…the fiction of a hill…

 

 

 

Letter to X
by kfpieters (notes on process) 

The Harbour Studio Years, Or How to Ask the Question, ‘What is a Life?’
by Christina Barton

She was only ever what she was; and always is what she was now . . .
Concerning the Work of Kim Pieters , by Carl A. Mears.

The Return Gesture
Hamish Clayton in conversation with Kim Pieters.

There is Time for Waking Slowly – Kim Pieters’ The Golden Fields
by Abby Cunnane

Michel Henritzi (France), asks Kim Pieters (New Zealand), some questions for the magazine
Revue & Corrigee (France).

 

 

quote from ‘the desert Homeric
by Sally Ann McIntyre

 

 

 

 

dear x.

i have a plan!!! i think we should go back to the beginning. back to a sort of foundation that will at least provide an anchor with regard to your questions. i have only recently become aware that i, myself have had a blind spot with regard to discussion about the underlying premises that inform my work. i am happy to answer enquiries but i have noted with puzzlement that there is often a lack of basic grounding in ‘questions’ and therefore my answers inevitably only give part of any meaning and then float off into voids. i knew i was missing something whenever i discussed the work. it seems i have remained silent on what is most close to me and oddly that thing is presence.

letter to X

i am going to attempt to discuss this ground. . i am not sure what this will do and it could be a complete failure. anyway i will try and i am going to write a series of small paragraphs. (well i hope) that start at a beginning and send them to you. part one. part two etc. any one of them may or may not be useful to you. hopefully things will become much clearer and my answers/examples will make more sense to you. i will write them quickly and send to you. i have part one!. will send now xxx k

 

 

part 1: the method

…my process has always been emergent and non-representational, (about the age of 22 actually, way before i could name it. before a naming ‘language’ therefore….. it is an experience that i have absolutely believed in for nearly forty years.)) (why is another discussion) it does not matter if i am making music, making films, taking photographs, painting or drawing, graphics and heaven forbid writing. (hence my difficulty with linear thought)

what i mean by emergent is that an action is decided on and delivered in that moment, without predetermination and in response to the field at hand. the field itself being in constant flux.    a play therefore of a particular presence inside time and space.   by non-representational i mean i have no intention of re-presenting anything. (not a tree, an expression etc etc) i am creating something of itself in the time i make it. this across genres but let us concentrate on painting. these words…..chance, necessity, contingency, choice.

diversion to improvisational music for a moment …..in the improvised music that i was involved in, you would of course have an instrument that you played. (the instrument could be a tin can, a toy, a computer, a bass guitar or any manner and combination of things) you got to know the sounds of your chosen instruments. no doxa. no orthodox chords. one just concentrated on the sounds it made. one could be simple or complicated when playing the thing. and then—when playing with others—the point for me was to listen intently to what sounds were being produced and to answer or to fold into those sounds a ‘choice’ from the sounds that i could play with my instrument. it was a choice made in that moment. in response to that moment. no preconceived notion or result in mind.

the result however was often highly original. sometimes it ‘worked’ other times not. what makes it work or not is another discussion. we must get on.

in the same way when i make a painting i have various criteria at my fingertips. i have the knowledge of the gestures i have made with colour and line over many years. these gestures are the ‘sounds’ i can draw on at any one moment. again no doxa. just the experience of looking and acting with colour and line. i draw on these gestures repeating them and as i do they manifest themselves differently each time. there is always a losing and finding and repeating of gestures.

one of the Most interesting things for me when i begin a work is that i have no idea what the end result is going to be. i cannot predetermine what decisions i might make at any one time in the process. the whole thing is very sensitive to initial and ongoing conditions. simplifying here, i will say…….i begin. i make a mark, this mark needs a response. i make another mark in response to the first. this gives me a completely new arrangement in which i then have to decide what is necessary for the whole field and the next marking. i draw on my knowledge of my gestures. i continue until the composition is finished to my satisfaction. therefore the work is finished when there is no more to add nor subtract from the field according to me at that moment. i might decide something different on a different day or at any one moment in the proceedings.

