Sorry, have we met? ...it's déjà vu all over again

Letter from an unknown woman (1948) directed by Max Ophüls - restored and re-opened at NFT/BFI Southbank. A trailer here. Starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan, Letter tells a Viennese tale of aching love, staircases, pedal-powered backdrops of journeys that go nowhere and the pretty lies that you tell to others and to yourself.

He, Stefan, a habitual chaser of women, a wasted talent, instinct shallow almost empty, undeserving the misplaced love from she, Lisa, the woman at 3 different stages of her young life, projecting onto his, if not blank, then vague canvas imagining a romance that for him was just one of a series of endless meaningless conquests. This is a beautiful witty movie tinged with delicious sadness, the dark ironies of unrequited love, of life's echoes, rhymes and circles. The film could be re-titled 'Love on a Staircase', from the opening to the end, stairs feature in beautiful long tracking and swooping crane shots; exquisite fluid movie-making that glides the viewer along.

To see both sides of this non-romance, the deceptions practised and the compulsive need to overthink and deceive oneself, you might ask of yourself, which of the protagonists do you act more like at different times? It is so risky to love anyone. You wonder how one beautiful memory can sustain an inner life, provide the oxygen for an illusion of reciprocal love. A neutral observer can see the lies when the deluded can not.

It is almost two stories - the delusion of one, the decline of the other. Their stories only barely intersect in actuality. But for one fleeting seduction he is oblivious to her existence (just one of many); her infatuation (he is The One), continues beyond any reality. His practised charm slipping into self-hatred, but both are destined to lose.

The knowing coyness of the earlier seduction reminds me of Joan Fontaine again a few years before in Suspicion (1941, Hitchcock) and her falling for another charming wrong'un, Cary Grant admiring her ucipital mapillary.

Ding dong dung

Went to see Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain, a mid-career retrospective of his painting career so far. The man who single-handedly increased the market value of elephant dung. I remember when Ofili's early work hit the headlines, saw the Turner Prize show in 1998. A trailblazer part of the YBA generation, but notably a YBBA (Young Black British Artist - Ofili is from Manchester with Nigerian parents) at a time in the 90s when there were very few black graduates from British art schools. He was 'the shit'. Those name-making early works were vividly coloured and patterned canvases presented standing on piles of elephant dung and included piles of dung glued to the surface.

Now what I didn't realise was that he milked the dung-wave dry for another 10 years or so. I can see what he was doing, tapping into raw materials of Africa, disrupting the picture surface with the incongruity, the assault against the other imagery - racial and sexual stereotypes in collage, bead-like application of shiny resin bright colours. Bling and dung. But I couldn't help feeling going through the array of his 90s work that his working practice must have become somewhat a tired gimmick, trapped by his own signature: right I've finished the painting, now where shall I stick the shit?

I was reminded of how with late Picasso's his actual signature got bigger as his efforts on the canvas got weaker. Buyers were paying for that signature, regardless of what else was in the frame.

It was interesting to see the evolution of Ofili's work post-dung. An interesting transition I thought was a series of green and red paintings where the dung pile protrusion was used pictorially - the dung over-painted and beaded placed to depict an elaborate beaming sun in scenes of African paradise. There was a maturity to this work; maybe when you've been an enfant terrible (and what terrible infant doesn't daub shit on any available surface), this is the next stage: first you make the shit ugly, then you make the shit beautiful to beguile people, then you leave the shit alone.

The Caribbean influence (Ofili has relocated to Trinidad) comes through in more recent dung-less paintings, also a Matisse influence comes into view. Glazes, darkness, and no protruding elephant dung. There is less audacity, less verve perhaps in the colours, less an obvious challenge, more atmospheric, more tuned into nature, climate and light, people and things half-seen in the twilight. Transferrring to Trinidad is bound to affect how you work, and it seems to me that these tall canvases aren't all completely successful, somehow not fully realised, but they are still seductive and mystical, self-seducing perhaps, as they again steer towards Afro-Caribbean stereotypes - a different time and place though, here perhaps of the colonialist kind, exotic, sexualised, by the mystical twilight quality of an outsider making home in the tropics.

