Missing Philly, but Dancing in the Crimson Room with the Whistling Ain't That Bad
João Penalva sees his art as giving spectators an awareness of their bodies in space and time, allowing them to improvise their own choreography so they can navigate through a piece as a "container of fictions ... there to be read." I decided to create a web site responding to Penalva's art after visiting his retrospective exhibit at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. In particular, the work called Wallenda (shown above right) evoked a variety of feelings and responses, especially as I had not heard of the artist before. A web search told me a bit more about him, but during it, I came to feel that he was underrepresented on the Internet. Ideas for a web site readily suggested themselves to me as I was sifting my reactions to the exhibit, so I began to implement them, even though this was not my intention from the start. In fact, I began to collect pieces of the exhibit to think about further even before it occurred to me that these fragments could become the core of an Internet presentation. So what you have here is the story of my visits to the Penalva exhibition, and some of my reactions to it, as well as a "table of contents" or guide to the web pages I created.
My Visits to the Penalva Exhibition
In all, I visited the Ludwig Museum three times, on January 3rd, 12th and 14th. Since the beginning of my nine-month stay in Budapest my friend Kati has been saying that we should go to the Ludwig. She hadn't been there since it moved to its new home in the Művészetek Palotája. She and I were going to go to a café one afternoon, and on impulse she said, why don't we go to the Ludwig? It was a gray and bleak winter day, and she had been sick, so we needed an adventure and off we went, riding the Number 1 trolley for most of its circuit to the end stop at Lágymányosi hid.
I had already been to the Művészetek Palotája because the choir my son belongs to performed in the concert hall last year. My son said that the hall's acoustics are even better than those of Exeter Cathedral, where he sang with the Cathedral Choir of St. John's in 2002. The concert had been a matchless experience: the thundering harmonies of Verdi's Requiem echo in my spirit to this day. Having already had a wonderful experience in this building, I felt like the hostess if not the proprietress of the Művészetek Palotája. I led my friend Kati around like any proud homeowner, even showing her the amazing toilet seats that disinfected themselves after you used them.
Of course, we remembered our original purpose and started our visit with a sojourn in the café, where we had sandwiches, cake and champagne. We hadn't had a chance to toast the new year because I was off in Rome, and we had to make that right. And then on to the museum part of the building.
When we came to the Ludwig, we saw that there was a permanent collection, but a special exhibition was closing on the 15th, so we decided we wanted to see that first. I have now been to the museum three times and have yet to see the permanent exhibitions. But I'll be back.
Well, in we went and first we saw Ruskin's hair, or rather Penalva's seven versions of it. There had been a frame with a lock of John Ruskin's hair in London's South End Gallery when Penalva was asked to create an exhibition for the gallery. So he made six versions of the frame, not copies, but variations, each one a uniquely fabricated frame with Ruskin-like hair. No one knew which one the original was, it seemed, and one of the frames had been stolen, raising amusing questions for the insurers until it was recovered. When I saw this exhibit, I immediately felt I understood the kind of artist I was seeing, and I was excited and happy to be making his acquaintance. One of my regrets at not being in Philadelphia this year was that I had missed the Rodney Graham exhibit at the ICA there, and I felt that in seeing Penalva I was going to have somewhat the same kind of experience.
Ruskin's hair made me chuckle, but I was completely intrigued with LM44/EB61, a work focusing on the murder of a clerk in an antiquities shop in London. I spent a long time reading all the different and contradictory newspaper clippings, studying the police report, and walking through the floor plan of the shop, feeling a little bit like Nicole Kidman in Dogville.
Taking my cue from Ruskin's hair, I came to believe everything I was looking at had been fabricated by Penalva, an opinion I was to revise on my second and third visits, when I came to see his work more as a pointed intermingling of historical materials and the fermentation of his own imagination.
Kati and I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition: we spent a long time looking at one of the films. It had been photographed through a narrow slit showing fragments of people passing by on the street. We were intrigued by the perspective and tried to figure out what country it represented. We also spent time at an exhibit which is based on the work of a photography school. In another work, "Addressing the weeds of Hiroshima," the artist catalogues the weeds growing around a factory in Hiroshima and addresses a speech to them, intermingling his own experiences and his appreciation of their resilience. Kati and I did not always travel together but sometimes struck out on our own. I remember meeting up with her at the narrow-slit film, and then wandering together awhile, but I lost sight of her while I was studying another exhibit. Soon it was time for us to go.
As we were getting our coats, we saw that there is always a guided tour of the exhibition on Thursdays, and we resolved to return in a week and two days. In fact, on our way between the café and the museum parts of the building, we had bought tickets for a concert on that Thursday: the Balanescu Quartet would be performing. Carl and I had heard Alexander Balanescu with Muzsikás and when I described his amazing music and his violin virtuosity to Kati, she was eager to hear him as well. A bit of time on the cell phone determined that Carl was happy to come along. Our plan evolved into a full Thursday: we would meet for lunch, go on to the Ludwig, view the guided tour and then finish our day with the concert.
