An Interview between Wouter De Broeck, co-editor of NU, and James Bacchi-Andreoli, artist and contributor.
The conversation focuses on the ideas behind James Bacchi-Andreoli’s ‘Notation Series’ linocuts in response to James Peake’s poetry, and also discusses the idea of the ‘periphery’ in reference to some of the other contributors in the current issue of NU. December 2020
https://www.nureview.org/
Wouter De Broeck It is great to have some of your work in our first edition of NU. One of our aims with NU was to act as a platform, a place for people to connect. You took this idea to a very concrete level by creating new artworks that react directly to that of your friend, the poet James Peake.
James Bacchi-Andreoli Firstly, thank you for the opportunity to be part of this exciting publication. When James, or Jim as I call him, showed me some of his new poems, I was very excited about the mood and vision of his work. Touching on ideas about time and memory (among many other thoughts and images), his visions of spaces conjured in the poems, whether physical or virtual, immediately spoke to me. As with his previous collection, ‘Reaction Time of Glass[1] ’, I felt that there were tangible motifs and feelings that could be expressed visually through the print medium. I read the poems numerous times and images would reveal themselves at different paces, some quickly, while others would evolve slowly.
I had been to the Dulwich Picture Gallery last year to see ‘Cutting Edge’, a brilliant show which included well-known modernist printmakers such as Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, and this propelled me to investigate the lino print process further. Also, the memorable Robert Motherwell ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition (at the Bernard Jacobsen Gallery, London) came to mind. Motherwell, in his later and increasingly gestural work of the 1960s and 70s, had responded to a series of texts and poems, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, through printmaking and drawing and this body of work on paper became ‘notable for its enigmatic brevity’[2]. Motherwell had also been very interested in the modernist poet Charles Baudelaire, whose vision of modern art was ‘the ephemeral [and] the fugitive’.[3] I hoped I could approach the print medium with a pared-down but energetic quality.
‘I read the poems numerous times and images would reveal themselves at different paces, some quickly, while others would evolve slowly.’ (James Bacchi-Andreoli)
WDB In what way did you connect to the poetry?
JBA I thought it would be good to have some form of fixed starting point for these new works and to have a set of rules to give myself - such as only using black and white, only using single lines and limiting myself to a number of lines per image. I have often found that in many ways restrictions bring freedom in the creative process. I started by picking key phrases or ideas from various parts of the poems and then made some preliminary designs and sketches. Whilst this initially seemed like a good idea, it became too illustrative and too laboured. In frustration, I decided to furiously eradicate the images with more intense mark-making and whilst this gave the work a more vigorous quality, it did not seem to express my feelings when reading the poems.
So I decided to read the poems again afresh and attempt to encapsulate and express a general mood or feeling. I recalled the power of the instinctive approach that Howard Hodgkin for example uses, a painter I am a great fan of, and the fact that he does not do preliminary sketches, but recalls and keeps alive first-hand experiences in the paintings. I too wanted to aim for a purer experience devoid of obvious representation but enough to allow the viewer to make their own connections.
‘I started by picking key phrases or ideas from various parts of the poems and then made some preliminary designs and sketches. Whilst this initially seemed like a good idea, it became too illustrative and too laboured.’
Another connection and inspiration was Cy Twombly’s art. Jim and I have always had a shared love for Cy Twombly’s art, his immediacy and the way he attempts to decode an idea in front of you, with his strong and impulsive scrawling. A few years ago we actually visited two of Twombly’s major shows together - at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and then Brandhorst in Munich in 2017 where you Wouter were also there! For me the primal quality in his work is something I enjoy very much and as defined by Twombly himself in his 1957 manifesto, 'each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realisation.’[4]
WDB I remember vividly the visit to the Brandhorst, especially because of Cy Twombly’s impressive Lepanto cycle. The whole spectrum of emotions of a sea battle splashes out of the canvas. How did you turn this into fertile ground for your creation?
