Jason Dodge and I are known to have both serious conversations as well as conversations about seriousness... From time to time we meet in a bar near where we live in Berlin and talk for a couple of hours, helped along by the house Pilsner. These conversations touch upon a wealth of topics, mostly shared concerns, some gossip and anecdotes, not so much art. The one recurring motif, the red thread that has turned our casual meetings into a programmatic project of sorts, is our shared love for, or interest in, poetry... It seems only natural, then, that I should have been asked to conduct an interview with the artist; after all, we know the drill.
JD: There is a poem by William Carlos Williams that I think of often, entitled “A sort of song”. In it, he makes a declaration about writing, starting by saying “Compose. (No ideas/but in things) Invent!”... Michael Dickman hints at something comparable when he writes that “there is only this world and this world” – I particularly like the “and” here, “this world and this world.”
DR: This doubling – is tautology the right term? I think not, but it is an interesting one. What are you talking about reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s duck rabbit, that famous cartoon that is either a duck or a rabbit depending on how you look at it, but that is never both at the same time, even though both the duck and the rabbit are “in” there. There’s an element of the heroic fetishization of the banal here that I’m wary of.
Joseph Brodsky, whose grave I just visited in Venice – that’s how much I admire the man! – once made a remark about American poetry’s love affair with the kitchen sink. “Kitchen sink poetics” is what he called it, at least I think that’s what he called it – if I’m right in thinking it was Brodsky who made this remark in the first place; I cant remember for sure now... Anyway I think it’s rather typical (not necessarily in a bad way, though) that an American poet would choose “The Kitchen Sink” as the title of an anthology of a life in verse – which is exactly what happened just recently. I forgot that poet’s name though. Doesn’t matter much now.
JD: This duck-rabbit is quite amazing. It reminds me of the bare fact of simultaneity that is so beautifully expressed by lists. Think of what everyone in this neighborhood is doing right now, and think of what everyone you know is doing right now, of the water conduits that run through this building and the house you grew up in, of the electricity and the gas running through it. And then there is also music – we could perhaps consider the conduit as a defining feature of music: how music migrates through the conduit provided by and to musicians giving shape to waves of sound.
DR: Incidentally, I finally found a poem entitled “Poetry Reading” by Wyslawa Syzmborska that I’ve been meaning to share with you. Let me read some lines:... “In the first row, a sweet old man’s soft snore:/he dreams his wife’s alive again. What’s more,//she’s making him that tart she used to bake. /Aflame, but carefully – don’t burn his cake!/we start to read. O Muse.”...
How many people read poetry these days? The poet has become a figure of extreme marginality...I like the experience (or at least the idea) of isolation intrinsic to the act of “choosing” poetry – its distance from the art world, if you will, or “to stand absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,” to quote one poet’s description of another.
JD: Giving a word space around it is ultimately not so very different from giving an object space around it. I guess this is where we return to where we started: poetry and sculpture, both related to things, to the world of things.
Listen.
So here we are, in a bar in Berlin, the name of which we have sworn not to divulge (this to please ourselves rather than the owner), and we inevitably end up discussing the contents of last week’s New Yorker – the sweet irony of it all. I have become a more attentive reader of the magazine’s poetry in the meantime and Jason has given me a recently a published profile, written by a poet I don’t know, Dan Chiasson, of a poet I do know, Constatine Cavafy...in return, I advise him to read an article by Elif Batuman on the repatriation of the legendary Danilov bells from Harvard’s Lowell House back to their ancestral home in the Danilov monastery in Moscow - classic New Yorker arcane. There is mention...of a certain mysterious Mr. Konstantin Saradzhev, “Moscow’s most famous bell ringer” – a man who not only “actually” heard a thousand different nuances within the oceanic illusion of sameness in a single bell’s ringing, but also truly heard these nuances: a thousand different voices, a thousand different colors, a thousand differently shaped shards floating around in a sea of sound.
Hereupon (I imagine) the artist pulls out a tuning fork and sounds out the furniture in the bar.
Dieter Roelstraete works as a curator at the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKa. He is an editor of Afterall and FR David, as well as a contributing editor of A Prior Magazine. The 'editorial board' of Kaleidoscope is 92 % the same as in Frieze, Afterall, Spike, Mousse and A Prior. They stand for 'intelligent' alternatives to Tim Griffin/Artforum. They adore people like Tino Seghal, Dan Voh, Leonor Antunes, Francis Alyse, Liam Gillick, Cyprien Gaillard, Adam Szymczyk, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Felix Gonzales-Torres and prefer the earth-bound value system of a brown dusty steampunk patina to a RGB color palette.
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