metropolis m

The family house, the flag he carried rolled up under his arm at his father’s funeral, a girl who allowed him to unbutton precisely four buttons on her blouse: scraps of memories from his childhood form the basis of the bizarre magic art of Andro Wekua (Sochumi, Georgia, 1977). A portrait on the occasion of his solo presentation in De Hallen in Haarlem.Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878. I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. Vladmir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, 1966.A life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984.A memory is not the same thing as a moment from the past. A memory belongs not to then, but to now, always now. Many memories are in fact memories of other memories (‘I recollect when I recollected.’). Not second-order realities, then, but third, fourth, or fifth – scars upon scars upon scars. Remembrance is a space into which fiction might wander unbidden, or be welcomed and lavishly hosted. Remembrance makes unreliable narrators of us all. The Anglo-Hungarian writer Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector (1997) is a tale told by a Sumerian urn, some 6500 years old. During its long material existence, the novel’s ceramic narrator has had many owners, each of whose habits and foibles it meticulously catalogues, building up a picture (which includes, wonderfully, ‘ninety-one types of surprise’) of our species over six millennia. A meditation on the humbling brevity of human life, The Collector Collector also posits the idea that objects do not only live through and record events, but that they remember them, too. While this is, in strict philosophical terms, a fallacious reification, it is nevertheless useful. If objects have memories, does that impact on their objectivity, and bend and buckle their relationship to linear time? Might they not in the end be, like Nabokov’s ‘magic carpet’, something we trip over in our search for that fugitive thing, historical truth? Andro Wekua’s three ceramic vases Untitled (Black Sea) (2004), Untitled (Rot/Schwarz) (2004) and Untitled (2004), are, like Fischer’s urn, vessels in which memories are kept, although their sealed voids suggest a strong aversion to opening up. Displayed together on the gallery floor, they resemble a triumvirate of portly, tight-lipped matrons, or passive-aggressive votive offerings to some invisible and perhaps absent god of time. Two of the vases, Untitled (Rot/Schwarz) and Untitled, bear abstract passages of paint on their trembling, off-white bellies, not quite designs (their freeness makes that word seem inappropriate) but rather organic compositions, redolent of wilting petals, dispersed pollen, ribbons of black cloud and the raking of claws. By contrast, the third is plain white, save for the words ‘BLACK SEA’, which have been incised on its rim in shaky capital letters, and the inky blue paint that pools on its interior cap. We might read this vessel, then, as a device for containing an inland sea (both geographical and psychological), or for transporting a trace of one place to another. While the ‘water’ that fills the vase is painted in such a way that it gives the illusion of near-infinite depth, its surface is in fact solid and determinedly impenetrable. This should come as no surprise. When you have very little of a precious substance, you don’t want to spill a single drop.

Stories about a world that might never have been

Fragmented, sometimes-fictionalized memories from the Berlin-based Wekua’s childhood and adolescence in Georgia feature heavily in his paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, installations, texts and films: Soviet propaganda and a ping-pong table behind the family house, a mathematics teacher who cut clumps of hair from his head, a twin named Nonha who died in a motor accident, the flag he carried rolled up under his arm at his father’s funeral, a girl who allowed him to unbutton precisely four buttons on her blouse, and people making love on a hotel staircase in the midst of a civil war. All this might seem to belong to the genre of half-horrific, half-nostalgic émigré narratives of the type popular with a certain type of vicariously thrilled Westerner (visit any airport bookshop, and the shelves will be heaving with hefty accounts of almost eroticized suffering and flight), were it not for the fact that Wekua’s work isn’t primarily concerned with memory as a defence against forgetting, but instead as a fraught, occasionally playful form of theatre in which atmosphere is more important than plot, and in which structure is provided not by the diligent recollection of verifiable events, but by the way something remembered, misremembered or even invented (an image, a mass, a feeling tone) cross-pollinates with another. This, then, is very far from bearing witness to history, personal or otherwise. Instead, it is autobiography as it is staged in the mind, with all the temporal slips and imaginative judders that that implies. In Wekua’s painting Spiel made in 2005, what might be plumes of smoke, or a leafless, white-limbed plant, rise from a diamond-patterned box. Four skulls rest, a little precariously, on this armature, their eye-sockets a bright turquoise, their mouths smiling orange slashes. On the right of the canvas hangs a curtain, from which emerges a calamine pink hand that may be attached to a black-sleeved arm, or may (and this feels more likely) be disturbingly disembodied. If we read this curtained space as a stage, we might read the hand as that of a magician summoning up a quartet of oddly jolly skulls, the possible price of which is the loss of everything but his pale, conjuring fingers. What’s happened, here, seems to me to be that a trick has been mistaken by reality for a spell, and what was intended to be an illusionistic fiction has instead become horribly effective fact. In Spiel, the question of what and who is being played is never quite resolved. Is the joke on the magician, or on the world-as-we-know-it? Is it the conjuror or the cosmos that controls the game? If Spiel offers up a possible narrative, albeit one that is threaded with uncertainty, then Wekua’s canvas The Play (2007) is considerably more oblique. Here, a creature that appears part nun, part cosmonaut and part monkey rests her hand on a plinth, while contemplating a large oblong object (another potential support for a sculpture?) patterned in the manner of a generic Constructivist painting. Her face is tense and wary, her body language fretful, self-protecting and prepared for flight. Perhaps she expects that the object’s diamond-shaped panels will unfold to reveal some nameless, uncanny horror, but why then does she cling to another of its kind? A further such volume appears in Wekua’s painting Shore (2005) squatting on an abstracted coastline, its black lines describing either a regress into the mainland, or an egress into the sea. Although Wekua has not identified them as such, it’s difficult not to interpret these forms as memories. What else might, as in Spiel, provide the base for an illusion that transforms into a fact? What else, as in The Play, do we cling to, and also fear? And what else, as in Shore, constitutes our mental picture of our forsaken childhood homes? Whatever the meaning of these objects (and Wekua’s work admits a multiplicity of readings), it seems clear that they are plinths of some sort, a formal grammar that supports the artist’s atmospheric poetry.

