Yearbook East

KEVIN KILLIAN

1020 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 863-6798 e-mail Kevin@kevinkillian.com

USA

SMELL OF A BOOK COVER Wearing a tough jacket, the yearbook stands on the altar proud and fierce, the cockatoo of books, its leather a rich Spanish blend, for the boy who bought it hailed from Spain and came to us here in California like Kim Novak, arrayed in the dusty turquoise-y pink costumes Novak wore in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Every day Scottie Ferguson, graying private eye essayed by James Stewart, tracks his prey to the Legion of Honor, where she spends hours gazing at this Spanish infanta from the time of El Greco. Old time kin of hers? Scottie jots a note in his mental pad.

He’s half mental following Madeleine everywhere, and not a trace of Judy.

Under her arm she clutches one Birkin bag and a book, bound in Spanish leather, its rich smell infecting its contents.

Can a book be physically altered, the way Tom Phillips erased his way through A Humument (1970), merely by binding it in leather, letting animal scents infuse and manipulate words on a page? Scottie’s beginning to think so. Like alphabet soup you could switch the noodle letters around, on the gruel’s viscous floating surface. Outside Ernie’s, the swank five star restaurant Madeline dines at nightly, Scottie presses his nose against the glass and yearns for a touch of that book. Its scent is telling his dick where to go. He hasn’t a clue otherwise, but even his initials spell out San Francisco—the city of names, sheltered bookful of gossip and incarnation. Madeleine might be descended from grand Spanish royalty of the Maja era of Spain. She is after all devoted to the Mission, and at the proto-Church on Dolores she tends her own grave is it? Scottie pretends to kneel behind her, but he’s just adjusting his underwear under cover of the twilight. He’s all like, this is only a book erection so how can it possibly count my lady?

He wonders maybe he should dip his hard-on in holy water, or bella donna, for a man when he dies doesn’t want to wear the traces of his seed, or the rod that fetched it out of him like dowsing. He looks up, she seems to nod, paying an allusion to the boy from Spain who brought the book to her doubleness. That boy was the first page of Spain, and she turned him.

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* A maze (inside out)

Don’t look Now — An art historian sees his daughter’s death prefigured while studying a magic lantern slide of a Venetian church.

Mullholland Drive — A mysterious blue box is unlocked and the darkness within, rushes out.

This causes a break in the narrative, between dream and reality, between two women, whose roles reverse.

Halloween — A suburban interior seen through the eyes of a young murderer (the “shape”), the steps lead climactically to his sister’s room, who he is about to murder.

Vertigo — As a counterpoint we see another estranged wife contemplating, with the same intensity, the portrait of a dead woman, as if it were perhaps a mirror. Jimmy Stewart, doubles this intensity as he stares at her, on the verge of losing himself he zeros in on points of similarity/familiarity between the wife and the portrait. Could that hollowed out space in the bun of her hairdo affect a similar rupture as the dark hallway or the staircase?

The Shining — The hallway, again as the site at which an uncanny experience occurs – this time, the doppelganger twins signal danger to come, but also a blurring between the house and the psychological distress of the murderous father.

And another scene pulled from the shining depicting the topiary maze, both real and imagined.

The Misfits — A liminal space is not only an architectural site but may also be a psychological state.

Hellraiser II — The quintessential depiction of architecture as psyche.

The labyrinth. An intricate maze of memory and premonition.

Safe — A modern housewife estranged not just from her husband but also from her house and her environment. Here the architecture that surrounds her, mirrors an internal condition.

Empire — The celebrity icon, the phallus, the penultimate nostalgic image that erases itself while watching it.

Lost Highway — An estranged wife searches for her husband in the dark and shadowed hallway of their Los Angeles home. As in Mullholland drive, the darkness spills outward signaling and break in narrative and between dream and reality. It is as if walking into the darkness would result in a complete erasure.

Last Year at Marienbad — A woman is confronted by multiple specters out of her past, both true and fictional. The man walks toward her and looms up ominously not unlike the sprawling house in the distance.

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From photographs for the production design of North by Northwest 1959 dir. Alfred Hitchcock

The Man in Lincoln’s Nose

Alfred Hitchcock in conversation with François Truffaut: “I made North by Northwest with tongue in cheek; to me it was one big joke.

When Cary Grant was on Mount Rushmore, I would have liked to put him inside Lincoln’s nostril and let him have a sneezing fit.” Cary Grant slides down the presidential proboscis, then hides from his pursuers in the nostril; ironically, the gambit is blown by Grant’s incessant sneezing… The nose gag, however, was never filmed. As screenwriter Ernest Lehman recounts: “The Parks Commission was rather upset at this thought. I argued until one of their number asked me how I would like it if they had Lincoln play the scene in Cary Grant’s nose. I saw their point at once.”

