There Where You Are Not
Alec Finlay, Jeremy Millar, Guy Moreton
31 May – 9 July 2005
There Where You Are Not is a collaborative
project featuring new works by Guy Moreton, Alec Finlay,
and Jeremy Millar. The exhibition explores
the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his
interest in the landscape (of language), and architecture within
landscape.
The remote places to which Wittgenstein was drawn include the
northerly landscapes of Iceland and Norway; the alpine village
of Trattenbach, where he worked as a school teacher; and the
later refuges that he found in Connemara and County Wicklow
in Ireland. These landscapes all share a quality of ‘quiet
seriousness’ that reflects aspects of his philosophy and
his own psychology.
Wittgenstein’s retreat to Skjolden, Norway, lies at the
heart of the collaboration between Alec Finlay
and Guy Moreton. Presenting
a descriptive essay in text and photography, they reflect upon
the site of Wittgenstein’s house overlooking Lake Eidsvatnet
and the surrounding landscape. Here he worked on the manuscripts
of the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, and its relationship
to a more general cultural model of a ‘house for thought’.
The austerity and sense of isolation in Finlay’s collage
poem and Moreton’s photographs can also be found in The
Dark Night of the Intellect, a new film by Jeremy
Millar. Based upon an essay written and, here, narrated
by Tim Robinson, the film explores the landscape of Rosroe on
Ireland’s western coast, described by Wittgenstein as
‘the last pool of darkness at the edge of Europe’.
Another new work brings together footage from the artist’s
home with a musical echo from Wittgenstein’s childhood.
It attempts to establish both a sense of belonging and an understanding
of how we might engage with the place of another.
Wittgenstein was a radical literary theorist, writing philosophy
as if it were poetry. There is a poetic intensity to the works
on show that illustrates a form of expression more eloquent
than language, echoing Wittgenstein’s own exploration
of the visual depths of language.
Yet while this exhibition possesses a quiet, haunting beauty,
it is not without a sense of play, perhaps most clearly found
within Finlay’s Language Games (Word Puzzles)
and Wall Wordrawings - wanderings within Wittgenstein’s
thought, and points from which our own thoughts might also wander.
There Where You Are Not has been organised
by the John Hansard Gallery. Guy Moreton’s
photography has received financial support from Southampton
Institute. Jeremy Millar’s films have been
made with financial support from NESTA,
the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
Publication: There Where You Are
Not – Wittgenstein’s Wandering is
a book of writings and photographs by Alec Finlay,
Guy Moreton and Dr Michael Nedo,
that will be published by Black
Dog in Summer 2005 and will be available in the
gallery during the latter half of the exhibition.
Guy Moreton, LW205, Skjolden, 2002/2005. Courtesy and copyright
the artist.
For further press information and images please email Nicky
Balfour, Press Officer: njb@soton.ac.uk
For information on exhibition talks, go to http://www.hansardgallery.org.uk/events/talks.html
artist interview
You can watch a 30 minute video interview with
artists Alec Finlay, Jeremy Millar and Guy Moreton using Windows
Media Player here
Instructions on viewing the video can be found
here
AF: Alec Finlay
GM: Guy Moreton
JM: Jeremy Millar
BB: Dr Bernadette Buckley, John Hansard Gallery
BB Thank you very much for agreeing to do this interview for
the John Hansard Gallery. We will share copyright of this interview
between yourselves and the John Hansard Gallery. I like to begin
by welcoming you all to the gallery here today: welcome to Alec
Finlay, to Guy Moreton and to Jeremy Millar who collaborated
on the current exhibition There Where You Are Not. Let’s
just start by talking about the origins of this project. Would
you like to begin Alec?
