Episode Transcript
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Hello. Welcome to today we'll speak about Ecfrazis. A verbal representation of a visual work of art or a rhetorical exercise that describes an object or another representation with language. Quite a lot to unpack and discuss.
My name is Arif Kornweitz and I'm here today with art historian and writer Ilza van Riej. Welcome, Ilza.
And with artist Mateen la Roche. Hi, Mateen.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Hi, Adish.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: So it's our second broadcast in relation to Morisseur and we are at Murussur in Amsterdam. And also in relation to the exhibition I saw it by ear, which recently took place here in Amsterdam at Rosestrad.
We'll speak about that also briefly today.
But primarily we'll try to understand how ecfpresses works and how it is relevant to us today.
But first, to give you some context, we will listen to an ecphasis and that is the island by Paola Salas.
[00:01:40] Speaker C: In front of me. A small island surrounded by a deep tunnel of water. There is a military fort on the island and it only has one access. A small land bridge with an iron gate that says you are now abandoning the unprotected outside world. I walk towards the room that they have assigned me. It is a cell with a vaulted ceiling and 60 cm thick concrete walls. The room is small. It has a bathroom at the back and also small window by the door. It is cool and humid. Delicious to relax during hot summer days.
At night I lock myself alone in my island fortress cell. Lying on the bed, I try to fall asleep staring at the curved ceiling.
A bodily sensation interrupts my trance.
A movement inside me, a drawing of relief under my belly button. I focus on the present moment as a form of relaxation. But something's wrong.
I don't hear the usual sounds of the night. A little bird, a laugh, a bark. Nothing.
Nor do I see the lamppost in the street, the lights of the cars, some indiscrete window. Nothing. It is almost funny to put my hand in front of my face and not see it. I focus again on me. On my body. On our body. On our body. I listen to my breathing. I listen to my breathing with so much deeper that I even hear a trapped cough in my left lung.
Do I have bronchitis? I hear my heart like a subwoofer. I clearly hear cystole and diastole and even the blood being pushed out. Like another soundtrack. Like another soundtrack. I hear your faster and lower beating. So much faster and lower.
Sometimes the noise of my entrails prevent me from hearing that subtle heartbeat.
I hear my bones colliding. Another sounds that I don't even recognize.
I'm afraid of being so deep inside that I can never find my way out.
I don't want to move because the noise from my body is going to be unbearable. Just in time, you turned energetically and painfully frightening me. Feeling your body inside mine returns me to the world, to the island fortressel.
It dawns over the stellings in Amsterdam and I think how was it like to live in a world protected from the outside world, where the solid concrete walls and the cannons gave foreseen certainties? The future for me is a swarm of wet bodies, infinitely combining. I don't see safe sights, only section of a large metamorphosizing organism embracing you and me and the island fortressel.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: This was the island by Paola Salas. You're listening to Yayana Nene and we are speaking about eggfrazis today. You just heard an example of ecfrazis. I'm here with Ilza and Mateen in Morisseur in the kitchen of Anna Maria. It's sunny outside.
I feel like spring is coming and it's a nice occasion to come back to this table.
Martine, you suggested to invited Ilza to speak about eggfresis. Also as a kind of contextualization, I would say, for the exhibition, I saw it by ear.
Maybe for new listeners or listeners that have not seen the show. It would be nice if you could tell us a little bit about the exhibition and also what Morseur is.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
Well, I have to say that I saw it by ear.
It's an exhibition that was presented last year in November December at Rosenstrat. And it was like a process made by Murosour. And it comes from a record that was previously recorded called ecfracis. Aptly to this program, and which consisted in 29 artists that once belonged to this art collective called Murosur were invited to record in their voices an artwork they would like to present in a potential exhibition that was going to happen in 2020. This invitation was done in 2017. And myself with Anna Maria and another artist, Jan Carlo Pasanese, we recorded the different artists telling and describing their art pieces to be presented in this potential show. And all this became two LPs. A record that in four sides contain all these descriptions by the 29th artist that once belonged to this art collective, Murosur. A little context about Murosur Murosur was born in the second half of the 90s in Santiago de Chile, after the country was coming back to democracy of many years. Of dictatorship. And it became like a sort of part of a refreshed cultural scene that started to happen in Santiago. And I got to know all these stories through Anna Maria. That was one of its founders, Anna Maria. Like, she moved to Santiago in year 96, and with a couple of young artists, she started this art collective from her apartment. So as we have talked, and we will talk also in the other podcast, like, when the artists were talking about what to do, where to do, like, at one moment, and Amaria said, why not to use my apartment, but where there in the southern wall, that's where it comes the Murosur. It's literally like the southern world where the pieces were exhibited. And the artist asks, but what are we going to show there? You decide you are the artist. What's the answer? Who will come to the openings? Who will come to these projects or these exhibitions? And Amaria said, friends, neighbors, people passing by for an Amarilla was always very concrete and very simple. There was a need to do something. So, like many artists that were part of this different process of Murasur, that then it evolved. Like, different artists took different ways and they did different things with it.
But the common thing was always this sort of urgency to do and to do in a spontaneous way, to have this will of the moment, if you want, and not think completely about it. So many of them didn't think of it as something that was going to have a development or like it was going to progress into something else, but they were really connected with what they were doing back then.
And in the 2000s, Anna Maria came back to Amsterdam.
And after many years of not involving in Mudosur, in 2015, when I moved to the Netherlands, I started a series of conversations with Ana Maria in which she started to tell me about Murasur, what it was like. She showed me different documentation, photos, little leaflets they did for that time, like, different things that they wrote. She started to tell me all these stories, and from there it came this idea of working with ecstasies. Because actually, I have to be honest, I never went to Murasur. I was a kid or a teenager. I didn't know too much about it. And so all the things that I know about this project came from stories. And that's when also where it comes, this name. I saw it by ear.
