Limbo, or The Transit Zone. A Reflection
Author
ANAKO is an artist who researches the theme of the mutual influence of art and disability.
Summary
In this reflection on the exhibition Spirit Labor: Duration, Difficulty, and Affect, a young artist trying to rethink the challenges posed by physical disability shares her experience in a meditation on her life, the perception of time, art, and self-actualization through art.
Art Transforms Disability
or
Disability Transforms Art
Time, its duration and consistency, the overcoming of physical disability, embodiment, spirit labor, and affect—these are the complex concepts I’ve recently been trying to unravel in their simpler (sometimes way too simple) aspects.
The exhibition Spirit Labor: Duration, Difficulty, and Affect offered an encounter with several artists that I really needed at this particular time:2 Nikita Alexeev, Tehching Hsieh, He Yunchang, Vitaly Komar, and others.
The exhibition encouraged me to learn more about these artists and their work. I saw light on the horizon…
I realized that drawing, which I loved as a child and which I find very difficult today3, has remained one of the few things that I don’t mind spending my time and energy on. Although I still need to think about how I will do it, the fact that I will do it is no longer in doubt.
With a fine art education and a sincere interest in art, I keep trying to understand what art is and whether what I am experiencing at this moment has any relationship to it. And if not, then what is it?
WAS IST KUNST?4
I am 4 years old. I’m playing with books from my grandfather’s library. I find Modigliani reproductions. Why does Lunia Chekhovskaya has such strange eyes? They are scary and captivating… I look at them again and again.
WAS IST KUNST?
I am 6. Painting lessons. It’s so easy to create a mood with watercolors. Wet paper, a little bit of paint…
WAS IST KUNST?
I am 8. We are looking for branches and roots in the forest to make funny forest spirits, who then live with us.
WAS IST KUNST?
14. Love poems. Someone knows how to convey in words precisely what I feel. Meanwhile, I am drawing on birch bark, also “conveying something.”
WAS IST KUNST?
15. Falling in love, inspiration, constant excitement, joy. A walk in the park is enough to feel that happiness is possible…
Later I realized that falling in love is similar to the feeling I get every time I sit at the table with paints. It creates a similar flow of excitement and happiness.
WAS IST KUNST?
16. The horror of final exams. I am preparing to enter the Stroganov Academy. Tutors, running around Moscow. My legs are getting weak and I stumble. I draw. I draw. I draw. I get tired. The teacher says that my lines have become “hairy.”
WAS IST KUNST?
17. The doctor. The diagnosis. I don’t understand a thing. I have awarded a place in the Art in Film and Television department. I thought that film might have been a passing fling, but no. The poetry of Fellini and the eerie aesthetic of Lars von Trier and David Lynch have stayed with me.
I want to be everywhere. My walking gets worse, and so does my writing. Nightclubs. High-heeled ankle boots are in fashion. We have bought some. They were expensive. I couldn’t walk in them.
WAS IST KUNST?
18. Love. Sex. A lot of sex. Friends. Exams. Exhibitions. IV lines. The security guard did not let me into the university, thinking I was really drunk. But that’s how I actually walk now ;-)
WAS IST KUNST?
19. We decide to try experimental treatment. Chemotherapy. Stem cells. A bald head instead of long hair. The illness stops temporarily. I go to university in the Netherlands. A new life and a very different kind of art.
WAS IST KUNST?
20. Studies in Groningen. Everybody’s riding a bike and I walk with a rollator. Nobody stops and stares. I draw. Nothing is quite right. Art here is very different, it has nothing to do with what I studied for five years in art schools. I’m lost.
WAS IST KUNST?
21. A trip to Berlin. I feel like I left the Bunker gallery a different person. A spooky space of the past filled with contemporary messages and the “popcorn” of today’s life. Nothing comes and nothing goes, everything coexists in one dimension.
– So, what is contemporary art?
“To me this is a question that dates back to long ago, as it is not completely clear what contemporary art is, how long it remains contemporary, and to whom it is so. I’m not even sure that time is linear.”5 Nikita Alexeev
WAS IST KUNST?
22. A wheelchair. I require other people’s help. Fear. Loneliness. Routine.
– Is it at all possible to escape the absurdity of routine?
“‘Switching off’ from social reality… sets consciousness in motion and brings on an ‘awakening’.”6 Tehching Hsieh and His Cage Piece.
WAS IST KUNST?
23. The way people treat disability in the Netherlands makes life a lot easier. I quickly stopped feeling embarrassed about my wheelchair. But “gliding” on the surface of existence has become harder, things have slowed down. The consistency of time has changed. It has become viscous and annoying.
– The realization that my time is not filled with activity and content creates a feeling of inferiority, as I have always wanted to be super productive…
In his Time Piece, Tehching Hsieh removed all content and context to experience the pure passage of time. He did that by taking to the extreme the way our society equates time with work. Hsieh used a time clock, a device that mechanically splits the time of workers into precisely equal segments and mercilessly measures human achievement by time spent… The passage of time itself, devoid of any particular content thus became the only purpose of his work. By pushing the materialization of time, typical of our society, to the limit, Hsieh could rediscover the inner experience of time—the experience of pure, eventless Duration.”7
WAS IST KUNST?