AF This project first started about five years ago,
when I became interested in discovering a place for thinking
– for thought. And I was invited to propose a new Centre
for Contemporary Art in the Natural World – a place that’s
never actually opened. But I wanted to make a replica of Wittgenstein’s
house. I’d read Ray Monk’s biography and I was very
interested in the life and Wittgenstein’s very famous
for the house that he designed in Vienna – which is very
abstract and very perfect and in a very obvious way, fits into
a Utopian, abstract European tradition. And I was interested
to uncover another kind of house – something that would
be more vernacular, that would more relate to an ordinary life
and maybe even to a country life – to the house that he
made in Norway in the early years of the century.
So I proposed this replica-house as an idea –
as really as a piece of research. I proposed it even before
I’d been to visit it. Then I became friends with Guy Moreton
and admired his work a lot and I wanted to make a documentation
of that place which would be a poetic record of the landscape
where Wittgenstein would walk, as he would say, doing philosophy.
So it came out of an interest in place and thought and you could
say, the relationship between the external world and the internal
world. And it was Guy’s ability to look in a very quiet
and still way that seemed to me to be a way of uncovering whatever
it was in that place that Wittgenstein chose. So I suppose you
could say that in a sense, the project was about discovering
how much one could uncover a thought within a landscape –
as it were – to follow Wittgenstein in where he’d
been attracted to and where he’d gone to discover his
thoughts and to see what it would be like just to look in that
place and to walk in that place now. Maybe Guy wants to say
something about that experience…
GM Yes I should say that before we’d met in Edinburgh,
I’d actually spent some time with Alan Johnston in Norwich
and it Alan that really talked a lot about Wittgenstein and
especially the house in Vienna, which I knew of. My work then
was really dealing with the relationship between architecture
and landscape. I was making portraits of houses, so I was very
interested in this. And I suppose I continue the same practice,
which is really about walking – about walking and looking
and returning to a site. It has that kind of rhythm which is
really important in making this work (and in reading Wittgenstein,
I think). So this work from Skjolden really is very much about
a very slow process of returning to a site and looking, and
looking at a certain kind of landscape. Some of it is a very
complex landscape. My interest is actually seeing something
clearly and making a portrait of something in a very particular
way. So in terms of photography, I use a large format camera
which has a very descriptive ability. The process is actually
about looking – about waiting and looking.
BB And what was it about Alec’s suggestion that really
drew you into his project?
GM There were many things actually. I knew about Wittgenstein’s
house in Vienna and it made perfect sense to visit the site
of the house in Skjolden as a counterbalance.
AF One of the interesting things of course is that
the house wasn’t there.
GM Of course, so the site becomes this really wonderful
possibility as a site for thought, for contemplation –
all those things which were intrinsic in my practice.
AF And also that sense of what it means when a thing
has been in a place and is no longer there – which is
what we always are. You know, “there where you are not”
comes from a Schubert song which Wittgenstein loved and would
no doubt have whistled on the veranda a Skjolden. So there’s
that sense of the romantic yearning just to be in a place –
which I think sometimes can come from looking through a camera
lens…there’s that concentration… or in the
same way, writing a poem. As human beings, we need to discover
a way just to be somewhere, just to be able to live. And certainly
for Wittgenstein, that was always a struggle.
So, in one way, Wittgenstein motivated our journey,
but in another way, we went as ourselves to look and uncover.
And I think in that sense, the invitation was simply an opening.
We met by happenstance and it was more a case of, what will
happen if we go there and look? And in a sense, the longer you
spend there, the less and the more that Wittgenstein is important;
the less because you’re so much more engaged by that landscape
(which I wanted to add is such an interesting landscape of sections
because you have the valley and the hill and the view –
a very Alpine landscape), but also Wittgenstein is more present,
not as a personality, but in terms of the character of his thought
and his life – which somehow you can read in that landscape
I think.
GM Yes very much…
BB At what point then do you come into this project Jeremy?
JM Probably quite late really…fashionably late
really. [Laughs]
I became aware of the book – Irish 2 –
which had been published and which had Guy’s photographs
in it. It contained a piece of writing by Tim Robinson called
‘The Dark Night of the Intellect’– which is
a very beautiful poetic essay about a period that Wittgenstein
spent in Rosroe, on the west coast of Ireland, in 1948. And
again, this was another example of Wittgenstein’s need
to be somewhere else – his need to isolate himself, to
find a place to think, to create a place of thought really.