And through all this sharing of stories came into being, this idea of inviting the artist to describe an artwork and to work now with the idea of an ecfasis.
And I have to say that I have the feeling it was in 2018, if I'm not wrong or 2019. One day I invited Ilse to my studio. I met Ilse at the fanaike for a great stash and some conversations and some Ilse was giving some sort of theoretical support to the participants at the. At that time. And I had a very good memory of our conversation. So when I moved to Amsterdam, I invited one day to my studio and I wanted to talk with Ilsa about many different things. I had a plan and I had even. I wrote down certain things that I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to show her my museum in a hat. I want to show this and that. But that day, when Ilse came into my studio, I don't know why. The first thing I do is I look on the floor and there was the record of ecstrassis. And even though I had all this list of things that I wanted to talk to her with a very clear order, I just broke that order. I took the ecstasy record and I say, look, I don't know why I did that. It was just something that was born out of the moment. And Ilsa said to me, like, with this very funny face, why are you showing me that?
And I say, why is so surprising? I'm just involved in these ecfrastic encounters and I'm really into ecstasies.
And then it started this very interesting conversation that hasn't stopped around the idea of an ecrasis.
So that's why I also felt, yeah, we have to talk about this and make somehow public these conversations, because I have the feeling, and also through this process of making the exhibition, talking with the artist, but also presenting about the project to different audiences and different people, that ecfresis resonates in a very interesting way with, yeah, for many, it becomes something. So I had the feeling that we needed to open this conversation. And that's why also I'm so thankful of Arif and to make possible that we start to share something about these ideas.
[00:12:49] Speaker D: Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned that. I still recall how this meeting happened in your studio, and we started to talk about ekrazas and never stopped again. And for me, this relation between image and language has always been very present in my practice. I have a background in both in literature and in history of art. At a certain point, artists started to write and more and more so, and present this writing as part of their visual practice. But museums weren't equipped to show writing because. How do you show writing? Yeah, I mean, completely nonsense. Into a white cube museum, which is open from ten to five or something. Like that.
So I became to develop, well, I called it a poetics of the artist text, a way of approaching text and writing within the realm of visual art. And ekfrassis, as a very old tradition, it really circles around this notion of how do you deal with the world in language? Such different regimes, actually, one concerned with language and the other with objects. Well, it entered my research and it never left it.
So, yes, it has a huge tradition pointing back to the beginning of our era, where it was really a vivid description and part of a rhetorical exercise, where it initially did not necessarily have to describe an artwork, but really all things and occasions and places and whatever you saw around you. That's why this excerpt or this ecfancis, which we heard in the beginning, was so interesting, because it didn't only point towards an artwork, but also the sound of a heartbeat and the entrails, and really all kind of details were mentioned.
Yeah. And then, well, later on in the Renaissance, this whole discussion about the relationship between images and language was picked up, and this competition between the senses became a topic of rhetorics and a way in which poets and painters came to dispute their arts in relation to each other, where the sight, the visual aspect, was the lesser sense, and the ear or language was. Well, no, I have to say it the other way around. Sight was the higher sense, more valued, but poetry was, as an art form, higher in the hierarchy. So how do you deal with this?
Well, there were competitions organized between poetry and painting. And in theory as well, this dispute continued to evolve, to develop.
Yeah. Well, today, this whole notion of ecfrassis is something else altogether. I won't run through it completely now, but, yeah, this is how our conversation started in your studio, with your record of ekfrassis. Yeah.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: It'S interesting because for me, ekfrassis is something that has always been somehow part of my practice, but also of my way of understanding some notions of the art world or of art itself, and also of this realm that is shared by literature. And art like these overlaps in a way. And it's interesting to know that this discussion and conversation goes back so many, many centuries, thousands of years. So it seems something very fundamental of the way of being, of the arts and of the way of being, of the writing, in a way. And, yeah, I'm curious to know even more about it. Ilse, also, like, how did you talk about that? This contemporary discussion has taken different shapes, but how are those shapes?
[00:17:42] Speaker D: Yeah, well, to refer to what you mentioned in the beginning, that I almost cried out when you showed me this record. Oh, I'm working on Ecfrans'encounter, in that word, ekfrastic, encounter.
I did it, by the way, together with Maria Barnaz, poet Maria Barnas, in that word encounter. We strived for another relationship between the arts.
And this is something completely different than the competition which was played out in the Renaissance, in the 18th century as well.
So I will look at my notes to give you some quotes. For instance, da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci, he reworked a quote by Simonides from the first century, which stated, picture is dump poetry and poetry a speaking picture, and Leonardo da Vinci made from it. But poetry is a science for the blind and painting for the deaf. But painting is nobler than poetry, inasmuch as it serves the nobler sense, unquote.
And this competitive element, who is valued more. This was really, as I mentioned, reworked, but also picked up, for instance, in the 18th century, when Lessing wrote his essay La Okon, an essay on the limits of painting and poetry, which he wrote in 1766.
And he argued very famously that painting is a spatial art, and that literature is temporal or a narrative art, and that the two media are therefore technically and philosophically distinct. And then he writes, if it is true that in its imitations, painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors and space, rather than articulated sounds in time, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose whole part coexist, while signs that follow one another and express only objects whose holes or parts are consecutive.
So you have this problem which I mentioned in the beginning, when I stated, well, how do you exhibit writing in a museum context?
You have this problem of different senses which are spoken to or used, but also different modes and temporalities and specialities which are being explored in these different arts.
And that's something which we try to bridge or to look at. Otherwise, in calling our lecture workshop an ecstatic encounter, how can you relate them to each other and find new ways and means to bring them into contact with each other?
