Conversation at CBP Part I + II + III + IVCecilia Brunson talks with Nicolas Sanchez about the exhibition Meditation on an ending at Cecilia Brunson Projects Gallery
CECILIA Nicolas great to have you in London. I have to say that when you came with your first picture, I knew you had a really interesting project, and my fingers itched to make an exhibition. How did you come about these images of pubs at night?
NICOLAS London is so hyper photographed that I decided to start exploring the city at night, on its empty hours, on sunday midnights. One of the things that immediately caught my attention was this image of the pubs at their closing hour. This old british institution, this gathering place appeared for me in a whole new perspective. They were like sinking ships in the middle of the night, with a very seductive mix of pleasure and despair but in a kind of harmony. I was at first sight shocked and in love with this image.
CECILIA And the night itself has been a subject for so many artistic movements...
NICOLAS Especially for the Romantics, that I admire a lot... they found in the night an alternative to the clarity of the enlightenment. I think it is the same again...
CECILIA Yes!, and despite the darkness of the night, there is a sort of warmth coming out of the pub even though it’s at its closing hour...
NICOLAS It is part of this ambivalence of the image, although the pub is closing and this darkness is covering everything, then this sort of warmth appears... they, the patrons are a few, but they are carrying a fire, that is contrasting with the emptiness and quietude of the exterior. It is a very special and beautiful moment with a very special atmosphere...
CECILIA And if we associate the work with Hopper obviously, and Manet. Is that something you would associate yourself with?
NICOLAS It was unavoidable, when I saw these pub images, to think in Hopper’s Nighthawks and secondly in Manet as you point...
CECILIA I am thinking of his “Bar at the Folie-Bergere” painting...
NICOLAS Absolutely, this sad girl behind the bar... but mostly Hopper. He was the portrayer of the great depression at the United States, of the hopeless sensation behind the optimism in the economic growth. I love when hopper paints empty houses or buildings because he is actually painting people, portraits of people even though you can’t see them
CECILIA I find that really interesting, because, just like hopper was capturing that moment of depression, you are capturing a city in a moment where there is an absolute affluence, and it’s a culture of excess. Is this a sort of critique?
NICOLAS It’s just the bringing back of historic sensibilities... more than a critique I prefer to talk of an awareness of the gigantic shadows that the future projects in our present -following Shelley, the poet-. And part of the seductiveness of these images is that you can see that affluence but you also can see the other side of the story.
CECILIA Aha, and in this image for example?. What’s that’s story behind?
NICOLAS This has been Martha’s family pub for over 80 years. I know the story because many times, waiting for the perfect time, I went inside the pub and started talking with their owners. Martha is selling the pub, she is closing, nobody is coming, a buyer wants to build luxury apartments there. So I tried too, to make these portraits of pubs, like people’s portraits, just in the way I think Hopper did.
CECILIA In the photos, but particularly in the video, as a viewer, it is very captivating and you feel a bit like a voyeur...
NICOLAS The idea was to immerse the viewer in this special atmosphere. It is very voyeuristic at first sight, but sometimes you get into the image and become part of the scene too...
CECILIA And this kind of mounting of the photos, I think it helped a lot
NICOLAS Exactly. At a quick look, you only see glare and reflections. But having a second gaze you start to see things, you penetrate the surface, you get into the scenery and find details in the shadows and capture the whole atmosphere. It was a way for slowing down the images...
CECILIA And that’s what I find very appealing as well about this project. Normally I find that in photography, you look at pictures and you capture things immediately, whereas painting needs a different kind of time. And what these photographies do, it’s linking both worlds. There is a moment when you begin to see, to discover…
NICOLAS In all my works I always try to slow down the images with a steady and contemplative gaze and aesthetics. This has to do with the actual difficulty of the images to trigger a dive into ourselves. Most images nowadays only allude to the immediate, to the external. I think that art must be capable of slowing down the images as well as ourselves, to make us look inwards and detonate some sort of enquiry...
CECILIA It’s like when your eyes need a moment to be able to see after entering a dark room
NICOLAS Yea that is a beautiful metaphor!
CECILIA And the title of this series... is ‘We spin around the night’, which is also the title of Guy Debord’s 1978 film...
