Marble E-Book

Amalie Smith

• Herausgeber: Lolli Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 102

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Amalie Smith ignites everyday encounters into sites of revelation and metamorphosis Recently unearthed from the ground, Marble leaves her new lover in Copenhagen and travels to Athens. The city is overflowing with colour, steam and fragrance, cats cry like babies at night, the economic crisis is raging. In this volatile landscape, Marble grasps the world by exploring its immediate surfaces. Capturing specks of colour on ancient sculptures in the Acropolis Museum with an infrared camera, she simultaneously traces the pioneering sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, who spent several months in the same place 110 years earlier. Far away from her husband and children, Carl-Nielsen showed that Archaic sculptures were originally painted in bright colours – a feat which meant defying Victorian gender roles and jeopardising her marriage. Sensuous and electric, yet admirably forensic in its approach to mineral life, Marble is a galvanizing novel about the materials life is made of, about korai and sponge diving, about looking and looking again, written in a spare and pellucid style. Praise for Marble Everything connects. In that Ali Smith/Isabel Waidner way, Amalie Smith manages to stuff a lot of topics in an economic way… Enriching and rewarding – The Bobsphere A resolute novel that, by virtue of its mix of literary suggestion, aesthetic experience and art historical insight, makes something that is simultaneously straightforwardly concrete and almost incomprehensibly abstract come alive – Jyllands-Posten Marble is not reminiscent of much else, but that does not make it odd. Just beautifully its own. It is made of the stuff art and literature is made of. In excess – Berlingske Amalie Smith brings marble to life – Politiken ♥♥♥♥ Admirably vivid – Information Marble is an artistically ambitious and original attemptat creating an open, hybrid and 'impure' strand of novel which integrates and supplements fiction with factual and documentary elements… Amalie Smith digs into the material with knowledge, sensuality, and aesthetic sensibility – Litteratursiden Marble is a novel about insisting on the significance of surfaces, about longing and absorption, about diving and becoming porous. The book thinks across disciplines and aesthetic genre conventions, and hence it is no coincidence that Amalie Smith is a practising artist as well as a writer – Vagant AMALIE SMITH (b. 1985) is a Danish writer and visual artist. A graduate from the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Smith has published eight hybrid books. She has received numerous awards for her work as an artist and writer, including the Danish Arts Foundation's prestigious three-year working grant, the Danish Crown Prince Couple's Rising Star Award, and the Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize for emerging writers. JENNIFER RUSSELL has published translations of Amalie Smith, Christel Wiinblad, and Peter-Clement Woetmann. She was the recipient of the 2019 Gulf Coast Prize for her translation of Ursula Scavenius's 'Birdland', and in 2020 she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild's All the Birds in the Sky.

Leseprobe

Marble

“A resolute novel that, by virtue of its mix of literary suggestion, aesthetic experience and art historical insight, makes something that is simultaneously straightforwardly concrete and almost incomprehensibly abstract come alive.”

– Jon Helt Haarder, Jyllands-Posten

“Marble is not reminiscent of much else, but that does not make it odd. Just beautifully its own. It is made of the stuff art and literature is made of. In excess.”

– Søren Kassebeer, Berlingske

“Amalie Smith brings marble to life.”

– Ask Hansen, Politiken♥♥♥♥♥

“Candescently cool.”

– Weekendavisen

“Admirably vivid.”

– Information

“In Smith’s universe, life’s big and small questions are flipped and turned with exceptional artistic dexterity. Images and text often interweave into a strongly unified expression, be it when she delivers a characteristic of marble or examines the qualities of the three-dimensional. Her literary as well as visual work is distinguished by combining strong intellectual reflection on aesthetics, language and life with heart and a voice that touches and moves the viewer/reader.”

– Jury for the Danish Crown Prince Couple’s Rising Star Award

“Marble is an artistically ambitious and original attemptat creating an open, hybrid and ‘impure’ strand of novel which integrates and supplements fiction with factual and documentary elements… Amalie Smith digs into the material with knowledge, sensuality, and aesthetic sensibility.”

– Litteratursiden

“Marble is a novel about insisting on the significance of surfaces, about longing and absorption, about diving and becoming porous. The book thinks across disciplines and aesthetic genre conventions, and hence it is no coincidence that Amalie Smith is a practising artist as well as a writer.”

