||| I. REPUTATION | II. FRAME | III. SPACE | IV. REFLEX | V. RETURN | VI. SEQUENCE | VII. RAINBOW | NOTES |
Remarks on Angelika Kaufmann’s graphical “Booking” of texts by Friederike Mayröcker
By Christiane Zintzen . Translated by Steve Gander -
in : Angelika Kaufmann - Arbeiten auf und mit Papier 2000 - 2006 | Works on and with Paper 2000 - 2006 , edition splitter 2007 ( 01 )
Always wiping the slate clean,
paws on the typewriter ( Friederike Mayröcker )
I. REPUTATION
It has the best and the worst reputation : the script .
On the one hand , as an alphabetical symbol , as a cipher for “the legibility of the world” ( Hans Blumenberg ) , neither society nor individual would find a way through the chaos of phenomena .
To print a script means to lay a trail , to make sense .
The script leaves marks , traces , thus seducing followers , companions .
Communication , tradition , integration - all that is the script .
On the other hand , the script usually appears in place of somebody absent . To the reader of a book of hers , as a person who has her own voice and her own charismatic being , Friederike Mayröcker remains in the distance .
The pneuma of the reporting voice breathes the note and returns - exhaling - in productive precipitation to a note . “what is to be seen - what is to be heard” once again becomes something to be written , something to be read .
What remains is the script. The script that we read .
The script that we have before our eyes , printed , in a book .
Yet also the script after which Angelika Kaufmann drew .
After which she wrote . Copied . Re-wrote .
Wrote on and on , transforming the Freudian “further” into a “here” . The script that Angelika Kaufmann writes from the past , writes into the present and into the future . And writes and writes .
Writes so large and designs in such a tactile fashion that the viewers would like to become entangled in it . Or else to seat themselves on the sweeping and loping overlengths and underlengths ( as if on a swing ) .
Please take a seat . There’s no-one expecting you . - Oh , yes there is : the script receives its own.
This script - Angelika Kaufmann’s daily entries - serially noted “magic leaves” , may indeed organise meaning into a form yet at the same time it by no means lets itself become subordinate .
It is not a utility script .
Not a traditional script , which looks away from itself in order to transmit something else - “content” . Angelika Kaufmann’s Bookings are not a means of transport , standard vessels , containers , flat goods and bindings for filling materials and net weight units .
Angelika Kaufmann’s re-writings are poetry , yes : these scripts are poetry AS SUCH , no more and no less than Friederike Mayröcker’s poetic work . |||
II. FRAME
But I am running ahead of myself . Or have I gone too far back ? … back to the criticism of the written language , as it has been making the rounds in various forms ever since Plato’s Phaedrus ? … as it is makes the rounds in new variations in every medium that appears on the screen ? - A criticism - to put it pointedly - is that FORGETTING actually begins with the RECORDING of knowledge ?
The transfer of living , narrated knowledge onto the hard drive of the written text already contains within it a moment of death . Anyone who places any importance upon tradition , upon the written language , the RECORD and the index , is already thinking about his or her own absence .
In this way - cum grano salis - death already becomes part of the work and the hubris of survival within the script or within the work .
One is therefore writing one’s own epitaph .
Secret message passed into what is absent , whether it is spatial or temporal .
Or is it the case that since every author , whether male or female , is closer to the “stately skin, the blotting paper skin in lieu of an oath” ( 02 ) of the pragmatic script than the eschatological coat when setting out the language , and since the market focuses on the medium of the “book” as means of dissemination , distribution and evaluation , literature seeks to be printed . That is how the poetical message-in-a-bottle is enciphered in the Gutenberg galaxy : the world of the artwork spans between cover , binding and endpaper . Basically , a box that one opens and closes .
Text and writing between lids .
With her script pictures and “dissections” of texts and books , Angelika Kaufmann tries to counteract such stocking routines . For years now , the artist has accomplished this with carefully printed arrangements , the making of which she has imposed upon herself ever since she was first struck by the poetry of Friederike Mayröcker - in particular , by the poem “Im Elendsquartier” ( In a Hovel ) , written in 1956 and published in the volume “In langsamen Blitzen” ( In Slow Flashes of Lightning ) in 1974 .
From an affinity with Mayröcker’s radical exceeding of the limits between art , handicraft and life , the trained graphic artist Angelika Kaufmann has come to formulate a self-imposed task and - in particular during the past twenty years - constantly embarked upon a fresh course with every new set of works and scripts .
For instance , with the prose text of “Das Herzzereissende der Dinge” ( The Heartrendingness of Things ) . Writing beyond the borders of the page and delimiting the word and linebreaks . The caesura , openness and the rhythm of the poetic original are , however , by no means suspended . On the contrary , the quiet drama of tension and relaxation , writing out and paring down , emphasising and taking breath occurs within the individual letters …
… If I had an endless piece of writing paper, so that I didn’t always have to span a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and put the previous one down, namely the most extreme version, namely that of a meditative submersion which liberates us from the racing of time … ( Friederike Mayröcker 03 ) |||
III. SPACE
Angelika Kaufmann calls it “TEXT DISSECTION” .
