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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
What do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say Affinities exist between such things? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, this book is first of all about images that have stayed with the author over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation, when the visual field had shrunk. Some are historical works by artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Others are scientific or vernacular images: sea creatures, migraine auras, astronomical illustrations derived from dreams. Also family photographs, film stills, records of atomic ruin. And contemporary art by Rinko Kawauchi, Susan Hiller and John Stezaker. Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities is an extraordinary book about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.
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‘Brian Dillon is always invigoratingly brilliant. His sentences, his stylistic innovations, the range and potency of his intellectual adventures; he is a true master of the literary arts and a writer I would never hesitate to read, whatever his subject.’
— Max Porter, author of Shy
‘Affinities is a book of enthrallments. Brian Dillon “performs” and “embodies” that tautology of fascination, its unspeakability. On titans like Julia Margaret Cameron, Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman and Tacita Dean, Dillon is revelatory. Conceived during the pandemic, Affinities shares the eccentric pain of the moment, the intimate revelations of self-doubt imposed on us all. Affinities is a book after my heart.’
— Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards
‘Brian Dillon’s essays match discernment and critical thinking with a sense of pleasure in finding a work of art that speaks to him and lures him into contemplating its mystery and intricacy. His writing is exact and calm; rather than explain he explores, playing what is tentative against what is certain.’
— Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
‘In Affinities, Brian Dillon has woven a sparking electric web of aesthetic attention, an astonishingly deft and slantwise autobiography through the images of others. With this third panel in his brilliant triptych – with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence – Dillon has made himself a quiet apostle of close looking, drawing such intimate connections between such disparate things that he reveals marvel after marvel, and miraculously passes his affinities along to the reader. His project, it seems to me, is a nearly holy one, borne of deep generosity and love for the world.’
— Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
‘Brian Dillon’s Affinities eloquently describes the relationships we have – both physical and mental – with works of art. Dillon reflects on the nature of these relationships, the affinities for the selected works, through his research and personal history with them while intermittently allowing us insight into his mediations about the complexity of affinity itself.’
— Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of Ways of Curating
‘The most moving essays in this superb collection are the autobiographical investigations, but every piece, even the most ostensibly impersonal, arrives imbued with Brian Dillon’s signature tactic of bliss-seeking focus on visual details, on impalpable atmospheres, on connections drawn as if in a state of clairvoyant summation. He spins language’s roulette wheel with a finesse and seriousness that recalls the severe yet secretly florid tones of Sontag, Sebald, Benjamin, and other principled foragers in the realm of the buried, the overlooked, the ecstatic. I feel safer in the world, knowing that a diviner as keen-eyed as Brian Dillon is operating the control panel of the sentence.’
— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Figure it Out
Praise for Suppose a Sentence
‘Brian Dillon is one of the true treasures of contemporary literature – a critic and essayist of unmatched style, sensitivity and purpose – and Suppose a Sentence is a book only he could have written. It’s an inspired celebration of the sentence as a self-sufficient artform, and reading it has reinvigorated my sense of the possibilities of writing itself.’
— Mark O’Connell, author of Notes from an Apocalypse
‘Taking as his starting point a sentence that has intrigued him for years or, in some cases, come into his ken more recently, Brian Dillon in Suppose a Sentence ranges through the centuries exploring the associations of what he observes and discovers about his object of study and its writer, through biographical anecdote, linguistic speculation, and a look at related writings. This rich and various collection resembles a beguiling, inspiriting conversation with a personable and wry intelligence who keeps you happily up late, incites you to note some followup reading, and opens your eyes further to the multifarious syntactical and emotional capacities of even a few joined words of English. Enjoyable and thought-provoking reading!’
— Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t
Praise for Essayism
‘Dillon is a literary flaneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.’
— John Banville, Irish Times
‘It’s short, digressive, teasing, dilettantish, circular, and it reads like some delicate, wandering combination of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and E. M. Cioran’s longer aphorisms.’
— James Wood, New Yorker
‘Brian Dillon could easily have written another book about the essay – its hallmarks, history, current role in literary turf wars, etc. What a relief, then, to find his Essayism navigating away, in its opening pages, from such a project, and turning instead toward this surprising, probing, edifying, itinerant, and eventually quite moving book, which serves as both an autobiographia literaria and a vital exemplar of how deeply literature and language can matter in a life.’
— Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
AFFINITIES
BRIAN DILLON
For Emily LaBarge
CONTENTS
‘These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.’
— Annie Dillard, ‘Seeing’ (1974)
‘One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities.’
— Joan Didion, ‘New Museum in Mexico’ (1965)
ESSAY ON AFFINITY I
I found myself frequently using the word affinity, and wondered what I meant by it. An attraction, for sure—to certain works of art or literature, to fragments or details, moods or atmospheres inside of them. To a sentence, for instance, or an essay, but just as easily to an impression diffusing in the mind that could not be traced back to source. A fascination with this or that artist, writer, musician, filmmaker, designer. With a body or a body of work. Fascination—already finding words with which affinity has affinities—as something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions. But also: the way things, images and ideas sidled up to each other, seemed to seduce one another, in ways I could not (or did not want to) explain. So that when I wrote affinity in a piece of critical prose, perhaps I was trying to point elsewhere, to a realm of the unthought, unthinkable, something unkillable by attitudes or arguments. Not a question of beauty or quality or taste, other eternal aesthetic values. Something fleeting in fact—affinities don’t all, or always, last. In the end, and for reasons above as well as others to come, something a little bit stupid.
I’d been writing about images for about twenty years, finding affinities rather than deploying any kind of expertise, because I’m no art historian. Still, it had felt like an education, a second training in the image, after my first in the word. For a long time I had been saying or writing affinity, but also dreaming, never exactly conceiving, a way of thinking about art, about objects and images, that belonged to artists, including the contemporary artists whose studios I might visit and find myself staring at pictures (not their own) they had stuck to the wall, books and artefacts on their shelves. I had thought in passing about how these, or the smartphone photographs and notes-app reading lists the artist sent me afterwards—how they sat alongside each other in more or less oblique relations and then, when I came to write up my encounter with the work, would not easily translate into the language of influence, subject matter, research. (Would not do so, that is, if the art was of any worth; sometimes everything explained itself too well.) How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities.
During the first pandemic lockdown of 2020, I imagined I might spend time in shut-in contemplation of many images and artworks (in books and catalogues or online) I had either written about already or long hoped to write about. Sometimes I drifted about staring at my bookshelves or handling the piles of books that gather around any writing project, no matter how small. What was I looking for? Free-floating reflection, liberated from the need for argument or judgement (or deadlines), somehow therefore more intimate, more attuned to its object. I thought I might stare at certain pictures—mostly photographs—and they would go to work on me, leach into soul or sensibility. I fancied I could memorize these images like poems. (As if I had ever in my life successfully memorized a poem, no matter how I loved it.) An idiotic project: naive, impossible, disingenuous in disavowal of knowledge, judgement, the privilege of planning such a monkish task before page or screen, while the world went to hell. But idiotic too in the original sense of an uncultured, uncivil, private urge. Was it quite so stupid to want to dodge at this moment the public and professional, try to refind a mode of dumb fascination? Could you make out of this a habit—or even a book?
The volume you hold in your hands is not that book—the book of pure uncritical escape, which proved implausible—but a collection of writings about art and artefacts that have hung around in my ‘image repertoire’ (Roland Barthes’s phrase) for years. And some that have only lately entered the canon or collection of images that will not leave me alone. All of them have recently—what is the word? Impinged. They seem to enact something when placed together in the imaginary space that a book makes. A book of evidence that I’d been an idiot all along, always looking with a slightly stupefied gaze. Not the intense and protracted gaze of a writer and project devoted to a single rapture: T. J. Clark, for instance, in The Sight of Death, looking long at two paintings by Poussin. Or Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, in which he excitedly delineates every moment the wordless benign trickster is on screen. Because when it comes to writing about art and images and objects I have mostly spent time and attention in short spans: days, weeks or if I’m lucky months devoted to the artefact or the corpus in question. (Of course some of them return, time and again.) Relishing the chance to concentrate, but also loving the constraint of deadline and word count: something will have to come from this more or less extended disposition or humour into which I have got with the thing itself.
