Remembering 9-11 and its Aftermath

The Mocking of Christ at Abu Ghraib, Carolyn Prescott 2004

September 11, 2021 marked 20 years since suicide attacks targeting the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C were carried out by militant Islamic extremists, resulting in the death of almost 3,000 people. The anniversary of 9-1l has prompted remembrances of the attacks as well as their consequences: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the detention of thousands of suspected terrorists in Guantanamo and secret sites in other countries, and the use of torture in the interrogation of suspects. Early on, the Bush administration declared the suspects to be “unlawful combatants” and thus held them outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and without rights under the Geneva Conventions. At Abu Ghraib prison, located about 20 miles from Bagdad, members of the U.S. Army and the CIA committed war crimes against detainees, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, and rape. In 2004 CBS News published photographs of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and—as legal memoranda exchanged among members of the Bush administration showed—the human rights violations at Abu Ghraib were not the result of a few individuals gone out of control, but rather part of a strategy intended to evade international laws and norms.

I don’t remember when I first saw the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib, but the image of the hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers was fixed in memory when, later that year, I was fortunate to see the frescoes painted around 1441 by the Dominican Friar known in English as Fra Angelico, at San Marco in Florence. Among them was the “Mocking of Christ with the Virgin and Saint Dominic,” which depicts Christ blindfolded, beaten with a stick, and spat upon. The two images—the “hooded man” at Abu Ghraib and the blindfolded Christ on the wall at San Marco—were linked in my mind almost immediately.

The Mocking of Christ with the Virgin and Saint Dominic, fresco by Fra Angelico, San Marco, 1441-2

Fra Angelico painted the Mocking of Christ on the wall of Cell 7 of the monastery of San Marco not as Matthew described it in Chapter 27 of his gospel: “Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers. And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.” Instead of a dramatic scene, Fra Angelico created a tranquil symmetrical composition, a stage of sorts but a very quiet one. The colours resonate calm even as they serve as spiritual signifiers (green for the resurrection, red for the blood Christ shed, for example). The gestures and facial expressions of the figures depicted—Saint Dominic, the Virgin, and Jesus himself—convey a deep and preternatural endurance. The perpetrators are represented primarily by disembodied hands: one hand holds a stick, others appear ready to strike; one soldier only is portrayed as a head in profile, as he spits and doffs his hat derisively.

The torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other “black sites,” as evidenced in videos and testimony, was brutal and terrifying, intended not only to injure but also to humiliate the prisoners, to attack and mock their religious faith, and to destroy any sense of dignity or agency. The photographs of these acts are almost unbearable to see. To reproduce them in a painting seemed not only pointless but in some way an amplification of the wrongdoing. The iconography of Fra Angelico immediately offered a way to refer to these acts without adding to the harm done by members of the U.S. military, to call attention to what happened but not to re-enact it. However, when I made the small gouache painting of the “hooded man” of Abu Ghraib in 2004, I did so intuitively rather than analytically. Nor was I motivated by religion, as I am not a member (not even a lurking one) of any religious group. However, I was exposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition and to Bible verses throughout my schooling in the southern U.S. and also by my parents, who, while not believers, were certainly bearers of many principles and much poetry from their own religious backgrounds.

The link between Fra Angelico’s painting and the image from Abu Ghraib was strengthened for me by the memory of another Bible verse learned long ago, Matthew 25, verse 40: “And the King shall answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.” The verse actually refers to acts of charity or the lack thereof, but it came to my mind as applicable not only to sins of omission such as failing to feed the hungry, but also to sins of commission such as acts of abuse or violence, like those carried out against the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The verse places Christ on a level with the ignored or persecuted, “the least of these.” It does not speak of what is deserved or whether someone is guilty or innocent of the crime of which they are suspected. This sense of equality is presumably not based on someone’s ability or goodness or wealth, and certainly not on their religious faith, but on the condition of being a human being among other human beings in the world. And whatever its antecedents, it is not too much to call it a principle of political equality. In the last century, in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, this idea helped to bring representatives from 196 countries to a consensus on the Geneva Conventions, defining among other things, the basic rights of wartime prisoners.