One might also say : Angelika Kaufmann’s written artistic “invoice” ( Roland Barthes ) manifests itself in delineating fresh characters . By liberating the letters from their usual integrity Kaufmann frames new spaces . Provocative spaces , as we see when they face us .
After all , we claim to decipher everything that has ever been written . Angelika Kaufmann’s BOOKINGS instead deprive us of linear legibility .
We decipher letters , yet at the same time remain illiterate .
Angelika Kaufmann’s method of showing as well as of concealing written meaning unfolds an abundant range of prospects hardly to be gathered by linear discourse . Nevertheless we may approach the essence of this art and the subject-matter of our considerations : the pure pulse and impulse of poetry .
One might state that there couldn’t be a more efficient system to record and stock “sense” than poetry . In every syllable , in every sound , in every phrase , in every verse - and even in the blanks , interspaces and interdependences - there sits an inexhaustible abundance of meaning impossible to be mapped out by explanatory notes .
Simply carry out the opposite test yourself by descriptively representing what “happens” in a poem : WHAT it says and what it DOES NOT say , HOW it has been set out and WHAT it leaves open , WHERE it seeks proximity and where it creates differences … and voilà , you will find yourself in the middle of the Sisyphean fate of philology and hermeneutics .
Helpless here , appreciative there , neither can ever come to an end . |||
IV. REFLEX
Art is tautology . It is self-uttering . A rose is a rose is a rose .
It says THAT it says something . It says HOW it says it . Ceci n’est pas une pipe .
Angelika Kaufmann places something equal alongside this inspiring , this scandalous tautology . Poetry conceals by displaying . She says some things and is equally silent about just as many things .
As a visual artist and as a script artist , Angelika Kaufmann SHOWS “this embroidery of silence” ( Friederike Mayröcker 04 ) . But we , of course , see what she shows us : “It rained, rained down many words onto it” ( Friederike Mayröcker 05 ) is written in “Pegas” , the book with text and images about a little horse created by Friederike Mayröcker and Angelika Kaufmann .
Even on the two dimensions of the surface Kaufmann interrupts the line or lets it swing out beyond the edges of the sheet of paper . It thus makes us SEE how much we DO NOT see . These characters manifest both presence and absence . Rump curves , synchronous arcs , diagonal markers . Fragmentary horizontal and vertical fragments of the architecture of writing . In their presence they direct the viewers’ gaze towards unusually formal and rhythmic patterns .
There “where something is missing” , there where the obligation to decipher that is instilled in us at quite an early age encounters an empty surface , that is where imagination and therefore also ( personal ) projection is inserted .
Here rhythmic contraction , there tabula rasa :
Angelika Kaufmann’s sheets murmur not only with the sibylline voice of poetry .
Much more than that : we look back at ourselves in the form of our own projections . It is no coincidence that it was Friederike Mayröcker’s “14 Mirror Texts” ( 06 ) , which Angelika Kaufmann first became involved with ‘redrawing’ in the mid-1970s .
Enough about the dimensions one and two , the surface coordinates .
Angelika Kaufmann’s acts of inscribing , copying , underwriting and overwriting also thread their subtle lines through the dimensions three and four . |||
V. RETURN
With her installations , paper objects and book objects , Angelika Kaufmann gives back to the text what it replaces ( we may remind ourselves of the topos of the criticism of the script ) , makes redundant or even exorcises, namely : the body . From the hands of the artist the script reclaims the lost moment of the physical body - as , for example in “CHINESE BRAILLE VOLUME” ( 2000 ) which is covered with Kaufmann’s notes .
In this book that is unfolding I have adopted a Non-Style, i.e. a kind of literary self-divestment, haven’t I, i.e. scribbling/soiling: scribbling on my naked thigh or writing on my palm and drawing a black cross that cannot later be erased … ( Friederike Mayröcker 07 )
The tactile presumption of paper objects , the fingertip readings of Braille scripts , the various viscosities of colours and inks , the porosity or sealing of textures : the writing manoeuvres , which are completed with a great deal of knowledge , guile and enjoyment of the material , transform the script and the text into an object . As objects that we encounter in space , they can be viewed while walking round , from behind and from the front , from above and below :
yes , they are there , present and quietly virulent .
They rise up , stumble , turn their leaves , fold and unfold in real space .
… In my womb the pages of notes twitter as I write … and the pages of notes in my womb twitter as I write … in my womb, as I sit in front of the typewriter, in my womb all the many scraps of paper … ( Friederike Mayröcker 08 )
On the other hand , the objective and concrete elements of Angelika Kaufmann’s tactile written art pieces indicate the wilful physical quality of Friederike Mayröcker’s poetic project . Scripts , papers , notes and letters all play an eminent role in Mayröcker’s texts . They frequently talk of a palimpsest of papers , notes and quotations , so that the murmuring of the names , excerpts and notes , partly report from the living world of the poet and partly constitute an inseparable component of this poetry .