So, not them being afraid of each other, or hoping that they will get together, but. But simply looking at their histories, or looking at their potential and thinking them together, perhaps, or talking more about their common ground. Actually.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: It'S funny, because there are many images coming to my mind. I have to think that somehow, and something that we also talked in the previous episode with Andrea at the beginning, that this ecstrassis is more natural to us from what we think to daily conversation. It's like, for example, I explained to you, yeah, I went to Berlin, I went to see, this exhibition, there was this weird, like, from the roof, there was a drop falling, like on a circular metal thing. And it was very interesting because the drop would fall in such a way that when it came to this metal circle, it fragmented in many little, little drops. And this was done again and again and again.
And this description of this experience that I had in this exhibition, I explain it to someone very naturally, to explain what was that I see that I saw? What was it that I saw? So it is like a technique that we use always. Like, also, we go to the movies and we say, yeah, I saw this movie by Fellini. And it's about this family and these characters. And sometimes we don't even notice that. We give a lot of importance to certain plots and certain more literary things. And we leave apart the scenes. Sometimes not, of course, but I was thinking of this tendency that we have to do an ecfasis even without acknowledging as an ecfasis.
[00:23:31] Speaker D: Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, sure, you're right. But then again, there's always this infra thin layer which you cannot fully grasp with words. So there's a certain, I don't know, some sort of stubborn resistance to the image as well.
And that's where the game of the poet comes in, who then tries to use this language which we use now in our daily conversation, in another way, in such a way that the image is brought before the eye, or the object is brought before the eye very vividly, with all the elements which are part of it, which cannot happen, because description is never exhaustive.
There's always something which you leave behind or forget. And then you have an esprit descalier. You return to it. You say, oh, yeah, by the way, I forgot that. And then you add to it. Plus you take into account that the other person you're speaking to either has an idea of what cinema is, or has seen the object, or can return to it, or whatsoever. So you always think that you already have a common ground, which is not necessarily the case.
So, yeah, there's tricky aspects to it, actually.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: There's like an impossibility in this translation. There is something that is always not fulfilled in the ecpheres somehow, which is something that I find amazing and very interesting. I also remember as a teenager reading this novel by an author, Siri Husfet. And she had a character that was an artist. And through the book, it was vividly described, the installation work that this artist was doing. And for me, that was like a world, because it was much better than even going to see actual artworks. But the idea of being able to imagine these artworks through her narration allowed me a lot of possibilities. That's also something that I think that is so appealing from the exorcism that is somehow like, you need to be active in order to reconstruct the exorcism. You need to be active in order to reconstruct what is being told to you, like you are actively imagining something. And I have also read from some people that they propose that it's like writing is more democratic, in a way, than, for example, the visual artworks, because it allows you as a reader or as a listener, to reconstruct the work as you would like to. So the image is not imposed. And I know that this is part of the discussion, in a way.
[00:26:30] Speaker D: It fully is, because you could also say that the description is very instructive and imposes on you what you should see, whereas the image leaves you time and space to wander around it and to make up your mind about what you're actually seeing.
There's an ethical perspective even to it, in the sense that description is prescribing almost what you should see.
Yeah.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: So that, I guess, pertains to also something that I was thinking about as we were preparing this.
So you are hinting, I think, at the question is if we kind of force an object, let's say, or an artwork, into the confines of, let's say, violent reductions of language. Right.
Or maybe into classifications or also into the limits of language that are always somehow constructed. So this will be the opposite argument of what you just said, Martine. Right. So this maybe gives us already an idea that the truth lies somewhat in between.
And I'm wondering in how far the object of reference is even necessary, because the ecfasys record that Martin has mentioned contains works that do not yet exist. So they are speculations, if you will. Whereas often, for example, in very, let's say, popular examples of ecfasys, like in Donna Tart describing the goldfinch painting.
[00:28:35] Speaker E: Right.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: That painting really exists, but then there is a kind of liberation of the figure, let's say, of eggfrazis, if you use it for a speculative exercise. I'm wondering what you think about that, Ilda.
[00:28:53] Speaker D: Yeah, there's the fictional aspect to it, which is interesting indeed.
Yeah, I'm struggling a little bit, because in the description, it's very gendered as well.
There's the duel, actually, between the male and the female gazes as well, where the voice of the male speech tries to control the female image.
So there's that part?
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean if you say, let's say, male gaze and the female image. Why is the image female? Just for people to understand a bit better?
[00:29:43] Speaker D: Well, historically, the object of the gaze was woman, and the one associated with language and rationality was man.
So describing an object almost automatically, or, well, you automatically fall in the trap of a gender division of task.
So I was also curious to hear from you, if you were describing this novel by Siriusfet, whom are you talking about? Is it the writer who describes or the character who describes? What is the part of fiction in it? Indeed. And is the artist a male artist or female?
So, yes, I think fiction is very important in the sense, like poetry, by the way, in the sense of rethinking these categories and the boundaries of dominant narrative and a language which is used in daily parlance, but also in most of the novels we read.
So, yes, please, this fiction. Add it. Add it to description. Yes.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: I'm thinking that also. Yeah, that's also of some of the richness of the ecstasy. Maybe that also. It allows something to be described, but like this fictional part also allows for. To play with it, because sometimes there is also this partial fiction in terms that maybe there is something that is described that actually exists. There is an object, but there is also this possibility of also adding fiction to the description. So sometimes it's not even about if it exists or if it doesn't, but it's also like it becomes something else.
And there is this reference.
I'm also interested in this discussion about the male gaze and the female image that is somehow conquered. I had the feeling that Siddi Husslet wanted to work through these issues in her novel. I have read different commenters of people that say that she wasn't successful enough, but she wanted to work with these ideas, because even her artist, from what I remember, like from ten years or 15 years ago, some of the installations force you to have a gaze, a particular perspective from where seeing. So these were like voxes that you would come in and you had to look in a particular way. So even she proposed that this artist was working with this idea of the male gaze, and that through the installation you would experience, you were forced to acknowledge this sort of language, trying to describe what it was seen.