Hitchcock was essentially a comic filmmaker.

During a 1967 interview, when asked why he never made a comedy Hitchcock countered “But every film I make is a comedy.” (Even Vertigo, a cinematic version of “Mourning and Melancholia” if there ever was one, contains plenty of humorous touches, including a droll exchange near the beginning about a brassiere designed by an “aircraft engineer” on the principle of the cantilever bridge – no doubt a reference to the amply bosomed Kim Novak, who replaced the more modestly chested Vera Miles, Hitchcock’s first pick for the role of Madeleine/Judy. The Golden Gate Bridge is, of course, not a cantilever but a suspension bridge. Additional note: It was during the filming of The Outlaw in 1941 that famed aviator Howard Hughes, putting his knowledge of aeronautical engineering to good use, invented the underwire push-up bra for Jane Russell.)

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Did the master of suspense have a favorite comic scene? In the same interview we read: “I think one of the funniest films I have ever seen is Laurel and Hardy in a film called Bonnie Scotland. The longest take I have ever seen on the screen comes when the two of them are standing on a Scottish bridge and Laurel is taking snuff. And he sneezes right into the snuff box. And all the snuff goes into Hardy’s face. It was then the longest take I have ever seen before anything happens. And finally, this long sneeze comes. The sneeze is so big that he tilts backwards into the river below. Laurel is left on the bridge and nothing came up but water and fish every few seconds.”

Laurel and Hardy, Bonnie Scotland 1935 dir. James W. Horne

In fact, the missing sneeze scene in The Man in Lincoln’s Nose (the original title of North by Northwest) belongs to a venerable cinematic tradition. Perhaps it was this delightful slapstick sequence, with its impeccable timing and exaggerated gestures—Laurel, still on the bridge, is drenched by water launched by a vigorous Hardy sneeze (indeed, at one moment the camera itself is drawn into the whirlpool)—, that set Hitchcock’s comic imagination into motion. Lehman wanted to write the “Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” What would it mean to film the ultimate sneeze?

Sneezing and the art of motion pictures are more intimately linked than one might suspect. Behind the pantomime of Laurel and Hardy’s nasal convulsions lies the antics of the early short film That Fatal Sneeze. In this madcap comedy, a pepper-laden handkerchief triggers a sneezing fit which precipitates an increasingly zany series of events: a bed is overturned, a vegetable stand knocked down, DIRECTION 08 ← 09

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a policeman thrown to the ground, a house destroyed, an old woman’s wig propelled into the air… Eventually, the sneezing is so violent it causes the whole world to shake (special effects: the camera is tilted back and forth, Star Trek-style). In the end, the poor man sneezes himself into oblivion, exploding in a cloud of white smoke.

This story may be traced back to the very origins of cinema. The first copyrighted motion picture, inspired by Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion, was—what else?—a study of a sneeze. Made by W.K.L. Dickson at the Edison Laboratory and composed of 81 frames, this filmic ‘primal scene’ features Fred Ott, an Edison employee who had a penchant for gags. According to the Library of Congress, “It was filmed for publicity purposes as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper’s Weekly.” An excerpt of the article reads: “The Edison kinetoscope gives the entire record of a sneeze from the first taking of a pinch of snuff to the recovery. As seen in this wonderful mechanical device of Mr. Edison’s invention, when he exhibits the series of photographs the figure actually sneezes, and the phonograph as an accompanist sounds the precise ‘as–shew’.

The illusion is so perfect that you involuntarily say, ‘Bless you!’” One detail: in the original idea for the film, suggested by a Harper’s Weekly journalist bored with the subjects of previous film experiments, the sneezer was meant to be an attractive young woman.To paraphrase Godard: All you need to make a movie is a pretty girl and a pinch of snuff.

That Fatal Sneeze 1907 dir. Lewin Fitzhamon

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The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze 1894 (also known as Fred Ottís Sneeze)

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W H Y WOU LD A S C U LP T U R E

N E E D T O B R E AT H E

I

’ve reached the northern border of Germany, facing Poland. The purpose of my trip is to learn to sculpt, by meeting a sculptor.

the result of who knows what research, they nod a bit and smile as if we were all fooling ourselves. The truth is really hard for them to face…”

I had some questions written down somewhere, but all I can remember now and that seems worth asking is this: why would a sculpture need to breathe?