24. I had to slow down and shift my focus from the flow to the moment. Mediation became key to the realization of the value of the moment. Time became deep and thick.
“Gliding” gave way to “contemplation.” I started looking more closely at people and things in my rather limited surroundings. Zen and the Eastern philosophy of contemplation came to me naturally, without any coaches or retreats.
– The lines that separate life, meditation, experience, thought, and art are sometimes unclear …
He Yunchang Caochangdi. He Yunchang Caochangdi – The Tenth Generation. 28 days of watching grass grow in front of the studio. “To contemplate nature and fill it with meaning, while changing constantly and imperceptibly.”
WAS IST KUNST?
25. Dissertation.8 I am studying artists who lived the drama of disability and pain and how disability affected their art and vice versa.
– Where does one look for subjects, when one’s abilities are limited?
– “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Frida Kahlo9
– “Which of our qualities is more beautiful than thinking? Our body has a hierarchy, and the head is on top for a reason. Thinking is the most complex mechanism we possess and it is great to train it every day. I feed on this knowledge. I want to integrate it into my life and pass it on.” Job Koelewijn10
– Could my experience be of interest to anyone?
– “Of course, I would like everyone to have a similar experience, but I am not a teacher. People see my work and get some kind of energy through it. That’s fantastic. But if I said, ‘I have made it this way, and this is how you should experience it,’ it would not work. It would turn into a lack of freedom, a dogma. I don’t feel good about dogmas.” Job Koelewijn
– "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality. My painting carries with it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It’s not revolutionary." Frida Kahlo
– How can one make oneself work when there is no inspiration?
– “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. […] All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. […] You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.” Chuck Close11
– “I’m lying in bed, paralyzed—now what am I going to do? I thought: I can make work of a conceptual nature. I can put a level on a shelf as well as someone else! But I was going to miss the activity of pushing paint around. So pretty soon, I thought: I’m going to get the paint on the canvas if I have to spit the paint on the canvas.” Chuck Close
– “Healthy people can think of sombre tones, death and suffering. But when you are ill, the only thing left for you is to think of something joyful and happy.” Boris Kustodiev12
WAS IST KUNST?
26. I rarely go out. Sometimes I feel like I can hear the sound of sand that Vitaly Komar speaks about. I like the idea of the cycle of matter in nature and I, too, would like to transcend my existence with an hourglass and a mobile phone.
WAS IST KUNST?
27. Disability is an awful word. But it is a great opportunity to reinvent oneself. To simply do what you like doing. To simply live and spend time on things that make you happy. I can do this even in my situation of being unable to do so.
— I want to draw. But why?
“October 16. How happy I am that I am not an actionist and not a contemporary artist. I can draw what I like without thinking of whether I am being contemporary or not. Without thinking of whether I am useful or useless to society. And I can even allow myself to not invent anything new but to draw pretty much the same picture over and over again, trying to make it better.” Nikita Alexeev.
WAS IST KUNST?
You live this experience over and over again. Nothing is final.
WAS IST KUNST?
1. In medieval Catholic theology, limbo (from the Latin limbus, meaning edge or boundary) refers to the condition or abode of souls that did not go to heaven, which is not the hell of the damned or purgatory. Metaphorically, it is a space where human consciousness gets stuck, and time is endlessly slow.
2. When I try to put what this encounter has revealed to me into words, it becomes flat and trite. It’s difficult. But I will try.
3. I am 27 years old. In 2020, I graduated in fine art from Minerva Art Academy in Groningen, The Netherlands. Before that I studied Art in Film and Television in Moscow and attended art schools in Moscow and Kiev. I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. In 2011, I was diagnosed with an illness and had to learn to live with serious physical limitations, which, however, did not affect my commitment to making art.
4. What is art? The film Was ist Kunst by Joseph Albus that we were shown in our first year at Minerva never answered the question, just kept asking it. It has been on my mind ever since.
6. http://moscowartmagazine.com/issue/16/article/223
7. http://performancelogia.blogspot.com/2008/01/performing-life-work-of-tehching-hsieh.html
8. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hHXs9CxrbGYEoDY7MiSiobWCxcsbXIJ1/view?usp=sharing / https://youtu.be/xS4v1pAaxGQ
9. Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) was a Mexican artist who worked with themes such as identity, gender, and class. She started painting self-portraits after a serious injury in a bus accident. Despite multiple operations, she suffered severe pain throughout her life.
10. Job Koelewijn (b. 1962) decided to become an artist after a car crash that left him paralyzed and pushed him to reconsider his life. The prognosis was bad, but life gave him a chance and he became a well-known Dutch conceptual artist.
http://www.jobkoelewijn.com/
11. Chuck Close (1940–2021) was an American contemporary artist. Paralyzed due to an occlusion of the anterior spinal artery, Close regained the ability to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist. He experimented with various formats of painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, and photography.
http://chuckclose.com/
12. Boris Kustodiev (1878–1927) was a Russian painter. During the last 15 years of his life, paraplegic after an operation on a tumor in his spinal cord, he painted in a wheelchair.