About the Overthrow Series

Nicaragua panel of the Overthrow series, oil on wood, 2006

The Overthrow series is among the works currently showing at Kang Contemporary in Berlin (the gallery is located across the street from the Jewish Museum) in the exhibit, transfusio, hiding and revealing, curated by Rahel Schrohe and including works by Katrin von Lehmann, MASCH, Carolyn Prescott, and Raúl de Zárate.

The paintings in the Overthrow series were inspired by and rely heavily on a book by Stephen Kinzer: Overthrow, America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Kinzer is a journalist of extensive experience. He has reported from over 50 countries around the world, served as the New York Times bureau chief in Nicaragua, Germany, and Turkey, and as the Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe. In this book he documents regime change operations carried out by the U.S. in fourteen sovereign nations over the course of a century, examining only those cases in which “Americans played the decisive role in deposing a regime,” whether by threatened or actual invasion or through covert operations designed to destabilize the existing government. He has drawn from the work of hundreds of journalists and historians and other experts in the field. He gives the context for each regime change, describes the operations that were carried out, and discusses the short-term effects and the long-term repercussions.

I discovered Kinzer’s book soon after it came out in 2006, three years following the invasion of Iraq. Like many who came of age during the Vietnam War era, I have questioned my country’s many interventions, and I wanted to understand the patterns of our involvement in the overthrow of other governments and their leaders.

Responding as an artist to Kinzer’s accounts of regime change, I was struck by the elegiac statements of the deposed, which convey the asymmetry of confronting a nation as powerful as the United States of America. Some of these heads of state submitted their resignations in order to save their people from bloodshed; some stated their cause just before they were forced out or killed; sometimes we have only the words of their compatriots.

In thinking about how to bring these events to light, I thought almost immediately of the tradition of retablo painting developed in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, with origins going back to the European Middle Ages. Variously termed ex votos, votive painting, or retablos, these devo- tional paintings typically tell stories of misfortune followed by a rescue through the miraculous in- tercession of a saint. The artist recreates the story as told by the protagonist. The role of the artist as a faithful listener yet imaginative recorder of stories not widely known seemed to me a fitting one for rendering these stories of regime change. Thus I have appropriated the retablo genre for the Overthrow series, rejecting the notion of a seamless historical narrative in favour of the fragmentary, knowing also that these stories have been and will continue to be told by the people whose governments were overturned.

In formal terms these paintings employ some of the features of retablos—flatness, the absence of traditional perspective, the condensation of pictorial space, and the inclusion of written narrative. They contain components of a linear story of a coup, but like many retablos, they may also jump backward or forward in time, referring to causes and subsequent events. In other ways I have taken liberties with the genre. These paintings do not feature saints; rather, they give voice to the deposed leaders or their representatives. Unlike most retablos, they are not meant to connect to a divinity or supernatural world; rather, they commemorate grief and loss, alluding to the psychic trauma experienced by the leader and the nation, offering images for contemplation, through which, in turn, we can hope to gain insight, to observe patterns of engagement, and consider responsibilities.

Carolyn Prescott, 2021

References


Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow, America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2006. (Note: Mr. Kinzer does not bear responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation in the painting series.)

Elin Luque Agraz and Michele Beltrán, “Powerful Images: Mexican Ex-Votos,” Retablos y ex votos. Museo Franz Mayer, Artes de México, 2000

Deutsch Version

Die Inspiration für die Gemälde der Serie Overthrow war das Buch Overthrow, America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq des amerikanischen Journalisten und Auslandskorrespondenten Stephen Kinzer. Er dokumentiert in diesem Buch Interventionen der Vereinigten Staaten in vierzehn souveränen Ländern, die alle zum Sturz des bestehenden Regimes führten. Ausschließlich geht es ihm dabei um Fälle, in denen „die USA eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Entmachtung spielten“, sei es durch Androhung oder Ausführung einer Militärinvasion oder durch verdeckte Aktionen.