the image that this process gives me at the end is always shocking! it is something new. something has emerged that i have never seen before. an enigma. it is a thing to itself and therefore open to the world and to me, its first viewer and then to others. the other viewers.

these words….emergent, adaptive, evolutionary.

to create a new combination of gestures each time is a complete pleasure and strangeness and this method that i have developed over many years allows me this experience. it is challenging and at times extremely fraught. i become totally immersed in the creative process that produces this entity and then entranced.

full of wonder at this thing, the finished painting which i consider quite separate from me. i forget that i have made it. i look to see what it offers me. it has qualities, potencies, differences, sensibilities that i can respond to. it keeps its reserve.

the work is predominantly concerned with questions of ‘being’ in the world (human beings included): that is, my interest is mainly ontological and arches over any political, historical, subjective or psychological concerns. what Is this thing? why is it there? why this colour? why is that bit so ugly? what simmers? what strikes? what travels? why these relationships? what is telling on me? what stories are evoked here? what of the silences?

these questions do not have satisfactory answers. the work remains open. free and rich with continuous possible meanings that can be actualised and revoked at any moment in time. I like it that the work gives me this freedom. I am grateful.

It gives me qualities that flash like signs in the distance. it reconciles me with life. and then i make another painting.

 

part 2: materiality... .

..i align myself with the material world. its mysteries. its pragmatics; these forces are my primary concern when i am making the image. i have always had enormous respect for this unlanguaged part of living. the various pressures…density, shape, colour, falling, folding, moving across, temperature, speed, light, weight…intensities. the ‘sense’ of these not the ‘names’ of them. most of these non human things are involved in dynamic systems. dynamic systems activate most of the world. large and small. what we know and what we do not know. only the human species removes itself with language. due to a weakness in language says plato, it cannot help but distance us from the experience of breathing.

it is a curious thing and has always fascinated me. we sit the breathing and the ‘naming’ of the breathing beside each other. for me the naming is a subset of the experience that is breathing.

it is the experience of sense that i want to let be in the painting. without the naming. i am letting the material be. i am human, i am creating something with these non-human things of matter. i am letting them be, i arrange them into compositions. i make with them a non-representational construction. by building with these traces.  i, the human, work in collaboration with the material, the non-human.

the first look at this work is about the experience of sense, not the experience of recognition. you look at a work and to yourself you say woooo….what is that? and something unfolds into being. you really look. you really feel something. later you may language it. words are created from it. the relationships between speech and the unlanguagable form the ‘meaning’ of this composition which manifests as pliable and continuous. the whole thing belongs to the convolutions of time.

 

part three: language.

.. i make paintings in series using a particular colour palette. i make many works. i select usually around seven paintings from the series. the extra paintings become outliers to the set. i give the set a NAME. each painting in the set is also NAMED. each painting and the set it belongs to is distinct and will never happen again. each work is quite singular.

each grouping has its own qualities. some series are muted and sweet. others are graphic and intense. one could talk about their effects. each painting is an event that generates effects and how those effects are received and processed depends on each viewer and the weaving of their particular sense of things.

at the beginning of this process of making i go through a thing i call ‘the finding’. most importantly i have to find the colours and the hand that belong to this time. but also the texts that i will use. quite a delicate process. something that involves listening closely to the time. to its shape. to its chance events. the texts (very human) are a supplement to the image.

philosophy and poetry tend to be my main reading materials. and it is usually from these i will find the language that resonates for me. they will be sentences, sometimes one word, taken from their original context and relocated to become titles to the work. i wait for the poignancies that relate to the time. once i find them, it is very clear.

the languages never illustrate the image but instead sit beside it, often evocative in themselves. they have their own indicators and histories. the space that is created between the image and the text allows for extensive lines of flight. here a layered and complicated constellation, full of associations, relationships and divergences, can be put into play. and it IS a matter of play. things and names engage in a state of unceasing reciprocity…

“…A language that speaks through enigma, the enigmatic Difference, but without complacency and without appeasing it: on the contrary, making it speak and, even before it be word, already declaring it as logos, that highly singular name in which is reserved the nonspeaking origin of that which summons to speech and at its highest level, there where everything is silence, “neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign” …’ [1]

