Sketchbook

I have decided to make some change to Tour Stories. It made little sense in the way in which is was structured and so, from now on it will exist primarily as a Blog with RSS feeds and accompanying podcast.

I finally dyed all the cut pieces of string and put them on some newsprint to dry. Looking at them I was reminded, for some reason, of writing, of a mass of scribbled words which had been piled up on top of one another.

Having worked with a plate I left in the woods, I began to think about whether I could take a print from a used mirror? I like the idea of everything the mirror sees leaving a trace (as an imperfection) on the mirror's surface, as if each look rubs a part of it away. So I've decided to buy a few old mirrors from various charity shops and give it a try. Whether they would withstand the pressure of a press without breaking I don't know, and whether there would be enough abrasions on the surface to achieve anything on paper is another matter, but the idea is very appealing.

I recently received a copy of the transcript of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, his epic documentary about the Holocaust and read over the part of the film which had, on watching it, affected me so much. In that part, historian Raul Hilberg discusses a document, the Fahrplananordnung 587, an innocuous looking typewritten document (save perhaps for the word 'Treblinka') which he reveals, bit by bit, as being anything but innocuous; rather it is a document which in the beaurocratic language of timetables, represents the deaths of some 10,000 Jews. It is just one of many hundreds (the number 587 tells us how many); each of which is a cipher for unimaginable misery and suffering. What follows is part of that transcript:

This is the Fahrplananordnung 587, which is typical for special trains. The number of the order goes to show you how many of them there were, Underneath: Nur fur den Dienstgebrauch - 'Only for internal use.' But this turns out to be a very low classification for secrecy. And the fact that in this entire document, which after all deals with death trains, one cannot see - not only on this one, one cannot see it on others - the word geheim, 'secret' is astonishing to me. That they would not have done that is very astonishing.

On second thought, I believe that has they labelled it secret, they would have invited a great many enquiries from people who got hold of it. They would then perhaps have raised more questions; they would have focused attention on the thing. And the key to the entire operation from the psychological standpoint was never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action being taken. Say nothing; do these things; do not describe them. So therefore this 'Nur fur den Dienstgebrauch.' And now notice to how many recipients this particular order goes. 'Bfe' - Bahnhofe. On this stretch there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and here we are in Malkinia, which is of course the station near Treblinka. But notice that is takes eight recipients for this relatively short distance through Radom to the Warsaw district - eight, because the train passes through these stations. Therefore, each one has to know. Not only that, but of course you're not going to write two pieces of paper if you can write only one.

Therefore, we find here not only PKR, which is a death train, going here in the plan labelled thus, but we also see the empty train after it has arrived in Treblinka, now originating in Treblinka, and you can always know whether it's an empty train with the letter L in front of it, leer, and now -

Ruckleitung des Leerzuges, which means 'return of the empty train'.

- the train returns empty. And now we're going back. Then we have another train. Now notice that there is very little subtlety to this numbering system. We are going from 9228 to 9229, to 9230, to 9231, to 9232. Hardly any originality here. It's just very regular traffic.

Death traffic.

Death traffic. And here we see that starting out in one ghetto, which is obviously being emptied, the train leaves for Treblinka. It leaves on the thirtieth of September, 1942, eighteen minutes after four o'clock - by the schedule at least - and arrives there at eleven twenty four on the next morning. This is also a very long train, which may be the reason it is so slow. It's a 50G - fünfzig Güterwagen - fifty freight cars filled with people.

That's an exceptionally heavy transport. Now once the train has been loaded at Treblinka - and you notice there are two numbers here: 11:24, that's in the morning, and 15:59, which is to say almost four o'clock in the afternoon - in that interval of time the train has to be unloaded, cleaned and turned around. And you see here the same numbers appear as the Leerzug, the now empty train, goes to another place. And it leaves at four o'clock in the afternoon and goes now to that other place where is yet another small town where it picks up victims. And there you are at three o'clock in the morning. It leaves on the twenty-third at three o'clock in the morning. And arrives there the next day.

What is that? It seems to be the same train.

It is the same - quite obviously the same. The number has to be changed quite obviously. Correct. Then it goes back to Treblinka and this is again a long trip; and it now goes back to yet another place - the same situation, the same trip. And then yet another. Goes to Treblinka and then arrives in Czestochowa the twenty-ninth of September and then the cycle is complete. And this is called a Fahrplananordnung. If you count up the number of not empty trains but full ones - PKRs - there's one - there's one here, that's two, that's three, that's four - we may be talking about ten thousand dead Jews on this Fahrplananordnung here.

What I saw as being described here was in many respects a gesture of the Holocaust. The gesture of a thing, whether it is an object or a system, is essentially a movement and with this passage, the underlying movement of all the documented horrors becomes apparent. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, it is banal. So can I really discover the gesture of the Holocaust? Or at least a part of it?