Als ich Kinzers Buch las, beeindruckt mich besonders die elegische Sprache der entmachteten Politiker. Aus ihr klingt die Asymmetrie der Konfrontation mit einer Supermacht wie den Vereinigten Staaten. Einige der aufgeführten Staatsoberhäupter traten von ihrem Amt zurück, um den Menschen ihres Landes das Blutvergießen zu ersparen. In einigen Fällen haben wir dazu nur die Aussagen ihrer Landsleute.

Bei den Überlegungen, wie ich diese Ereignisse bildnerisch ans Licht bringen könnte, fiel mir gleich die bildnerische Tradition lateinamerikanischer Retablos ein, wie man sie zum Beispiel in Mexiko findet. Solche Gemälde erzählen typischerweise die Geschichte eines Unglücks, auf das – vermittelt durch einen Heiligen – die Rettung folgt. Der Künstler malt, wovon die Hauptperson erzählt. Die Rolle des Künstlers als genauer Zuhörer und gleichzeitig als Aufzeichner von wenig bekannten Geschichten erschien mir für die Wiedergabe dieser Geschichten von Regimewechseln passend. Meine Bilder zeigen keine Heiligen, sondern lassen die abgesetzten Führer oder ihre Vertreter selbst sprechen. Im Gegensatz zu den meisten Retablos sollen sie keine Verbindung zu einer Gottheit herstellen; vielmehr erinnern sie an Trauer und Verlust, indem sie auf das psychische Trauma des jeweiligen Oberhauptes und Landes anspielen und als Bilder Kontemplation anbieten, durch die wir wiederum hoffen können, Einsicht zu gewinnen, Muster der Verstrickung zu beobachten und Verantwortlichkeiten in Betracht zu ziehen.

Übersetzung: Ralf Jaeger

Lisa Glauer at Kang Contemporary

Milky Way, performance/installation, Lisa Glauer at Kang Contemporary

In Lisa Glauer’s recently released leparello comic book, Broaching the Next Man Suit Barrier, a cultural “top dog” queries the artist in the story: “. . . are you a social practice artist or a painter?” Glauer’s current show at Kang Contemporary in Berlin answers the question by rejecting the dichotomy altogether. Rather, she insists on experimenting in all directions. Her immediate purpose here seems to be to explore—one might say expose—the patriarchal territory of weaponry, drones and technical installations. To do so, she works with a delicate yet robust medium—human milk (provided by a cadre of donors)—milk that initially hardly manifests on the semi-transparent paper. Only after the drawings have been ironed, we are given to understand, do the ivory lines give way to the almost tender ochre and brown tones, which reveal in turn an array of military hardware and the figures of the self-assured men who seem to be managing it. Layers of these images are then backlit with LEDs in a lightbox, a device that itself can be read as an extension of the technology in the drawings. The drawings map territory, marking borders and depicting technological interventions that can seem threatening. Yet, as I looked longer, the images became more distinguishable, less menacing. The milky lines seemed to soften; standing before one piece, Vorstoss zum oberen Erdmantel, my focus shifted to the figures of men in the foreground, apparent spectators to their own barriers and devices, small and merely human against the sweeping curves and geometric forms of technological icons. In the short film piece, Skyjacking Across Borders with Toy Guns, a helmeted, military clad man holds up his hands in a gesture that could be helpless before the observed event. There is both fierceness and mercy here in the way the artist assembles, renders and transmutes these images.