NICOLAS That’s right. The Situationists appeared, as in most of my work, in the act of wandering around the city at night looking for pubs. So this gave the name to the original photo series, although the exhibition is called Meditation on an ending. It is an old latin palindrome that Debord rescued –in my point of view- as a tribute to those who are searching without sleeping and get burnt by the fire...
CECILIA So the performative component of your work... it is present here too?
NICOLAS Absolutely. Although I do not appear explicitly, for me the performative work is as present as in the other pieces. When you see the whole photo series and the video, with their titles that refer to specific places around the city, you realize in your mind the performance itself. This drifting was the performance and it is very present for me in a more metaphorical and beautiful way sometimes.
CECILIA Your practice works really nice, reading it as an ethnographical investigation... you travel to different places and do very different things but all linked in a way.
NICOLAS Every place I have inhabited for long or short periods, was a trigger for me. My creative process is deeply linked to a place, it’s a response to it, to a reality. It is a buffer for approaching it, for being capable of assimilating what I like but also what scares me
CECILIA And where next?
NICOLAS London still has a lot to squeeze!
CECILIA: Ok Nicolas, great to have you here.
NICOLAS Thanks to you and all the best and luck with your new project
Nicolás Sánchez (b.1981) is a Chilean artist currently living in London. His practice is driven by an interest in the situations that highlight, and even suggest an alternative to, the conditions of capitalist society. Often this is realised through his own journeys or interventions in urban and rural spaces, which are then presented as short films and photographic series. In Wild rosehip jam (slow food) (2008), he recorded the making and sharing of jam made from fruits picked on a walk through the periphery of the city; in La balsa de Noe (living off) the fat of the land (2011) he documented his navigation of Chile’s Mapocho River on a raft that he constructed from the waste that clogs its waters.
Continuing his interest in the idea of landscape as performance, in Sánchez’s latest series his journey took the form of a pub crawl – although not in the traditional sense. Roaming London’s streets on Sunday evenings during the winter, he adopted the position of the lone outsider looking in, to capture pubs in the hour before closing on the slowest night of the week.
Consisting of a video and six of his series of thirteen photographs, Meditation on an Ending is Sánchez’s first solo UK exhibition and the inaugural exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects. His work has been shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions including the MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile, Borges Cultural Centre, Argentina, and BAC Festival Barcelona, Spain. In 2009 he won the Juan Downey award for video creation. Below, Emma Lewis recently interviewed Sánchez about the background to his works currently on show in London.
Emma Lewis: You have previously described your work in terms of a critique of capitalism: specifically, the idea of observing or creating situations and gestures that counter the homogeneity fostered under this ideology. How did you seek to develop this position in Meditation on an Ending?
Nicolás Sánchez: In all the cultural and artistic movements that interest me (the German Romanticism, the Decadentists, the flâneur poets of the modern era, the Hudson River School, to mention just a few), the night as an image and as a metaphor has been a recurrent subject. Especially during the Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century, the night represented an alternative to the suffocating clarity of the Enlightenment, and a fascination with the obscure arose in response to the excesses of rationalism and its misleading utopian promises. Meditation on an Ending brings back this same feeling that the Romantics experienced in their time. Because of the optimistic view based on science and technology as the solutions for all of our problems, we experience a misleading sensation of plenitude, we think everything is being clarified by these means, but – I think – it is not. Mainly because our existence is diverse and random by nature. Meditation on an Ending is an exercise of turning the gaze inwards, to the night of the self, to the infinite night, to the sombre future, to an ending.
EL: What interested you about the pub, specifically the institution of the British pub, with regards to this mood or spirit?
NS: First I was fascinated with the traditional pub as an image (the different decorative styles, the hanging pots outside, the names, those particular signs, and so on) but didn’t know what to do with it. Then I started understanding it as an old institution of convener spirit, as a gathering place for artists, intellectuals, writers, poets, bohemians, drunks and anonymous nighthawks, that have always defied the hours and challenged the norm that keeps them contained but never content. So then I started pub-crawling at night with my camera at that damn hour when pubs are almost closing. Obviously Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) appeared, as did Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), and with them, these images of pubs like sinking ships in the night, a mix of pleasure and despair in a kind of contradictory harmony. It is again the bringing back of historic sensibilities: Hopper was the portrayer of the great depression at the United States, of the emptiness, anguish and hopeless sensation behind the curtain of blinding optimism and faith in the economic growth and material progress.