JBA In making the prints, I considered notions of repetition, marks, traces, shapes, micro-views such as envisaging the texture of the threads in the ‘rutted carpet’ that Jim talks about, or the tyre surfaces that are evoked in The Resort – possibly details the eye might fleetingly focus on whilst passing through the mental and physical spaces one inhabits whilst in the poems. With this mark-making and the different speeds at which it was actioned, perhaps there is an attempt to grasp and notate that which is slipping away, or, coming back into focus. Linocut printing can often be seen as a laborious and repetitive medium. I wanted the mark-making to be free by using as limited means as possible, through stripped-down compositions and allowing the negative space to be as important as the white lines that are revealed. I really like the schematic directness of black and white. In the end I made about 50 different linocuts and finally, together with your co-editor Stefanie (who is also my partner!), narrowed the selection down to the four that are in NU - companions to Jim’s poems but certainly not representations. I decided to title this body of work ‘Notations’, a word that has often been used in reference to the work of Cy Twombly. I liked this word because it suggests a form of sketching something out, an abbreviated expression of something that is fleeting or has a resonance.
‘In making the prints, I considered notions of repetition, marks, traces, shapes, micro-views, possibly details the eye might fleetingly focus on whilst passing through the mental and physical spaces one inhabits whilst in the poems. With this mark-making and the different speeds at which it was actioned, perhaps there is an attempt to grasp and notate that which is slipping away, or, coming back into focus.’
'Notation 18', 2020, Lino print on cartridge paper, 20 x 15 cm
WDB Can we consider these two separate creations with a third layer? Or should we rather consider the dynamics of two interacting disciplines, each with their specific creative potential for a reader/spectator? Reacting to pre existential works can be very enriching. Did the fact that it is the work of a friend give any extra dimension to it?
JBA ‘Both artistic expressions become companions, passing images back and forth- a dialogue waiting to be continued by reader and viewer.’[5]
I feel that an extra layer of significance and strength (to my prints at least) has been achieved through the partnership. The fact Jim is a friend has enabled over the last 10-15 years a creative dialogue to take place. We have had countless discussions about poetry, art, the truculence of Twombly, film and the ups and downs of the creative process and have collaborated before. There are not many situations artistically where you get the chance to respond so directly to someone else’s work and it is the friendship that allowed this to happen and a mutual respect for the ideas being put forward. Ultimately though, I was faced with words on a page and I wanted to tackle the essence of them without too much deliberation, almost ‘automatically’,[6] to maintain through the prints a ‘first-hand’ experience of the texts.
Often I find very exciting work comes from collaboration: directions and results are arrived at that could not have been foreseen. In my job of teaching art, I also see the dialogue between teacher and student, and, student and student, as a form of positive collaboration where ideas are thrown back and forth. The juxtaposing of different ideas in NU is clearly a very good example of how different creative platforms can operate side by side and create new partnerships. Having read the magazine a few times now, the strength is both the variety but also the fact that everyone has an individual voice even though they are brought together through the similar concept of ‘habitat’. Every time I have read it, I have certainly gained something from the re-visit.
WDB Are there connections you see with other works in NU issue01? How would you d describe that connection?
JBA Although 'habitat' was the initial starting point for NU, I also felt when reflecting on the contributions, an additional word that came to mind was 'periphery': many of the works address (not solely) the idea of spaces or places and ideas that exist on the margins of society, the edge of conurbations or the limits of the perceptible: mental spaces on the borderline between the conscious and unconscious[7]. A text that I have always been drawn to is Bernard Tschumi’s chapter ‘Questions on Space’ in Architecture and Disjunction[8]. He attempts to unravel ideas about how space is occupied or inhabited through a series of numerous proposals, for example,
‘If the understanding of all possible spaces includes social and mental space without any distinction, is the distinction between living, perceiving, and conceiving space a necessary condition of that understanding?’
Through the first issue of NU, we are presented with a variety of spaces that we are probably aware of on the periphery of our mind but are made more invitingly concrete through the text and images presented. I think the contributors are also processing the habitats they find themselves in.
‘An additional word that came to mind was 'periphery': many of the works address (not solely) the idea of spaces or places and ideas that exist on the margins of society, the edge of conurbations or the limits of the perceptible: mental spaces on the borderline between the conscious and unconscious.’
WDB Periphery can mean both a limitrophe place/edge or a 'marginal' position. While the latter is clearly used in negative contexts, the former is a neutral description. Would you say that the contributions to NU are circumventing this in order to try to grasp what is habitat? Is that outsider position a condition for that? The contributors of NU have claimed their territories to explore and so invite the reader to unravel or define the spaces presented. Could the spaces the contributors have documented or used as a backdrop for their narratives, now be called a ‘place’?
