Neville Wakefield

Vija Celmins: Works 1964 - 96
Published by ICA, London, 1997
ISBN: 9781900300049

‘Long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat impossible-to-believe America in New Mexico under the prisoners’ moon...’01 Such Was Jack Kerouac; scripting of Robert Frank’s desolate shot of US route 285, a black and white ribbon of asphalt unspooling across a featureless desert landscape. The photograph is situated is the heart of The Americans. An emigré’s paean to dis-location, Frank’s romancing of the road brings with it a nostalgia born of immensity - an endless procession of mineral surfaces and motel interludes, from which pictorial content has been all but abolished in favour of the single motif of traversal. Staring ahead we see horizons that recede as they are approached - timelines permanently screened between the proscennial dashboard and the rear-view mirror. Parcelled out by road markings and utility poles, time and space are measured by man-made integers of faith, punctual promises of measure and communication. The desert of New Mexico belongs in Frank; vision to the iconography of movement, of highways and the mythological attachment to numbers - of 285, 66, and so on - where the metaphysics ot speed eliminate the picturesqueness of travel. The road is a tissue stretched through the desert. Driving is the rite that initiates us into emptiness; the speedometer clock that reads zero as landscape rushes by.

In 1966, almost exactly a decade after Frank took to the road seeking narrative lines of interconnected lonelinesses, Vija Celmins painted Freeway. Largely monotonal, it too is based on a snapshot of a journey, albeit in tnis case a prosaic commute. In front of us we see the main artery connecting Venice Beach to Irvine, California where the artist was teaching painting and drawing. It is a painting of modest dimensions from which colour has been filtered out, as if deadened by emissions, the conspiracy of gasoline and geography, the suffocating pall of the LA basin. Anchored to the foreground by the interior landscape of the car we ride with Celmins through the tunneling orthogonals of a freeway system, staring ahead. Our senses and gaze seen dulled by familiarity. Where Frank’s writing of ‘dewy exposures to infinity in black space’02 was a hymn to the attenuation of the road - to a new kind of elapsed experience syncopated to the rhythm of the windscreen wipers - Celmins’ painting suggests also a gradual cooling of the Beat romance.

Both Images pay certain homage to the road as kinaesthetic thread. In each case it is pictured as a line drawn through landscapes of disconnection, the linking expanses of desert and concrete, of localities without locals. But Celmins’ remaking of the photograph also brings with it a deadening of Frank’s amphetamine narratives.

Freeway is marked only by slowness. It is as it the paint undoes the theology of landscape as the unraveling of vision. Born less of movement than of its slipstream, Celmins’ vision appears caught forever in the turbulence between the thing and its passage. The diffuse glare of a low Pacific sun, rather than momentum which consigns the billboards to darkness, a banal signage of empty facts. And for the time being the clock has stopped. An image frozen like a line in the road, momentarily held in the eye before rushing to join the linear blur.

The source of the image may have been the transparent medium of the photograph, its depiction of space ostensibly tied to that of the traveler’s eye -the demarcated America of slip roads, intersections and interstices, the relentless organisation of the inchoate West into the tidy rhythms of stop/start traffic, of freeways and motels, motion and rest. Yet Celmins’ vision also brings With it an intimation of uneasiness with the confines of such predetermined experiential paths. Her ear seems less tuned to the song of the road than to its abstract materiality. For the route that it depicts is clouded and opaque as if clogged with the inertia of the brushstroke and the substance of paint. Just as the Sysiphean task of surface transcription rests uneasily with its quotidian subject, so its stillness seems at odds with a landscape bowed by the laws of motion. Freeway might be Celmins’ only image of the Web of acculturisation that binds the desolate, open spaces of the American West into the narrative imagination, but it also contains Within it the premonition of future Work; the suggestion perhaps, to paraphrase the slogan of ‘68, that underneath the asphalt and concrete lay the desert.

In 1964, two years prior to Freeway, Celmins painted a series of Works based on the objects around her. Heater, Lamp, Hotplate and Fan are painted in the tradition of still-life. The objects themselves are positioned in the pictorial space with lepidopteral precision. True to the traditions to which they apparently deter, their stillness at first appears to be the stillness of time. But the objects Within are anything but dead. The heater and hot plate continue to glow. An electrical cord trails from the arched mandibles of the gooseneck lamp. Another appears from behind the squat body of a fan. Clearly these are portable appliances capable of being plugged into any situation, simply turned on at the Wall. And just as Freeway brings with it the suggestion of stillness beneath the tunneling narrative vision, so the dis-ease of the still-life objects springs from the possibility of movement: of unseen power outlets and implied connections.

Far from being hermetic and still, Celmins’ paintings of domestic objects seem curiously agitated. Like autistic props from narratives yet to be devised, they are offered as sites of inaction staked out with the vacant stare of a Weary detective. The gaze is more ‘film noir’ than ‘nature morte’. Circuits of narrative enclose their apparent stillness. Networks of cause and effect poised at the periphery of vision threaten at any moment to waken the image from narrative sleep. Like film noir cutaways the gun glimpsed in the drawer or the blade briefly caressed - Celmins’ domestic objects come loaded With portent. All it would seem to take is the throw of a switch or the itching of the trigger finger to spring them from their inertial prisons. Disjunctive in time and dislocated in space, they stand poised to rejoin the flow of action, like accidents Waiting to happen.

