(Kevin Acers, November 2006)
The
exhibit is taking place in a large, stately house converted to gallery space. It
is an old, multi-storied structure with numerous rooms. Each room has high
ceilings. The walls have been painted the color of French vanilla ice cream,
except the basement, whose walls have been carefully coated in paint the color
of rust. Near the ceiling of most rooms, in the corners,
there are fine, jagged cracks that look as if they might have been
carefully drawn with a stylus dipped in India ink.
Publicity
for the event has been effective—word of mouth among the fanciers of art who
seem to matter most in terms of mobilizing attendance. In the anteroom a
tall-legged, cherry-wood table stands just to the left of a simpler, smaller
table where a visitor’s registry is splayed. People dutifully sign their
names, ignoring the question—if it arises—of what the purpose is. The taller
table is there for a more evident purpose: atop it sits a large glass tray, and
on this tray is the obligatory assortment of squishy cheeses, olives, and
bread-things.
This
show is of new art—canvases, mostly oils and acrylics—created by, all
together, more than a dozen painters. Some have exhaustibly generated a painting
for every room in use, meaning some 15 or so. Others more modestly contributed
three or four paintings to the whole event. Several were content with one
painting alone to join the fray.
The
exhibit is the culmination of 36 months of creative labor and the works of
numerous minds. The first year, most of that labor was centered in one
person’s head: Pornsawan’s imagination. Awake one night, she found her
muddled brain piecing together odd, kaleidescopic thoughts. To her astonishment
from these drifting mental blips a cohesive vision emerged: an exhibit of new
art based on selected excerpts of Kafka’s diaries! It excited her, and soon
the sleepy mind was quite alert. She sat bolt upright, illuminated her apartment
and, with the caffeine-like effects of adrenaline, stayed up the rest of the
night poring over her old tome of Kafka, marking asterisks with a pencil in the
margins of relevant lines.
Over
the following months, she made use of her ‘art-world’ connections. In time
she received some inquiries from accomplished artists who were intrigued.
Eventually she came up with the structure she envisioned, refined the
project’s parameters, communicated these, and waited for slides of finished
art.
The
art was slow in coming, but it did, throughout the second year, trickle in. Then
it poured in. The response amazed her, delighted her.
She enlisted assistance. Together, she and her team worked tirelessly and
pulled it all together.
In
the exact center of each room is erected a slim sort of podium made of black
painted metal. It is actually a modified, telescoping
microphone stand painted black. Atop the stand is a small, angled placard
holder framing an index-card sized parchment bearing the inscription of an
excerpt from Kafka’s diaries. All the paintings in that room were created in
response to that particular quotation. Each room a different quote, a different
set of paintings. A wildly different set of visual responses to the same set of
words.
The
diary excerpts, with their corresponding artworks in the various rooms, are
these:
LIVINGROOM
(13 paintings)
22 December 1910: “Today I do not even dare to reproach
myself. Shouted into this empty day, it would have a disgusting echo.”
LIBRARY
(14 paintings)
20 August 1911: “I live only here and there in a small word in whose vowel I
lose my useless head for a moment. The first and last letters are the beginning
and end of my fishlike emotion.”
PARLOR
(11 paintings)
15 December 1914: “The joy of lying on the sofa in the silent room without a
headache, calmly breathing in a manner befitting a human being.”
DINING
ROOM (9 paintings)
24 January 1915: “The difficulties I have in speaking to people arise from the
fact that my thinking, or rather the content of my consciousness, is entirely
nebulous, that I remain undisturbed by this, so far as it concerns only myself,
and am even occasionally self-satisfied; yet conversation with people demands
pointedness, solidity, and sustained coherence, qualities not to be found in me.
No one will want to lie in clouds of mist with me, and even if someone did, I
couldn’t expel the mist from my head; when two people come together it
dissolves of itself and is nothing.”
KITCHEN
(6 paintings)
14 December 1914: “At Baum’s in the afternoon. He was giving a pale little
girl with glasses a piano lesson. The boy sat quietly in the gloom of the
kitchen, carelessly playing with some unrecognizable object. Impression of great
ease. Especially in contrast to the bustling about of the tall housemaid, who
was washing dishes in a tub.”