But there are many say that she wasn't so successful with it. There are some discussions about it, but at least you proposed this theme. And even without knowing about these issues back then, somehow you were thrown to them through the expression.
[00:33:23] Speaker D: The question is did the image speak back? And then we have like an interr. Artistic or inter subjective or whatever exchange, and then a real or real, I don't know, a new relationship can come into being, or existing categorical thinking is being contested.
So that's the play with language and the play with the world, so that the limits of language do not become the limits of your world, that you extend it and expand it, explore it and think it. Otherwise, I think, yeah, I haven't read a novel, by the way, but this.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: Gender issue is common to all literature, in a way. Or not.
[00:34:16] Speaker D: I don't know, it's common to the arts, I would say, to the world, even.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
And do you have some concrete examples that we could share of ecstasies?
[00:34:34] Speaker D: Oh, that's a nice one. How long do you have?
Yeah, I brought some.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Wait, I would be curious to hear some. And then to think of these issues through the.
I was also thinking about something a little bit absurd, but on how much this discussion is embedded in our daily life. Like there is this commonplace, and then maybe we can talk about it with, like, about people saying, don't tell me anything. Let the artwork talk by itself.
[00:35:12] Speaker D: Yeah, well, this was talking about examples, what Keats was doing in the oath on a grecian urn. No, you have this urn, and which is silent, and he writes with a capital s and doesn't speak back. And then the image which is overlooking it, and a poem written in beginning of the 19th century.
I have it here.
Do foster child of silence and slow time.
Silence with a capital s and time with a capital t. Then do still unravished bride of quietness. Do foster child of silence and slow time. Sylvian historian who can't thus express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.
What leaf fringed legion haunts about thy shape of deities or mortals, or of both in tempered deals of archety? What men or gods are these? What maidens lot? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? So really I won't read it in full because it's long, but really these two opposite arts are juxtaposed. The silence of the object and the time of poetry, written in May 1819. John Keats.
So yeah, this was very much in line with the essay of Lessing and Laocon.
The spatial and the temporal arts set next to each other.
But a nice example, perhaps, is Frank O'Hara, the poet.
Well, he was a curator at the moment, and he wrote a poem, why I am not a painter. I'm not a painter. I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I'm not. Well, for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in, sit down and have a drink. He says, I drink, we drink. I look up. You have sardines in it? Yes, it needed something there. Oh, I go and the days go by. And I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go and the days go by. I drop in, the painting is finished. Where's sardines?
All that's left is just lettuce. It was too much, Mike says. But me, one day I'm thinking of a color. Orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more. Not of orange, of words. Of how terrible orange is. And life. Days go by. It is even in prose. I'm a real poet. My poem is finished. And I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems. I call it oranges. And one day in a gallery, I see Mike's painting called Sardines.
The painting does exist. Mike Goldberg does exist.
But also here it's very much the consecutive moments of poetry set next to the way painting works. It functions in another way. The whole process of painting a picture functions in another way.
You could call it an ecfrances, because it, well, refers quite literally to this painting.
But it's also a poem about painting more in general and poetry more in general.
Yeah.
[00:39:25] Speaker B: So that's also something that I. I think is also interesting to share, that the ecstasies, sometimes they are embedded in bigger text, in bigger conversations. So sometimes it's something that comes in. So there is this description of the particular painting, but there is also this conversation about painting.
So the particular painting serves as an object to talk about these more general things. And I think we also do with ecstasy, in a way. And that's also something that I find interesting, is that ecstasy is fundamental to many conversations. But it's not the whole conversation. It's also like some part of it sometimes.
And I wanted to maybe also connect to the show, like in a sod by ear or in the exorcist record. We invited, a little bit connected to the question that Arif made recently. That is like we invited the artists to propose these hypothetical works, artworks. Some of them, they had already done them and they were thinking how to show them in this potential or hypothetical show. But there were others that were playing with this sort of speculation or open space that fiction gave to them through the exorcism. And I'm thinking something about you, ilse, that is like, I remember once you mentioned to me that what happens when the artists start to write?
What is my position as an art historian, as an art critic? Do I have to become a literary critic?
What is my position? And I wanted to ask you about this. If you could elaborate on this question that happens to you.
[00:41:13] Speaker D: Yeah, I'm thinking of two things, actually.
At the one hand, which is kind of a detour or sidestepping a bit. Your question, what happens in an ecfasis is that still a common ground is created because you tease out the listener as well, and this is something which is actually forgotten, or we haven't even mentioned it in the table. We mentioned the poet and the painter, but there's also the listener.
And I think another kind of space is created. The moment you insert ekfrassis or you insert the spoken word into the. In this case, the museum space, or even as we're sitting here on the table, you extend this space.
And that's what I find interesting in bringing in writing in the museum context as well, because you're forced to rethink the existing, almost like physical and temporal boundaries as well. So the whole separation between space and time and matter, for that reason, it becomes porous. So you have spacetime matter, which is, I think, a much more flexible and much more generous way of thinking, how we can relate to each other and to the world in large.
That might be one answer on your question. I don't know whether it is.
But then the other one, how I position myself then, in relation to artists putting pen to paper. Yeah, I don't know.
I did a PhD research on this question, and then one of my supervisors, who was in literary studies, he really summoned me to write very clearly and to make a sharp distinction between my language and theirs.
Now I've done the job and don't have to listen to him anymore. Now I see that I use more and more fiction as well in my own writing and thinking more in terms of writing with the world. I'm fully fascinated by writing with the world. How do you do that? How do you make sure that this boundary between words and the world doesn't exist, which it doesn't? For me, it's one.