– Kizaja Ulrikke Routhe-Mogensen, Vagant

DANIEL FOUND HER IN the ground.

He dug her free and brushed off the dirt. He joined the pieces, logged the pigment traces: how they were distributed across her clothes and her skin. Her blue-green eyes. Her coral lips. He carved new marble and filled the holes where fragments had been lost.

Her name is Marble. Daniel calls her Maggi.

‘Maggi.’

Her body fills with blood that can flow in every direction.

Daniel places her on the bed. He asks what it feels like to be her. She says that her ears are small microphones. When he strokes her earlobe, it sounds like wind through a wind muffler. Now the blood flows to her legs.

Daniel lies down and Marble turns to face him. Her right hand grasps his left thigh, she pulls it across her hip. His left hand closes around her right breast.

She finds his mouth in a darkness that comes from her own closed eyes. A kiss so deep and honest, like slowly opening an abyss with your tongue. Massaging it forth.

Marble pulls back her tongue.

‘Daniel, what do you see behind your closed eyes?’ she asks.

‘Orchids,’ he says and looks more closely. ‘Orchids spread throughout enormous greenhouses. And fluorescent tubes that twist through amber honey. A hand pressing small lumps of charcoal and coral into the sand on a long, white beach. And colours that seep into other colours, quickly and almost imperceptibly.’

‘I see sculptures when I close my eyes,’ says Marble. ‘Ancient sculptures with brilliantly painted surfaces. Not just one colour, but a multitude of saturated colours covering the form. Polychrome. A surplus of colour.’

‘The colour isn’t superfluous,’ says Daniel.

‘It isn’t superficial, either,’ says Marble.

Now the moon casts a window of light onto the floor. Marble gets out of bed and sits on the floor and looks at the moon’s window.

She lights a cigarette and blows white smoke out into the moonlight. The smoke doesn’t smell of anything. She passes the cigarette to Daniel in the bed. They take turns smoking.

Marble with the cigarette pinched against the loose skin between her fingers, the entire palm of her hand beneath her chin.

‘Forms are eternal,’ she says. ‘And materials are eternal. It’s when they meet that time begins.’

Daniel blows a smoke figure that looks like a horse’s head.

‘You can carve a form in marble and let it travel through the centuries,’ he says. ‘It never stops occupying a space in the world.’

‘Yes,’ says Marble and blows at the horse head. ‘But the colour slips off.’

Dear Laila,

If the surface is where an object ends, then nothing can be kept there. If you try to pinpoint it, it becomes thinner and thinner until it’s nothing but an idea. The surface seems to border on the immaterial.

And yet we perceive the world by virtue of its surfaces. We encounter the outermost layer of things, never anything but that – through reflection, resonance, touch. Are we then only encountering ideas? Do we reach out and touch them all the time?

Daniel and I visited the cast collection today, in the warehouse down by the harbour. We wanted to take a closer look at the cast surfaces. To reproduce a form in plaster, you solidify the air around it. Then you cast the copy inside the cavity. That is to say, you turn the form around its own immaterial surface.

The collection consists of three stories crammed with plaster copies of European sculpture. We wandered around among the copies as if they were something other than plaster in familiar forms. The Laocoön Group, Venus de Milo etc. The form transcended the plaster like an echo that said: You’ve seen me before. I was deeply moved. I couldn’t help but touch the plaster. I thought: The plaster does not know what it represents, and yet it has the potential to represent anything.

But then Daniel pointed out something black within the folds of the sculptures, and said: That’s time.

And: The muzzle of the Parthenon horse head shines because the plaster has drunk from the hands that have touched it.

The casts’ surfaces have a history. They were kept at the Academy of Fine Arts, where they gathered dust and were painted white instead of being cleaned, and later exhibited at the National Gallery. Again and again they were deemed worthy of being touched and reproduced and restored.

I said: But these sculptures were created white. There are no traces of paint.

Then we noticed the painted plaster of the Greek korai statues. And Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s coloured reproductions from the Acropolis: the Typhon and the Bull’s Head.

So everything wasn’t white after all.

Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen!

Say hello from me in New York,

MARBLE

‘A DIGITAL 3D MODEL consists purely of surfaces. Nothing solid exists in three-dimensional space. Nothing fluid or ethereal. It isn’t possible to model a landscape without surfaces,’ says the 3D animator.

But that’s exactly what Marble wants: a landscape without surfaces.