MAID’S
CHAMBER (7 paintings)
21 November 1913: “These predictions, this imitating of models, this fear of
something definite, is ridiculous. These are constructions that even in the
imagination, where they are alone sovereign, only approach the living surface
but then are always suddenly driven under. Who has the magic hand to thrust into
the machinery without its being torn to pieces and scattered by a thousand
knives? I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them
whitely merging in a corner.”
FIRST
BATHROOM (4 paintings)
2 December 1914: “From Esther: God’s masterpieces fart at one another
in the bath.”
MASTER
BEDROOM (11 paintings)
15 September 1912: “The hollow which the work of genius has burned into our
surroundings is a good place into which to put one's little light.”
GUEST
ROOM (6 paintings)
16 February 1914: “I was going home in my usual fashion in the evening after
work, when, as though I had been watched for, they excitedly waved to me from
all three windows of the Genzmer house to come up.”
BEDROOM
(14 paintings)
26 December 1914: “Do I make my laments here only to find salvation here? It
won’t come out of this notebook, it will come when I’m in bed and it will
put me on my back so that I lie there beautiful and light and bluish-white; no
other salvation will come.”
NURSERY
(10 paintings)
24 December 1911: “This morning my nephew’s circumcision. A short,
bow-legged man, Austerlitz, who already has 2,800 circumcisions behind him,
carried the thing out very skillfully. It is an operation made more difficult by
the fact that the boy, instead of lying on a table, lies on his grandfather’s
lap, and by the fact that the person performing the operation, instead of paying
close attention, must whisper prayers…The operation is performed with what is
almost an ordinary knife, a sort of fish knife. One sees blood and raw flesh,
the moule bustles about briefly with his long-nailed, trembling fingers
and pulls skin from some place or other over the wound like the finger of a
glove. At once everything is all right, the child has scarcely cried. Now there
remains only a short prayer during which the moule drinks some wine and
with his fingers, not yet entirely unbloody, carries some wine to the child’s
lips.”
SECOND
BATHROOM (4 paintings)
23 May, 1912: “Yesterday, behind us, out of boredom, a man fell from his
chair…Now, in the evening, out of boredom, washed my hands in the bathroom
three times in succession.”
ATTIC
ROOM (10 paintings)
23 December 1911: “All yesterday morning my head was as if filled with mist
from Werfel’s poems. For a moment I feared the enthusiasm would carry me along
straight into nonsense.”
ATRIUM
(7 paintings)
20 January 1915: “With what malice and weakness I observe myself. Apparently I
cannot force my way into the world, but lie quietly, receive, spread out within
me what I have received, and then step calmly forth.”
CELLAR,
EAST ROOM (11 paintings)
6 June 1914: “There are certain relationships which I can feel distinctly but
which I am unable to perceive. It would be sufficient to plunge down a little
deeper; but just at this point the upward pressure is so strong that I should
think myself at the very bottom if I did not feel the currents moving below me.
In any event, I look upward to the surface whence the thousand-times-refracted
brilliance of the light falls upon me. I float up and splash around on the
surface, in spite of the fact that I loathe everything up there and – ”
CELLAR,
WEST ROOM (9 paintings)
30 October 1921: “Feelings of complete helplessness. What is it that binds you
more intimately to these impenetrable, talking, eye-blinking bodies than to any
other thing, the penholder in your hand, for example? Because you belong to the
same species? But you don’t belong to the same species, that’s the very
reason why you raised this question. The impenetrable outline of human bodies is
horrible…It forces one to this arbsurdity: ‘Left to my own resources, I
should have long ago been lost.’ My own resources.”
Porsawan
is exhausted, and she is exhilarated. She receives excited compliments from
guests—many familiar, many pretending to be familiar—with a flashing smile.
She stands alone and drinks a glass of wine, watching, at the same time absorbed and detached, as if intoxicated. From moment to moment she is aware of her heart’s thumping beat, thumping like it did the night, so long ago, she couldn’t sleep.