I think we share a lot of the same interesting concerns about
place and landscape – for instance this notion that, as
Joyce wrote, places remember events (that is, the sense that
events, or history, or memory can be inscribed onto a place
but could also be half forgotten as well). It’s about
trying to locate yourself at that point between remembering
and forgetting.
So as soon as I read this piece – and Tim is
such a fantastic writer – it just seemed obvious really,
that the essay was almost like a very beautiful shooting script
for a piece of work. And so I used it in a very straight-forward
way. When Tim describes certain spaces (what had been the cottage
that Wittgenstein stayed in for example), when he describes
the hills, the valleys, the pass, the summer tree…these
just become, one after another, shots to follow in a way. And
I sort of like the idea of following as well. We’re all
following Wittgenstein in some way. We’re always being
in place that he’s been in before. I quite like that notion
which is contrary to a classic notion of the avant garde –
that art is beating through the wilderness and breaking new
ground. I quite like the idea of actually following something
as well. It seems to be more interesting in a way and maybe
less egotistical.
BB Are you embarking on a kind of pilgrimage?
JM It is in some ways but then, as Alec said earlier,
that diminishes somewhat. The reason (personally for me) for
me going to the west coast of Ireland was because Wittgenstein
had been there and then because Tim had written about it. And
so that was the entry visa – the reason for being there.
And then as soon as you’re there, your own sense of looking,
of being in a place, starts to take over. I think this is something
which then became manifest in the piece itself because, as I
said, Tim’s essay provided the structure of the video
and the order that the shots appeared in. There were certain
points within – and Tim has narrated the essay over the
footage – there were certain points where he just cuts
out. Because it’s then the desire to look at the place
for longer means that the images and the words move out of synch.
It’s then that the desire to look overpowers the desire
or the law of the words and gets broken. So then there’s
a sort of a sense of repetition and Tim’s voice comes
back in again. So that’s an interesting tension within
it and I think it’s a tension that probably exists in
all of our works and that acts as a form of pilgrimage. It’s
a way of paying respect and also of trying to find something
out about yourself as well. Wittgenstein’s desire to go
to a place is to use it as a method of understanding oneself
really.
AF Can I come in here? Just thinking about Jeremy’s
work and Guy’s work and also my own experience, I wouldn’t
use the word ‘pilgrimage’. I might use a simpler
word like reason – it was a reason to go there. But what’s
interesting is how much the landscape then structured that experience.
And Wittgenstein had an incredible gift to do philosophy sometimes
without philosophy. He did philosophy in terms of teaching methods.
He devised a vocabulary for Austrian schools. He did philosophy
using photography. For two years he made these incredible photographic
albums, which were really an attempt at philosophy. And in some
senses this was also just an attempt at looking – you
know how to look at the world. When you go to both of those
landscapes you discover that they share certain very simple
characteristics – northerness, wetness, both in proximity
to the sea (in Skjolden it’s a fjord but still you feel
that connection with the sea), backed by mountains and looking,
in both places to the west. And so in both places you sense
a structuring of the landscape. Patrick Eddis would talk about
‘sections’. It’s very easy actually to be
in that place and analyse it – but also to be broken down
oneself by it, to be almost analysed by the landscape.
I would say that anyone could walk through this exhibition
and know nothing about Wittgenstein and have the essential experience.
And that is part of what Wittgenstein says – that he wants
to teach you as much about how to live as how to think. And
he certainly struggled with that and in many ways, wasn’t
good at living but was very clumsy and awkward. I’ll always
remember that thing that he said just before he died, he said
“Tell them that I’ve had a wonderful life”
– which for anyone that’s read his life is very
strange because he plainly didn’t. But I want to add one
other thing about these places which is interesting. It’s
to do with this journey and this idea of ‘there where
you are not’ …which is that, in both places he’s
always struggling to resituate himself. In both of them, he
is really at the edge of a small crafting community. In Norway,
his house is some way away from the village and yet it’s
not up in the mountains. It’s unusual in that respect.
