Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Dublin - Stephen Brandes: Klutz paradiso - RHA - July, August 2006.
Circa 118: Review  | | Stephen Brandes: The Canaries , 2006, permanent marker and acrylic on vinyl, 201 x 226 cm; courtesy RHA. | Line carries thought, darkly; less a process of illumination than of withdrawal. Drawing a few unsuspected leaps, Stephen Brandes embarks on arboreal wanderings across a terrain marked by opaque yet familiar signs, uncoded architectural fragments, peculiar props, backyard detritus, and the ruins of various faiths; a pilgrim’s itinerary plotted out in those mildly sinister moments of suburban ennui that leave one doodling on the linoleum floor, dreaming of northern vistas and Classical passions – Sibelius beneath the Leylandii, Jerusalem in Wolverhampton. It has long been second nature for the complex line to confuse and fascinate, capture and divert. It does so by leading the eye into perceptual knots, designs of bewildering intricacy from which it cannot extricate itself, and thus it diffuses or redirects the eye’s original purpose. The complex line is a trap. To achieve graphic convolution Brandes uses various means: brickwork, piles of planks, fake broken-tile flooring, unexpected shifts of scale. Most importantly, such meandering patterns elaborate upon confined spaces, expanding them indefinitely: a sofa becomes a vast terrain of hills, forests, fields, lakes; the roof of a B&B carries a suburban estate. And as they expand and grow in complexity, so their viscosity increases. The map is also a puzzle that places a course of obstacles in one’s path, to be successfully negotiated. Brandes’ drawings, then, present a navigational problem, and as such they are a distant echo of his grandmother’s flight from the pogroms of Romania in the early twentieth century. Freed from the brute necessity of his grandmother’s journey, Brandes’ flight loops back upon itself, tracing the longest possible route between here and there, or now and then, in the hope that this tracing shall at least lay a hold of the ghosts encountered en route . As Barry Schwabsky notes, that imagined past is reconstructed from notations Brandes makes of real or imagined details of present-day Eastern Europe – ‘graphically distilled details delicately prised loose from their context’. These details provide numerous points of departure and return, or an attic to repeatedly ransack, but Brandes performs a further operation on them. Like a child surrounded by its toys, he is an exemplar of bricolage , taking ‘crumbs’ and ‘scraps’ from diverse sources and reconstructing by means of what he calls ‘barbed magic’. Through processes of miniaturisation, graphic dismemberment, and grotesqueries of scale, Brandes loosens the temporality contained in objects, presenting them on the margin of the ‘once’, the ‘no longer’ and the ‘yet to come’. One can decipher the desires that have traversed this margin. They are those that make history. In much medieval cartography, nature is given as a negative space, a space of discontinuity, outside the sites of civilisation through which the pilgrim must travel. However, in Brandes’ case, between sites of imaginative catastrophe, clusters of broken figures, identical housing units – demolition sites; the ruins of civilisation, one might say – linoleum occupies the non-space of nature, a DIY replica of history and status, a substitute for a nature not so much lost as unknown. Brandes’ terrains are always isolated and enclosed on their ground. What is imagined lies parallel to the mundane, upon its surface, not in perspective. There is no clear threshold connecting here with there. This ‘self-distancing’ movement of the map once prepared the medieval pilgrim tracing an imaginary itinerary for the ‘contemplative ascent’, to the point where the traveller might intimate the unifying force of God’s plan. Like these ‘spiritual itineraries’, Brandes reverses the direction of map-making, so that the map does not give onto the objective world but to a greater degree of fictive complexity. These are historia rather than geographia. However, as might be expected, Brandes offers no ascent, more a lurch across, which catches the desire for this ascent – this clear vision from on high – unawares. For example, the homely is uprooted, turned over and its underbelly exposed, so that from amidst suburban effluence the towering purity of the Urwald emerges. In his travels Brandes forewent the techniques of the snap-happy tourist, framing the unfamiliar within a series of recognisable images, deferring the anxiety produced by the world’s sudden estrangement; against this, Brandes makes use of the slowness of his materials to return the world transformed, yet with all its initial foreignness intact. Memory, imagination and observation encounter each other directly, catastrophically, denying the easy partition demanded both of consumable images and the suburban dream.
Tim Stott is a critic based in Dublin. Dublin - Stephen Brandes: Klutz paradiso - RHA -
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