'I was painting our side of the mirror - the mirror for me is a door - but I think that I've gone over, to a place where one no longer faces identities at all.'
After I went to the dorothrea tanning exhibition at the tate a year or so ago and bought the tate book, I've been reading it here and there and recently been reading into the 'spaces' she occupies in her work. I realised I sort of was exploring these unreal or virtual spaces in my second year essay (which was really badly written and organized, I couldn't go into depth with the range of things I was looking at, basically it was all over the place). anyway, I was reading the first few pages and here are some bits I found relevant...
p.9 - 11
- One of her metaphors is the agoraphobia [NHS: fear of being in situations where escape might be difficult or that help wouldn't be available if things go wrong. Many people assume agoraphobia is simply a fear of open spaces, but it's actually a more complex condition. Someone with agoraphobia may be scared of: travelling on public transport, visiting a shopping centre, leaving home] of the Sedona Desert [which she lived in with her husband max ernst.. and painted 'self-portrait' etc..
In that camera-sharp place where planetary upheaval had lift its signature: the now placid monuments that, as far as anyone out there cared, had been there forever, I would undertake—"dare" would be a truer word—to paint the unpaintable. One year was enough to sear it on the lens of memory (It was not done on the spot, as artists generally did: planting their shaky easels in sand or shale, wind and sun; dipping brushes in globs of paint and hope) so that, in the studio alone with my dream I would record it like a diary entry, just like that.
–from Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and Beyond. Exhibition brochure. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000. https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/230/], another the possibility presented by dreamlike interior spaces, in which doors open into new, more fascinating spaces, abyssal and 'unknown but knowable', as she put it...This exhibition explores Tanning's practice of interrogating personal biography as a means of escaping it. [interrogating it by escaping it... another contradiction..] She offers a means of narrating a life which breaks free of a reliance on civil records and bureaucratic human memory that collects facts deemed relevant by convention then attaches them, automatically and teleologically, to an artistic discourse. Tanning challenges this 'biographism' of concrete experience, quantifiable or demonstrable from documentation, through her use of an individual mythology that sometimes reaches out into new territory, sometimes settles in a circumscribed and paradoxically fecund place: a room. Tanning was doubtless referencing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (published in 1929) in her investigations into the potential of this intimate space and the alternative stories it can generate. This exhibition has points of connection with 'Biographical Forms: Construction and Individual Mythology, presented by the Museo Reina Sofia in 2013-14, which also included work by Tanning. Both exhibitions reference psychoanalysis, understanding of the mechanisms through which individual perception is accumulated and constructed, the ways in which each person tells themselves their story. Sigmund Freud's starting point was the intersection between myth and first person biography: artists such as Tanning use plastic or literary tools to create symbolic narrations of the 'I' inspired discourse around these biographies, working instead with memory, evocation, and fragment.
In Tanning's work, auto-representation becomes a form of emancipation. She subverts the concept of the bourgeois domestic space, transforming it into a place of enquiry into the personal psyche, personal fears and desires. Nudity for her is the baring of the subconscious, a mental exposure in many ways more rebellious than literal nudity. Her sculptures, textiles, and installations depict the non-normative body, with all its phantoms of imperfection. Doors, a central trope in her painting and literature, are used to express obscure impulses, internal voices and co-existing identities. Her interpretations of habitable space, domestic ritual and places of semi-privacy reveal something more arresting than the conventional distinction between public and private space: the removal of limits, whether imposed by the skin or by the walls of a house. She said: 'I was painting our side of the mirror - the mirror for me is a door - but I think that I've gone over, to a place where one no longer faces identities at all.' The body is another door. Behind it, another invisible door appears.
*reminds me of bill viola's book title 'Reasons to Knock at an Empty House'
*this also reminds me of paul nash's painting:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-landscape-from-a-dream-n05667
After I went to the dorothrea tanning exhibition at the tate a year or so ago and bought the tate book, I've been reading it here and there and recently been reading into the 'spaces' she occupies in her work. I realised I sort of was exploring these unreal or virtual spaces in my second year essay (which was really badly written and organized, I couldn't go into depth with the range of things I was looking at, basically it was all over the place). anyway, I was reading the first few pages and here are some bits I found relevant...
p.9 - 11
- One of her metaphors is the agoraphobia [NHS: fear of being in situations where escape might be difficult or that help wouldn't be available if things go wrong. Many people assume agoraphobia is simply a fear of open spaces, but it's actually a more complex condition. Someone with agoraphobia may be scared of: travelling on public transport, visiting a shopping centre, leaving home] of the Sedona Desert [which she lived in with her husband max ernst.. and painted 'self-portrait' etc..
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| Self-Portrait, 1944 Oil on canvas |
–from Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and Beyond. Exhibition brochure. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000. https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/230/], another the possibility presented by dreamlike interior spaces, in which doors open into new, more fascinating spaces, abyssal and 'unknown but knowable', as she put it...This exhibition explores Tanning's practice of interrogating personal biography as a means of escaping it. [interrogating it by escaping it... another contradiction..] She offers a means of narrating a life which breaks free of a reliance on civil records and bureaucratic human memory that collects facts deemed relevant by convention then attaches them, automatically and teleologically, to an artistic discourse. Tanning challenges this 'biographism' of concrete experience, quantifiable or demonstrable from documentation, through her use of an individual mythology that sometimes reaches out into new territory, sometimes settles in a circumscribed and paradoxically fecund place: a room. Tanning was doubtless referencing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (published in 1929) in her investigations into the potential of this intimate space and the alternative stories it can generate. This exhibition has points of connection with 'Biographical Forms: Construction and Individual Mythology, presented by the Museo Reina Sofia in 2013-14, which also included work by Tanning. Both exhibitions reference psychoanalysis, understanding of the mechanisms through which individual perception is accumulated and constructed, the ways in which each person tells themselves their story. Sigmund Freud's starting point was the intersection between myth and first person biography: artists such as Tanning use plastic or literary tools to create symbolic narrations of the 'I' inspired discourse around these biographies, working instead with memory, evocation, and fragment.
In Tanning's work, auto-representation becomes a form of emancipation. She subverts the concept of the bourgeois domestic space, transforming it into a place of enquiry into the personal psyche, personal fears and desires. Nudity for her is the baring of the subconscious, a mental exposure in many ways more rebellious than literal nudity. Her sculptures, textiles, and installations depict the non-normative body, with all its phantoms of imperfection. Doors, a central trope in her painting and literature, are used to express obscure impulses, internal voices and co-existing identities. Her interpretations of habitable space, domestic ritual and places of semi-privacy reveal something more arresting than the conventional distinction between public and private space: the removal of limits, whether imposed by the skin or by the walls of a house. She said: 'I was painting our side of the mirror - the mirror for me is a door - but I think that I've gone over, to a place where one no longer faces identities at all.' The body is another door. Behind it, another invisible door appears.
*reminds me of bill viola's book title 'Reasons to Knock at an Empty House'
*this also reminds me of paul nash's painting:
 |
| Landscape from a Dream 1936–8 |
This painting marks the culmination of Nash’s personal response to Surrealism, of which he had been aware since the late 1920s. As the title suggests, it echoes the Surrealists’ fascination with Freud’s theories of the power of dreams to reveal the unconscious. Nash explained that various elements were symbolic: the self-regarding hawk belongs to the material world, while the spheres reflected in the mirror refer to the soul. Typically, Nash set this scene on the coast of Dorset, unearthing the uncanny within the English landscape. - Gallery label, September 2013