My current studio reading (each morning, a chapter to start the day) is The Memory of Memory by Russian writer Maria Stepanova. Today I reached the chapter where she writes about Charlotte Salomon, the young German woman who painted a huge collection of paintings with words that she called Life? or Theatre? I discovered Charlotte Salomon’s work some years ago via a second hand bookshop in Berlin (ah, Berlin!) and blogged about it here. Her work inspired me to think differently about my own ‘dynamic’ painting, to take the idea of ‘painting my life’ more seriously as a major part of my practice.
Prior to The Memory of Memory, I read my way through Griselda Pollock’s recent volume on Salomon. She takes on the tricky task of siting Life? or Theatre? in art history. It was a tough job because this collection (of paintings, overlays, writing, and musical connections) does not slot easily into an art historical form, genre or line. It is, suggests Pollock, more of an ‘invocation’ of people and events than a representation, with a ‘complex aesthetic architecture’. It is ‘her own reclamation of life in the face of her own trauma’ and yet it is not strictly autobiographical. It is some kind of ‘restaging of the past’, cinematic ‘stagings in the theatre of memory, spatialised in pictures’.
Another art historian, Astrid Schmetterling, sees Charlotte Salomon as creating a space of uncertainty, neither part of the dominant culture nor separate from it, in which and for which she makes her work.
As to what Charlotte Salomon was doing with memory in her work, I love how Stepanova captures it in today’s reading:
The extent of memory, its ability to catch those who try to evade it, depends directly on whether we can turn and meet it head on.
This is how I see my task as a painter and writer, to turn and meet my lived experience head on. Taking this task seriously and working out how to do it underpins my painting practice. When the work falters, it is often because I’m scared of that turning, or because there’s too much uncertainty about the space that I make for myself. Then it’s time to look back at artists like CS, and take courage once more, to turn and meet it head on.
Studio and painting as spaces of uncertainty, 22 August 2021.