By Alexander García Düttmann and Jean-Luc Nancy
Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013, photographic print, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist, Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris, chandelier projects, London
All these rounded buildings, all these buildings that curl upwards and form spirals, all these buildings that seem to be on the verge of taking off into a livid sky like a telescope waiting to be extended, all these swollen and bloated buildings, all these buildings with golden and silvery reflections, photographed as if they had already been erected, or as if they had already changed the city’s three-dimensional skyline, all these buildings that assimilate themselves to the dome of a neighbouring cathedral, that appropriate it, and that belong as much to the future as to the past, all these buildings that photography has already stored away by carrying them through the arch of a depot, a large arch made of bricks that surrounds itself with spikes, or that doubles its low curvature as if in search of protection – well, these buildings do not exist, as they say, not all of them. And that’s precisely what Rut Blees Luxemburg’s images show. Rather than appearing as buildings one could enter so as to circulate within their enclosed spaces, or rather than appearing as buildings one could climb so as to throw oneself into a new depression from the top, they appear as urban construction sites. Here, the city comes into sight as a place where something happens, or as something that takes place right now. Clearly it can exist only in and as photography. The city is a deceptive poster, a post card where the image hovers between the real and the imaginary, given facts and virtual projections, vulgarity and luxury, the modern and the old, the private and the public. That the city exists only in and as photography must be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, the finished city, recognisable as such because nothing proves out of place, the city as a museum of the past and the future, is the city of digital photography, of photography that knows how to put things right. Yet on the other hand, the city that is in the process of turning into what it will once have been, the city that is being built, the city that keeps growing, the city that falls into ruins and undoes itself, the city that eliminates, excludes and evicts, the city that is being abandoned, that abandons itself and flees, that escapes towards another city or something other than a city, the dusty city and the rotten city, the city that has become too expensive, is also the city of photography, for it must still be staged. What must be staged is the city’s own staging, its construction site full of scaffoldings and yellow and green plastic sails, teeming with rubbish, with bags made of synthetics, with stuffed bags that form a dam, with bags that become humps of wet blackness, with white and empty bags that display the name of a supermarket chain. On both sides, it is always the misery of the city that is at stake. Photography exhibits the heart of the city as its misery, its petrification, its transformation into cardboard, and as its passion, its line of flight, its winter journey. One must show the work of architects, limpid and proper, sustained by huge Doric or Corinthian columns, and one must try to glimpse the undoing, or the unworking, that the work must call for if it is to come into its own, if it requires labour in order to be produced. Since the architect’s project can only be realised if there is a site, a construction site, and a garbage container, there is no city that could renounce photography, that could do without a more or less accurate representation of what it will resemble one day, and that could bypass the unexpected presentation of what resists the project, of what is at work in the city and deconstructs it at the very moment it is being built. The coming city takes leave, and it is here, in this interruption of the project, that art finds its place, or that photography reveals the event of taking-place as a drifting, as a horizontal movement that constantly renews itself, that provides itself a new thrust by allying itself with a voice and encountering a few strangers. Photography reveals the event of taking-place as a tracking shot that wrests its force from the frozen image of a Greek vertical line and that passes along wooden fences, iron grids, and camps improvised in an open space.
Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013, photographic print, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist, Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris, chandelier projects, London
Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013, photographic print, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist, Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris, chandelier projects, London
The tracking shot wrests itself from the frozen image of a Greek colonnade. It travels, it journeys across the city in winter along with Schubert’s bittersweet melody, in which the voyager sings that he came and will also leave a stranger. The journey goes nowhere. Having wrested itself from the photographed Greek colonnade, from a ludicrous advertising poster with a troop of recycling containers lined up in front of it, the journey ends after several stops or stations, several meditative or puzzled halts. It has reached a miserable and grey, hostile and futureless obstruction. The world is so ‘trüb’, the voyager sings, so grey, so drab, so murky, so disenchanted. The world is ‘a much bigger mess’, a mess much bigger than the mess of the camp, he may read as he comes across the tents set up by outraged protesters. And only a few steps further it says ‘love is the answer’, an echo of words sung by the voyager, ‘das Mädchen sprach von Liebe’. The young girl has been glimpsed as she went by with her friend right in front of the recycling containers, while the poster of the Greek temple moved away into the background. Later the fluted and massive columns of the city’s monuments will parade at the speed of a walk quickened by restlessness, just before we are led to dirty walls, nocturnal passers-by who are intrigued by the camera, and then on to the big shambles, a plastic bag next to a neo-Roman gate, a group of people waiting for a bus, and once again the lower parts of supposedly Doric or Ionic columns, shown repeatedly as if the repetition were the beat of the ambition to create a polis. The whole city becomes its own temple, lifted up by other and mimetic columns into the cathedral sky, by a spiral or a heavy cone or shell, by signs that gesture towards a sky overloaded with dusty steam and yellowish or blueish pollution. Only one image cuts through it all with its straightforward colours. It is the image of a blue arch with a frieze made of bricks. All that can be seen through its wide gape is an intense blackness into which the beige floor disappears as it turns greenish. Why should I stay on if I am going to be expelled, the voyager asks, and he begins to look elsewhere, in darker places. The high fronts of buildings and the glimmering partition-walls of the construction sites are shot through with lights that shimmer excessively, as if they were trying to emit a radiance that no longer does any good since all that may be left inside is emptiness. Perhaps the polis and its temples no longer have an inside, just like the ruins of the Greek temple on the poster, and all we can do on the construction site is walk from ruin to ruin, while a tired worker wearing a boiler suit as orange as the surrounding lights leans on something. What is he thinking of? He may see the passing voyager, or he may not. Love loves to gallivant, the voyager sings, turn itself into a ballad, it loves to go from one to another. It passes in front of wire fences, in front of 140 LONDONWALL written in big antique-style letters, and then continues to heavy concrete blocks that are not topped by columns. Good night, my gentle darling, the voyager says before he vanishes. He does not wish to disturb her, he simply wants to let her know that he has thought of her in the night of the city, in the vicinity of the columns and the shambles, the Greek skyscrapers, the colourless dome, and the torn sails displayed along the construction sites, tinted the colour of mimosas or periwinkles. The photo captures all these nuances, these streams of dirty beige, of grey, of rancid butter, of greyish-brown and bistre, of bitumen and cobalt, of steel, silver and putty, it captures all the vestiges and pulverescences, all the flakes on a hat, all the fluorescent flashes on a protective net, and also the dense chocolate of the river that features a gliding boat, a boat that is not used by voyagers but by tourists who are in town and want to gaze at the Greek ruins, tomorrow or way back, before or after the big city. Writing of lights, photography, rain of bright photons that emanate from the sullied marble and from the lemony attire of a black night watchman whose cigarette is lit up suddenly with a magenta sparkle. There is misery, abandonment, and yet there is also the voyager’s song, the pausing of the camera, a patient waiting for each image to lay itself down, a note or a touch placed like tender mist.
Rut Blees Luxemburg, London Dust, 2013, photographic print, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist, Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris, chandelier projects, London
Translated from French by Jared Stark and Alexander García Düttmann
Rut Blees Luxemburg is an artist living in London, UK. Her work is included in the Liverpool Biennale, UK, which opens on 5 July. Her exhibition ‘London Dust’ was shown at Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris, France, in 2013, and chandelier projects, London, earlier this year. A monograph on her work, Commonsensual, is published by Black Dog.