Glauer shows a range of media for this exhibition: drawings in milk and pencil; comics rendered through wonderfully analog linoleum prints; a neon light piece called monument against patriarchy; a short film; and the installation piece, Landing Strip for the Milky Way. The latter is constituted by a wooden frame supporting two neon-lit layers of translucent paper laid across stepped rungs; the whole piece transects the gallery both vertically and horizontally and becomes a landing strip for milk, poured from above and cascading tranquilly along the gradients of the paper (see photo). The performance at the opening was a quiet ritual; the milk ran and slowed, streamed and pooled its way down the incline. I pondered the title that invokes the notion of the heavens as well as images of astronomy. I considered the medium of human milk associated with kindness and nurturance but also highly contaminated, as we learn, in the border region of Tijuana/San Diego, where national boundaries are drawn with military technology. Glauer exposes the hardware of violence, but she is not seduced by it in the process; she does not respect or love it, nor does she hate or even make fun of it. Instead, through her selection of materials and actions, she sets the paraphernalia of aggression into the context of our human condition, summoning material from the intimate act of nursing as well as conjuring the immensity of our surroundings, the vast Milky Way. Thus she makes known the destructive power of that paraphernalia, yet weakens its mystique.

— Carolyn Prescott

Disrupted Seeing, Haptic Drawing, and the Power of Line

Drawing of dinosaur skeleton at Natural History Museum, Berlin

In thinking about seeing, what I called “extreme seeing” (Seeing, Remembering, Imagining—see below) as well as the seeing associated with memory and reverie, I soon come to my own case of disrupted seeing. Twenty years ago I began to experience a neurological disorder, dystonia, that causes an involuntary squeezing of the muscles of the eyelids. Eventually spreading to the lower face, neck, and shoulders, it caused various hindrances in eating, speaking and walking, but above all, seeing became unreliable. I walked into poles or doors left ajar, knocked glasses off the table. It was not easy to look skyward, so I was focused involuntarily on the near and middle ground, stealing upward glances for a second or two at a time. My timing and judgement of distance in things where those factors matter—from filling a glass with water to stopping the car in traffic—were untrustworthy. My ability to read or to make steady eye contact with others was compromised. The spasms were intermittently and partially brought under control through topical injections but remained present in some form, ever distracting, tiring, disabling. In the last three years, through a combination of movement modalities, my condition has improved. I don’t expect to drive a car again, and family photos attest to a continuing difficulty in keeping my eyes open, but my condition has notably improved.

Dystonia has affected my ability to see, yet counterintuitively perhaps, in the last two decades, the activities that have been among the most calming to the hyperactive nerves around my eyes have been drawing and painting. Admittedly, my seeing was inconstant; it was hard to judge at times when the brush would actually make contact with the paper. It was not possible to have precise control. When I drew a person on the bus or train, my eyes sometimes squeezed shut almost as often as they remained open. I was aware of the gaps, knew I was approximating, inventing, often relying on the hand and not the eye.

The scholar David Rosand has described the way in which a line in drawing becomes a line in space “whose path is clearly controlled by the habits of the trained hand.” The haptic sense I had developed as an art student—the illusion of touching the subject and trusting the reactive motion of my own hand—aided me in creating a line in space. Rosand speaks even of “the haptic ambition of the drawing hand, the repeated attempt to reach the object, to secure it for the grasp.” Whether guided by steady vision or by faultier and more intermittent eyesight, and whether or not it is undertaken for any purpose of rendering—drawing always does involve a haptic exploration and invention and is a function of gesture as much as of vision.

In my case, the very attempt to tame my darting, irregular vision with line was somehow soothing; the line could bring the world around me into line, I might have said, and in turn, the line was freed from mere perception. Again, Rosand identifies the “exploratory possibility of a line that [gives] it purpose; its extension into the world [makes] visible vectors of force and energies otherwise unperceivable by the eye. Line made the world imaginable.” “To draw a line,” says Rosand, “is to extend oneself into the world, to know it, and to recognize one’s self.”

I thought of this recently while drawing the dinosaur skeletons at the natural history museum here in Berlin. I was feeling an urgency to draw from life but wanted to avoid familiar subjects with associated preconceptions or habitual motions. With a definite excitement about taking on so large a form (and appreciation for the return of my ability to look up, to see above eye level), I set my drawing pad on my lap in the great hall of the museum.