So the material and the discursive, they become together and apart writing alongside a work. I find that very interesting, because the work is not necessarily only the object existing one time, point, place, but it's also the whole process towards the moment of presentation. Not representation, but presentation, which is part of the game, actually.
So I'm collaborating with writers, so. And with visual artists, it's a matter of co creation and of them interacting, being entangled with each other. No, I think that's a way of making do with traditional hierarchies as well, which bother at least me so much, really.
[00:45:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:37] Speaker E: I like that you bring in these terms that you also have been taking apart, I think, the different categories that are spoken about in terms of, let's say, space and time and the object and the work and how we can maybe entangle them more.
[00:45:57] Speaker D: A highly theoretical term. I mean, it almost becomes a jargon and a buzword these days, just to mention. And I think we have to flesh it out far more. It's from Karen Barat, from meeting the universe halfway.
[00:46:12] Speaker E: Yeah, I like you bringing this reference. And there is something in this book that maybe we can use as a kind of an entry point. And that is the.
I mean, what she does is she takes the words apart. Right. In an interesting way. You already did that with presentation and representation. And there is another beautiful one that I had to think of, and that is remembering, which you can take apart a little bit into remembering. So member and remembering.
And that would be nice to discuss a little bit. And maybe then the kind of naive, overarching question that I had is, if we question these categories and the hierarchies, as you have been doing, what does that mean for the stability of the object? Or in other words, can an ecphasis also change the work it speaks about?
[00:47:14] Speaker D: Yes, it does.
To me, that's the whole point. That's what's happening the moment writing enters the earth space.
Not only the space is reconfigured, but also the object isn't anymore what it used to be, or the way it is presented in a museum context.
So, yeah, just to point out that ecfrasis is actually a way of representing the object, it's an instance of representation. So it's actually a highly contested subject to discuss this morning in the sense of how is it still possible to represent? Is it possible at all to represent something, to have the.
To feel yourself entitled that you or that language can represent what is here in front of us on the table.
So it's highly problematic, actually.
[00:48:38] Speaker E: Yeah, it's a. It's a vast discussion.
If you allow me, I want to read one paragraph from this book that I hold in my hands just to maybe open up the discussion. Furthermore, even though we're going quite fast, it's Orlando Vasquez, and he's writing about aesthetics. Right. And then I guess what we are discussing is also how to relate to objects. And so I was reading this.
Well, there is the notion of aesthetics that is kind of, let's say, an alternative to the aesthetics and introduced by Miniolo. And it says here, aesthesis is not focused on the object, but on the perception of the senses.
In this way, it is more of a verbality, not focused on the object of perception and its qualities, but rather on the practices of perception, thinking through aesthesis.
So the alternative term to aesthetics enables us to move from the logic of representation to the verbality of reception. So I was thinking that maybe that could be a kind of first step to what you describe apti as representing. Right. That comes with questioning the categories of presentation.
[00:50:03] Speaker D: In the first place, we forget that the etymology or the root of, let's say the western term aesthetics is from aesthesis is from Alexander Baumgarten's views of the sensuous speaking to the senses. Vasquez refers to mignolum, but we are overlooking that aspect of even our western term, which is interesting indeed. I fully agree with him, because Vasquez obviously talks in the context of modernity, in the sense that it's very much defined by western conception of art and of the world in large, where there's other traditions as well, oral traditions, which do not have a place in this way of dealing with the world and dealing with language.
So, yes, talking about the senses would be an option, but then we have to rethink as well, which is an interesting question, a requirement, actually desire as well.
Rethink the whole history of ekfrasis and how we have overlooked certain aspects of it, stressing the temporal and the spatial, talking in terms of revel arts, but not so much talking about the senses, whereas it was part of the game. Yeah.
[00:51:57] Speaker B: Definitely.
I'm thinking of, like Elencio.
[00:52:03] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:52:05] Speaker B: French philosopher who wrote about Batshiba, like this painting by Rembrandt. And I remember when reading it in a reading group that, yeah, it's complex and big text, but it really appeals at one point to the senses, and it really makes you to approach this painting from so many different angles.
I have to think that at one point it also, as we talked before, it changed me as a reader, it changed me as a viewer.
So after the text, I saw the painting differently.
It expanded it, it enriched it. But also the painting was not so different from before when I saw it before the text. But the text gave me different accesses and gave me different, pointed out certain things and also proposed different worlds that departed from the painting, but at one point were far away from the painting and sometimes came back very quickly. So there was this whole philosophy that was being unfolded through the description of the painting.
I'm thinking of what you talk about also a question, maybe for Arif, that we talk about remembering, like in the radio. Yaya yani nay nay. You're always like, somehow remembering certain art exhibitions, art experiences, certain objects. You are constantly doing anecdotes. How do you feel about it?
[00:53:54] Speaker D: Talking about reversing roles and breaking categories.
[00:54:00] Speaker E: You mean because I'm supposedly the moderator?
I think I'm just here to sometimes ask a question.
I participated in what is apparently called a socratic dialogue recently, where you have to always summarize what the person before you said, and you're being called at random. So it's like an exercise of listening. So if I managed to do that slightly, I'm already quite happy, I think, in this role.
In terms of the egg frastic radio project, I think it has never become this clear.
I was joking yesterday that the project is like one ecfastic loop. Not a very successful joke, but I think a pretty apt description of what we're trying to do, although I have to say, it is not what we're doing, literally, as in, we are hardly ever describing the works that we are speaking about.
It does happen sometimes, but I don't think that's what this project is good at, let's say, in the sense that we are trying to understand.
