April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

— T.S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1921

PAYING OFF MY AMEX ★★★★★

Of all the exciting things going on in your life, I’m sure the most exciting will be the itinerant knowledge that I am, for the first time in several years, debt free. According to various woo-woo women I’ve had drinks with recently this is something to do with Pisces currently begetting great fortune, a sign I have very little of in my LLM-generated birth chart. AMEX, however, was founded on the 18th of March 1850, which does make it a Pisces. Perhaps the great fortune begetting them is no longer having me as a cardholder. I am sure Richard1 from Dhaka, with whom I developed a close relationship over the past year and will miss terribly, will similarly mourn calling me at 10:30 on the dot every Sunday2 to remind me that I am overdue and really need to get my shit together.

My financial catharsis occurred a day after I wrote about Isaac Julien’s (terrible) Metamorphoses show at Victoria Miro, which involved spending a few hours pouring over a fortiously-aquired copy of Bazzotti’s catalogue of the Palazzo Te, specifically the sections about the Sala dei Giganti, which depicts Jove/Jupiter crushing the Giants, a scene from Ovid’s first book. The iconography of Jupiter in Renaissance tradition split him roughly three ways: there's the civic Jupiter (law, authority, empire, patron of the temple on the Capitoline that made Rome, well, Rome), the erotic Jupiter (golden showers, seduction/rape of diverse and increasingly creative kinds, etc, see also: Correggio’s whole career), and the philosophical Jupiter (various Neoplatonic readings of Jove as demiurgic intellect, the ordering principle of the cosmos, a metonymy of Christian logos; these guys LOVED a hashtag problematic king, especially Ficino). The Sala dei Giganti deviates from these in classic Mannerist fashion by implicating the viewer in a scene of violent, mundane disaster; there is simply nothing civic or sexy about it. The whole spatial trick of the room (no cornices, walls and ceiling continuous) is ordered to present Jupiter as the Romans knew him, sublime in the full Burkean sense.3

According to Claude:

“Jupiter direct in Cancer is trining your 2nd house. Trines to the 2nd house from a benefic planet = multiple income streams arriving with relatively low friction. The fact [your windfall is coming from multiple sources] rather than one is very Jupiter-in-Cancer: nourishing, multiple, comes through relationships and reputation rather than gambling.”

What I’m trying to get at here is I am Jupiter and credit card debt is the Giants. Suck it, AMEX.4

THE WEIGHT BETWEEN, GROUP SHOW @ GATHERING ★★★☆☆

“All that is good is easy, everything divine runs with light feet."
— Nietzche, The Case of Wagner, 1888

I was not familiar with the specific aspect of Bachelard’s philosophy on which this show is based. I enjoyed his phenomenology of shelter in the Poetics of Space (referenced in my photoshoot interview with India Sachi and Sarah Daoui for AppleDoll), but had not read L'Air et les Songes, in which he asks the following: “Can the study of fleeting images be a subject?” It's a good question to open a show with, but it is also, if you're not careful, the kind of philosophical alibi capacious enough to accommodate almost anything. The Weight Between at Gathering mostly avoids this trap, but only by the skin of its teeth.

I will preface this by saying I tried reading the full Bachelard text, I really did, but the only complete copy I could find online was in French, and I kept getting distracted by the Rilke references, because why on God’s green Earth would you read a Frenchman write about Nodier and planes when when you could be reading Rilke writing about literally anything else, so I only got about a third of the way through, mea culpa. Also I picked up another Pratchett on my way to Geneva that kept calling my name, like, why are these footnotes not funny? Whatever, I digress. What I am trying to get at is I am not a Bachelard expert, and who knows, perhaps if I was I would have felt differently about the show, but I am undeniably shooting from the theoretical hip here.