And he was always struggling about whether to be further away
or to be closer. And he was really like that I think in terms
of his human relationships. And when he was at Rosroe, he dreamed
of crazily going to live in a hut on the island that he could
see. And he also wanted to move in with his next door neighbour
– a crofter who said to him ‘I’ve only got
one bed’. So there was this real struggle for Wittgenstein
just to find that place. It’s not simply someone who goes
and is peaceful there. It’s a tormented life in which
the thinking happens in moments of clarity.
BB I guess that’s the reason why the word ‘pilgrimage’
comes to mind initially – because the ideal pilgrimage
is supposed to be that which arises out of a sense of struggle
and out of a search for something…
AF That’s true.
BB ..but another reason as to why it sprung to mind for me
is because Tim Robinson’s recent book Rock of Ages was
divided into two parts – that of pilgrimage and that of
labyrinth. And that brings me to the next question too which
is about the labyrinthine qualities of this project. Because
we are here – to quote your puzzle which quotes Wittgenstein
– in a forest trying to find our way out of it. Could
you say something about these labyrinthine qualities of the
exhibition also?
AF Guy and Jeremy are very gifted with lenses. They
look. They know how to look. They’re both very thoughtful
artists. But they know how to look. And perhaps I struggle with
that in that I don’t have that facility. And I remember
thinking in the poem I wrote there, that perhaps I couldn’t
learn from Wittgenstein how to think like he thought. I would
never have that intelligence. But perhaps I thought that I could
learn to look. And I learnt a lot from watching Guy looking
and from looking at the photographs. But then, for me, the labyrinthine,
the inner life was just as key to that. And when we went to
talk with Dr Nedo at the Wittgenstein archive, he taught Guy
and myself that one of the things that Wittgenstein was always
seeking was a view - in other words to be above the forest and
see out over the lake, the hills, the horizon, towards the west,
to see, to be situated at the centre of the landscape. And I
don’t think this is about having power over it as some
people might discuss. It’s more simply to find a situation
from which you can look and then clear a space for thinking.
So the labyrinthine is certainly about finding those
clues and finding that clearing and the works that I made are
puzzles. They obviously refer to Wittgenstein’s ideas
of ‘language games’. But because they use words
and in a sense are like a poem, they’re also very influenced
by John Cage. And they’re somewhere between the Wittgenstein
ability to clear away and make a single view: you know, I see
and this is the truth of this seeing…I think that would
be a definition in a way of what Wittgenstein achieves…
but Cage would always be happy to stay with complexity. So for
instance he would talk about a ‘weather system’
and in many ways my puzzles, once they’re shuffled up
and the words are jumbled, are more like a weather system. They
deal with the complexity of ordinary lives, with the complexity
of ordinary thought, with how difficult it is to clear thought.
BB And the changeability of thought as well…
AF Absolutely so I think that all of us would agree
that we’ve had moments of clarity and that as human beings
sometimes that’s all you can aspire to. Perhaps the contemporaneity
of our work is to also admit the way in which complexity now
impinges on our lives. I think one of the main current of thought
in the last 50 years is to try and actually acknowledge how
we will never clear away complexity – whether we use the
pile-driver of modernism or the camera – whatever, that
complexity will always remain. So I haven’t, as it were,
found a trick to remove that, but certainly the labyrinthine
that Tim brings out, the way that a place has so many layers,
is part of the looking and the seeing.
BB Guy would you like to say more about this concept of the
labyrinthine? It seems in listening to you that there’s
a kind of connection between the geographical or the geological
and the metaphysical. What is it about place that that makes
one come back to oneself.
GM Yes, can I first just also come back to what I was
saying earlier – to something that also links in with
this? The way that I work is that I use a ladder actually. I
climb a ladder in the landscape. And I work more or less at
the same height which is about 10 or 11 feet off the ground.