 

part four: the encounter

….of course i am the first viewer. & as i have said previously this emergent process that i use gives me a new, singular work each time and this new thing produces a type of shock in me, where i have to ask myself ‘what is that?’ and perhaps have to LOOK for the first time. there is a sort of shimmer in the brain. no doubt any other viewer will be puzzled also. it depends on ones temperament as to how much ‘looking’ will be given the work considering its initial silence.

however attention pays handsomely. (why i prefer to keep works for at least six months to a year after they are complete) (why the works are satisfying to live with) (why i live with them).

at first there is very little, then something grows as thought and feelings start responding to what the work gives out. each work has its own constellations. there are temperatures and speeds; insinuations and exhalations; any manner of forces. clustering intensities, a going across, quiet pools. a friend recently said these words in response to a drawing…’that is magical kim, somehow warm and funny and full and traveling’ [2]

something like that. just like that. perhaps that is all that needs to happen

each image presents multiple differences. completely other. at once a resistance to suffocation and a line of flight. there are breaths, communicating intensities: worlds of simulacra and ‘mysteries’. one could land at colour for instance “ Is the sky blue?” what opens out in that question? what is actually possible in our many worlds. different for each person. this is good for our hearts no?. to avoid the irrational. something possible for us.

a curious aspect of the work is that it offers an ongoing experience. for each time i pay attention to its play, it will give me a different field of relations to consider. each time a glittering in my life, a thought can be actualised & with this another sense of what is possible manifests itself. this in turn can change. turn back, go forward, double up, slow down… the story becomes richer with each interaction and the work becomes a continuous life giving thing. a changling that can also—of course—because of speed, remain static for long periods of time.

well there it is, a basic basic outline. a field from which to leap. artists work in so many different ways. sometimes very difficult to decipher. it is hard to trace back. again i am not sure if i have been successful in providing a ground with this letter. i hope so. i would like people to at least be alert to the life affirming qualities that are latent in the work and from there they can do what they like with it. it will be their experience. however rich or poor.  i consider them endless gifts actualized ANDabsent inside our uncertain and unrolling world.

 

soon soon kim 

 

 

[1]  Maurice Blanchot in the essay ‘Heraclitus’ from ‘The Infinite Conversation’ published by the University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1993, pg 92.
[2] Fi Johnstone in a facebook comment.

kim pieters. dunedin. new zealand. may 2019.

 

 

 

download pdf of this essay here

 

 

 

 

Λ

She was only ever what she was; and always is what she was now . . .

Concerning the Work of Kim Pieters , by Carl A. Mears.

 

 

Prologue

Part One, Dirty Eyes

“DIRTY EYES assumes the position of a specific object
 
 with no specific form
Cinema is not by its nature a metaphorical medium
but presents a visceral visual structure that allows
the viewer to develop metaphors in relation to
their needs & desires
The players are objectified & not in fact
open to empathy 
 It is always obvious that they are a
means to an end “

— Lawrence Weiner

 

 

Everything after all, comes from somewhere. In an excessive age, the long-gestated works of Kim Pieters are not excessive. Until one is struck by those reiterated moments which by her are so obviously cherished, dwelt upon like a half-sucked lozenge; the recent duotone shapes for instance, which emerge and retreat, and emerge and retreat while staying stationary. Cool blues, grey hues, they lie there: random seeming percussive devices that will fire up surreptitiously to energise their arena, cause frolic in our eyeballs and appear to disappear. Unusually restrained but not excessive.

Later, the lookers feeling fanciful and seeking wider for clues, might ruminate upon her family name: Pieters. Easily enough the Dutch-ness is summoned; her discipline, the seriousness and the quasi-religious dedication, they are surely leads. There is an older-fashioned awareness of being, which we can sense, moderated with irreverent humour: not as dismissive as the children-of-excess are today, respectful even—self-mocking, perhaps. Delft blue eyes contemplate a reaction in the visitor, always questioning. Okay, yes then, a Dutch biscuit please perhaps, in the ordered and excessive concentration of her living-working-being-real-artist space, with distinct and pale, scented teas in fine old, odd, porcelain.