From what I can tell, the premise of the aerial imagination/the imagination of movement is oriented around air, wind, light, and unperceptible elements that, as Bachelard puts it, are such that “movement takes precedence over matter.” The difficulty that both Bachelard notes (and that the show is trying to address) is that these substances are defined by a kind of spiritual flux. Images of aerial imagination are those that exist, in so far as they can, in the world of transition. What TWB is trying to do is, I suppose, reify what Bachelard concedes may be unreifiable in material terms, to find substance that can somehow formalise the Rilkean sky or Shelley’s celestial islands. This is, of course, a paradox5 — and one the show resolves unevenly, depending on how seriously each work takes the problem it has been given.

Bachelard (above, fantastic beard) proposes that the test of any aerial image is “the extent to which it makes us lighter or heavier.” He distinguishes between kinematic and dynamic imagination: movement that is perceived visually, he argues, "remains purely kinematic," and because "sight follows movement so effortlessly, it cannot help us to make that movement an integral part of our inner lives." He speaks of this too in literary terms (a poem talking about clouds is not the same as a poem that feels like a cloud), and the idea is easily enough resolved in the visual artistic realm: the aerial image that merely looks like air, functioning in some vague atmospheric register of weightlessness and transition is a failure, much like the poem that talks about clouds with burdensome or unwieldy language is a failure. What Bachelard demands instead is dynamic participation, an inhabitation rather than an illustration of weightlessness. The strongest works in The Weight Between fall into the former camp, the weakest the latter.

The show’s strongest works are Harminder Judge’s Untitled (shell) and Magdalena Skupinska’s small untitled panel, and it is not a coincidence that both demand physical participation to be properly received. At distance, the work flattens, which sounds like a criticism but isn’t. There is something of Nodier’s aerial traveller in the experience, in that the depth is entirely present but it requires your movement to activate it. It feels like looking at a landscape from a plane, altitude yielding topography. Yummy. Skupinska operates at the opposite scale and with the same logic; her panel, her earthly materials (annatto, chamomile, blue spirulina, ultramarine on wood) gesture directly to Bachelard’s dynamic imagination, the translation of the mundane to the divine.

Monty Richthofen’s work is also some of the most compelling in the room that doesn’t quite answer the show’s question. Lightboxes as a premise is aerial enough; but the ink splotches feel fungal, rooted, earthbound, and no amount of backlight fully resolves this. It answers Bachelard, but in the negative, the light is doing the celestial work; the transitory mark-marking simply can’t follow. Lukas Heerich’s Glocke (a bell encased in rubber, muted, grounded) has the same problem at greater symbolic cost. A bell on the floor is an omen: it cannot work because reverberations cannot travel without hitting the ground and stunting themselves, and its collapse implies the structure that held it has gone too. This speaks obviously to ruin, to churches returning to soil. Again, the opposite of aerial. Striking, both of them (seriously — these are all good works of art!) but being the best work in a room and being the right work in a room are, occasionally, different things.

Rana Begum is represented by two bodies of work, and one is considerably more interesting than the other. The Mesh (galvanised steel suspended from the ceiling, arranged to suggest a cloud) is the show’s most obvious gesture: heavy material made to look light, which is more or less the opposite of what Bachelard asks for. It is kinematic in precisely the sense he warns against. The Louvre works are more considered. Painted glass slats mounted in aluminium, they operate on the logic of the window blind, objects that are themselves designed to mediate the flow of light, which is as noted far more interesting. The gradient is the problem: it descends, deepening from pale at the top to saturated at the base, which is exactly the wrong vertical differential for a show organised around ascension. Well maybe that’s the point, Vic, I hear you say, the work gets heavier as it goes down, Begum is actively pulling in the wrong direction. This may well be the case, I reply, but to me it reads as a pretty but conceptually kitsch representation of the classic light = good = up and dark = bad = down. The title, too, speaks of hierarchy, or at the very least institutional power and judgement. Again, I have to express I like these works very much, I just think they’re answering the wrong questions.

And then there’s Serra. Oh, Richard, my beloved, my baby, I’ve previously written about how in the next Vedic/Puranic yugas, after which the universe is destroyed and re-created by Brahma, I hope to be re-incarnated as whatever metal gets used in the next world-cycle’s Serra sculptures. But I have also spoken about how I find his oilstick works really quite mid. Horizontal Reversal VIII does not change my position. None of his genius survives the transition to paper. His inclusion feels forced, frankly, Carvalho and Széchenyi’s pairing (not particularly clever, still very lovely) does more to address the idea of aeriality than Serra’s big goopy boxes, which feel sort of thrown in because a. Serra is a good name to have on the press release and b. it’s also a black rectangle.