What would it be like to put some of these fits of affinity alongside each other, and allow myself to discover new examples to insert among the more familiar? And still unsolved: what did I mean by affinity? It seemed impossible to address the question on its own, as if it were an abstraction in aesthetic theory: answers would have to emerge while the particular affinities (the things to which I was attached) were going to work on each other. It was not as if I didn’t know that others had been here before me, that a lineage of sorts existed among poets, critics and philosophers who knew affinity by one name or another. It was possible I simply intended what Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin meant by correspondence, or what art historians and theorists (Georges Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood) had rescued from anachronism. These writers and their ideas hovered, but it seemed that affinity landed a little way off. In what follows the essays on specific artists or images alternate with unmethodical passages on affinity itself, its meaning and meandering. In the life of any writer about art or (weak word) culture who is not deliberately partisan about this or that artist or group of artists, who has not turned aesthetic or political preferences into a self-conscious programme, who doesn’t have the liberty of only ever writing about what they choose—in such a case affinities can remain unthought, until you place them together like this and are forced to see where they connect, or do not.
A surprising number of the essays seem to be about images that stage in their content or form some act of blurring and becoming—as in the dance of Loie Fuller or the monstrous transformations of faces and bodies in the works of collagists and monteurs like Hannah Höch, Dora Maar and John Stezaker. Becoming otherwise, in disguises and personae assumed by Claude Cahun and Francesca Woodman. Ambiguous, entrancing performance, as in the visual insistence and erosion of Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol’s Inner and Outer Space. A remarkable amount of mutable matter—remarkable because, if asked what I value most in art, in photography especially, I might not have said: a state of bodily between-ness verging on dissolution, aspiring to reconvene otherwise, in alternative forms. Sometimes it’s a question of visual texture: the frequent lack of focus (admired and dismissed in her lifetime) in the work of Julia Margaret Cameron; a woman’s blurred face emerging from a crowd in a photograph by William Klein; the sheen of black make-up around a mouth blubbering away in the dark in Samuel Beckett’s Not I. Elsewhere, instances of animal or plant life whose borders or structure seem imprecise: the aquatic specimens of Jean Painlevé, the preserved pears in a film by Tacita Dean. And images overcome by darkness or light, as in Kikuji Kawada’s photographs in Hiroshima, or Rinko Kawauchi’s radiant documentation of daily life.
Almost all of these affinities are about photography or film, and even when not—Hooke’s experiments with the microscope, De Quincey’s fixation on stellar nebulae—there is usually some connection to optical technologies, some new way of seeing or framing the world. When I started writing about art, I gravitated towards the photograph—then also film and video—because it was something I already knew from reading Benjamin, Sontag and Barthes. (Which means that I also had to push those writers aside, which I have never fully succeeded in doing.) Eventually, editors at magazines and journals trusted me also to write about painting, sculpture and the whole field of modern and contemporary art, untethered from medium. Still, I have kept coming back to photographs, and especially to those aspects of them that won’t exactly resolve, and continue to seem excessive, obscure, even idiotic. The challenge, always: to try and render the obtuseness of the image with some but not too much acuity.
As for the order of the pieces, it seemed if I was to remain true to my subject I could not consciously add another layer of affinity to what already existed. A pattern based on newly perceived correspondences was out of the question, but so also an entirely random array, which seemed to put too much faith in accident. I thought about the arbitrariness of alphabetical arrangement, and Barthes’s abecedarian structuring of A Lover’s Discourse: ‘Hence we have avoided the wiles of pure chance, which might indeed have produced logical sequences.’ But logic was not entirely at odds with affinity. In the end I realized chronology was random enough for my needs, and so the sequence for the most part follows the first appearance of an image or a body of images—or another significant date in an artist’s life or career. Contemporaneous artefacts sometimes rhyme but frequently do not, and there are I hope enough leaps across decades, or even centuries, to obviate too strong a sense of ‘story’ (still less the history of photography, or other forms). This episodic essay on affinity runs through the book like a loose seam, less an argument than a mood or a hunch, which the reader may encounter as it comes, or ignore. Such is the risk of affinity.