… after all my table the whole surface of the table: an accumulated confusion of writings, notes, books and dirty plates and cups … ( Friederike Mayröcker 09 )
In this way , the objectivity of writing and text in Mayröcker’s texts becomes a leitmotif both as desire and burden . The poetic language and the work of the word literally cannot get round speaking about the physis of the textual - and furthermore also about that of the body and profane things . |||
VI. SEQUENCE
Tertium datur . Friederike Mayröcker’s frittering notes , her faithful transcription of quotation objects that have been read or read up , as well as Angelika Kaufmann’s three-dimensional objects consisting of scripts , books and paper : both of them examine “a sameness” in ever new tasks and serial rules , by recreating the original text : copying it , but as something different .
Copying becomes rewriting and in the process depicts “a sameness” DIFFERENTLY.
In her play “Gertrude Stein hat die Luft gemalt” ( Gertrude Stein Painted the Air , 10 ) Friederike Mayröcker herself writes attributes to that setter of language traps , Gertrude Stein , the sentence that one has to WRITE DOWN , in order to understand something . It was formulated in a similar way by Walter Benjamin , when he was writing - taking down quotes for his Work of Passages - seated in the Bibliothèque Nationale : when ( silently ) reading , the text remains external to us , but it gradually penetrates us physically through copying it by hand . We ‘grasp‘ it.
Grasping the text in the dialectics that exist between the hubris of such appropriation and the humility of the copyist .
Whereby we have arrived at the fourth dimension : to write something down takes TIME .
Syllable for syllable , word for word , remembering , copying , checking … pressing the START button on the photocopier would seem to be considerably more efficient . The photocopy as an ersatz act for neglected reading is a favourite topos of academic jokes . Yet at the same time , this practice also tells us something about the difference between HAVING and BEING . If we HAVE physically stored the text , it seems to us that it is in our POSSESSION .
Angelika Kaufmann , on the other hand , shows in her writings that we cannot HAVE such POSSESSION - and will never be able to . Through her handiwork and by means of the everyday painstaking act of writing out a text , the author of the rewriting shows that she can never and will never arrive at an end . Her diaries of brush-wipings and dabbings manifest TIME as an element :
time as extension become material , linear metres of the mundane . By lining up passing NOW-moments Angelika Kaufmann’s scribbling pads , convolutes and palimpsests provide an illuminating insight into the form and the design of TIME . |||
VII. RAINBOW
They thus share a further characteristic with Friederike Mayröcker’s everyday word-furthering work . The act of drawing is being drawn . Writing about writing which watches as it is being written .
Accordingly , Angelika Kaufmann’s acts of writing out , writing down , re-writing , post-writing , overwriting and underwriting are both an illustration and an encoding of poetry . From an “opening and closing of the mouth” ( Ernst Jandl ) to the appearance of the evidently hermetic script : there has long been an “intercourse of blossoms” - thus Friederike Mayröcker in a poem dedicated to Angelika Kaufmann - to and fro between works inclining towards one another ( 11 ) . The positions of precursion and tracing , of writing in and writing out , which were once separate , now flow into one another in a continuum of reciprocal effect .
Still life at the place of writing: beaked can and bonnet
spilled bathwater, with rainbows, on the parquet. ( Friederike Mayröcker 12 )
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czz in : Angelika Kaufmann - Arbeiten auf und mit Papier 2000 - 2006 | Works on and with Paper 2000 - 2006 - wien , edition splitter 2007 , S. 38 - 71 | OUT NOW !
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NOTES
( 01 ) On the exhibition Arbeiten von Angelika Kaufmann , Literaturhaus Wien
( 02 ) Friederike Mayröcker : Das Herzzerreiszende der Dinge - Suhrkamp 1985
( 03 ) Friederike Mayröcker : Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling - Suhrkamp 2005
( 04 ) Op. cit.
( 05 ) Friederike Mayröcker , Angelika Kaufmann : Pegas , das Pferd - Neugebauer 1980
( 06 ) Friederike Mayröcker : Fantom Fan - Rowohlt 1971
( 07 ) Friederike Mayröcker : Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling - Suhrkamp 2005
( 08 ) Op. cit.
( 09 ) Op. cit.
( 10 ) Friederike Mayröcker : Gertrude Stein hat die Luft gemalt - Radio-play , directed by Klaus Schöning , DLF/ORF 2005
( 11 ) Friederike Mayröcker : für Angelika Kaufmann | sobald die Schneefeger [ 1.1.1997 ] - In: F.M.: Gesammelte Gedichte 1939 - 2003 , ed. Marcel Beyer - Suhrkamp 2004
( 12 ) Friederike Mayröcker : ich habe angeboren das Blut | für Angelika Kaufmann [ 4.3.1997 ] - op. cit.
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