The Weight Between is a show that sets itself an almost impossible task and half-succeeds, which is more than most shows manage. I was listening to Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin when I saw it, a piece that fits Bachelard’s description of the aerial-ideal, "the great timeless memory of an aerial state, one in which everything is weightless, in which our very own matter is innately light." I go to shows like this one partly for professional reasons and partly because I am, at my core, someone who still believes that paint on a surface or plaster on a wall can do something to a person that nothing else quite can. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzche notes how “everything good is instinct — and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection. Light feet are the first attribute of divinity.” The non-divine works of this show, that is to say the mundane ones, are not bad works; they are effortful ones, heavy with a sort of epiphanic failure, the real trouble being that in the time it takes to say look at me, I’m about air! you’ve used up half the oxygen in the room.

NATUREA, GROUP SHOW @ SKOPIA, GENEVA ★★★★☆

Featuring Silvia Bächli, Erik Bulatov, Jean Crotti, Franz Gertsch, Fabrice Gygi, Alex Hanimann, Alain Huck, Claudio Moser, Leanne Picthall and Melissa Steckbauer. Really pleasantly surprised by this. I was feeling a little tender after a very unpleasant afternoon, and thought I would cheer myself up by sneering at some bad Swiss art, but alas, only ended up making myself a bit weepy and overwhelmed — having forgotten that since about 2016 the Swiss have actually starting making tremendously good contemporary stuff.

There is no particular throughline to the curation of this show, and none needed, because so many of the works themselves are just so good. Crotti’s mark-making (pictured above) is superb, I’m such a sucker for coloured pencil on paper, it was — as I’m sure it was many of us — the first material I ever worked with. For that reason I find it so irresistible when it’s used to depict youthful bodies, something almost unbearably appropriate about it, doubling the nostalgia until it becomes something closer to grief.

Franz Gertsch (below) was a new one for me but wow, just look at this, look at the texture. In Christoph M. Loos: Eine (Wieder-)Erfindung des Holzschnitts in Resonanz mit Merleau-Pontys Chiasma woodprint is described, very charmingly, as skulptural-grafische Meta-Sprache, a a sculptural-graphic meta-language. You can see this very much so in Gertsch’s work, Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility of flesh, the wood grain is simultaneously the tool, the surface, the image, a complete collapse of art and the body (wood, flesh) that makes it.

This is simply one of those very unpretentious shows chock-full of good art. I had a look at their roster and woof, what a programme. As I say, pleasantly surprised, I think I sort of embittered myself towards Swiss art while reading L’art Suiss N’existe Pas in preparation for a residency at La Becque that I (very sadly) did not get past the shortlist for, but this is after all the country that produced Valloton, the Giacomettis, Calame, Hodler, Anker, etc. I did not get the residency but the Swiss, it turns out, are doing just fine without me.

PITY DRINKS @ PIZZA EXPRESS ☆☆☆☆☆

Deeply unpleasant meal after a deeply unpleasant phone call with somebody I love very much, the sort of conversation that causes a crash-out6 so major that a circumspectly sugary mug of tea gets left outside my bedroom door, followed by a slightly nervous knock and a gentle “shall we go to the pub, dear?” All the pubs are closed or busy so we end up at Pizza Express on our phones, presumably because it’s quite hard to feel sorry for yourself when eating free dough balls. Nevertheless, I still manage to.

FINAL THOTS

• I will be in Paris all next week. And Milan afterwards. Tell me what to see!

• I got to go to my first all-journo party on Friday, wherein someone interrupted a conversation about the Muslim Brotherhood to point out that the Daily Mail was running a headline we’d just coined as a joke. Journalism is a field. We are all just standing in it.

• Happy Easter! That one was our bad guys, sorry.

TEXT OF THE WEEK