WHAT PITIFUL BUNGLING SCRIBBLES AND SCRAWLS
Robert Hooke’s Micrographia was the first book published in English to describe and depict (in engravings) a set of observations made with the microscope. Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea. Before training his apparatus on such complex curiosities, Hooke demonstrates its magnifying power with some minute but mundane sights. The point of a small sharp needle is exposed as gnarled and pitted, the svelte edge of a razor is covered in scratches and striations. The scientist turns next to ‘a point commonly so called, that is, the mark of a full stop, or period’. Whether printed or made with a pen, the tiny point, circle or dot of the period turns out to be disfigured, ragged, deformed. Under the lens, this microdot looks as though it’s been made with a burnt stick on an uneven floor. Imagine, Hooke writes, if he had found room in his engravings for a single O, greatly magnified: ‘You should have seen that the letters were not more distinct than the points of Distinction, nor a drawn circle more exactly so than we have now shown a point to be a point.’ Stared at as closely and keenly as possible, even the most elegant, precise or selfsame forms are revealed as monsters.
THIRD PERSON
Uncertain origins—in the vexed history of early photography, Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (c.1838) is often said to be the first photograph depicting a real live person. Two versions survive, after the fragile fashion of Daguerreotypes; both were taken from a window of his studio in the rue des Marais—the first at eight in the morning, the other at noon. The earlier image is far better known. A thicket of tiles and chimneys, rows of mature and sapling trees, bright cobbles not yet sluiced with water. An exposure time of four minutes has ensured, as in most street photographs of the decade following, that the scene has been emptied of whatever human and equine traffic teemed there. Almost. Towards the bottom left corner, a svelte male figure lifts one bent leg, thrusts a hand into his pocket or onto his hip. The animated blur in front of him, we may assume, is shining the shoes of this early-rising flâneur.
In the uncommonly bright and warm spring of 2020, when London, like most cities worldwide, was deep in its first pandemic lockdown, I found myself thinking sometimes about Vue du boulevard du Temple and its two small figures, hardly there at all. (It’s been suggested there are others to the right of them, in a dark mass surrounding a young tree, and even that there’s a child in one of the open windows—but none of this is very convincing.) I live on the edge of the City of London, and during those long strange weeks my partner and I would go walking among the abandoned office buildings, the vacant pubs and restaurants of the financial district. Londoners had not yet vanished: there were still enough people around to avoid each other, taking advantage of the absence of cars to stroll into the middle of the street at the first sight of a fellow pedestrian. We all kept our distance, and I began to wonder about a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before. The solitary distant walker, far enough away to be anonymous, unthreatening, uninteresting.
There is a series of small works, collectively titled Crossing Over, by the artist John Stezaker that consists of fragments excised from larger (but likely not very large) vintage photographs, each fragment containing a tiny figure or figures isolated from the absent whole. These people are crossing streets, wandering in parks, sitting on benches or on beaches, tramping away down country lanes, hiding under Edwardian parasols. In the book that Stezaker has made of the series, each little inhabited square sits at the centre of a white page, snowy allegory of their isolation. Of course, in the original photographs, which have the look of postcards, they may not have been isolated at all: the city or landscape might be heaving. It’s as if the artist has turned each photograph he touches into a version of Vue du boulevard du Temple. Like Daguerre’s inaugural image, Stezaker’s project asks: what do we—we who are also, after all, distant walkers and distant viewers—owe to these figures on the edge of visibility? By the time this question had properly formed in my head, there were more of us in the streets of the City of London again, and we had all got used to being slightly closer to each other, masked this time and possibly more wary.
RESOLVING
Wisps, convolutions, branches, appendages, strata. A few of the phenomena recorded by the polymath John Herschel in the course of astronomical observations he made in South Africa in the 1830s. Herschel’s telescope swept the heavens nightly, but sometimes he would interrupt his work to train the instrument directly at certain stellar nebulae. Of these, he made initial drawings, ‘working skeletons’, that later informed more realistic (if that is the word) illustrations. ‘Frequently, while working at the telescope on these skeletons, a sensation of despair would arise of ever being able to transfer to paper, with even tolerable correctness, their smaller details.’ In the language of optics as well as astronomy, the nebulae would not resolve under Herschel’s gaze.