Calle me, Calle me any, anytime

The Sophie Calle exhibition that was on at the Whitechapel. Bit late on blogging about this, as it has now been and gone from London, and onto the Netherlands.

The centrepiece exhibit is the installation 'Take Care of Yourself', a collaborative exploration of male-female relations triggered by the artist receiving a break-up letter (in fact an email) from her lover, ending in the words 'Take care of yourself'. In Calle's words:

"I asked 107 women... chosen for their profession or their skill, to interpret this letter. To analyse it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself."

So what we get from Calle, and her all-female collaborators is a multi-faceted dissertation on the "It's not you, it's me" break-up line; a mass of different readings from a mass of different women, dissecting, expanding, shooting holes through, and in some cases physically digesting the letter.

Calle has previous of course, in turning her life into art, and other works are shown here too. These often involve her ceding control of her life to some extent: letting others write rules for her to live by - fiction writers, tarot card readers - but she, certainly her collaborators are in control here. They slice through this unnamed man, his every word is picked apart, becomes evidence in the case against him. Not just every word but even every letter - the email is signed off with an X. Is this a kiss, an initial, or a code-name, a sign for 'ex', a symbol of mystery?

Was strangely reminded of this exhibition again while reading 'Rabbit at rest' (the fourth and last in Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series) where the Angstrom family, having been laid bare by Updike for over 30 years, play out the last strains of group attachments and individual isolation, male ego, female scorn. Both Calle's work and Updike's novel are comedies, rich in detail and insight, and human, both take the mundane and make it sublime. No spoilers here, but this from 'Rabbit at rest', on a family trip to a nature park staring out at flamingos on a lake, their odd one-legged stances, their upside-down-drinking scooped bills:

And they stand marvelling, the four human beings, as if the space between farflung planets had been abolished, so different do these living things loom from themselves. The earth is many planets, that intersect only at moments. Even among themselves, slices of difference interpose, speaking the same language as they do, and lacking feathers, and all drinking the same side up.

For me this excerpt gets at that self-reflective instinct with which art of any kind scores its deepest points. You look at a context outside of you and you think about yourself, it speaks to you. It’s different, the distance makes you think about togetherness. Distance (and togetherness) you feel when looking at something wholly (sacredly) weird and separate, how that can’t help but reflect back on what you do recognise in and among your own weirdly separate but connected existences. You feel the weight of ingrained (genetic?) impulse to recognition of something you don’t entirely trust or would ever consciously choose to belong to, but deeper down you know you do. Feeling part of a broader collective through pondering the granular specifics of someone else’s private life.

It is probably consistent that the insights of literature are brought to mind at this exhibition, (oh hang on, it’s vice versa ain’t it), as Sophie Calle is a literary artist. It is an exhibition you have to read, is about reading (interpreting), as well as the less tangible sensation that this apparent glimpse into someone else’s private world is like getting to know characters in a book. The overlapping layering up of readings creating a distilled essence of a moment, not everyone’s idea of a good read, but there are lovely insights here.

A schoolgirl’s reading of this worldly man’s words includes this veneer slicer:

He says he would have like things to have turned out differently.
That means they are going to turn out badly.

Haunted somewhat by the exhibition, as I am now by Updike’s Rabbit, I bought the catalogue – it is more than any other really the book of the exhibition, every word and performance reproduced in a chunky 40cm of glossy hardback.

I re-read ‘Exercises in Style’ by Raymond Queneau, a gift from a friend, destined to be recommended to other friends, present and future. Another comedy, and like Calle’s ‘Take Care of Yourself’ a succession of readings and treatments from a single starting point. ‘Exercises in Style’ is an odd read: 99 different versions of the same rather pointless story, entertaining and instructive; it is either a more trivial work than Calle’s or a more profound one, (or both), depending on your mood at the time.