And it is about understanding what I see and I need to have
a little bit of height from eye level as it were. And its very
much about standing at the top of this ladder with a lens-hood
over my head. So I’m in this darkness, only with the grounds
glass screen of the camera. And one really becomes involved
in the picture through that method. And it comes back to this
line that Wittgenstein wrote, which always stays with me: “A
picture held us captive and we could not get outside of it.”
It’s very much part of that idea. I think place is central
to that – it’s like understanding our position –our
position within a landscape, our position within the world,
our relationship to the world and to ourselves. So it is very
much part of all those ideas. And the work in Skjolden is absolutely
central to that. It’s a very slow way of working. It’s
about coming back to a certain point, revising, crossing out
ideas mentally and actually making a picture and understanding
that place, that sense of place.
AF What it doesn’t represent is the mosquitoes
though…[laughs]
GM It doesn’t represent the mosquitoes…no
and the rain and the wind and all those problems but there is
a fine line between waiting, between nothing and something.
JM I can’t follow that!
BB What we’ve been talking a bit about here is also some
of the complexities of seeing in particular. And it seems to
me that what Alec and Guy have been talking about is not just
a seeing in terms of visibility and invisibility but a seeing
in terms of recognition or in terms of an understanding. Does
your work feed into these kind of concerns as well?
JM I think so. One of the things that I had in my mind
when I was in Rosroe – an aspect of Wittgenstein’s
thought which he was working on then and which Tim talks about
– is this notion of change of aspect –that is, where
things change where nothing has changed. What you’re looking
at hasn’t changed at all, but everything has changed.
This is obviously something which was very important to Wittgenstein,
because he talked about it a lot in his philosophy – actually
just removing the problem by refusing to accept that there was
a problem. I think this is something which is incredibly important
– not only in life but particularly in terms of art –
this idea that suddenly it has a value, instead of just being
random sounds or collections of words or some sort of arrangement
of coloured shapes. It becomes something profound, but nothing
has changed.
I think this is something that I was aware of, in the
sort of slow looking which you have in Guy’s photos as
well – the sense of waiting. Perhaps if you look long
enough or look in a certain way, what you have in front of you
changes. It’s just whether you recognise that change or
not – rather than trying to impose some sort of change.
And I think that perhaps, what we all share (with Wittgenstein
as well maybe) is this striving for clarity. But it’s
a clarity which is then transformed into something poetic rather
than into a very ‘scientific’ clarity.
It’s very interesting. You know, Guy’s
way of working seems almost abstract – the notion of a
large format camera and this sense of isolation – but
at the same time this becomes transformed into something which
would seem counter-intuitive to that. Something (which could
almost be used for purely topographic purposes) is then actually
turned into something else. I think I was thinking of this when
I was framing in Ireland – the sense of clarity and looking
at details.
It would be interesting to think about what Wittgenstein
might think of this work. Famously (I think it was the first
time he went to Skjolden) Wittgenstein went with a friend, Pinsent.
They ended up having an argument because Pinsent was a quite
keen, amateur photographer. Pinsent wanted to take a photograph
and Wittgenstein stormed off and wouldn’t talk to him
for an hour. He said ‘Oh you’re just like a man
who, when walking in a landscape, can think of nothing but what
it would be like for a golf-course. So he was critical of this
idea of landscape being transformed into something useful rather
than being just experienced. And I’m sure that in a typically
contrary way, he might have the same reaction to Guy or to me
going to a place, instead of just experiencing it – this
sense of having to bring something back.
And it’s this very fantastically interesting
and difficult position that a lot of artists share – particularly
John Cage – this sense of trying to erase their own position
– of trying to remove the ground from beneath themselves,
to a point where its necessary to make art in order to arrive
at a position where art is no longer necessary. I think that
that’s probably an area that we all struggle with and
that Wittgenstein struggled with as well in his desire to make
philosophy in order that philosophy no longer become necessary.
