small stories: paper cut-out girl

Artwork: lonely_girl by_splinter_ops

There she goes again.

The paper cut-out girl.

She’s wearing the same woolly coconut ice striped beanie, complete with panda ears. It’s something a kid would wear. Except, she’s not a kid anymore. Although, I wonder if that’s what she wants to be—an eternal child—never having to grow up.

She’s buttoned up tight in her wool check jacket, layered with a jumper and shirt so you can’t see her outline; the way her bones are jutting out. A body too thin to carry the weight of so much wool.

I saw her most days. I’m not sure if she’s going to school or work. Her thin legs are clad in tights and her feet—I can’t keep my eyes off the high top pink Converses. She wears them no matter the weather.

 I think she wants to hide, but the hat and the sneakers make her conspicuous. Maybe it’s a way to only get people to notice parts of her, not the whole, because then they’d have to see how sometimes she walks slowly, carefully, and that each step seems painful.

She often carries a red and white backpack, and I can't help stewing over how she manages the weight when she wants to shed so much of her own.   

Once I tried drawing her, but the lines were too faint, too scant as if I couldn’t pin her to the page. So I cut out a space in the paper where the girl should have been.

She was present in the world by the very space she was absent from it.  

© Angela Jooste

The eternal art of Louise Bourgeois

“Art is truth because it is eternal.”

                                           Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

The first time I saw Louise Bourgeois's work at an exhibition, I discovered something that altered my relationship to art profoundly. I remember being mesmerised by her sculpture Spiral Woman, and walking away wanting to write about it, but not with the language of theory or criticism, but with poetry. That stumped me. I was an art history student, used to navigating the discourses that shaped current art historical practice—of writing texts with cross-disciplinary theory, historical methodology, visual analysis—dry, distant and "learned" writing that spoke to academics. But no, I wanted to write a poem, and I did. That was the beginning of my Art Stories project. I later discovered that my impulse to write about art creatively had a tradition after reading art historian Paul Barolsky’s interpretation of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (first published in 1550), one of the foundation texts and primary source material in studying the Renaissance, as being a work of fiction. That was mind-blowing to me. And while I'll save talking about that tradition for another day, it affirmed what I was doing, and that I wasn't alone.

When I came to write about Louise Bourgeois's work Cell (Glass spheres and hands), I delved into some of the recurring themes of her work: the pain of deception and betrayal; the blurred lines of truth and lies; the cut of rejection; how risk is inherent in love and that safety in relationships is a precarious concept. And fear: of being alone, denied, unloved. What is exceptional and challenging about Bourgeois's work for me, is its mystery and how its secrets are not yielded easily, if at all. Her work evades categorisation and simple theoretical or biographical approaches. Her own words might point to a meaning, but she herself once said: “I never talk literally. Never, never, never. You do not get anywhere by being literal, except to be puny. You have to use analogy and interpretation and leaps of all kinds.”

By being so elusive, the openness of Bourgeois's work to interpretation is enduring. And her ability to elicit such an emotional and imaginative response, it makes her art eternal.  

Pipilotti Rist trapped in hell

I've been thinking of writing a story about Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist's installation I saw a couple of years ago at ACCA, I Packed the Postcard in my Suitcase, and I remembered a lecturer at uni mentioned this small, brilliant and hilarious video of her trapped under the floor at PS1—in hell. It's called Selbstlos I'm Lavabad and Rist is swimming in a lava bath crying out, “I am a worm and you are a flower!” This video was first exhibited in Basel, Switzerland in 1994.

metropolis rhino

I love this artwork of the rhino with a city on its back by Mike Maka aka MAKATRON (check out his website: http://www.makatron.com) . I first saw a similar version of this while Maka was actually creating it at an intersection on Lygon St near the Melbourne Cemetery. It also became a fave of the character Jake in my book Chasing Light (forthcoming late 2014).