Towards the end of the sixties Celmins began to produce a new body of work for which the accounting of space and time radically changed. Switching her interest away from the shading of events held just outside the frame she began to focus on what she would later term “impossible images, impossible because they are non-specific, too big, spaces unbound”03, specifically those of the moon, the desert and the sea. It was a conversion that might be read through the films of Michelangelo Antonioni of the same period. The Passenger and Zabriskie Point were made in 1975 and 1969 respectively. Both movies relate a foundering of narrative in which the desolation of landscape -the North African and Californian deserts - progressively engulfs the story to become the character of the film. Throughout the opening sequences of The Passenger, set in a small town on the fringe of the Sahara, no one recognizes or even acknowledges the presence of the protagonist. The lead character has assumed a dead man’s identity, but no one around him knows or cares. The indifference of the desert and its inhabitants gradually rises around story and setting, like a relentless tide. Specular unity starts to dissolves before our eyes, as the lead character, deprived of the refuge of narrative, himself slowly unravels. All that we are left with is a series of dissolutions, of slow planar adjustments -the fixing of once familiar objects With a look so intense that they seem to lose their context and stare back at us - as the desert gnaws through the narrative strands dissolving difference in its sameness. For Antonioni and Celmins, the call to the desert is to the dead time outside of narrative, where everything has been done, Where motion eclipsed by silence and emptiness makes way for acts of pure observation. The result is a sort of ‘temps morts’ for which minor changes of scale -the tilting of possibility one Way or the other- make Way for a protracted and poetic inspection of surface substance.

Made in the closing minutes of the sixties, Zabriskie Point tracks similar themes. Set in the Berkeley campus upheavals of ‘68, a gunshot triggers the main protagonists flight from the strictures of the past, awakening him to the futility of protest and the endeavour of change. Stealing a light aircraft he takes the camera aloft, tracking slow circles around the city of Los Angeles before heading out to the desert. From this point on the plot is lost. It is as it the liquidity of narration had itself fallen victim to the parched anhydrous landscape. Societal boundaries disappear, and with them the time of their making. History, ethics and mnemonics are given over to the experience of the desert. Dissolved under the spell of continual discontinuity everything is the same but different, everywhere but nowhere. It is as if the events preceding the protagonists’ involuntary exile become calcified in the surrounding geology. Speaking of the need “to confront the conventions of narrative with visual evidence, to overturn the story with facts”04, the Italian film-maker might have been describing Celmins’ own visual ruminations upon desertion, that become the shades of the ocean, desert, galaxies and lunar seas.

Whether the events of the late sixties played any role in Celmins’ own decision to concentrate on spaces unbounded by the forces of historical animation is harder to say. Undoubtedly from that point on narrative intimations have been abandoned in favour of an intensity of surface description. The ‘nouvelle vague’ in literature and film may Well have been influential -in the early sixties the artist professed an appreciation of the work of Robbe-Grillet, admiring ”the way he repeats passages many times over to build a very concrete image over the course of the work”05 - but it also perhaps belonged to part of the more general experience of dis-location described by Joan Didion in her reflections on the same period: ‘I was supposed to have a script, and I had mislaid it’, she Writes in The White Album. ‘I was supposed to hear cues and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no meaning beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in narratives intelligibility, but to that one could change the sense with every cut was to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.’06 Such a diffusion of time and space from its narrative alloy - of travel, the frontier and the continuity of history - opens onto the preferred spaces of Celmins’ later oeuvre: the uncircumscribed spaces of pure description.

Taking her meticulous ‘electrical’ acts of observation into these expanses, Celmins seems to find in the concentrated intensity of their rendering a topography of process. Like the desert itself, her depictions of it seem born from pacts of Wear and erosion made between the elements. Created slowly over long periods of time they demand a similar slowing of perception. Layer upon layer of charcoal and graphite provides a visual density born of minute alterations of pressures and resistances felt between paper and marker. Just as the deserts themselves were once underwater reliefs, so too the charcoal stasis of Celmins’ galaxies and seas transforms them into deserts. This is the sense in which all of these works belong to the category of the ‘smooth’ or deserted spaces described by Deleuze and Guattari. Ambulant spaces as yet untouched by narrative geometries they are the places Where ‘there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour, visibility is limited: and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that does not rely on points or objects, but on haecceities, on sets of relations (Winds, undulations of snow or sands, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice); it is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic,’ a sonorous much more than a visual space...’07 Forged out of the linking of proximities independent of any determined path, Celmins’ deserts are neither land nor landscape, but geology - time’s song - made visible.

Enigmatic and beguiling, the power of Celmins’ vacant terrains lies not in the chemistry of substances but in the impassivity with which they are put to Work. Resisting the theatrical grandeur of the canyons or the romantic appeal of the crashing seas, she favours instead surface tensions created out of minute and barely perceptible agitations. The seascapes, like the desert scapes, though transcribed from photographs that the artist would take from the pier on Venice beach or her Walks in Death Valley, are also depictions of all seas, and all deserts. Yet despite Celmins’ predilection for the impossible it has little in common with the nineteenth century treatment of the same subject, With Caspar David Friedrich, the heavens, seas and ruinous landscapes are recruited as monuments not to themselves but to the human insignificance with which they are held in awe. They are infused with the meaning and melancholia of a singular isolated vision. For Friedrich, the natural sublime was the experience of limits, Where thought and vision faced by the unpresentable turns in on itself. Such is the romantic inversion that sought to resurrect grandiosity out of frailty, to calibrate mortality in the face of timelessness. Nothing could be further from the modesty With which Celmins makes time manifest.