EL: In the video we observe a pub in this ‘damn hour’. A patron’s occasional, steady movements and an outside light that flickers sporadically are the only movements in an otherwise very still, quiet scene. Is your attention to slowing down and relative absence of action intended as a part of your mode of critique?
NS: In my work there has always been a steady and contemplative gaze and aesthetics. This has to do with the difficulty of images [succeeding in] triggering a dive into ourselves. Most images nowadays – even if they succeed to refer to something else than themselves, even if they get past the surface, to dig furthermore – even then, they only allude to the external. To be able to turn towards the internal, looking inwards, and spark an enquiry – not a desire – art must be capable of slowing down the images as well as ourselves. My works in general and Meditation on an Ending in particular are directed towards this, through a contemplative approach. More than criticizing without pointing to solutions, I look for an awareness of the gigantic shadows that the future projects in our present. That is how I like to read the video you mention, as a metaphor: While the city sleeps and the shadows cover everything, a few people plot their own revolutions, getting lost around the nights to be found in a new way every day, changing everything, changing themselves.
EL: A number of the works in the series are titled ‘We spin around the night’, from the palindrome ‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’ (‘We spin around the night consumed by fire’), the title of Guy Debord’s 1978 film of the same name. Could you explain the significance of this?
NS: Actually this was my second finding, after Hopper and Manet. The Situationists appeared, again as in most of my work, in the act of crawling itself, of drifting around the city at night looking for pubs. The group led by Debord, that as part of the historic avant-gardes vociferated for changing everything from the root, conducted urban derivés as a way to change a world that suffocated them with boredom, juxtaposing to the city grid a human one. So this gave the name to the original photo series, although the exhibition is called Meditation on an Ending. It is an old Latin palindrome as you point it out, that Guy Debord rescued – in my point of view – as a homage to those who are searching without sleeping, to the wakeful who can not rest and get burnt, consumed by the fire while they are spinning around the nights.
EL: Did you apply any structure to your movements through the city? How were you guided around?
NS: I never make any plans in the first attempts. Here I let myself be guided by the night and its power to sharpen our senses. In the middle of the (partial) darkness, silence and solitude, everything resonates in a stronger way; the unknown and the uncertain awake anxieties, fears…. but also cheerfulness and quietude. That frightening beauty that the Romantics called the feeling of the sublime: that is my compass. Unlike controlled causal processes, the creative process – life itself, following Beuys – is not foreseeable. There has to be space for the casualty and imagination, especially at that numinous time at night when forms are ever-changing and diluted. It is a search for metaphors rather than answers, as the only possible way to capture the transcendental which most of the time is blurred or only insinuated.
EL: With the idea of drifting, or the derivé, in mind, I wonder what degree of importance you place on the specifics of geography and location? (For example, the pub frontage and also the red postbox seen in one image are indicative of the country you are in – but the name of the particular establishment has been digitally removed.) What was the decision behind this relative anonymity?
NS: The first cut I did among the pubs that left an impression on me, was to discard the too-bustling pubs and the over or under illuminated ones. After that, I digitally removed only the signs with the names of each pub, not looking for a denial of the place, but in an intention to extend the metaphor to any other pub. The postboxes, phone cabins, transit signage and slightly distinctive frontage of many pubs, despite speaking of a specific country (a detail that I like), are mostly generic urban furniture or archetypal typologies, so I didn’t consider them to interfere with the poetic play. The intent behind this selection process is to choose the best way to give the known the dignity of the unknown, as Novalis says, a higher meaning to the commonplace, to the ordinary a mysterious appearance.
EL: And how about choice of time, too? As you mention there is a sense of quietude, even melancholy, captured in these images of the Sunday evening in the hour before closing time – a feeling that may not have been evoked had you shot at a different time, on a different day of the week….