The skeletons are indeed so large that it is exhilarating to even contemplate them. In addition to the overall form, which seems determined to extend beyond any single sheet of drawing paper, there is a wealth of detail in the articulation of joints and protruding backbones, in cavities and spines. Yet I found myself constantly referring to and moving with the whole structure, even while struggling to apprehend various sockets and appendages. And somehow ever present was a feeling about the great scientific endeavor to reconstruct these creatures that came before us, to understand how they evolved. Moreover, I even had the admittedly grandiose notion that I had joined that effort to make sense of what is found, of what can be seen. It was a wonderful day, full of discovery. And that is surely one of the key elements of drawing: the curiosity we can bring to it, the desire to discover and invent form and to know the world and place ourselves in it.

— Carolyn Prescott

Seeing, Remembering, Imagining

Sidewalk color, seen in winter, Carolyn Prescott

Two instances of extreme seeing

A couple of weeks before Christmas, a day of bright sunshine broke our steady record of heavily overcast, foggy, and rainy days. I was facing the sun as I walked home from a morning appointment, my face turned up and eyes momentarily closed, enjoying the warmth. Then I opened my eyes and stared down at the gray diamond-patterned sidewalk—when suddenly the lines between the pebbled cement blocks rose up in glowing red. I say rose up because they seem to come toward my eyes, almost to leave the ground. I was thrilled by the intensity but looked for a reason: Why this strong red (cadmium with maybe a touch of Caput Mortuum)? I looked around for green, the complement that would generate such an optical event. Aha, the hedges, short as they are along that stretch of sidewalk, were unnaturally green for the season, as if only recently planted. As I walked on, the patterned lines of sidewalk remained red, now and again brilliantly so, the color present even when a cloud softened the bright sun, even when bordered by a dull patch of grass or gray wall. I reflected on the conditions: the sun, the sense of warmth, the green hedge, the gray pebbled sidewalk, the closing and opening of the eyes, the wavelengths of visible light, the cones in my retina responding, and thus—a few moments of what I might call extreme seeing.

Days later, the sun was not shining. It had rained again, and the ground glistened wet as I rounded the corner from the bus stop on my way home. I passed under the willow tree that droops over the fence there, and again, my perception seemed to fall into place all of a sudden. I looked down at hundreds of slivers of color, randomly composed but to great effect—luminous deep yellow reverberating with an ivory color. A few seconds passed before I could take it in: ah, these are leaves from the willow tree, this saturated yellow of the top of the leaf contrasting with the pale underside, fallen and juxtaposed in a slivered, shimmering path, so vivid that it almost rose from the ground; it met my eyes.

Seeing and remembering

My work is not a rendering of what I see, yet seeing, and moments that could be called “extreme seeing” are nonetheless critical to painting as I practice it, in which the well of visual memory becomes a fundamental source for the act of making. We experience these vivid moments most of all, perhaps, as children. From my childhood I can still see the vivid orange clay and deep green grass of Piedmont North Carolina; the black filigree of bare deciduous trees against the sky in winter; the skin and hair on my own meager forearms, minutely examined; my father in profile as he sits talking at the kitchen table, jaw forward, hand waving a cigarette. These memories differ in nature from my recent optical encounters; these remembered instances, although they are visual experiences, are steeped in culture and family history, no doubt altered or even invented through replaying in the mind’s eye. Gaston Bachelard writes about such images “which arise from the depths of childhood . . . that they are not really memories, but products of a dialectic of imagination and memory, situated within a net work of human values . . .” For Bachelard, these images tell of the continuity of great childhood reveries with the reveries of the poet.

Seeing and imagining

Especially as children we engage in another sort of imaginative gazing, picking out faces in the clouds, or creatures in the patterns of tree trunks. Even now as an adult, I sometimes stare across the furrows of the bedsheets in early morning light until they reveal figures with extravagant gestures and facial expressions. This “projective faculty of imagination,” was cited by Leonardo, who encouraged close observation of “the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like things, in which, if you consider them well, you will find really marvelous ideas . . . the compositions of landscapes and monstrous things, such as devils and similar creations. ”

Readymade seeing

How much of what we see is presented to us in books and on screens, and there is likely no truly unmediated seeing; our vision is culturally framed and habitually reinforced. Nevertheless, the conscious work of reacting to the visual field as we encounter it, selecting from it and making meaning out of it—seems possible to some degree and is an essential human experience that belongs to all of us. In everyday seeing as in painting, the finding of form is not preordained. Rather the image can be discovered through a process that involves seeing and responding, thinking and remembering, discerning the ever evolving world in front of us.