‘The empty space has no surfaces,’ the 3D animator adds and points at the screen.

The screen shows a dark-grey plane. Three coloured axes, one green, one blue and one red, diverge from a point at the centre of the screen. The axes indicate width, height and depth.

The 3D animator can reach into the screen’s three-dimensional picture plane with her mouse and keyboard. She can twist and turn a given 3D model on the screen. Enlarge and shrink it. Cut and drag it. Animate it and make it speak.

‘The empty space is too much,’ says Marble. ‘Too many points where the emptiness refers to itself.’

‘OK,’ says the 3D animator and creates a sphere that looks like a ping-pong ball. She shrinks it drastically and replicates it millions of times. Using a randomised algorithm, she distributes the spheres throughout the space. Together they form something that resembles vapour. The vapour is white, the background is charcoal grey.

‘Thank you,’ says Marble. ‘I will now journey through that vapour.’

‘Safe journey,’ says the 3D animator.

Marble travels through this landscape of vapour and discovers that it is a landscape without surfaces.

The vapour is neither wet nor dry; it has neither sound nor smell. It condenses and expands with the unpredictability of a landscape.

Then a face emerges from the vapour. A woman’s face with thin lips and friendly, bright eyes. A primitive animation.

She floats in front of Marble without a word.

IN THE SPRING OF 1903 Danish sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen travels to Athens on a grant, and her husband, the composer Carl Nielsen, accompanies her.

She goes to Athens because she wants to copy Archaic sculptures discovered during the excavation of the Acropolis in the 1880s.

Italian cast-maker Napoleone Martinelli has a monopoly on the production of casts of ancient sculpture in Greece. But the sculptures found at the Acropolis have such well-preserved colours that they cannot be used as moulds, as the process would remove the paint.

Marie is granted permission to make copies of the sculptures in clay, create moulds on the basis of the clay sculptures, and then cast plaster reproductions in the moulds.

There’s a photograph of her and Carl taken at the old Acropolis Museum. The photograph documents her copy of the Typhon: an Archaic pediment sculpture of a monster with three truncated torsos and three bearded male heads. The first two heads from the left look towards the middle of the pediment, where two lions are bringing down a bull, while the third looks out at the viewer. The monster’s lower body consists of intertwined snake tails that twist towards the pediment’s right corner.

A magnificent piece of primitive open-air sculpture with bold forms and childlike strength and variegated colour all the way to the outermost twist of its tail! writes Danish archaeologist Frederik Poulsen of the Typhon in 1929, in the book Early Greek Art.

The photograph has no colour, but it has nine faces: three originals in limestone, four in plaster, and then Marie and Carl’s faces, which are dark grey, that is, suntanned. Marie is wearing a white, full-length linen dress; Carl is in a black suit with white cuffs.

What’s Carl doing in the picture? His face is turned in a different direction than the other eight faces. He’s sitting on a stool in front of Marie, right beneath the copy of the Typhon. He has taken off his straw hat and is holding it in his hand.

She began working on the copy in March, and it has now taken form; perhaps we’re in June 1903. It’s hot at the museum.

Marie holds an extra copy of the monster’s third head in her hands, and it looks as though its stiff beard is resting on top of Carl’s head.

Some water has leaked from a vase out onto the marble floor.

One might think she were nearly done, but she’s not. She’ll have to return in November the following year and work for seven more months. That’s when Carl writes her a letter saying he wants a divorce.

But before that, she sends the photograph to museums across Europe, asking whether anyone would like to commission casts. They would. The still nascent body of European museums is eager to acquire reproductions of all these classical sculptures. That way people will be able to come and see them in plaster, at the new National Gallery of Denmark, for example. They’ll be able to walk all the way around them and grasp the ancient origins of their own culture, without the arousing translucency and polished sheen of marble, so evocative of skin. Plaster is dry and dead and more modest than marble.

Marie paints her plaster reproductions. But in spring of 1903 she is yet to begin painting. She and Carl have taken up residence at Hotel Achilleion, where they live off her grant. When the Acropolis Museum opens, Marie goes up there to work. She stands in the middle of the exhibition. The lighting is poor. Each day she transfers more of the Typhon’s form to the clay, recreating its porous surfaces and fractures.

Great precision is required to reproduce a fracture. It requires a different logic than when modelling carved surfaces.