There’s no sense here of trying to illustrate what Wittgenstein’s
work was, but perhaps there’s an attempt to inhabit the
same sort of place. What he might have thought of this is open
to conjecture really. Given that he said that not only were
there no great British films, but that it was logically impossible
for there to be a great British film, I don’t suppose
the things that I’m producing here would change his mind
about that. But it is interesting to consider what his position
might be and that his response would be typically awkward. [Laughs]
BB We seem to be edging here into stories all the time. You
seem to be treading in the way of stories. Is story an important
part of how this work has come to be? I started thinking about
this first probably in relation to your work Guy, because these
lush landscapes are there – they’re photographed
as ‘real’ if you like – but also they have
this mythical quality to them, as in your work Jeremy –
the snow falling and the birds picking up crumbs – also
seems to have. Perhaps you’d like to say something about
this quality that I’m talking about – because it
impinges on language but also on the symbol?
GM Er not…[laughs]
AF I’ll speak. I’ll say what Guy was going
to say. [Laughs]
BB Well yes Alec, because this question is relevant to your
work too isn’t it and you’ve spoken recently about
the importance of story too.
AF Well one of the interesting things about Wittgenstein
is how many stories there were about him. And he was, maybe
wrong about many things, because although he had a vastly superior
intelligence, he did also have such a tortured relationship
to the world. I think, as Jeremy was suggesting, and again like
John Cage (though in a very different way because Cage was so
genial and had a Zen-like contentment), they’re both constantly
wiping the blackboard clean. And to do that, you have to have
a certain savagery.
So there’s that aspect. But also, Wittgenstein
was very concerned about how to live and he was very bad at
it but also very gifted – I mean in the sense that he
was very prickly, very difficult (especially in his younger
years) and he was trying to find people who he could be at one
with. But the stories about him are in a sense almost saintly,
in that there is this accumulation of myth. And anyone who reads
the biographies is struck by this. And those stories teach.
But what is also interesting about Skjolden (I remember
reading it in one of the studies) was that Ibsen’s Brandt
was actually meant perhaps to have been based in that valley.
It’s an imaginary place. It’s a supposition but
Ibsen had been there and so this was a meeting in an incredible
landscape. The mountains are, I don’t know, 3000m. The
glen has an incredible sense of space. And it has a contradictory
sense of being an inner space because of the heights of the
cliffs and yet offering these incredible panoramas and skylines.
So that before Wittgenstein had been there, although actually
not that far away in terms of time, the place had other mythical
associations.
One of the things that we were all conscious of also,
was that we were very much going to places – not ‘non-places’
as in that contemporary sense of the urban non-place –
not airports. We were going to the west coast of Norway and
the west coast of Ireland – to poetic, beautiful, tragic
landscapes; landscapes that in one sense had been left behind;
landscapes that had cultures which have incredible value to
us now but are also marginalised. So all that is going on within
that sense of story here and Tim Robinson very much picks up
on that. He’s also interested in this relationship between
Wittgenstein and really what you might call ‘folk culture’
– that Tolstoyan sense of a people, or of the relationship
between a people and a place. And so, in terms of story, when
we went there, all as strangers (though perhaps I would suggest
that with my Scottish relationship to landscape and to place,
I had more familiarity with that). But we were all going to
beautiful, western, Valhallic landscapes and so in a sense,
that then in itself becomes a story doesn’t it? There
are all these Wittgensteinian stories but there’s also
just the sense that that landscape is a narrative that still
has a lot of charge for us.
GM You can also see this in Wittgenstein’s photographic
albums in the archive. He very interestingly makes these typologies
– these groupings of photographs. And they’re all
perfectly cut. He’s very very concerned with scale. And
he presents us with photographs of friends of his, and photographs
of places (of Vienna and of Skjolden and of Cambridge and of
London) and they’re positioned together. You know, it’s
very much about a relationship between where he is, and a relationship
between him and other people. And that’s set up in these
typologies. It’s a very very interesting way of presenting
those connections. One can really read that through the photographs.
And it’s quite an unknown side of Wittgenstein I think.