Remember the trick, remember the spell

A pedestal commonly props up a sculpture, but the pedestal in Wekua’s White Face (2005) operates more like an open grave. In this piece, a bronze bust slathered in white-glazed ceramic sinks, as though into a pillow, into a roughly head-and-shoulders shaped recess in a rectangular block of wood. Its empty eye sockets daubed with blue pigment, and its doleful lips with orange, it resembles the skulls in Spiel before they shucked off their flesh and adopted a skeleton’s compulsory grin. With its white face and pencilled-on eyebrows, it might be a death mask of a blind Pierrot, or a Yorick who has put jesting aside and turned towards the infinite. While this bust’s milky skin has begun to curdle, it is significant that its make-up remains. What survives, here, is illusion − a second, fictional face. Is this a faulty memorial, a false memory, or one that accesses a different type of truth? Adroit at stagecraft and acts of summoning, at pulling unexpected rabbits from unexpected hats, Wekua bears a certain resemblance to a magician, and it seems reasonable to read his bronze sculpture The Big Player (2007) as something like a self-portrait. In this work, a skinny-limbed figure stands with its knees pressed slightly together, his right hand resting upon his chest in a gesture that is half plea, half astonished self-effacement. Trussed-up with tape, this hand nevertheless holds a wand between thumb and index finger, its black length pointing at the sky like an unwelcome erection, or a gun unwisely cocked at God. Cast from what looks like a female mannequin, the figure’s head is crowned with a stage magician’s top hat, its brim shielding his placid eyes. In many ways this magician is a fragile presence. Physically slight, constricted by bandage-like bonds, he appears utterly de-powered. And yet, I suspect that he is still able to perform a feat or two. He still has his right hand free, after all, and in Spiel this is what remains of the magician when everything else has been occluded or lost. We might imagine it as a cursor shuffling information, or a Hand of Glory, the witch’s tool employed to arrest the passage of time. We might, though, imagine it as the hand that holds the paintbrush, the one that marshals fact and fiction into images not of a remembered past, but of an immersive, multivalent now. This is Wekua’s magic, his unexpected spell. In the opening pages of his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) the Czech writer Milan Kundera (who, like Wekua, long ago left his homeland) famously revisits Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Return’ – the claim that ‘everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum’. If the German philosopher is correct, argues Kundera, then human life is burdensome, but significant; and if not, it is free, but lacking in substance.Nietzsche’s concept is neither provable nor falsifiable, so we are left with an apparent choice between the ecstasies and excruciations of either lightness or of weight. Most of us, though, oscillate between these two positions, experiencing as we do recollections of the past, and fantasies of the future – things that indicate, imperfectly, a deterministic universe and its opposite. For Wekua – as evidenced in his recent exhibition Blue Mirror at Barbara Gladstone, the title of which evokes reflection tinctured with sadness, but also the act of gazing up into a clear, cerulean sky − memory may weigh heavy, but there is always the opportunity to transform it into something that will rise and take flight. Tim MortonAndro WekuaDe Hallen, Haarlem13 September−23 NovemberPortions of this article first appeared in Andro Wekua: Hydra Workshops, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2007.