NS: Absolutely. Going back, London is a place endlessly photographed, full of images of its appearance, immersing myself in its night was the way for me to slow down the images, to make them point inwards again, where we never look in these times of insistent expellant images that have failed – or never wanted – to show us the elemental paradoxes of human condition. The quietude of Sunday midnights were a beginning for this elegy of the night, for those who are looking for themselves, who are in search of something they don’t know but that does not let them sleep, for those who don’t believe in mass revolutions but in small, silent conspiracies.
Untitled (The Lansdowne, Primrose Hill)We spin around the nights Series
Digital C-print, Mounted on Aluminium and Perspex
60 x 40 inches
Entre el 19-22 Septiembre 2013, estaré mostrando algunas fotos de la serie We spin around the nights en la Feria Summa Madrid, sección Up, junto a Gerardo Pulido, Catalina Bauer, Josefina Guilisasti, Tomás Rivas y Francisca Valdivieso bajo Cecilia Brunson Projects.
+ info at http://summafair.com/
Silent plot (The White Lion, Barbican)We spin around the nights video Series
1080p HD video, ∞ loop, 27” LED Screen, Aluminum case 25” x 15” x 2” inches
Por Nicolas Sanchez
Cuando lo claro se vuelve difuso, lo conocido incierto, lo evidente misterioso y lo definido sin límites precisos, aparece un nuevo territorio libre donde coinciden -como en el tango- sabios, suicidas, amantes. La noche como imagen, despierta consigo asociaciones que han estimulado desde siempre el trabajo de artistas, músicos, poetas y escritores con pasajes notables en los románticos alemanes del siglo XVIII, el movimiento decadentista de fin de siglo (XIX) y los poetas flaneurs de la vida moderna. Pero son dos pasajes en el arte del siglo XX los que sirven de punto de partida en este viaje: la pintura Noctámbulos (1942) de Edward Hopper y las derivas de la Internacional Situacionista (1957-1972) encabezada por Guy Debord.
Hopper fue el retratista de la gran depresión estadounidense. Tras su pintura de paisaje urbanos, se colaba el retrato de una nación acosada por la angustia, el agobio y la desesperanza. Sus protagonistas son personajes taciturnos, ciudadanos abandonados en la soledad de las habitaciones de hotel, de los suburbios, en el tedio infinito de despachos sombríos. Incluso en sus cuadros sin personajes, donde la ciudad se presenta vaciada y decadente, la arquitectura cobra vida humana; pinta casas, fábricas y edificios, pero son personas. Los Noctámbulos es un resumen magistral de su personal estética, donde sus melancólicos personajes naufragan por las noches apoyados en barras de bares sin sueños.
The sun descending in the west, The evening star does shine; The birds are silent in their nest, And I must seek for mine. Night by William Blake
Si Hopper fue el pintor del silencio que sigue al optimismo del progreso material, la Internacional Situacionista se sumó a la avanzada de las vanguardias históricas que vociferaban por cambiarlo todo. Desarrollaron la teoría y práctica de la psicogeografía, que planteaba el caminar como un instrumento de interpretación del territorio y al mismo tiempo de modificación simbólica de un sistema inhumano, una sociedad inerte y un mundo que los asfixiaba. Así, abogaban, en principio, por una nueva ciudad, para terminar planificando una nueva sociedad y un nuevo mundo que quebrantase los habituales parámetros de estabilidad y producción capitalista que los mantenia en el aburrimiento, la más moderna forma de control social. De alguna manera, los Situacionistas radicalizan el legado del flaneur que Benjamin detectó en Baudelaire como metáfora nítida de las paradojas de la vida moderna, ese ciudadano melancólico que contemplaba con distancia el éxtasis del progreso y la vida urbana.
… y el fuego nos consume
Bares retratados en plena oscuridad de la noche. El encuadre a media distancia muestra partes de su exterior en sombras, calles vacías iluminadas sólo con la débil luz de las farolas, buzones de correo, bicicletas sin dueño, veredas desoladas. El interior encendido de los bares nos invita a entrar y nos entrega pistas sobre lo que ocurre en su interior. Un puñado de personas parecieran estirar con calor esa hora maldita en que los bares a punto están de cerrar.