BB And this concern about story is also present in your work
here Jeremy too isn’t it. For example the film in the
project room is based on a story – the story of how Wittgenstein
used to feed the birds and of how, when he left, all the birds
died and were eaten by cats…
JM Yes…you know we keep using the word ‘place’
and I think that it’s very interesting that we use the
word place rather than that of ‘space’ or ‘territory’
or ‘location’ – all of which have very different
meanings and connotations although they tend to be rather lazily
used to replace each other in a lot of contemporary art discussion.
Place for me is something that is related to history and memory.
It has a sort of embeddedness about it. So, just to go back
to the notion of the story then, maybe a location becomes a
place just through the layering of stories that are placed over
it, over a period of time. The birds video as you say, come
out of another story of Wittgenstein becoming fascinated with
birds, when he was on the west coast of Ireland. As Alec said
earlier, Wittgenstein had this hope of maybe living on this
small island and of having this man called Tommy Mulkerrins
making him a hut on the island. Mulkerrins of course put him
off that idea rather rapidly. But he was fascinated by the domestic
birds – the robins and chaffinches which used to come
to the back door and which would feed. And as you say, when
he left, he left some money for Tommy to carry on buying some
food and the first time that he came back, because the birds
had become so tame and so used to being fed, some cats had killed
them.
This was something I was interested in – this
notion of how you relate to a place, but also of how you relate
to the person who has almost invited you to go to that place
as well. A number of my works often relate to other people,
to other figures and to their relationship to a specific place.
It was something I was very curious about, because obviously
my cultural upbringing, my history, my intellectual capabilities
are just so vastly different from Wittgenstein’s.
While I was in Ireland – well you have your own
responses to it and you’re always trying to imagine what
Wittgenstein’s responses would be and you can just never
know. The thing that interested me about the birds was the way
that we feed the birds in our back garden in the same way that
he fed the birds at his back door. And there’s a line
from Goethe’s Faust that he often used to quote, which
was that ‘in the beginning is the deed’ and that,
no matter what else had happened, then this was to the thought.
There seemed to be the short-circuiting in a way – that
this was the one connection that I had with him – was
that we both opened the door and we both threw the bread out.
And that’s maybe the only one.
BB It’s interesting the way you talk about this connection
because it seems again and again to be described in terms of
ways, paths, searches, and perhaps in your work Jeremy there’s
a stronger sense of ‘home’…can you talk a
little bit more about that?
AF I just want to and one thing to Jeremy’s story
about the birds which is the only reason that we know it. The
first person that came to live at Rosroe after Wittgenstein
was a young poet called Richard Murphy – an Irish poet
who’d left the city gone there and talked with Tommy Mulkerrins
about Wittgenstein and wrote down this story (many years later,
he didn’t write it down at the time). He wrote this story
about Wittgenstein’s deed and deeds do have effects and
influences and become part of people’s memories. And art
still has this role – we talk about this story but we
know it because of Richard Murphy. So our layering of this includes
Richard Murphy and it also includes John Cage, who also has
a connection to the birds. So in our layering, you know it’s
not a linear track. And no doubt someone one day may follow
us – not in any sense that we’re great – but
Richard Murphy was just a young poet, so other people may make
that journey and add their own layers to the place.
JM And just relating to what someone said earlier about
following a track…
AF Or a deed…
JM Yeah, it’s not say in the sense of an open
wilderness which is a classic Modernist notion of the artistic
landscape in which you find yourself – which is empty.