— Carolyn Prescott

Invisible, ifa-Galerie in Berlin-Mitte

Achayef, Abdessamad El Mountassir, 2018, video still, copyright the artist, IMéRA and Le Cube

The ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) gallery in Berlin-Mitte has undertaken a three-year transdisciplinary project, Untie to Tie, that addresses colonial legacies, movement, migration and environment. I recently visited the current exhibition, Invisible, and two works were especially evocative for me.

Abdessamad El Montassir’s film Achayef takes us to the part of the Sahara where both he and his friend Weld Sidi spent their early childhood years. We see Weld Sidi walking in the desert as we hear the story of his mother, Khadija, who—as we learn—was deeply traumatized by events that forced her to leave her Saharan home around 1975. The events are not specified, not categorized even, and although Khadija refers to these events (we hear her voice and see her hands and her body seated on the floor, but we do not see her face), she says only that she had to leave and that she cannot describe what happened. As viewers we become watchful and wary, our reactions perhaps corresponding in some small degree to those of the child who has carried the story, in all its incomprehensibility, in the body. This is one kind of invisibility with which the exhibit as a whole is preoccupied — perceptions that are, in the words of the curator Alya Sebti, “beyond the margins of the visible,” in this case presumably the unseen is the war in the Western Sahara. But in this film we do sense something of the invisible, and we are then led into the more familiar (to many of us) territory of scientific discussion, first by a botanist who talks to us about the daghmon plant that once had leaves but turned its leaves into thorns in response to environmental conditions, another scientist who discusses human trauma and its effect on the limbic system. This transition is a powerful and at the same time, gentle strategy that prevents us from exoticizing or dismissing the main story as having to do with the other.

In One story amongst many others, Zainab Andalibe presents a web fashioned out of thread—two meters in diameter, dense at its center yet sparse overall—and displaying a luminous palette. The web is accompanied by a written dialogue, in which one voice, perhaps that of the artist, perhaps not, describes to another a meditative practice of walking.

“Yes, I like to walk. It is as if I connect to the divine, as if I am praying.”

“You pray?”

“No, I walk, I like to walk for hours . . . “

As the dialogue continues, we are given to understand that the walking practice is generative of the web; the thread marks the walking and changes color when the walker encounters others. I was drawn to the web because of its spare beauty. What is intriguing beyond that is the notion of a ritual delineated through artistic practice, connecting the sensorial with the spiritual. The work is an instance in which the material and the conceptual meet in an uncanny way—to be sensed and not explained.

— Carolyn Prescott

Friends with Books at Hamburger Bahnhof

things I see in the sky, 2018, Ines Martins—llustrative modifications of clouds - from a series of devoré drawings on textile, a small book collecting those drawings wrapped by an original burnout print on textile.

Last weekend I went to Hamburger Bahnhof to see the Friends with Books Fair: two rooms packed with artists who experiment in one way or another with book and publishing form and content. Among the works that caught my attention were these:

• The Danish artist Julie Sass (www.juliesass.dk) makes abstract paintings and collages and writes thoughtfully about abstraction and visual thinking.

• I, Oblomov is a playful and serious book by the artist Ikuru Kuwajima (www.ikuruwajima.com) in which he presents photographs of his own languid moments, appropriating selected quotes from the 19th century novel by Ivan Goncharov. Fittingly for a book with torpor as a theme, the artist provides his Oblomov book with a cushioned cover.

• Ines Martins’ books (www.ines-martins.com), especially the one pictured here called Things I See in the Sky, made by means of a tender, selective removal of threads.