JBA The main reference that came to mind when considering this question was ‘Non-spaces’[9], an essay by the French philosopher Marc Auge. He discusses how ‘in-between’ spaces such as walkways and airport lounges have no real concept of ‘place’ due to their transient nature. I would extend this notion of the transient into the spaces depicted in NU, such as the refugee camps Frank Willems worked at in Grand-Synthe, the traces of human activity in the woods on the edge of the urban space that Danny Treacy is investigating, the internal and external landscapes of emotion that Igor Moritz captures indoors or the locations that are on the edge of our memory as witnessed in Jim’s poetry. This is not to say that the fleeting, transient or ‘marginal’ is not significant, it is more a state or space that must be ‘captured’ but through its very nature remains difficult to define. I feel new or current ideas of habitats and spaces are being confronted by the contributors in NU and the power of the work is that it allows the reader to also consider what these spaces might conjure in relation to their own history and experience. Interestingly, the word ‘limit’ comes from the Latin for ‘border’ and ‘limitrophe’, whilst it has historically been a French diplomatic word for a frontier dating back to the Roman times, for me conjures this physical or mental idea of being on the edge of something that is perhaps unknown.
‘One can obviously create new connections to a space or place, and the contributors in NU have, I believe, through walking, inhabiting or circumventing new spaces, put forward their experiences for the reader to ruminate on.’
In my own work, I have always considered how we occupy physical and mental space and so I also thought of Michael De Certeau’s book ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’[10], in which he discusses how people can influence environments around them by everyday actions: Individuals create meaning when walking through a space. I also liked the way De Certeau defines the verb "to walk" as an action of "lack[ing] a place”. Many of the spaces described in NU have involved some kind of journey (whether mental or physical) to find or experience thresholds, marginal positions or peripheries. Irina De Herdt’s, journey in ‘City Belts in Vialand’ is a form of pyschogeographic delineation. Your walk, Wouter, to the now approved lithium mine in ‘Montalegre’, as with De Herdt, seems to have a ritualistic quality to it, but reveals that ‘Nature’ is under threat: this peripheral area has now been adulterated and the future is uncertain. Danny Treacy, as ‘post-ethnographer’[11] is ‘drawn to territories where people gather as there is nowhere else to go’[12]. He exposes the remnants and traces left. On the edge of a conurbation as well, Kathrin Blum (in her essay ‘My Home the Forest’), has found stability, and quietly confronts this innate desire to feel part of something, to have a sense of belonging.
Ultimately, I was left thinking what happens when spaces on the periphery that are not meant to be inhabited by people, industry or activity become occupied, even just for a short time? Do the inhabitants or the ‘artists as ethnographers’ take on a new identity?
One can obviously create new connections to a space or place, and the contributors in NU have, I believe, through walking, inhabiting or circumventing new spaces, put forward their experiences for the reader to ruminate on.
With this in mind, maybe it is good to end on a question by Bernard Tschumi:
‘Does the experience of space determine the space of experience?’[13]
[1] James Peake, 2019, Two Rivers Press
[2] Sam Cornish, Introduction to Robert Motherwell, ‘Works on Paper’, originally published 11.10.2011, Bernard Jacobsen Gallery
[3] Ibid
[4] The Art Newspaper, ‘How to read a Cy Twombly’, Kenneth Baker, 28.11.2017
[5] Stefanie Braun in NU issue 01, September, 2020
[6] The idea of ‘accessing material from the unconscious mind’, as outlined by Andre Breton in the 1924 Surrrealist Manifesto referenced from the Tate website.
[7] In reference to one of my favourite exhibition catalogues, ‘Rites of Passage: Art for the End of The Century’, 1995, Tate Publications by Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris. In the introduction it mentions the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. He coined the term ‘the liminal’ (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold”) in his book ‘Rites of Passage’ (1909). This concept in my mind can be extended to a marginal or peripheral place where a new identity might be discovered or be in the process of transformation.
[8] MIT Press, 1994
[9] ‘Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’ by Marc Auge, Le Seuil, 1992, Verso
[10] It was originally published in French as ‘L'invention du quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de faire' (1980). The 1984 English translation is by Steven Rendall.
[11] After the essay by Hal Foster, ‘Artist as Ethnographer’ in Return of the Real MIT press, 1996 / annotation by Brandon Hopkins (Theories of Media, Winter 2003). The essay considers that reflexivity is essential for the artist but also there must be a balancing act between having too much distance from the ‘other’ or subject, or, to little.
[12] Danny Treacy for NU Magazine Issue 01, Introduction to ‘Collective Territories’, 2020
[13] 2.72 p58, ‘Architecture and Disjuncture’, Bernard Tschumi, 1994