A woman, his daughter, answers the door at the only address in my possession. He hasn’t lived in this house in years, she says. I enter, we sit down and she brings me something like coffee. She asks me if I am interested in history. Just like that, the way you might ask someone how the weather is in Rome or Paris. I give the nihilist’s answer, no. But in the end we both know that if I’ve come as far as this tasteless coffee it’s because history does indeed interest me, along with the dead.

My contact with him was his daughter, I’ve never spoken to him directly. I could have, because though I speak no German his Italian is excellent. I know this because in his biography it is written that he lived in Italy for five years in his youth. I imagine him breaking little plaster arms into pieces, reassembling eyes and lips, dissecting heads. Maybe he was already aware of his fate as the next iconoclast, the faces that crumble into lumps of earth. The Roman breast he’d been copying for days would become the dry, cracked mud of his middle period, when he was to announce, in one of the very few interviews ever granted, that he is insensitive to the figure.

There are two sculptures in the back yard, her entire inheritance.

A face of a woman, weakly carved in a piece of white marble. You can just glimpse the eyes and the cheekbones. You can’t tell if it is vanishing into the marble or starting to come to the surface. A lemon tree is nearby, and a lemon is resting on the forehead. Further on, at the center of the garden, stands a lump of earth as tall as a man, fired who knows how. It is utterly formless, yet you can recognize arms, maybe a head. It could have been there always, a strange natural outgrowth we think resembles us due to our

“This is all I know how to do,” he would say, indicating a block of formless, dry, cracked mud, as big as an ancient bust but more similar to a lump of earth torn from the ground than to a man.

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- In 1979 your participation at the RWTH was very controversial. The sculpture you showed was made by pouring wax into the intestines of an animal, and then casting the form in bronze. The sacrificed animal was a rabbit. This was the first and only time you used such a method. Did you give up on this practice as a result of the reaction of the audience?

excessive anthropocentrism. She tells me it is one of the few sculptures with a title: “dog on two legs”.

The road climbs gently, surrounded by trees. Driving up the hill she tells me she doesn’t like to bring strangers to visit her father, his nerves are bad and such encounters always put him into an evil mood. She says I should avoid annoying questions and make my stay as short as possible. She warns me that the trip might be useless.

He is not a dangerous man, she adds. I continue to watch the road; what if my question is annoying?

- Yes. I thought it was a very good idea, but evidently I was wrong.

He stopped teaching at the art school because he would hit the students. They say he once entered the classroom with a sack full of stones and starting throwing them at the students in the first row. Taken to task by the director, it seems he defended himself by saying that this gesture was “indispensable for the education of a young artist who wants to come to grips with plastic materials”. The director searched for some sign of irony in the sculptor’s eyes, but in vain.

- So you were not interested in causing controversy?

During the same period, it seems he began to make holes in many of his works that were already on display in museums. In Frankfurt they managed to stop him before he ruined one of the last pieces to remain intact. I have personally checked on some of these works; the holes nearly all have a diameter of 80 millimeters. Made with a manual drill, the holes penetrate the sculptures for at least 20 centimeters, but never cross them completely. The holes are placed a few centimeters apart, so I think they resemble two nostrils.

- I was young, I had no money, all I could afford was a rabbit.

I thought about catching a cat in the street or something like that, but cats are hard to catch… That is, you have to shoot them, and I wanted a live animal.

It is an isolated two-storey house. Voices can be heard inside, like an argument. I ask his daughter if it might not be better to wait a bit, but she is already crossing the small porch. She knocks, opens the door and beckons to me to enter. A lone man is pacing the center of a room, hands in pockets, face twisted into a strange expression.

The rooms smells of lavender and piss. When he sees us silhouetted against the light he stiffens. I say “buongiorno” and he makes a bow that is too exaggerated to seem sincere, and responds “buongiorno sua maestà” (“good day, your Majesty”).

- In the past you worked with many materials, then almost thirty years ago you decided to just work with earth, clay, mud.

Was this choice the result of a precise formal process?

I do not dare to speak his name. He has already changed his name three times during the course of his career, and I can’t remember which was the last, or if there is a new name, perhaps. The one I do remember sounds Italian. When he started changing names he put fantasy dates on his sculptures. In Edinburgh there is one work with two holes and three dates. The last date, 1772, was painted on with white acrylic paint, in the same moment the holes were made.

- Your sculptures never have a pedestal, they never stand up straight. Except for the “dog on two legs” I saw in your daughter’s garden today.

- Of course I was. I stopped because the reaction was tepid, lame. I was expecting something more, I thought that someone would at least destroy the intestine. Instead it is still there in my studio, I think.

- Why a rabbit?