And you know that, Martine, the radio as a kind of a space in itself. It can be a curatorial space, but it can also just be a space for discourse that forces you in its own way, just by the, let's say, mediality, if you want of it. The fact that we're sitting around the table with microphones and headphones, and that our voices are amplified to relate to each other and to works in a certain way, so that it is actually less appealing to, let's say, go back to certain categories that we are used to when describing artworks or when thinking about artworks, right? Because the descriptions often lead then to thinking about the artworks. And I think what I'm interested in, in this project, and I think it goes for all of us, if I can say that, let's say, mastering the object through a description, but thinking about the radio as a space for objects itself. So that's why I'm also interested in the figure of the ecphasis as something or in other words, my question about the relation to the object, I think it's related to this because I guess the immaterial object, the boundary of that to the material object are never really clear. So then we are trying to kind of expand that with the project.
And sometimes it is very pleasurable to describe what you see, actually.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: But, yeah, for me, it's also interesting. And with this, maybe Ilse can help me. But I have the feeling that there is a whole academic discussion that also ecpheres. Sometimes it goes a little bit beyond the object. And every ecpheresis that also allows the possibility of an artwork or of a sensual experience already is part of these ecstatic encounters. So even not describing and mastering the object, exhausting the object, but even talking about the possibility of an object being there and giving, somehow proposing the circumstances for something to happen, could also come in this realm of the ecstasies. So sometimes, also, if we are able to describe and talk about the possibilities and the potential for something to happen, we are already somehow propitiating the object to be, or to be presented or represented.
How do you feel about that?
[00:58:11] Speaker D: I don't know. I have to think of when students come to the university to study art history, one of the first exercises they have to do, and it's not. Well, it's an obligation, really. They have to describe an artwork. And there are certain.
Well, you have different tutors who have different ways of approaching this exercise.
But there do exist, in the older art historical traditions, very strict ways of how you go about it, and that you work from the center to the margin, from top to bottom, from clarity to the darker shades, et cetera.
So, yeah, this is, to me, I don't want to say a horror scenario, but you have other ways to go about it, in the sense of you could ask a student as well, to go to a museum, look at an artwork, and start with whatever triggers their eyes, whatever catches them, and asks a question.
And from there, you work, and your eye is led over the painting.
You enter into a dialogue with the painting, and not only with the painting, because your eye is caught by the lighting as well, by how the work is hung, about the museum conditions. And if all goes well, you become aware of how looking at something. Looking is looking with something, and that it's a larger whole which enables you to look at something, but which also makes that what you look at is part of the game and is entering into a dialogue with you. So the other way around.
Yeah, I hope that there's this more free way of doing this exercise more and more in the university grounds these days.
Because if not, you hold these disciplinary boundaries and this distinction, the sharp distinctions between word and image, you keep them intact. And that would be a pity, I'd say.
[01:01:23] Speaker E: I think we could listen to one more egg fuzzes and then we come back and talk a bit more matinee. You chose the second one.
[01:01:34] Speaker B: Yeah, we chose the one by Claudio Correa. We have it in. Originally it was in Spanish, in the record. And for I saw it by. It was translated to English by Carlos Lechner. So maybe we listen both the spanish first.
[01:01:53] Speaker F: Olena Maria Kiro Contra Chile Amsterdam Parapaso and Nisidaras mira poira Sergeinolanda Paregono Cala Primer Nivel attend to sura del cancer victima Mezico Anamaria Enchilados Nisikira Ilagarida Catolicas Protechive Ito de la pere criterios Capori hempro de la mildos office la poseidira applicant Paramorosura kenso Solidad is a prasion. I am Alofono, an electronic hero. Parasikport susia sanda ola buenat um ute pretender Telephonica the katie bo senor Psychological.
[01:03:35] Speaker D: No. Telephonic, but.
[01:03:40] Speaker F: No.
[01:03:45] Speaker C: To see and.
[01:04:02] Speaker F: Mentor national Buddhianismo la repatacion de loretos perivine la poso alarcion Mihante de permanent Robert in Quentos in chokes ethnicos cajulos exapirazi yellows and Fermo Samuris Etason Misultima Palavras.
[01:04:39] Speaker G: Hello, Anna Maria. I want to tell you in these last words my intentions at Mulroshur, which are to make a humanitarian corridor between Chile and Amsterdam for people in need.
My idea is to make it possible for them to travel to the Netherlands so they get to know first rate medical assistance and so they can opt for a final solution to so much usury of which they've been victims in our inhuman medical system.
Hannah Maria in Chile, as we know, we don't even have an abortion law and the charity we receive from catholic organizations protects and watches over our life only until we are born.
I'm aware of the open mindedness of the Netherlands, which, for example, since 2002, offers the terminally ill the possibility of legally opting for assisted death, applying the method known as lethal injection.
My plan for Mulochur is to choose some of the most anguished people who, in their loneliness and desperation, have called self helplines and offer them euthanasia abroad in order to export suicidal people to Amsterdam.
Operator. Hello, the Chile for Life foundation. Good afternoon. Me?
Hello? Good afternoon. Do you offer telephone support? Operator. What kind, sir? Me? Psychological support.
Operator, this line is for. Do you perhaps belong to any company?
Me?
No. I'm alone and I need help.
Operator. Better call 802 36236 and ask for the program. Raise your voice of the association of Psychologists.
Me?
I want to kill myself.
Operator look, this is an antiabortion program and only helps pregnant women.
Subsequently, the bodies will return to national soil so they may be exhibited as works of art in our cultural centers.
Likewise, the repatriation of the remains prevents the possibility of violating any type of agreement to the current residence regulation of Chileans in the European Union.
Hopefully, this possibility of a binational encounter without ethnic clashes, which helps the desperate to get distressed and the sick to die, is of interest.
These are my last words.
[01:08:20] Speaker B: We were hearing Claudio Correa and his original piece for ecphracies and then the translation done by the voice of Carlos Lechner for Isoid by ear.
And yeah, maybe it's a good moment also to talk about translation and what gets lost in translation.