The image in question is Herschel’s, from observations he made in the decade before travelling to the Cape of Good Hope. But I found it first among the collected works of Thomas De Quincey, who seems to have misunderstood its provenance, and puts it to grandly visionary use. I’ve never owned a reproduction of this image except in a photocopy made when I was a student, so for the past twenty-five years it has mostly been a picture of the mind, slightly misremembered. (Occasionally I’ve gone looking for it online, but the results have been more pitiful than the photocopy.) More than once I’ve forgotten this crucial fact about the image: in the pages of De Quincey, we are looking at it (as you are now) upside down, in order to see what he has seen. ‘The inversion being made, the following is the dreadful creature that will then reveal itself.’
De Quincey’s description of the ‘creature’ is long, detailed and digressive; its wordiness is part of the wonder of what he sees and how:
You see a head thrown back, and raising its face, (or eyes, if eyes it had,) in the very anguish of hatred, to some unknown heavens. What should be its skull wears what might be an Assyrian tiara, only ending behind in a floating train. This head rests upon a beautifully developed neck and throat. All power being given to the awful enemy, he is beautiful where he pleases, in order to point and envenom his ghostly ugliness. The mouth, in that stage of the apocalypse which Sir John Herschel was able to arrest in his eighteen-inch mirror, is amply developed. Brutalities unspeakable sit upon the upper lip, which is confluent with a snout; for separate nostrils there are none. Were it not for this one defect of nostrils; and, even in spite of this defect, (since, in so mysterious a mixture of the angelic and the brutal, we may suppose the sense of odour to work by some compensatory organ,) one is reminded by the phantom’s attitude of a passage, ever memorable, in Milton: that passage, I mean, where Death first becomes aware, soon after the original trespass, of his own future empire over man.
What is De Quincey looking at? His essay is titled ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes’, and was written in 1846. It is a review of a book by the popular astronomy writer J. P. Nichol, a friend of De Quincey’s from his precarious days living in Glasgow. Among Nichol’s achievements as an author was his popularizing the (mistaken) nebular hypothesis, which held that stars were formed by the condensing or resolution of a nebular substance, a kind of gas or mist. In some cases—the Orion Nebula, for instance—you could see this interstellar medium with the naked eye; but mostly it was glimpsed through the telescope: a vague, luminous mass surrounding certain stars. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the telescope itself had started to make this stuff disappear: the visual confusion of the nebula now resolved into precise points of heavenly light. (In Ireland, the Earl of Rosse had built a telescope fifty-six feet long, with a mirror six feet in diameter, known as the Leviathan of Parsonstown. It was said the Bishop of Ely had walked the length of the instrument’s interior, with his umbrella up.) But Nichol resisted the new evidence, and in his Thoughts on Some Important Points relating to the System of the World he admitted only that the nebular hypothesis had encountered some difficulties, not that it had been disproved.
Still, Nichol was not so attached to an obsolescing theory that he did not baulk at De Quincey’s use of his text and its illustration. He later advised the oracular author not to reproduce the image in his collected works, because this vision of the nebula and its origins had been superseded. Nichol may also have been abashed by the exaggerations in his old friend’s account of the nebula, especially his high-flown description and Miltonic personification. When a later edition of the essay was noticed in the Westminster Review, the reviewer lamented that the passage seemed ‘more worthy of one whom the moon has smitten, than of one who gazes calmly at the stars’. Worse, De Quincey had misattributed the image; he thought he was looking at an illustration based on Lord Rosse’s recent observations, and not one of Herschel’s from twenty years earlier. It is not clear he even grasped the mistake he had made, even when he went back to the essay later, and consulted Nichol.
For De Quincey, his ‘errors’ do not matter. Nichol, he notes, has ‘apparently misunderstood the case as though it required a real phenomenon for its basis’. De Quincey by contrast is engaged in a type of poetic astronomy. (There is something similar, though on a vaster scale, in Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘Eureka’, published two years later.) The descriptive passage is a dream vision in the mode he had already perfected in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In that book, under the influence of the drug but also of certain Romantic spasms of the unconscious, De Quincey dreamed of endless labyrinths in the style of Piranesi. He had Orientalist nightmares about the size and populousness of China, imagined the obscene and murderous kisses of a crocodile, experienced strange distortions of time and space by which he was flung back ceaselessly into his own past. The devilish or deathly being trapped in the Orion Nebula—he too seems tormented by such images, or such knowledge. ‘There is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind’, De Quincey wrote elsewhere.
