Uncomposing Space – Trudi Jaeger and the Chronotope
The exploration of space is central to Jaeger’s practice as an artist; we see this in her drawings and paintings as well as in the way she displays and presents her work. Her artistic vision is characteristic and consistent, and yet dynamic. We see evidence of this in earlier projects such as Umbrian Sequences (2003) and Touching Down (2011), as well as in the recent 2013 exhibition Interaksjoner, in co-operation with Carl Martin Hansen.
Touching Down was the first phase of an extended project – ‘Small house – a Place in Space’. The exhibition consisted of series of drawings and paintings in new formats, on Japanese paper and canvas. In addition to exhibiting paintings on the wall, series of drawings were presented in layers on specially constructed tables, and this mode of presentation has become an important aspect of the way in which the works are experienced. The underlying works could be glimpsed through the drawings that were placed over them. The artist herself was present in the gallery on a number of days, performing silent presentations of the underlying works. The public were thus able to experience the dynamic relations in the various series and the space between observer and works was brought to life. The performances could also been seen as a natural continuity of the brush strokes.
Jaegers process-orientated style of drawing is closely connected to ‘action painting’, and can be compared to a meditative performance. The brush, in various ways and at various speeds, lightly touches different types of paper. Improvisation is largely intuitive, but a hidden structure can be located in Jaeger’s drawings. She always follows an organising system, and in the pictures we find a certain formality, a conscious choice of composition and placing of strokes that are structured around a tonal resonance. There are subtle differences of a muted colour palette and light brings out the differences in the various types of paper. Brush drawing is central to Jaeger’s artistic practice. The French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954), when describing his own brush painting and the special significance it had for him, stated that it was a medium that had all of the qualities of painting: ‘It is always colour that is put into play, even when the drawing consists of merely one continuous stroke. Black brush drawings contain, in small, the same elements as coloured paintings; that is to say, differentiations in the quality of the surfaces unified by light.’ (i) Matisse’s words can also describe Jaeger’s drawings; her brush strokes seem to have a unique ability to capture light and give movement to surfaces.
The Poetry of Space
The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), in The World of Perception, writes about space and tactile contact with space. He refers to another artist, Paul Cézanne, who according to Merleau-Ponty: ‘[…] remarked that ’as soon as you paint, you draw’ by which he meant that neither in the world as we perceive it nor in the picture which is an expression of that world can we distinguish absolutely between, on the one hand, the outline or shape of the object and, on the other, the point where colours end or fade, that play of colour which must necessarily encompass all that there is: the object’s shape, its particular colour, its physiognomy and its relation to neighbouring objects.’ (ii) In other words, neither in reality nor in art is it possible for us to discern the difference between the very outline of form, colour and brushstroke. The significance of the play of colours and the impossibility of differentiating stroke from form is reflected in Jaeger’s drawings and paintings, no matter how much they otherwise differ from Cezanne’s colour surfaces. Jaeger’s brush strokes are characterised by both lightness and heaviness, opposing qualities that play together and lift the forms from the paper. Stroke and form, outline and content are one. This should be seen in connection with the way in which Jaeger’s work takes its point of departure in the fragility of light as it touches a room. She is engaged with how space comes into being, how it is filled and how we experience it. This engagement is clearly expressed in her works, which can be seen as improvisations over aspects of our everyday life and an exploration of our presence in space and the world.
Such improvisation on the quotidian, on space and places that surround us, provides a link to The Poetics of Space, a book written by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962). This work, which discusses phenomenology and architecture, takes up questions of how our surroundings appear to us. Bachelard’s departure point is our lived, everyday experience of architecture. He describes an ‘architecture of imagination’, an architecture that considers how the people who use it will experience it. He calls for architects to create space for the imagination. (iii) Through her examination of the potential of space, presence and of what is sufficient to fill a space, Jaeger employs a similar methodology in her drawings and paintings. This first phase in her long-term project, ‘Small House – A Place in Space’, has been given the title being-there.