- Can I see your studio? (no reply)

(no reply) - Why did you stop working with plastics?

- There are none where I live now.

- The human world is inhuman, it doesn’t have to agree, that’s how I see it. Everything resembles a great museum of immobile bodies that look at each other and desire each other, immobile, posed. The erect position, for example, everyone wants to stand on two legs. Straight, erect. This is how we recognize ourselves. I have always preferred crawling.

The pedestal, likewise, is an emblem of our wearisome paranoia. Definitively, we want to be dignified, statuesque and dead. All this, right away. My wife couldn’t wait to see our daughter finally walk. I was against it, I said let her crawl around freely for two more years. That’s what happened. I often crawled myself.

His daughter indicates a spot, and I sit down. When she pulls back the curtains and opens the windows light bursts into the darkness, like wind, raising dense white dust that hangs in the air like rigid blades. In all that light he remains bent in his bow, in the midst of the dust and all the rest, until she goes to him and helps him to sit in a small armchair. Only then do I realize that is face is not symmetrical. The eyes are not on the same latitude, nor are the ears, and I think that with a face like that it is obvious that he has no interest in proportions.

- Is the purpose of the pedestal to bring something that is worth looking at up to eye level, or what?

The following interview was not authorized. I recorded it secretly. To avoid any repercussions, I have omitted the names of the sculptor and his daughter, and I have changed the titles of the works mentioned.

- It is this supremacy of the eye that I find unbearable. It seems to have replaced Descartes with something else. As if 2

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“I see therefore I am” were the equivalent of “I think therefore I am”. So I try to make the gaze uncomfortable. It’s a ridiculous practice, I admit it, but here in Germany we had Heidegger, all us westerners have had a bit of him, actually, and his system has always seemed visual to me. He says, more or less, that to know you exist you have to see yourself exist.

But in the end this is a rather superficial interpretation, because I believe the problem lies in the fact that most people read Heidegger in a superficial way.

- Did you share the same concerns about Germany after the war?

- I am the son of a Nazi. I cannot speak for what my father was, in the past. I felt an emptiness, we felt that a rift had been opened. When I was young I thought a wound could be healed by rediscovering the classics, just as the first German modernists did long before me. I didn’t want to throw myself into the darkness, into that mystique that had put our country into the hands of a dictator. Beuys was courageous, I was looking for something else, that’s all. Something that could connect past and future in a clear, crystalline way. Now I no longer think about the future, or even about the past.

- So you are against this representation that has passed from realistic figuration to a sort of figurative abstraction?

- It has been written that your sculpture is psychoanalytic in character...

- I don’t think this question is pertinent. I copied the classics out of a certain arrogance or narcissism that comes with youth, but I was never so good at reproducing a hand, a nose, not to mention an eye. I simply decided not to remedy my shortcomings, to accentuate my ineptitude. Furthermore, there is not just one way to look at a sculpture, or there shouldn’t be. That is another reason why I have never put anything on a block. I have broken two bronzes and ruined a floor this way, but that doesn’t matter.

- Walking through the countryside here you often encounter enormous holes, part of the landscape of the war. Sexual repression and ignorance construct bombs that open gaping holes, ripping up the earth, gutting buildings.

Trench warfare was nothing but wallowing and dying in wet holes. These activities were then bureaucratized by the other war. I grew up in an environment where sex education didn’t exist. So it would be all too simple to say that my sculptures look like the excrement of a giant. This leads straight to a psychoanalytic interpretation of the work that does not explain the interest of these forms for people born in a more aware, sexually more open context.

- You once said that it is hard for a sculptor to make a urinal that is a real urinal. Were you thinking about Duchamp?

- Duchamp’s lucubrations are really of very little interest to me, I think they are based on explicitly linguistic “language”.

Sculpture is something else. I simply meant that when you copy an object, even when you invent it, you actually always make a bust. A urinal is seldom anything other than a copy of a human body. The Greeks already thought about the idea that technique had constructed a world of humanoids. In this sense, Duchamp did nothing new.

- You once said that the eyes are a wound. This statement might seem too rhetorical, but you were talking about a relationship…

- The executioner explores all the possibilities of reality.

A sunny day, a Sunday with a light breeze, can be transformed into a nightmare of slaughter. The executioner can show you, before your eyes, the horror triggered by all the possibilities he has to transform the configurations of the real. He can cut off your feet and stick them in your mouth. He can open your knees and throw their caps in the air like balls of plaster. Torture, rape, murder, he can do anything. And he does not only do it to you, to the victim… he also does it for a witness. For the eyes of another who must see this power, live this nightmare without being able to awaken. But there must be another category of men.

