The Blueness of the bottle

Extrait d’un entretiern entre Craigie Horsfield et Carol Armstrong en juin 2005. Carol Armstrong, nommée à la faculté du département d’histoire de l’art de l’université de Yale en 2007, enseigne et écrit sur la peinture française du XIXe siècle, l’histoire de la photographie, l’histoire et la pratique de la critique d’art, la représentation des femmes et du genre dans l’art et la culture visuelle.

Craigie Horsfield. I am at a loss! The blueness of the bottle! Does your question concern blue, the bottle, or the making of the picture?

Carol Armstrong. Why that picture? You go through a lot of trouble to make your pictures and I don’t want technical information any more than you are interested in giving it! But I am interested why making a blue bottle matters to you. Because of all the artists that I know anything about you are the one for whom-on the evidence of what you produce, if not of what you say-it matters. It matters that it is large not small, it matters that you have a blue bottle, and a purple cabbage, and so on…assembled together. Each one is like a sentence that is part of a paragraph. I want to know why you care about it-because you do.

C.H. The depiction of the bottle concerns our thinking of the world. Now you may say that that is not the question, but it is precisely the question. And it is as a whirlpool: instantaneity spiralling into language, our perception of the phenomenal world, our shaky grasp of the other’s being and of our own being … Now is all of that resting on a modest picture of a blue bottle? Why? It connects because we attempt haltingly to try to hold on to something, something to allow us to come to some provisional understanding of what we are. So, the blueness of the bottle is …

C.A. Absolutely lovely!

C.H. … How we attempt to speak of the material of the world …

C.A. It is seductive that blueness!

C.H. But it is also of its being « bottle. »

C.A. It is breath-taking!

C.H. How language …

C.A. And more when it is large!

C.H. How we speak to each other …

C.A. It is no longer a small bottle; it is another kind of object!

C.H. Its material is not that of the thing in itself, the physicality of the bottle; the depiction of the bottle is not the bottle, but it is more than that. The gap between, the distinction is one we negotiate every day of our lives …

C.A. This may be your thought process as you think about your blue bottle.

C.H. It is not mine!

C.A. It is not yours any longer.

C.H. It never was!

C.A. As you think about that thing that you made.

C.H. That I was one of those engaged in making! There is the bottle maker, the paper manufacturer, the audience …

C.A. This is a lot of bullshit! If I took you at your word, your stuff would look just like a lot of the other drek out there.

C.H. But it does!

C.A. You are completely wrong! What you make are ravishing things that speak to people. They do not speak to people in this dispassionate semblance of a philosophical stance!

C.H. But there is nothing philosophical in what I am describing. That is one of the mistakes we have talked about: To think about thinking and how we live in this world and how we live together has nothing to do with philosophy-it has everything to do with life. Because thinking about thought is not the province of …

C.A. Oh, of course, I admire the way you live!

C.H. Come to the point! While I am touched by your appreciation of my being a thinking and caring human being, I don’t think that you are entirely sincere!

C.A. You might be right! Just as I doubt some of your sincerity.

C.H. How can that be? Why do I want to say that my work is not any different from anyone else’s?

C.A. Maybe it is the same in some senses and it is different in other senses. I choose to privilege the difference.

C.H. The words we use are not different from anyone else’s; again we don’t suddenly start to speak in an alien language.

C.A. But I am interested in the difference and the specificity that that makes and I am interested in how it communicates specificity.

C.H. If it were not the same in some senses you would have no way to read.

C.A. But this is a device! Obviously, it is the same in some senses, but…

C.H. It is crucial to the work, as I said, I made photographs because it was something that everybody could do, at least in a Western society suffused with photographic images. I use it in the same way I use the English language. I have the same language that everybody else uses.

C.A. You can say it but it is not what you do!

C.H. But just as in speaking, we use the structures and devices used by our fellows. These carry with them particular weights and associations. If I make a picture of a blue bottle, it brings with it all of those connotations, those quotations, those familiarities, all of those matters of recognition, just as I see in you a human being, with the forms of a woman, the mind of a person of your generation, that you’re blonde, whatever … all of that. But your specific being, and I agree with you utterly, is without comparison: Your life, your experience, the way that you speak, the way that you think is particular and unique to yourself.

C.A. And this is common to every individual.

C.H. But at that stage it is not, it is no longer true of every individual. It is simply true of yourself, but that self now brings with it all of those other relations.

C.A. But you are very comfortable with this! And I think the evidence of the work you produce speaks absolutely otherwise. You do not do what you say that you do, what is interesting about what you do is that you labour caringly with the materials you have, which include the bottle, which include the paper … it includes the installation, it includes the people who come to the installation, I suppose. But you labour to make something that has an effect, a calculated effect. I am not particularly interested in the calculation, but they are very calculated. And the effect is one of ravishment, and that is something that human beings want in common; it is not something which elevates us above each other, it is something we want, and that it is human to want. It is something… and it is the reason that I try to craft words when I write and I can’t quite do it the same way when I am speaking because it is a different process; it is to « sing » the world not to critique it, not to parse a sentence, not to say this is the same. I can’t say more. You are very effective at doing that and it works, and it is good that it does.

C.H. What we want for …

C.A. More people should do it! That is what I want.

C.H. What we are without…You remember Rilke’s passage from the Duino Elegies where he is speaking about house, about tower as hoping to be more than the things in themselves, as though the speaking is maybe more than the thing in itself.

C.A. But may have something of the thing in itself in it…that is the hope.

C.H. And surely that more can only be in our speaking, in our recognition. Now the want that we may feel, for me, is in that attempt to share fully in the world, not just to survive. The things that matter, that allow us to live or to have a humanity and you were speaking the other day in this context of love…

C.A. And I am still speaking of it.

C.H. For the most part it may be beyond reach.

C.A. It is beyond reach finally in the sense of its being … perhaps partly within reach and the effort to bring it within reach is what makes us human.

C.H. It is why the idea of empathy is so significant, a being with, but never as one, never becoming the other, never one.

But in the attempt, in the towards from the self is our possibility. It is never accomplished, it is always ongoing. Much art concerns separation but in a world which is frequently cruel, sometimes barbaric, where most of us live lives which we are attempting to negotiate, to figure out how to try to get by, there must also be an art which speaks for this, the pressing outward from self toward the other.

C.A. To connect. But under the « other » I would include the world as well as other people.

C.H. I think it is more than recognition.

C.A. Although recognition or a feeling of recognition is a part of it.

C.H. We may find within this the most intense sense of loving … a sense of our own being as protagonists, rather than merely as bystanders, as witnesses looking on.

C.A. The ramifications of that are, at least potentially, political and ethical