— Carolyn Prescott

About the recent work

Platform with safety line, Carolyn Prescott, gouache and ink on paper

(Zur deutschen Fassung nach unten scrollen.)

The human figure—its form, weight, posture, gesture, facial expression—has long been at the center of my work. Invention in painting is for me grounded in observation but also fueled by thoughts about human contact and isolation, intimacy and estrangement, individuality and plurality.

For more than a decade now I have lived in Berlin and filled sketchbooks with drawings of my fellow citizens as we occupy the space of streets and platforms, alongside buildings, tracks and tunnels. The drawings reflect an attempt to grasp and acknowledge the sheer fact of our plurality, what Hannah Arendt called the defining condition of all political life: “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anybody else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

These ideas, together with my experiences of going about in the city, open up a space for making, open up a search for the rhythms and interactions of form, the inventions of composition. When I look to give these figures a space in the generative field of a painting, I am always asking: What will painting allow? What does it demand? How much can it hold?

Zu den neuen Bildern

Der menschliche Körper – seine Form, Haltung, Gestik, das Gewicht und der Gesichtsausdruck – steht seit langem im Mittelpunkt meiner Arbeit. Malerei beruht für mich zum Teil auf Beobachtung, aber auch auf Ideen über menschliches Leben: Kontakt und Isolation, Intimität und Entfremdung, Individualität und Pluralität.

Seit über zehn Jahren lebe ich in Berlin und habe in dieser Zeit Menschen im öffentlichen Raum gezeichnet: auf der Straße, in Gebäuden, im Untergrund, auf Bahnsteigen und in Zügen. Die Zeichnungen sind ein Versuch die Gegebenheit unserer Pluralität zu begreifen und anzuerkennen.

Die Pluralität bestimmt Hannah Arendt als “die Tatsache, daß nicht ein Mensch, sondern viele Menschen auf der Erde leben . . .” Weiter sagt sie: „Pluralität ist die Bedingung menschlichen Handelns, denn wir gleichen uns als Menschen in dem Sinne, dass niemand derselbe oder dieselbe ist wie irgend ein Anderer, der jemals lebte, lebt oder leben wird“.

Diese Ideen zusammen mit meinem Erleben der Stadt eröffnen mir einen Raum künstlerischen Handelns, dem Suchen nach den Rhythmen und der Wechselseitigkeit der Form sowie der Erfindung kompositorischer Anordnung. Ich suche für diese Figuren einen Platz im generativen Raum eines Gemäldes und immer frage ich: Was lässt Malerei zu? Was fordert sie? Wieviel kann sie fassen?

— Carolyn Prescott

Book Excerpt: First Grade, Part 1

School Rules/First Grade, leparello book, 2012, edition of 20; story, paintings, and books by Carolyn Prescott

1.

I am wearing a white, round-collar, puff-sleeved blouse trimmed with red piping. It slips out of the waistband of the plaid gathered skirt and slides up along the matching plaid suspenders all the sticky hot afternoon on the first day of school. My mother made this skirt and blouse for me.

As we return from recess, outside on the wide sandy playground, I think about how I am walking, how my skirt swishes between two rows of desks, and how I hold my head—left, then right—to show that I know what to do, that I know where to go.

My hair is shorter than ever before—in tight springs, unfamiliar. Only at Easter and now, on the first day of school, are my sisters and I so shorn and permed, my mother promising us, each time, soft curls and no frizz. Enough time passes between these ritual ordeals that we forget about the sausage curls that end in splayed fried fans of hair. All through the rolling up in the early afternoon, our mother not yet tired as she takes us on one after the other like customers in a salon, we are excited by visions of our faces framed by soft movie star waves. Only when she adds the permanent wave solution--that unmistakable, astringent odor--do we remember the disappointing result. Too short, too frizzy, too tight.

And now on the first day of school, I am sweating under the round-collar, puff-sleeved blouse and at the temples, and the smell of permanent wave solution washes over me. My frilly white socks slide down beneath my heels inside the black patent leather shoes.