So on the 12th, we were back at the Penalva exhibition. Carl had brought the camera; I obtained a photography permit for us, and looked forward to taking pictures of the Hiroshima exhibition. Carl, though, had a very different reaction to Penalva than I did. Of course I misled him as well, portraying Penalva as someone who fabricated all of the items we were looking at. "Where," said Carl, "is the art in that? He just makes things up!" This led us to a conversation that wove in and out of the galleries and through the work of other artists whose work we had enjoyed, including Peter Greenaway and Ana Mendieta. As we were pursuing this track, we intersected with Kati, who said some thing about the "crimson room with the whistling." Well, that represented a lacuna in my wanderings, this time or last. Carl who had wandering on his own earlier, had seen it as well and explained that Penalva had taught himself to whistle The Rite of Spring. He added that I really had to see it, but then the tour was starting and we again traced our way through the exhibition back to the beginning.
This time through, I got to see the whistling room, and was captivated by it, though I was overwhelmed by the large amount of material to consider, wall after wall of framed mysterious items and a text that seemed to encircle the room. I tried to read the text, succeeded only in getting through some fragments of it, and – like those Japanese tourists we often make fun of in tour groups – photographed the rest to think about later. I had what I thought was all of it – I later discovered there were some significant omissions. We then went on to room with the film clip of Karl Wallenda. Like Penalva, I am afraid of heights, so I could not imagine a more upsetting sight. I sat a long time in the dark; all I could think was that I was seeing Karl Wallenda die, over and over again. It was hard to see his death as any kind of metonymy. But as I watched the film clip over and over again and again, I became more and more aware of the whistling. I came to understand that it too was part of the exhibit.
I went over to the corner of the dark room and watched the patterns made by the whistling on a video of output from a spectral analyzer. Then I came back to the center of the room again and looked for a while at the black and white screen. I asked Carl to turn off the flash on the camera and capture a bit of the film for me. On our way out, running to see the concert, we took a few more pictures of Penalva's text. The Balanescu Quartet played a work called Maria T which turned out to be as much a multimedia presentation as a concert. Balanescu said that if you are Romanian, you see life as a path of suffering, but nonetheless find joy in everyday living. The music was a maenad whispering, wailing and strutting through this eternal dance.
On Friday, I sat down with our camera and spent the evening improving the picture quality in Carl's recording of Wallenda. I began assembling as much as I could of Penalva's text from the photographs, but I only had time to piece together the left side of the room. On Saturday, I told Carl that I needed to go back and see the Penalva exhibition because it was closing the next day and I was missing parts of the text. I didn't have any idea why I wanted the text or what I was going to do with it. I had worked from after I was done helping Mickey with his homework until 1:30 AM and there were still gaps in what I could piece together. I thought I had all of the right side of the text but I wasn't sure of that either. To my surprise and delight, Carl said he would come along. He still was not a fan of Penalva, but I think he was intrigued as much by what I saw in him as he was by the art itself.
On this visit, we did not take the camera: that way of working had not proved reliable, and I was feeling too cheap to fork out another photographer's fee, though it was only 1500 Forints, on top of admission. Instead, I printed out what I had assembled of the text, expecting to fill in the gaps on this copy, and enter them into the electronic version of the document after I came home. When we got to the Művészetek Palotája, we stopped first in the bookstore and I looked at some books they had on Penalva. In one, there were some pictures of Wallenda as it had first been mounted somewhere else: in London, I guess. There, the part of the exhibit on Penalva's process of learning to whistle The Rite of Spring spanned several rooms, and the text of his narrative was on two lines, and not four. The picture showed the lines snaking through the exhibit; you would have had to walk through all those rooms to read this story. After about half an hour of looking at the books, we went on to the Ludwig Museum itself.
Once there, we focused almost completely on Wallenda. As we were the only ones in the room, I sat in the middle on the bench and read out what I had from my printouts, while Carl stood and read off the missing text from the wall. We paid special attention to mistakes in the writing, some orthographic, some due to spacing and placement. I still didn't entirely know I was creating a web page, but I wanted a record of what I had seen, not what could have been or should have been there.
Images of My Text and Transcriptions
As we worked, we came across Penalva's mention of the image of the spectral analyzer and discovered that Carl had not noticed it the projection room. After we were done with our transcription, I looked for the first time at the frames with Penalva's musical notation in them. Once, again, I found a rich text to read. When I was a child, my mother always laughed at my attempts to sing, and said "you have a tin ear like your father." As I grew up, I never developed any musical ability, but I love to listen to music, and from talking to friends with more musical training than I have, I usually find that I notice sensible and meaningful things in music. Penalva's notation made perfect sense to me. I saw how he used curled lines and separate strokes to represent the duration of individual sounds in the work, and I also noted that his notation evolved over time. I would have loved to study the notation in more detail and actually match it to the complete performance of the work, but we had other things to do that afternoon, and knew that the project I was considering would have taken several more hours.
After that, we sat in the projection room for quite some time, but I discovered the projection of the spectral analyzer was not operating. I had been looking forward to showing this aspect of the work to Carl. Eventually I traveled back through the exhibit and found some guards to ask about this. There was a great hubbub; the guards followed me to the final room of the exhibit and saw that the small projector at the side of the room was indeed off. They were very grateful that I had pointed this out to them and promised to try to solve the problem for us. They called a curator on the phone and even, against the explicit orders they were given, tried to help me get the projector going but we were unable to do so. It was a projector of the sort I use in my classes, but I couldn't get it to work. I judged that its bulb must have burnt out.
We sat a bit longer and headed out slowly, pausing here and there in the exhibit for a last look, taking with us my transcripts and a cocoon of warmth from the museum.
Table of Contents to My Pages on the Penalva Exhibition
The "process room" in Wallenda
Transcript of the text in the "process room"
The image in the projection room of Wallenda
