CRACKED NARRATIVES

Uwe Wittwer: Cracking Glass (after Jarman), Parafin, London, 2015

‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter...’

A veiled woman. Light upon water, a river. Dark buildings, shadows. A dancing Pan-like figure, another wearing a conical hat. Yet another traversing twisted metal, silhouetted against the sky. A man’s face, close-up, in distress. A child in a sun dappled garden. A page of manuscript upon which we can make out the word, ‘father’.

Uwe Wittwer’s Cracking Glass (after Jarman) (2014-5) is a single work made up of twenty-eight images. Twenty-eight stills from Derek Jarman's film The Last of England (1988) are rendered as washes of monochrome watercolour and interwoven with lines of poetry from TS Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Light and shade. The images range from solid blacks to ethereal and delicate greys. In some the details are difficult to read but others are clear and distinct. Some frames seem to be abstract, just air, water and movement. The lines of poetry seem to be embedded within some of the images, weaving through them, barely legible, and at other times seemingly float above the surface. Occasional words – ‘Moorgate’, ‘Greenwich reach’, ‘sails’, ‘London’…. -  are rendered with clarity while others become little more than calligraphic marks. While these framed images look like watercolours, they are in fact unique inkjet prints. Both original paintings and handwritten text were scanned before the two separate elements were digitally layered and entangled. Having combined these two elements Wittwer further manipulated the results, introducing shade and highlight, rendering sections of text more or less legible or illegible. The final images are thus several times removed from the original film stills: initially selected, secondly rendered in paint, thirdly scanned and layered with text, next manipulated as digital files and finally printed and framed. Each step in this elaborate process introduces a degree of distance from the source. Indeed, in all his work based on photographic images culled from the internet or from movies or paintings by masters including Poussin, De Hooch, Van de Velde and Holbein, Wittwer has sought to remind us of this distancing, using strategies such as fragmentation, mirroring, deconstruction and re-composition. He renders images as negatives. He allows the paint to pour and run or introduces flares – coronas of light or darkness – or eruptions of pigment that interrupt the integrity of the painted image. 

These strategies serve to remind us that we are looking at a fabrication, a kind of copy, not the original. With Cracking Glass, a final and further step in this process is offered by relinquishing control of the order in which the individual images are displayed. There is no set sequence for the grid and it can be installed in as many different ways as there are numerical combinations. Wittwer’s refusal of a set arrangement raises an interesting question: how might one construct an order for the images? One could follow the order in which the images appear in the film, or the order in which the words appear in the poem. Or shuffle them, as if a pack of cards, and allow chance to define the outcome. Thus, while built upon a narrative foundation (a film being a series of images in a set sequence, even if The Last of England is a non-narrative piece of film-making) Cracking Glass confounds any formal sense of narrative but instead opens up a field of possibilities.

The grid produces a space of potential in which the eye can move forwards, backwards, up and down, diagonally, or jump from image to image pursuing an internal logic (unlike a single row of images which inevitably produces a sequential reading). In ordering his images as a grid Wittwer creates an area in which visual connections override chronology, where each viewer will find their own personal illogical logic, which might even be different upon each encounter with the work, even from minute to minute. In The Waste Land the narrator laments that ‘On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing’. Conversely, here it seems the possibility is to connect everything with everything. 

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Cracking Glass is the second of a group of three major works by Uwe Wittwer that take iconic films as their subject, or rather as the starting point for complex explorations of the way narrative is constructed and the way meaning resides in and around certain images. These works address the intersection of the personal and the universal, the overlap of memory and history. The first work in the group was Black Sun (after Antonioni), a hugely ambitious 78-part work painted for Wittwer’s exhibition ‘In the Middle Distance’ at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in 2012. Black Sun used stills from Michelangelo Antonioni's swinging London movie Blow Up (1966), a film that itself forms a meditation on truth and the inherent instability of photographic images. Wittwer’s third work in this putative trilogy is based on Kenzi Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and will be exhibited in Japan next year. 

These three films couldn't be more different in style and sensibility but interestingly each is set in and reflects upon a specific moment and place. By which I mean that the place and time is more than mere setting, but part of the meaning of the work. In Blow Up and The Last of England that place is London, the 'Unreal city’ of Eliot's great poem. In Mizoguchi's film, it is feudal Japan in the last sixteenth century. London is a place that has figured largely in Wittwer’s development as an artist and so we might see his choice of Antonioni’s and Jarman’s films as offering some degree of personal significance. Certainly Jarman's state-of-the-nation film evokes London at a specific moment – the late 1980s - when the young artist first spent time in the city, a time when he began an extended engagement with British culture and in particular with the collection of the National Gallery.

Wittwer's use of Jarman's film is also revealing for it points to a number of shared concerns. In a sense, the film turns a mirror upon the painter’s practice. Thematically, Wittwer shares with Jarman an interest in history, memory, and the use of allusive, poetic imagery. Both artists explore a lack of, or resistance to, narrative. And both artists make extensive use of quotation, repurposing the archive to create something new.. Jarman's film is a collage of old and new footage, including scenes shot along the banks of the Thames and in ruined buildings, and home movies of the director as a child. The soundtrack combines new music with historic recordings. In the same way, Wittwer brings together – in the present exhibition at Parafin, of which Cracking Glass is the centerpiece - diverse elements including a ruined building in an old family snapshot, the old Swiss card deck (recalling the  clairvoyant with a ‘wicked deck of cards’ in Eliot’s poem), a photographic image of a card player culled from the internet, Jarman’s garden at Dungeness, and a beautiful vivid cornflower (in the voiceover, a man’s voice, world-weary, intones: ‘Poppies and corncockles have long been forgotten here…’).

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Finally, we should consider the role of Eliot’s poem within the spider’s web that is Wittwer’s Cracking Glass. In many ways The Waste Land is the element that triangulates the construction, the glue that binds the conceptual structure.

Eliot’s poem was a major influence on Jarman’s film. Indeed is has been suggested that The Last of England is actually a quasi-adaptation of The Waste Land. Eliot's poem is about notions of death and rebirth, of ruination and reconstruction. It is formed out of a collision of past and present, and an interweaving of reference and quotation (as are Wittwer’s suite of images and Jarman’s film). Eliot’s scope is impossibly broad, both historically and geographically, and the wasteland of his title is both the ruin of Europe in the aftermath of war and the barren situation, the ‘stony rubbish’, within which culture attempts to persist. For Jarman the analogy was with the present state of England in the 1980s but also his own life (he had just been diagnosed with AIDS). The parallels are profound. Just as they are for Wittwer, who in his work has consistently addressed the history of Europe in the post-War period, using autobiographical cues and cyphers, as well as the reality of a post-internet cultural landscape.

A river runs through all three works of art. Images of fire and water (and earth and air) recur again and again, but especially water, that great metaphor. Here too are ruins, many many ruins, often shrouded in smoke. But here too are gardens, places of growth and renewal. The gardens in the film are sites of memory, where the infant Derek plays ball with his sister and mother. In Wittwer’s work, this image of a child and mother, together with empty deckchair seems transfigured into autobiography. The deck is shuffled and in different versions of this particular reality these two figures, adrift from the present, might find themselves alongside the river at sunset, by an empty garden, or a blazing fire, depending on how the hand is dealt. In words, film, in these paintings and inkjets something profound or mundane may take place:  the world ‘cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air’.