And yeah, somehow through this very provocative piece of Claudio, there are some things that with this humor are touched upon also related to boundaries and until what, yeah, information is translated, until what extent we represent the object and until what extent also there is this ethical limit in these propositions. I think Claudio plays also with this sort of fictional character of the Exorcist to propose something that could be completely rejected or out of place if done truly.
And we just were talking about translation. So I want to give the voice to you, Ils.
[01:09:31] Speaker D: Yes. Somehow, listening to the first lines of this ecfrastic encounter and speaking about encounter, it feels a bit perverse in this time of wars and where human corridors are completely impossible and the Red Cross trying to negotiate with Russia and Ukraine, well, it feels weird to talk about it.
So in that sense, text and language and writing to still make the connection with the piece can never be isolated, never really.
And a word gets fleshed out and a new meaning each time you read it again and again and again.
Or as get Woodstein, wouldn't it? Rose is a rose. Is it? Rose is a rose. No, I mean, never. One and the same.
Yeah. Talking about translation, there's a triple translation going on then not only between a fictional work of art and the voice who tries to utter or express what this work of art might be, but also translating this from Spanish to English, which is also a translation and impossibility to completely grasp what the other language tries to express.
So, yeah, in the wider sense, Ekrasis could be called a form of translation. Yeah, why not? I'd say.
And there is a way of discovering that there is a difference between the object and language, between one language and the other. But it's also the sheer fact of speaking out loud, of making this encounter happen. Like what you mentioned about a radio. No, it's a place of relation as well. And there's a possibility for exchange. So it's a very generous space as well, a way transaction can take place.
You referred earlier to the work by Helen Sizu, who was describing the painting by Rembrandt.
I brought along another work which is also dealing with translation in this triple sense. It's a work by artist Roni Horn, who translates a work by brazilian author Clarice Le Specter, which is then translated by Helen Sizu, who reflects on the work by Ronnie Horn, which translates the work of Claricelis Spectre. Claris le Spector, coming from Ukraine and fled to Brazil, spoke in the portuguese language, whereas Sisu would correct me, I would say the brazilian language, and Sisu, who learned Brazilian later in her life, in order to be able to grasp more fully what Clarice Le Spector actually tried to say.
The work by Roni Horn reflects on or translates, let's say, the novel of clever suspector called aguavaviva, which means something like running water, or living water, actually.
And it consists of silk screens, 17 prints, but also an installation of what she calls rings, which are rubber tiles, where texts taken from aguaviva are printed on those tiles, which are 75 thick, square centimeters and 3 cm thick. Just to give you an idea.
So these texts, they are printed on these tiles, running in circles. So in rings, which refers then to the title rings between bracket aquaviva.
And what's interesting in her text, Helenciou also mentions that the book of Clavis Spectre is actually not a book, but it's a book thing. It's something more than a book, or not quite a book. And this Spectre didn't know what to do as well with all the fragments she had written. And then at a certain point, an editor say, okay, let's make a book out of it. So in her writing, sisu really very much refers to the fact that for the spectre, it wasn't clear that her book was an actual book with all the linguistic boundaries it implies, the container, which the word book actually is.
And the notion of water, which returns in the work the practice, the Irfra of Ronihorn far more, which then refers to Agua. Agua viva, the title of Ronihorn's book.
So that in her way of displaying this text, she refers perhaps less so to the text by Clarice the spector, but more to the notion of water and translating it in the circular forms, in the materiality, the very materiality of the piece, there's also crossing this boundary between the material and the discursive.
So it's an interesting practice, actually, which has a lot of moments of ecfrasis in it, and a lot of moments of translation and relation, which is less clear and distinct, but much more fluid to keep in a metaphorical terminology.
[01:16:44] Speaker B: Talking about water, I have to think about gardens. Maybe it sounds odd, but it's very connected. I used to study the first gardening manual. It's a japanese manual, very like 2000 years ago. It's called the sakuteki, and it's considered the first gardening manual that humankind has record of. Not like for planting, like eating vegetables, but more like the idea of a garden. And it is said that there were many classic japanese gardens that because of weather and extreme conditions, storms, but mainly because of wars, were completely destroyed. And we just had an ocean about them. And in elder times, certain gardeners in japanese society just knew about them through these descriptions in the Sakuteki.
So at one point the gardens became just a verbal description, and then they were reconstructed and then they were destroyed again. Imagine a garden is something that needs a lot of work to be maintained. But sometimes also there are moments, like contextual moments, in which nobody takes care of a garden and then it's destroyed or it becomes a ruin. And through these texts that were built back again. So there was always this sort of transit of going from the garden to the description and the text, and then coming back as a real, actual garden.
[01:18:19] Speaker D: What would be intriguing is to consider this writing also as a moment of undoing the object, which it actually does, it deconstructs, or it undoes the object as a coherent whole, which is a nice way of perceiving it. And then the encyclopedia description, the manual, the dictionary, not as moment of construction and constituting a language, because a language is vaster than just what the dictionary says or what we define that something is, but the dictionary as moments. And the manual you refer to as moments of undoing the language, definitely.
[01:19:11] Speaker B: And there is also like this moment in which you undo, by doing the instruction, you also undo it, or you have to do the translation. And in this translation, something will be lost, but something, maybe new, might come up.
I used to talk to Arif about this. Maybe it's very classical, but still, for me, it's very interesting about this classical fluxus piece by Josh Brecht called the dripping event.
And George Brecht, at one point he put a ladder, he stepped on it, and he poured from, like a container, some water into a pot.
And after this event, he made an instruction that was called drip event. And the instruction is very simple. It's like just two lines. And basically it's to pour from one container to another, like a liquid water, a quaviva. And the thing is that many of the other fluxus artists started to redo and do their own drip events.