It’s actually acknowledging that maybe there have been
people there before. You’re not erasing the history and
you’re not pretending that other things haven’t
happened there. You’re actually working within it. There’s
a sense that the place is shaping you more than you shaping
the place or the response to it. And this was sort of important
in the birds piece because I have a very different relation
to place that I imaging Wittgenstein did. He had you know, a
troubled relationship with his family – there was this
tension that he had about wanting to be by himself but also
needing people; or of having to isolate himself in order to
work. Whereas I have a very different relationship. I love being
at home. I love being with my family. And though I can understand
his desire from a purely conceptual point of view, it’s
not one that I can share. The piece with the birds was in a
way trying to show that difficulty. The music is Brahm’s
Clarinet Quintet, which had it’s first performance in
the Wittgenstein’s family house in 1891, when Wittgenstein
was two (the same age as my daughter now). It’s a piece
of music that he loved and that he played throughout his life
as well. So there’s a sense of nostalgia, which means
a longing for place rather than a longing for past time. It’s
just a way of inscribing my place – my back garden with
his place. And that sort of uncertainty that he had, I also
had and it exists between the two of us - my trying to connect
in some ways but ultimately being completely unable to do so
because we are just so different and had such different upbringings
and backgrounds.
AF Yes, I’m just thinking about that moment with
the birds again and that it kind of forgives something –
there’s a connection. And we say we’re so different
but I think that in those moments, you are sharing something
with Wittgenstein. So when you’re reading Wittgenstein
there’s a sense in which he’s scouring clean language
and thought and ideas. But he also is the person who fed the
birds. And for me, I know that I connect to the whole experience.
You know, growing up in the country and we had one of those
Norwegian Jøtul stoves – which had this strange
decoration in cast iron of two people in a forest, sawing down
a tree. And it had a godly inscription on the front. And it
gave us heat – it was very important. It also used to
smoke the clothes on the pulley. But it was part of my childhood,
which I can actually weave into that story. So the ability to
think of the Wittgenstein family, patrons of Brahms, his experience
of that, and then going all the way to the west coast of Ireland
and then into the back door of Jeremy’s house and then
into my childhood home with this Jøtul – you know
that’s the magic of art – that it can allow those
things to connect. And there’s something that we all seem
to perhaps bring – a certain domesticity; even perhaps
the word ‘humanity’ – to this story –
or it might be a gentleness, a kind of forgiveness, to perhaps
what you might call the relentlessness of thought. As human
beings, that relentlessness in itself is a scourge and will
always have an aspect of…a kind of, there’s almost
an aspect of self-hatred about it. Intelligence will always
have an aspect of that to it. And in the story of Wittgenstein
wanting to go further and further away to this island is very
like the story of DH Lawrence. You know his story called ‘The
Man who Loved Islands’. It’s about a man who utopianises
his life to the extent that he ends up on a little rock in the
ocean, facing obliteration in this storm. And Lawrence is not
praising this. He’s aware of the aspect of himself which
wants to shut off from society, from mess, from the British
film or whatever. But there’s also another voice that’s
saying ‘no, you have to find a connection to the birds’.
You have to find a moment when you do that and all of Wittgenstein’s
homes were spartan, were scrubbed clean – from his little
teacher’s room in Austria to the Skjolden house. There
is a kind of relentlessness in his sense of self. And the stories
do forgive that and I think something that we all share here,
is a love of all stories to do with art. We put the art up.
We invite people to look at it. It’s what we can give
them. But the narrative is also underneath that and through
the cracks of that. The mosquitoes are part of that. It’s
all part of it.
GM In another sense, I could mention also someone like
Sebald in his The Rings of Saturn (which is very important to
me) and his wanderings on the Suffolk Norfolk coast which is
somewhere that I have wandered – Dunwich Beach. Again,
it’s this idea of being in this landscape and yet trailing,
wandering through a history, wandering through a story that
Sebald so eloquently describes. That’s so important –
being in a place and being able to imagine a certain history
– to imagine another place.
BB And Sebald is also someone who likes to tread this line
between fiction and reality…
AF And often following these figures of the past who
have again written texts which to us are scourging, or are very
difficult – you know the idea of melancholy and Sebald
coming out of illness before he made that journey. So he always
seems to be looking for those human moments – those human
details.
BB Well I’d love to be able to speak to you about this
for longer, but sadly we’re run out of time, so my thanks
to all of you for participating in this interview. Thanks to
Alec Finlay, to Guy Moreton and to Jeremy Millar, on behalf
of the John Hansard Gallery.