Whilst writing up some notes on making lists as a strategy, I thought again of the Bill Viola quote I mentioned in the last entry. The following is taken from what I wrote concerning lists, starting with an extract from one of the first lists I made during my residency at OVADA:

engine purrs
yellow clothes
hiss
reverse warning sounds
food
pie 'n' pint
Leffe
thumbs up
zebra crossing
fat stomach
boarded windows

This I then turned into a 'prose' version:

An engine purrs. A woman with yellow clothes walks towards me. The hiss of a bus's brakes, and then its reverse warning sounds, telling of its departure. Outside the pub on a blackboard food is advertised; a pie 'n' pint. Leffe is also served here. A man gives a thumbs up as I cross the zebra crossing. A man with a fat stomach walks towards and then past me. Ahead, on the opposite side of the street, a shop and a restaurant stand empty with boarded windows.

The idea of single words, or 'hightlights' reminds me of Bill Viola's quote regarding our lives as a single moment.

"We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or 'highlights'."

The individual words are highlights, extrapolated from (or in this instance built into) a piece of prose (the 'same moment').

Thinking about the Three Fates project, I was considering how the individual fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, might somehow reflect the work I've been doing over the past year. As I thought about their roles, I realised that there were some interesting connections. Clotho for example, through her spinning yarn and creating life, reflects much of the work I've been doing regarding pathways and the coming-into-being (the unliklely, almost impossible coming-into-being) of the individual human. It is interesting that in much of my work and thoughts this year, I have been considering the pathways of our ancestors and visualising those pathways with, amongst other things, string (a tangle of string might represent the impossible pathways of ancestors). Lachesis of course represents the lifespan of the individual, and in the case of my work, the lives of individuals is a recurrent theme, particularly as regards my work on the Holocaust and World War One. Everything to do with life, our physical acts (such as walking) and the everyday, mundane objects which we encounter and which shape it, are represented by her. Atropos, who cuts the thread, is of course death, and I needn't say how she fits in.

Of course, much of my work deals with memory and Bill Viola's quote regarding how we have been "living this same moment ever since we were conceived," and how "it is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or 'highlights'", fits in with the 'action' of the three fates, who could be said to be dividing a single life into its component memories as well as Life with a capital 'L' into its separate lives.

Taking the work I have done so far on the knot installation, and looking at some of the ideas inspired by a set of recent free-drawings on the subject of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I decided to try out an idea I'd put down quickly in my sketchbook on the 20th.

This involved tying a few of the paper cups I'd shown at OVADA to the ends of the strings (which themselves, now dry and somewhat two-toned reminded me even more of wires) to emphasise the idea of these strings being ways to communicate with those who have come before us. The cups act as both a device for listening and a device for hearing and in that sense they are tools for dialogue. There are 50 strings altogether, and so, I initially tried the idea with about a dozen cups.

The idea worked well, although one loses a little, the sense of a string being cut, so I will just carry them through as separate works.

Today I began to cut up a few balls of string, cutting the strand into various lengths so as to indicate the different lengths of lives. It was interesting how as the pile grew, it had a completely different consistency to a ball of string that had become tangled, having been unravelled, dyed and left in a pile. It seems an obvious point to make but an observation that is nonetheless worth mentioning. It was on the second ball of string that I began to focus on the sound of the scissors and as I cut, I realised what the sound reminded me of - it was the sound of hair being cut. Of course the cutting of hair and the Holocaust have particular and distrurbing overtones, and on the third ball of string, I made a loop several strands thick and cut the lengths that way. In this respect, the thickness of the strings and the action of the scissors trying to cut through the threads became interesting to me.

I thought again of the ideas I have had recently where, three 'Fates' would pull tape through a reel to reel recorder. The action of the pulling - a violent action - when applied to the idea of Atropos cutting hair was particularly chilling.

Looking at the 'string' work I've been doing recently, the work with lines in the camp (railways lines, telegraph wires, barbed wire), threads, tape, Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos and scissors, it's interesting how the action (potential performance) of the Three Fates can be used in so many different ways when the fabric is changed. Certainly, this whole performance/action is something I want to explore thoroughly over the next few months.

The repeated images imply a memory one can't rid one's mind of and/or singular visions of many people. Represented on one page, one gets an image of confusion, panic. There is a sense of urgency about it.

"We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or 'highlights'."

I was thinking about the above quote from Bill Viola in relation to the myth of the Three Fates; Clotho, Lacheis and Atropo. I had imagined creating a work involving string being drawn, measured and cut as signifying life being measured and cut. This was to have been created in relation to my ongoing work on the Holocaust.

However, it could be that the lengths of string represent not only individual lives, but these discrete moments (memories) which Viola describes, i.e. moments of a single life. This could be very interesting as regards work which aims to find the individual amongst the millions who died in the Holocaust. A pile of cut strings could represent a pile of bodies, or, a pile of one person's memories.