In 1951 the architect Le Corbusier built a summer cabin at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in the south of France. This building, Le Petit Cabanon, is only 3,66 m x 3,66 m. In his search for the ideal human environment, Le Corbusier’s measurements were meant to represent the absolute minimum area that a person could live in. Trudi Jaeger has for this project found a new focal point – a small lakeside cabin, scarcely bigger than La Petit Cabanon, a space that is both a concrete and metaphorical starting point for the architecture of the imagination, and for presence.
Jaegers chronotopes
Artists, architects, geographers and planners have provided us with a variety of different interpretations of landscape and space. Since her student days at St. Martin´s School of Art in London, Jaeger has taken specific places as starting points for her drawings and paintings. However, a place is primarily something she approaches, a spatial focal point that is open to interpretation.
Jaeger’s pictorial world is first and foremost open, in motion, and may suggest an on-going process. This gives unquestionable strength to her artistic production, and can lead to a variety of exciting interpretations. However, it is possible to trace a number of clear, typical features. The concept of chronotope can open for an understanding of her work as a particular (and playful) manifestation of time, place and space.
The concept of the chronotope was coined by the Russian linguist and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) who used the term in order to stress the aesthetic centrality of the indivisible link between time and space, the two dimensions in which the subject is always located and must always relate to. Bakhtin refers to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed.’ (iv) Whether we are at home, in the street or standing in front of a painting in a gallery, we always find ourselves within space-time co-ordinates that tie us to a here and now that is different from any other combination of time or place. It is such moments that Jaeger catches and conveys. However, any chronotope also involves the viewer, who is integrated and creates new constellations of time and space, here and now. Jaeger explores given situations and lets different points of time; places and spatial experiences meet each other on paper. Instead of representing time, place and space in the traditional manner, she presents the interplay between various chronotopes, herself and the spectator.
Linguists use the term deixis to describe the ways in which words or phrases locate the subject within time-place: the pronouns I and you distinguish persons, here and there provide a distinction that locate the speaker in space, and now and then locate an event in time. It is within these co-ordinates that the subject is created. In Trudi Jaeger’s work this is expressed in a dialogic landscape where the subject is in constant movement. Jaeger’s artistic production is characterised by apparently random – yet meaningful and consciously placed – lines, strokes and colours that relate to each other and affect each other. Her paintings depend on the observer for their syntax to be completed, just as musical notes need each other for harmony and melody to be established. This can be clearly seen in her series, where format, material and colour are repeated and thus establish a common context for the expression of each individual work. As a part of this process, she has at times displayed layers of drawings on special tables and changed their order during the exhibition. She did this for the first time in her Works on Paper, 2006 exhibition. The unclear translucency of the paper gave the impression of a fragile balance of the time-room-space continuity – within and between the individual works. Movement in time and space makes visible a gentle restlessness in the pictures, and strengthens the sense of presence and the significance of the chronotope. In this respect, her art might evoke the work of certain modern poets, and we find such a link expressed in a work which has borrowed its title from the American poet William Carlos Williams’ (1883–1963) poem Sometimes It Turns Dry and the Leaves Fall Before They Are Beautiful (1944). Williams drew his inspiration from both language itself and ordinary, everyday things. In Jaeger’s work the title suggests that it is through everyday objects and processes that the inexpressible can be expressed.
Place as process
The British cultural geographer Doreen Massey (f. 1944) has, through research that combines Philosophy and Sociology, been an inspiration to artists and architects. Massey defines ‘place’ as a dynamic process with no unambiguous, static identity. Her concept of ‘place’ implies multiple identities rather than a single one and, furthermore, that there are no clear boundaries between what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’. According to Massey, a place is by no means a neutral, frozen or predefined phenomenon; it stands in a natural and inevitable relationship with time. And for this reason, a place will always be in a state of change.