I reach my desk, relieved. I turn in my seat to see the children in the rows behind me, my legs stick and then pull away from the warm wood with a little sucking noise. “Face the front,” says Mrs. Harwood, and I do.

— Carolyn Prescott

Book Excerpt: Transmitting Wonder

Science in the Family, artist’s book with six hand colored etchings, 6 poems and prose pieces; 2016; limited edition

The following excerpt is the framing essay from the artist’s book, Science in the Family

Transmitting Wonder

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.
– Albert Einstein, in Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time

Certain scientific ideas and principles have been with me for almost as long as I can remember. These ways of knowing the world—through atoms, molecules, cells, the electromagnetic spectrum, Darwin’s theory—all began for me with my father’s impassioned explanations.

My father Charles was an unlikely teacher, given his eighth grade education and his occupations as a carpenter, and later on, construction supervisor. He had grown up in the swampy lowlands east of Columbia, South Carolina, under the religious tyranny of his mother, a fervent Baptist intent on finding the path of righteousness, pointing out the sins of others (and not sparing the rod) and anticipating the glory of the “end days.” This strict fundamentalism did not appear to have taken hold of my father in his earlier years, but when he reached his late twenties, not long after I was born, he began taking our family to the fire and brimstone Baptist church, and during a period of financial stress, he came to believe that he was being called to the ministry by God. In the ensuing altered state that he attributed to the Holy Spirit, he followed my mother around the house, reciting long Biblical passages from memory. He soon quit his job to occupy himself solely with religious questions.

His obsessive zeal was eventually interrupted by doubt, triggered in part—as he explained to us—by my sister’s nightmares of “burning fingers,” which began after one particularly vivid hellfire sermon. What kind of religion is this, my father wondered, to so frighten a small child? Books lent by a lawyer whose house library he was remodeling provided a catalyst for his thinking: Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, and Faiths, Cults, and Sects in America were two that made a strong impresssion. Later on he read Darwin and Freud. The crisis of faith led eventually to his psychiatric hospitalization and our family’s move to North Carolina, a state away from the direct influence of my grandmother.

My father’s story was not one of simple triumph of reason over dogma, however. The journey from belief in a personal god (a phrase I first heard from him) to a scientific view of life brought estrangement from much of his original family and the loneliness of a working class man who had few opportunities to discuss ideas with others. He often drank excessively and he was depressed for months at a time, straining our family life and leaving our mother Helena to carry us through periods of joblessness and a later round of hospitalization. A primary image of him from childhood: he is home from work and sitting at the table hunched over a book; he does not speak much, he does not notice me there.

Despite his often withdrawn demeanor, as soon as I was old enough to form questions about the world, he began to answer them enthusiastically. His delivery was charismatic, with all the rhetorical flourish and timing of a southern Baptist sermon even if the subject was electricity, germ theory, or covalent bonding.

While my father’s scientific understanding cannot have been deep, he conveyed it honestly as an open framework, with gaps and possible errors (of his own in the telling as well as of the scientists themselves), yet to be probed and filled in. For my part, I did not always grasp his explanations in their entirety. My mother (meaning to help me out of my position as a captive audience of one once my sisters had fled the room in dread of “another lecture”) would sometimes interject, “enough, Charles, she can’t understand all that.” Determined to live up to expectations, I would, of course, immediately claim to understand “everything!”

For the kitchen table lectures undoubtedly served many purposes: they provided attention that I craved and a balm on the psychic wounds inflicted by my father’s moods under the influence. Not infrequently I saw them as a way to control his behavior while he was intoxicated. The transmission of knowledge, then, was a thrilling but uneasy process, fraught with the fundamental contradictions and insecurities of our family life. Nevertheless, my father imparted to me many core principles and theories of science, infused with great religious feeling, that is, with a sense of awe and delight for what really exists. And so he nourished in me a certain alertness in the world, a will to notice, a desire to understand.

— Carolyn Prescott