inhuman by the description of an apartment filled with dead and dying kittens on page 37, “the demented glow-in-the cats green eyes as it crouched Motionless in the corner.”

The idea of inhuman is used in the Silence of the Sea as well.  The German soldier in describing JS Bach’s music on pgs 81-82.  “Outside man- outside human flesh. That makes us understand, no, not understand but guess... No: have a presentiment... have a presentiment of what nature is... of what - stripped bare -  is the divine and unknowable nature of the human soul. Yes, it's inhuman music.” “...it’s like the presence of God  in me…”   The German soldier also states that Bach’s homeland of Germany has an “inhuman character… a different scale to man…”  On page 75 Ebrennac describes Germany in the other inhuman way while his contrasting description of France is quite human. “My home reminds me of a powerful thickset bull which needs all its strength keep alive. Here everything is intelligence and subtle poetic thought.  Animal like “inhuman stare of a horned owl”  is used to describe the look in the niece’s eyes as she looks at the German Soldier near the end of Silence of the sea.  Her uncle also ascribes a “catlike power of divination” to women in general.

The work of Pizarnik combine both understandings of inhuman: of a different scale than human, otherworldly, godlike, madness and animal like animal as metaphor for human desire, sex, bonds, and intuition.  I am hard pressed to find a concise quote but perhaps,” The real celebrations take place in the body and in dreams.” pg. 79 sums it up a bit.  The body being our animalistic selves and the dream being the other- worldly dimension. The artist is inhuman on both levels?  Pizarnik seems to be writing a lucid dream or nightmare of artistic fever.

Silence by Kawabata gets at the idea of inhuman through Ghosts, isolation, possession.

Akifusa “refuses” to speak and thus the ones surrounding him speak for him.  Tomiko acts as if her father is speaking, does she really understand what he wants? Mr. Mita also starts to speak to and for Akifusa.  He gets to an almost rhapsodic understanding of the meaning of words in his unfolding monologue with the man in the sickbed.  If a t could be the most momentous thin the mute writer could ever write then perhaps silence is the most meaningful.  The ghost story suggests that to speak with a ghost then you are doomed to be possessed.  I believe that Tomiko and her mute father have a ghost possessed relationship.  Mr. Mita is also being pulled in through his conversations with Tomiko. The presence of the ghost riding in a car with three people suggests that there is something unusual afoot.

It is certainly not stated but...Because, they spoke to him and then for him.  How do they know what he wants or is it a group fantasy and pretend game.  Yes we think we know, we posit we stumble and yammer on.  Talking to yourself is like talking to no one?  The daughter, the good daughter, the visitor thinks he will betray the mute writer’s words and history- where did that thought come from.  Was he possessed?  She says yes father I will offer him sake- who spoke?  No one- she IS the father.  He has possessed the daughters frail form- he is now she that tends to his mute writer’s body.  (S)he will write the first I book for them.  She tells the visitor that he should look seek out the ghost- the author says that is a strange thing to say.  When she leaves the room the visitor is the one possessed by the idea of writing for the mute…  If I were making a movie of this story that is definitely the angle I would take.

Mari-

In Vercors Le silence de la Mer Werner von Ebrennac confession is testified by the uncle: "I silently finished my pipe. I coughed a bit and said, "It may be inhuman to refuse him a single word. " (Vercors pg 19) "…an endless monologue; because not once did he attempt to obtain from us an answer, an acquiescence, or even a glance." (Vercors pg 21)

I appreciate your viewpoint.  The Pizarnik touched me deeply but it is difficult to put into words.  Silence contemplation, appreciation are sometimes the most suitable response.

Kathryn-

In Vercors’ Silence of the Sea, there are things thought but unsaid, or said only with knowing glances and other forms of body language. The uncle testifies to his niece’s complicated resolve to maintain silent resistance, in the face of the german occupation of their house in the body of the soldier, Werner von Ebrennac, “as if the officer didn’t exist, as if he had been a ghost” (74) but confesses that at one point he “lost all resistance,” and broke the silence. (90) The soldier tells of his meeting with German officers and confesses disillusionment when the reality of war thwarts his fantasy of a marriage between French and German culture (as perverse as it was) The writing of this novel itself, is in tension with its intent to testify without being detected.

The ghost connection to Kawabata and Silence of the Sea.  If you speak to the ghost you will be possessed.  The niece was possessed with feeling that is why she spoke.  The use of "Adieu" by both was the spoken conviction that this was goodbye forever, and the only words ever spoken on her part.

Ayo-

Not just a blanket for the environment, but this silence lays there and is the actual environment itself.

(this is a beautiful image so is the S curve between one and the (m)other.)

I also see silence materializing “It became thicker and thicker” (pg 43), or “Tacit agreement we had decided” (pg 46) which leads me to understand an unspoken, yet palpable tug of energy between to two parties, in agreement with each other, a confession. (or a conspiracy?)

I found the driving force of silence to be rooted in power and influence. It is simply an agreement to something that holds no space, but can be perceived to move and create just like an object. (the power of art, or a ghost, magician, hypnotist, or witch.)

Tyler- Vercor brings layers to the individual and the basis of looking into the mirror.   “Everything that I have said in these six months, everything that the walls of this room have heard…”He took a deep breath as laboriously as an aesmatic and kept his lungs full for a moment. “You must …” He breathed out again: “You must forget it all.” (P.91) Gazing into the individuality of the character and the agony within his discovery his new reflection shows the prior naivete and returns to Camus’s, “It’s men who complicate things.” (39) All characters have their own simplistic ideas, but continue to complicate the situations individually.

I can't find it now- but there was something about frightening yourself in the mirror. Something like becoming a soldier and then frightening yourself by the change in the mirror?

The idea of confession/ testimony not interchangeable but related.  Are you compelled to do both, is the motivation different.  If it is for consumption by others it is testimony, but when you expect no response as is the case for the soldier and Tomiko, does it move to the realm of confession? I respect the talking around and through the thoughts by Camus and some of the others we have read- the soldier, the visitor.  It is like riding someone’s thoughts.  Words do not say what we mean, they point to the place where our thought have been. “What does it mean to translate yourself into words?”, Pizarnik. History is owned by the ones speaking it.  The now owns everything.  Confession art.  Art that must be spoken, written, performed, created.  Must like a pious Catholic must go to mass and confession.  Maybe it is just a ritual but how would I/we know.   

The you happens eventually- The mother of the author of between yes and no, she thinks about nothing-  seeing your children is like breathing.  Maybe she is not thinking because She is not pondering she is doing the best she can every second.  Children do not realize they are separate from their mothers for a while.  Mothers know they are both separate and one.

Statues- women, broken statues, silent appraised but not addressed.  She sat like a statue and the soldier gazed at her face while he spoke.  He would turn and look at the Uncle but would pause, would close.  The flowing of speak came with the inanimate, cold, not -gaze-returning, silent niece.  

Oh what light, what he says when she looks back at him.  Like a religious revelation.  It is interesting the name given to the English editions during wartime, Put out the light, kill the soul, “there is no Hope” That light that shines from her eyes. That crossing of borders, the intersection of confessor to testifier- the confession of his guilt in the plot of his country, his testifying to the once mute niece and uncle.

“You wear the costume of a young assassin, yet you scare yourself in the mirror”, 73 Pizarnik

“Wolf deposits…”73 Piz

I speak the way I speak inside”, 71 Piz

“After prostrating myself before the pain of others, after silencing myself in honor of everyone else”, 79 Piz

History is the present- silence 170, kawabata