But the thing and the anecdote that I told to Arif and that it was very interesting for our conversations, was that Josh Breck got very angry because everybody was using a ladder, using a pot that was very similar to the one that he used when he did his concert. And they were all doing exactly the same. And he got very nervous and he said, you don't have to do the same, you have to translate it. That's the idea of my instruction is not to be follow as you think that is, very strictly. But maybe you can just take one glass and maybe take like a plate and just pour some liquid. It doesn't need to be water. And then he said, it doesn't even need to be an action. It can become a sound, it can become a writing, it can become an image. So he was really into this idea that there was never like a fixed score or the fixed instruction, the fixed text that exhausted all the possible descriptions. But for him, it was always like a step, like there was this sort of moment, and then there would be a translation that would take it to another.
[01:21:36] Speaker D: It would be fascinating, really, if we could use language the way Brecht meant it to be. Just as a score is a stepping stone or trampling from which you can work and not living, to the latter, let's say, with language and feeding the space and freedom in it as well, spatially and temporarily and materially, in terms of matter. Sorry. Yeah.
[01:22:09] Speaker B: But coming back to lensu and Ronnie Horn, I think they fulfill somehow this idea of George Brecht in terms of aqua viva, of Clarice Lee spectre, becomes these images, becomes these rubber bands, and then comes back with sisu. And in a way, it's also like. That's the encounter moment.
[01:22:27] Speaker D: Funny.
[01:22:32] Speaker E: Would you like to read it a bit? Or is that a spontaneous.
[01:22:37] Speaker D: No, I love the spontaneity.
[01:22:41] Speaker E: Yeah.
The anecdote you just told us, Martine, also made me think of a term that I think I also mentioned to you in that conversation that is maybe peripherally related, which is Wechtoyer, a german term indicating a kind of fidelity to the work, presupposing that there is such a thing as a work that is distinguishable. Right. And then that you can represent or represent or perform, for example, a score or a composition in a way that is true to the original work, which indicates also some sort of author's intent. Right. Or a sort of correct interpretation of that. And in that sense, I like what we talked about today, because it kind of offers a challenge to this idea of the work as a complete, representable object.
Yeah. We're still in the kitchen here of Anna Maria, and Ilza has opened the book. And I think Monty is giving us a sign that we will have five more minutes and then we will finish now with a reading. What are you going to read, Ilza?
[01:24:13] Speaker D: Well, I will start with the first lines of Sisu's text, and you'll hear a little bit of how she writes as well. I think it's interesting.
One reads Aguaviva, if one can read Aguaviva, if one knows how to read running water. I say the sentence, one reads Aguaviva. And it seems to have in mind a book by clarity Spectre that bees on its cover. The title Aguaviva, if it's a book. But the sentence might also be thinking of some Rony horn images called water, called wonder water.
Eloquence images, photographs.
Come closer to Clarice Lispecta's book called Aguaviva.
It's not a book exactly. It's another genre. It's a sort of thing, this volume, this book thing. Claritly, Spectre herself wasn't sure she could call it a book, publish it as a book. And even she didn't really know how she would let it be, nor how she would let herself let it be. What? Yes, what for? If the thing was made in words, in sentences of thoughts, in the thoughts of before thought, and in the thoughts behind thought sentence, things that had come to her over several years had had the freedom and the necessity of migratory animals, schools of fish, flights of birds, half thought, ricochet, quarter thoughts. All that was alive. Each coming moment was alive. But there wasn't any road leading from one point to the next next, nor any point of departure, nor port of arrival. None of the things that usually make what one calls a book. No story, no yarn, no threat, no direction, no order, no hole. Only the hammering pulse, the moments.
Finally, a friend helped her gather all these drops together, all these jets and streams helped her, urged her, made up her mind to put these spurts together, juxtapose them, pretend one moment came after another moment, that these liquids crystallized, that these brats and guts and whirlpools could fall into lines.
I think I'll leave it. There's all that was cuttered into the frame or the vase of a book thing, but with the understanding that the title would tell the truth. This is not a book like other books. It is water, it is life. In its liquid state, it is running water. Aguaviva is like the name of a princess or fairy.
I could go on forever, I think. Shall we just leave it here?
It kind of gives you an inkling of how one can write. Also in terms of this sentence was enormous. It was not composed as the more traditional sentence, with just one subject, verb, object, but it contained many clauses, actually, which is interesting in itself, and runs like water as what it describes, without it being poetry or whatsoever. It completely tries to undo the categories in which we think, making a sentence a sentence thing and a book a book thing.
So I think it's absolutely fascinating to read and to think in this way as well about language.
[01:28:15] Speaker B: I had to come back to Hertzein arose is a rose, is a rose. Which reminded me that we also had to mention and thanks, like Rosenstrat, for hosting this exhibition by Murosur. Also to the labs from the lecturer, from the Gerrit Ritfeld Academy and Sandberg Institute that is also supporting this podcast.
And to the IFCA, the Amsterdam funds for the Kunzar also helped us with the exhibition. And to Yayani Nene, that has become a great partner and ecfastic partner.
[01:28:54] Speaker D: Ecfastic companion.
[01:28:55] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:28:57] Speaker E: Well, thank you so much. I also want to thank Monty, who has been allowing us to speak.
And thank you, Ilza. I think we could go on.
[01:29:09] Speaker D: We really could go on now we feel how language kind of generates language. Thank you for having me, really, for inviting me, really, Martin, and for sitting with you around the table. It's lovely.
[01:29:24] Speaker E: We will put some resources, some references, and maybe also something like further reading.
There are more books here that we didn't get to. We'll put them in the description of this show on the website, and then I think we will leave it at that. Thank you, Martine.
[01:29:46] Speaker B: Thanks to you.
[01:29:48] Speaker E: Okay, bye.