Concentration is indeed of her being; self-education feeds her voracious curiosity. Books are stacked high, stalked with neat book marks, while creeping potted plants balanced aloft loftily – fill the studio warehouse with modulated colour and add foliate drama to the fullness of the adventure of the studio-visit. Light – bright sun-stricken stuff – permeates; its entry mediated by coloured celophane gels teeteringly taped on high grubby windows. This light is remarkable, for it has also negotiated to be here: after penetrating the granularity of those old panes, then passing through the botanical leafiness, the hanging and piled-up things, it slows down enough to hover in the haze of dust motes that float like tiny thoughts.

Eventually the visitor scans for, and finds the only clear space. This is a section of wall, its whiteness compromised by over-strokes of colour, dribblulæ and crustacea of dried, striated, and scumbled pigment. The marks extend perpendicular to each other, upwards and sideways, but the phantom paintings there that used to occupy and activate at the median height, have been removed. The marked wall is interesting but enervated. The whiteness grinds to a jagged line just at the reach of a roller extension.

The paintings, when they are brought into clear space, can seem drawings they are so light. Drawings with colour and stuff; recognisable and sort of unrecognisable, on surfaces that are ordinary, to a degree, but most particular. They can be very large and very raw, as they are painted upon torn pieces of hardboard. Broken; scored and snapped Masonite. After the sheets are handled into position, stapled or tacked into place before painting; they are – as if rescued, to become mysterious slabs of counterfeit wall again. But when they are finished with Pieters, they are separate from the architecture by their untamed broken edges to be painting/drawing supports, and even paintings, not drawing but painting. The lines, the stains are so delicate, but so very deliberate; there is human frailty and decisive ambiguity; the colour irradiates. Is there ‘existential poise’? If so – then here it is . . .

I find myself using the word ‘sophisticated’ to describe her most recent paintings, unlike the similarly serious works – on handmade paper with deckled edges, and found hardboard supports – I was first shown sixteen years ago. Though similar we talk of the words that might be used to describe their differences: ‘knowledge’, ‘confidence’, ‘knowingness’, the understanding that some things are no longer necessary, the elimination of the extraneous and the already known, the too obvious.

Within the artist’s congested studio, one hundred metres from the harbour wharf; one pilots around narrow passages between the books and packages of mysterious things. In the small area reserved for painting, every horizontal surface is covered with tubes and pots, pencils of all kinds; brushes of course. Most interesting to guest and voyeur, are the mystery pots with no commercial labels, mixtures with cryptic notations on the lids, like ‘auntie’s preserves’. There are a lot of them, small, carefully ordered.

There is a history here of colour, of experiment and striving. This is evidenced, too, by the array of lighting shining on the wall of ‘operations’. One becomes conscious that there has been an enduring attempt to battle fickle natural light and to supplement it with a more sustained amalgam of artificial illumination. One senses the effort to control or stabilise the pigments in relation to the illumination needed to see, and to develop the not inconsiderable skill of anticipating the changes in tone and hue when wet colours dry. This is the serious business of a serious artist; science and mechanics mix with a free-ranging sensibility orchestrated by strong instincts and firm, though inarticulable belief.

This artist is undaunted by the impossibility of pertinent utterance. Of course she will try and, in doing so she draws on poets and philosophers, who have been consumed and digested by her over the last dozen or more years, whose words now exist as a part of her legitimate vocabulary; alongside informed opinions on her art-world heroes. It is a fine mix. Without formal instruction in such material, the meanings she distils are genuine and provide original observations, without the embarrassment of either hearsay or the impolitic correctness of second-hand knowledge. She experiences her articulation. She has always argued her identity.

The proof of her cogitation is laid out on the surfaces of her drawings/ paintings, like multiple and contiguous scientific experiments. This is where the real arguments lie; their benign simplicity defying categorisation as much as the complex graphics of William Blake. There is always an almost invisible line of text—often a quote or a poetic reference—along the bottom of each work, which serves as title but also as a mantra, to hold in the mind while one learns to look.