A category that escapes from this triad and lives only for harmony, in the musical sense of the term. It is a question that allows for no irony.

- I am reminded of William Wilson, Poe’s story about the double. Do you mean that everything can become a double of the subject? (no reply) - Could you tell me something about your friendship with Beuys?

- There’s really nothing to say. We were friends. I could only tell you anecdotes, drinking stories, and I can’t drink alcohol any more, I lose control too easily.

- What is your position with respect to the avant-gardes that have attempted to have a different relationship to the past?

- You were one of the first people involved in the Fluxus project, and one of the first to abandon it. Your participation lasted for just two weeks. What made you give up?

- I don’t believe those who talk about the avant-garde as a sort of point of no return. As if in a certain historical period man really had the possibility of exhausting the potential for error of all humanity. The idea that imagination can be folded back on itself, to determine its own borders, and that what remains is only a tired fading away, seems like an inexact theory at best. A simple Raku vase from the Momoyama period suffices to deflate this end-of-history arrogance. This pottery is made in such a way as to display all its imperfections. The pieces are made by hand, without

- I didn’t give up a damn thing. I immediately realized I was just following a good friend and that sculpture, the idea of sculpture I had in mind at the time, that I still have in mind sometimes, was something else.

- You mean its social value? (no reply) 3 DIRECTION 08 ← 09

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- Because I think it is not an opposition, but maybe more a question of integration between a certain type of representation of realities and possibilities. As if, describing things, you were to start each description with a “perhaps” or with a “we may presume”. Like saying: perhaps this is a leg, perhaps this is a woman, etc. I’m not talking about approximation, but about a sort of complexity.

any tools, with humble materials. If you look at them in a naive way, you might try to trace them back to more complex, finely decorated vessels, but they actually come before the vases of the Song dynasty. The idea of the vase simply changed, people got tired of a certain idea of beauty, the ruling class had absorbed the theories of a new culture.

This has nothing to do with the end of history or with a progressive idea of aesthetics. After a period of appreciation of incongruous forms, there was a return to symmetry, without the faintest hint of the end of the world.

(no reply) - When I thought about this trip, this meeting, I imagined asking you this question: why would a sculpture need to breathe?

- Your lumps of earth vaguely resemble human figures, but often they are anything but. In classical sculpture, for example, one takes formless matter and makes it become a head.

Does your procedure move in the opposite direction?

(no reply) - I’m talking about the holes that have appeared in your sculptures over the last thirty years.

- I wouldn’t say the opposite direction. Our imagination accepts the Centaur, but it is hard for us to accept a bull with the head of a cat, a small cat. In Italy I was able to read Dante and I discovered a magnificent painter and a great sculptor. His idea of the Minotaur, a bull with the face of a bearded man, is so disorienting that often, in my youth, I wondered if it wouldn’t be worth reproducing such a sculpture. His image was triggered by incomprehension, taking its distance from myth. No longer a man as strong as a bull, but a bull with human intelligence.

(no reply) - The holes in your sculptures resemble the deep nostrils the Greeks made in their statues… (no reply) The way back always seems shorter. Beyond the window of the train the landscape melts into dusk. I watch and think about what it would be like if they gouged my eyes out, if they plugged up my ears with wax. And instead, what if this man had lost something inside all that earth? Something precious? So what he has probably been doing for years is simply exploratory drilling?

- Why didn’t you make your Minotaur?

- Realistic figures served to instruct the people, or so the church said, already back at the end of 6th century. They wanted realistic, emotional art. Age, sex, type, expression, gesture and garment all had to suit the character of the figure represented. Such “exact” images had the job of nurturing religious sentiment, of sustaining it and even transcending verbal expression. Those who are involved with this type of figuration, even in a critical sense, have or want to have something to do with power as well. I have sought something else with my sculpture.

- But this kind of “exact” figuration inflicts a feeling of anxiety that…

- You don’t need to be faced with an automaton to feel a sense of anxiety. Every sculpture contains this possibility of relation to the observer. There is this sculpture by Henry Moore I often think about with fear. It looks like a human head, one of its many helmets, but it is actually a monument to atomic energy. As a child I played a game when I was washing up in the bathroom. I would look at my breath condensed on the marble tiles and imagine human figures there. Then in Italy I read a bit of Leonardo, he encouraged artists to paint the figures suggested by the knots of a tree, the strange curlicues of a cloud. This kind of thing is very frightening, you have the impression that we are truly alone, alone in general.

- Do you see an opposition between your figures and these “exact” figures? Or is there a critical relationship instead? (no reply) 4 DIRECTION 08 ← 09

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