Massey’s philosophy of place may be compared to Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. Rather than putting an emphasis on the insecurity that might be a consequence of the variable time-place chronotope, Massey has formulated a progressive understanding of place, where it is necessary for us to re-examine our experience of place. An acquaintance with the theories of Bakhtin and Massey can help us to understand what it is that unites Trudi Jaeger’s projects. Her drawings and paintings can be seen as uncomposed spaces that insist on their presence in time and place and make the same demand of the observer and the artist herself. Her art points at our present understanding of places and localities and how we position ourselves, define ourselves and relate to our surroundings. The observer is challenged to question how we imagine a place’s character in the age of globalisation and sweeping change. Massey claims that we need a global understanding of place, one in which place is neither limited nor static but rather, as in the art of Trudi Jaeger, a point of concentration for decomposing the chronotope, where both local and global contexts play a role:
It is a sense of place, an understanding of ‘its character’, which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond. A progressive sense of place would recognize that, without being threatened by it. What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place. (5)
Everyday Musicality
A particular feeling for place as a focal point is also expressed in her most recent works, created in 2012 and 2013, during and after two long stays in Rome. She explored the park of the Doria-Pamphilij and the sacred landscape around the Via Appia Antica, the setting for many classical myths and legends. She wandered along the Via dell’Almone into the Valle della Caffarella, the area named after Rome’s holy river. From her room in Circolo Scandinavo she had a view of the secret garden, Giardino Secreto, in Villa Farnesina, a place she visited on several occasions. From these experiences came the drawings that provided a starting point for her most recent work, which was displayed in Bergen, at the exhibition Interaksjoner, in the USF gallery that ten years ago housed her 2003 Umbrian Sequences exhibition.
Trudi Jaeger’s 2013 exhibition, which was a continuation and development of her Touching Down Imaginations project, contained time, musicality, nerve, repetition and atmosphere– as well as landscape and cartography. Time was gradually and partially revealed. The most recent series of drawings, entitled Roman Drawings, consisted of short series of two or three works that played against each other. They were presented in a manner reminiscent of a musical score, where the different motifs of the drawings overlapped with each other. In this project she connected different drawing media on different types of paper with varying formats. The dynamic relationship between the various series and qualities of paper captured light in in different ways and thus activated the space between the spectator and the work. As in earlier projects, the drawings were inspired by different places and experiences; however, on this occasion they were more clearly characterised by a minimalism. This was partially expressed by an exploration and development of the interplay between the vertical and the horizontal, both in the pictures and the exhibition room. Space continues to play a central role; the works were displayed on low tables that were specially constructed for the formats that she used. In addition, two vertical steel frames were suspended in the space and filled with drawings. These walls consisted of vertical threads, where visual notes were woven in and arranged to create a type of musical score. Associations with a score were further realised by silent displays before the public in the exhibition period, where aspects of the underlying or hidden work were made visible. Her improvisations moved from the space of the paper to the space of the locale and further to the social space in an experimental interaction with musicians where the three respective voices – drawing, silent display, voice and instrumentation – were linked. These musical happenings and improvisations were arranged in the course of the exhibition period, in a co-operative endeavour that also involved the artist Carl Martin Hansen. In this way, Trudi Jaeger’s exploration of the chronotope of place and landscape opened for an examination of how place can be connected to other places and people in new ways. The place’s chronotope was developed and explored through new artistic projects, projects that now contain a soundscape. Time, place and space will continue to intertwine, dissolve and continually create new meeting points for the observer and it is this process that we witness in the visual world of Trudi Jaeger, a world with its own unique tempo and sound.
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Endnotes:
(i) Jack. D. Flam (red.), Matisse on Art. Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
(ii) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception. London: Routledge, [1948] 2008, side 51.
(iii) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, [1958] 1994.
(iv) M.M.Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,’ i The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M.Bakhtin, red. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, side 84. For a discussion on the relevance of the chronotope to contemporary culture, see Esther Peeren, Bakhtin and Beyond: Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
(v) Doreen Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’ in Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
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Synnøve Vik, Art Historian
This text was written for the publication Lucent. Starting with Indigo. Trudi Jaeger, Works on Paper. Published in 2014.