On my other screen at this writing moment, adjacent to this text is an image of a medium-sized painting. It sat well in the window of a Dunedin gallery, hung on tongue and grooved boards, almost rhapsodic in tones, hints, and shades of blue, acting in time as well as in space. Hesitant and gravity prone, the thin emulsions shift; minute surface details hint at far off events, in distant galaxies perhaps. Yet, the whole entity sits deadpan without illusion or allusion, a field of skilfully, knowingly balanced colours. Our gaze can meander; possibilities, distant memories, and feelings emerge but never fix.

From the first time I saw her work, I was fascinated by her concomitant involvement with the world of music and her passion for photography and film. The combinations of moving and still, image and sound, are not to be dismissed as experimental dabbling. As her painterly sophistication has matured through practice, so too has her vision in her photographic and cinematic images, become much more discerning. Her eyes have learned to see and hear. Tellingly, her involvement in group music activities has diminished, out of recognition, perhaps, that those involvements are no longer necessary, though she still listens hard and wrestles meaning from that activity.

Her intelligent appraisal of form and the necessary knowledge she has accumulated towards enquiry, led me years ago to tell her that her works were not paintings at all; that she was ‘not a painter’, solely or even at all. Although I was being flippant at that time, and provocative, there is an element which is still true, in that her paintings are works of planar thinking alluding to time as much as space, just as her moving images are considerations of the event—or multiple events—through time.

Behind this observation is my slow-brewing conviction that art – despite the gross proliferation of art works – is a branch of philosophy that utilises direct sensorial experience, thus dispensing with the noumenon – the thing-in-itself, the intellectual thing that underlies perceptions, according to Immanuel Kant. Pieters abjures the inherent mediation of the word. She extracts raw information from a visual reality by means of digital photography but also through the forms of her painting and her control of paint, of mark. The sensorial distillations which inform her experience of the world bypass the strict intellectualism of Kant, they jostle through the matrix of her various media, are organised like the carefully regimented pots of paint on her working surface. Like trays of splendid butterflies, not dead but hovering for apprehension, for grasp.

Over there is a steam punk Super-8 VideoPro camera she was using when I first met her, and which I had so envied! Whenever I visit, there is an improved version of the camera she had the last time I saw her. For her, high definition enables improved optics; DVD will no longer suffice, she requires projection from a hard-drive to get as close to the ‘original’ as possible. Raw data is also necessary for the tiny scale of her still images, to achieve their punch and particularity. And constantly the window gels are changed to argue with the telling of her eyes . . .

Of course, as much as poetic literature and the history of ideas about perception have fed her practice, so too has the history of film. Béla Tarr in particular, and the slow evolution of Tarkovsky’s early narratives, have allowed her keen vision to slow down, to contemplate the passage of time with the calm fixation of a meditative yogi. She has read film theory for a long while, and is well versed in Gilles Deleuze, his attitude to film and in Antonin Artaud’s views on action and performance. Strangely, Artaud’s drawings seem to have left her untouched, but the passions of his conviction might even have consolidated the rigour of her lifestyle, without of course the chaotic ingredients of M. Artaud’s per se. The negation of colour in classic film has allowed Pieters to consider time and movement as an essence, which is neither to be diluted, nor polluted by irrelevant nuances of colour. In this way there is rigour, and method, and discipline to sustain the wide wonder of her practice, while it slightly, surely, and slowly evolves.

Rigorous dedication to her methods is certainly not common in this age, nor even in an artist of her generation, and particularly not with a relatively unsung artist in this country. Many practices subsist at the necessary level of ‘paying off the mortgage’, doing as little as possible to maintain the right to use the ‘artist’ noun. With Pieters, rather, one might consider figures in history: Giorgio Morandi for instance, or even the heroic ideal of Vincent Van Gogh; Seurat á propos her singular investigations into colour; or Bourgeois, perhaps, as models for her single-minded pragmatism. Yet, none of these, in fact, have any evident relationship to her creative practice, nor her lifestyle!