Borroneados digitalmente los letreros distintivos de cada pub, su carácter anónimo extiende su metáfora a cualquier bar de esquina. La silueta, deformada y borrosa de los parroquianos a causa de la exposición múltiple y larga de la cámara acentúa esta sensación.
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves. Gandhi
Las tomas contemplativas y silenciosas -agudizada la sensibilidad por el deambular nocturno- contrastan con la pequeña energía en su interior. Individuos que en su complicidad e incesante movimiento parecieran gestar una revolución, montar una fiesta improvisada o quizás simplemente emborracharse hasta la médula antes del fin. Pero los noctámbulos de todas las épocas han desafiado los horarios y con ello las normas que los mantienen contenidos y nunca contentos, y ese impulso que se mantiene intacto es el que la fotografía intenta rescatar. Ya no es el silencio de Hopper ni el radicalismo situacionista para cambiar el mundo de raíz; mientras afuera la ciudad duerme, otros traman su propia revolución en el interior de sus corazones, se pierden por las noches para encontrarse de forma nueva cada día, para cambiarlo todo cambiando ellos mismos.
La Serie Damos vueltas por las noches toma su nombre del antiguo palíndromo en latín In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (damos vueltas por las noches y el fuego nos consume) -que Guy Debord rescató- como un homenaje a los que buscan sin dormir, a los que llevan el fuego, a los que la vigilia y el desvelo les enciende porque no pueden dormir sin sueño.
Public Houses: una breve historia
Hacia mediados del siglo XVIII, el centro de Londres contaba un pub cada 116 personas. Centro neurálgico de negocios, trabajo y transporte, impulsó el establecimiento de espléndidos coaching inns, donde los viajeros podían estacionar los coches, cambiar los caballos, descansar y por supuesto, comer y beber. Pero durante el siglo XIX, la llegada del ferrocarril disminuyó los tiempos, acortó las distancias, y se llevó con su velocidad este tradicional tipo de establecimientos.
Pero al tiempo que desaparecían las casas de postas, el Beer Act de 1830 bajo el reinado de William IV que liberalizó las regulaciones para la fermentación y venta de cerveza, expandió por toda Inglaterra las Public Houses y breweries. A los tiempos de pubs en cada esquina, le siguió luego el auge de los Palacios de Gin en la época Victoriana, -de donde proviene la imagen ícono a la que se asocia el pub inglés- y los últimos años a la moda de recreación, modernización o estandarización de grandes cadenas. Pero si hay algo que no ha cambiado es su espíritu convocante, atomizador como lugar de encuentro de artistas, intelectuales, escritores, poetas, bohemios y noctambulos anónimos.
La historia -y las leyendas- cuentan de que Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese ha recibido en sus barras a través de los años al escritor Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), a su colega Charles Dickens (1812-1870), al poeta escocés John Davidson (1857-1909) y al irlandés William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). En la Fitzroy Tavern saciaban su sed el pintor Galés Augustus John (1878-1961), su paisano poeta Dylan Thomas (1914-1953, aunque había pocos bares de los que Thomas no hiciese su hogar), y el escritor George Orwell (1903-1950), cerrando la jornada los dos últimos en The Wheatsheaf, luego de tranquear 2 largas cuadras hacia el sur. Y la lista sigue; The Grapes frente al Támesis -citado por Dickens en una de sus novelas-, The Lamb frecuentado también por este último y The French House, popular entre artistas y escritores como el Irlandés Brendan Behan (1923-1964), otra vez Dylan Thomas y Augustus John, el pintor Francis Bacon (1909–1992), su colega Lucian Freud (1922-2011) y el novelista Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957). De los antiguos coach inn’s originales quedan The George en Southwark, pareado al desaparecido The Tabard, lugar en el que Geoffrey Chaucer da inicio a sus Canterbury Tales y The Spaniards Inn en Hampstead que cuenta entre su no despreciable lista de parroquianos con el romántico inglés John Keats (1795-1821), Charles Dickens (...), el autor de Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), el poeta y pintor simbolista William Blake (1757-1827), sus colegas Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), John Constable (1776-1837) y William Hogarth (1697-1764), Mary Shelley (1797-1851) -Frankestein- y Lord Byron (1788-1824) -Don Juan-, entre muchos otros.