Non-sequiturs abound with Pieters. Her interest in European tradition without direct connection to that history; the variety of passions paired with what might seem desultory or casual observation; the singular personal application as dedicated as any Paracelsus but without the accompanying alchemical nonsense; her unsentimentality. Every aspect of her activity is recognised as of the utmost importance to her developing self-awareness as an artist; to be explored or discarded, along with the ancient Volvo. Hers is a practice of truly independent self-discovery, from her youthful realisations that were naive to the point of wilful, to the hurdles which might have stopped a weaker sister in their tracks: the destruction of her home and a mid-life’s work by fire, for instance. All such events large or small, have been treated as pauses for thought, time for evaluation and change, a rueful shake of the head; Amsterdam after the occupation. On a bicycle.

She has made the massive decision to live alone in an artist’s garret in a cold climate, with few niceties as might amuse or even console a mature woman, apart from her necessary literature and music. This has become or rather she has made, a veritable greenhouse of growth and discovery for herself. These discoveries, move continually forward, veritas energising her whole being. They are shared with a variegated group of loyal friends, artists of all kinds, writers, poets, musicians, who have also learned to listen and test her decidedly independent thinking. She will often try on arguments, to see if they fit. New comers are invited – to also be tested – perhaps the absence of actual European experience has fuelled her pursuit of meaning, of truth, and of becoming a whole person. We debate survival in concentration camps. An artist without guile, without compromise, she has become an entity of startling coherence: traditional in an old-fashioned way, but contemporary in ways that are outside prevailing contemporary orthodoxies.

To mention this next subject, is to stray into unknown territory. Pieters has heroes: writers and poets: women, New Zealanders and from elsewhere, and international artists whose work is not represented in any New Zealand gallery, Cy Twombly for instance. There is at least one massive volume of Twombly’s work, among a stack of others. His life and work, all digested for unusually, she reads art books; studies historic poetic opinion: Mallarmé. Yet Pieters has not done the obligatory and conventional overseas trip, she has never seen the real work she reads about, never absorbed the stuff she cannot begin to visualise from printed images. For me, there is an almost morbid interest in watching her develop as an entirely New Zealand artist. Contemporary, polymorphous and knowing, multi-skilled perceptually probing. Not too bad so far; without any real experience of her heritage in Europe or the contemporary landscape of the world gallery, which like many other internationally experienced contemporary artists, she might view as a Titantic moving out of sight, out of time, and out of sych: doomed as spectacle.

Beauty or the sublime are not concepts in play for this present generation. A dearth of the real, the jewel of cool; and ensuing histories of Goth Steam Gangster Punk Twerking Riot has made those words: ‘beauty’ and ‘sublime’, decidedly uncool. But in that cluttered garret near the dock, there is emerging beauty. There is a lithe and tuned sensibility to colour which is at once fragile and strong, line which is flexible and controlled; both without sentiment, neither hesitant, cutting like a scalpel.

Aestheticos, the Greek word for a ‘gasp of surprise’, which engendered the gestalt of Greenberg and others in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, is of course the semantic origin of our word ‘aesthetic’. That ‘gasp of surprise’ is elicited time and time again, in that wharf-side garret, certainly not by the picturesque environs, but by the artist’s works that have been made there. There is little more to say about their exquisite, seemingly spontaneous generation. Except – look and learn; slow down; consider the Lilies of the Field, perhaps? She is after all the first child: the daughter of a Dutch horticulturist immigrant.  Everything does come from somewhere, even from the fact truncated European traditions that may have endured, back there, were jettisoned by father and growing daughter, here. The first born could move free of gendered constraints, into a new world of discovery and sensation, and of meaning. Everything after all comes from somewhere. 

 

Epilogue

Part Two, Dirty Eyes 

“Each passage of the day
from the middle of the middle of the middle of the morning
to the middle of the middle of the middle of the afternoon
to the middle of the middle of the middle of the night
has at that point in time no destination other than
with all due haste to bring continuity into a realm
of contiguity
Only at that point can hope be seen as a possibility
in the dawn & in the sunset
The concept of perception becomes a necessity
& in the end requires DIRTY EYES “ 



— Lawrence Weiner, text for a film, New York City, 2014

 

 

Carl A. Mears, Aramoana, Aotearoa. April 2014

 

 

this work was first printed in the catalogue book ‘Kim Pieters: What is a life?
published by Adam Art Gallery, Te Pataka Toi,
Victoria University of Wellington. New Zealand.

 

 

 

 

Λ