Ideas are exhausting

This how that idea got out of control: the apartment had an absurdly large terrace with a thick concrete wall just above waist height. The concrete was tinted a hue better suited to the American southwest; it was garish in the damp and there was a lot of it. None of the surfaces that coated that place were soft and perhaps that was the point of entry—where the idea came in. The terrace and the apartment had a generous aspect to the east and a coveted outlook to the north: mountains and city skyline. A neighbour directly south introduced himself with a threat: don’t block my view. Points progressed to punctures.

There was a lumber shop at the end of the block so maybe it was the ease of material access; this has happened before. What’s within reach becomes suggestive—consequential—like the mound of old doorknobs Peter dropped in the metal recycling outside the door a lifetime later. They ended up in the metal recycling again but not until they were a major distraction. The lumber distraction was cedar—silver, soft and sweet smelling. A fence or screen it would have been more practical. Why was the idea not for a fence or screen? Why was it instead for a box?

Because. 

Because the terrace was so large.

Some of it needed consuming. Filling. It asked for occupation.

Because.

Because the terrace was so large and all of it was seen. 

There were no places of intimacy. There were no soft corners.

The box was no higher than the terrace wall. It had a frame made from pressure-treated lumber and it sat in the centre. The intention was always that it would have a small door so its vacant core could hide things like garden hoses. The top of the box was clad in soft cedar and had a recessed trough that was filled with native plants that took easily, their changing profile layering delicately onto the view of the neighbour to the south. The vertical faces of the box were also clad in cedar and they were pleasant from every angle. A disruption, yes, but in possession of some purpose. The box held its ground. It made new spaces and yet everyone asked what the box was, what it was doing there. It was exhausting.

Aaron took a lot of the cedar to his studio outside the city. The lengths weren’t useful to anyone building a fence and no one else saw two seasons of weathering as the perfect base for paintings. The rain drew a faint outline of the space where the box stood in the centre of the terrace. The plants that thrived in the recessed trough quickly outgrew it; the survivors were relocated to better accommodations. There were as many questions about where the box went as there were about what it was. Ideas are exhausting. It’s easier to call them art.

New Year

I imagine one without strength to go outdoors. I imagine another watching the electrical box outside her studio window. I see one, looking from great windows into boreal forest, waiting for it to be consumed in white. Another, in a suburb with a long commute, calculates the accumulation in extra time while another—older, earned—cashes it in for sleep and books.

The epiphany was that we each have our confrontations.

Damp patch

Now there are clear mornings. When I pull back the drapes from the corner, the window that opens reveals a lightness in the sky that we never see. There is no pink as the sun rises. No orange, no heat. The ink of the blue only thins on the horizon. Like the runoff from that indigo pot.

I thought of it yesterday when I was talking to her about doing things you aren’t sure you should do; like going to live in other places for a while, with other people, in the hopes that new things can be made. Of course you can make things in the place where you are but there are moments when invitations can be answered for journeys to be taken. She said that the house she was given was unbearably cold—a confrontation in a cold January—being cold made her tense, she said. She wrapped my shawl around her waist; she wore one pair of pants atop another. The situation I dreaded before arriving there was that I could not sleep. They provided me a private room in the shared apartment across the hall from the shared bath. It was comfortable and clean and directly above the town tavern that stayed open until the early morning. I thought about leaving but that was before walking up hill, before breakfast with strangers and before the runoff from that dye pot. 

I just found a damp patch in the corner of our bedroom. It’s right near the floor, where the east wall meets the south. It isn’t a leak; it’s developing from within. The cold that comes with this new sky has altered the possibilities in the interior and there is even a bit of mildew growing. Last year the conditions just weren’t right, I guess.

Boxes

She wants to build a series of boxes.

First, a group of three: they must all be identical, rigid and clean. They will sit on the floor in front of the performers and they will be painted soft pink.

Next, a single box. It should be shallower. It should also be rigid and clean. It will hold rubber gloves and cleaning cloths and should, therefore, be painted that particular yellow.

The last box is harder to imagine. She wants to attach it to a microphone stand. It will hold some equipment to modify her voice.

I need these boxes to complete my thesis, she says. I need these boxes to make sure it is finished.

Some foreground

I see a shadow. 

The edges are fuzzy and not sharp. I looked again right now and it faded from view.

I breathed. It came back. 

When I make colour, I want it to be flat. I don’t like delineation. I want it to be even and subdued. Heather said I wanted it grey. I said I preferred gray to grey. Not somber. Modest.

This isn’t modest but mute.

Just now I saw a shadow. The contrast is low, there is a blanket on my knees and the door shouldn’t really be open. But finally, I saw a shadow; some foreground in the depth of field, some action of the tongue.

Alert. Active.

The cutting wilted on the window sill.

I moved it to the desk I never work on. It lives there now with a small drawing table, my good camera, my big hard drive, two 3kg dumbbells and my sewing machine with the cord wrapped around the peddle. It tucks perfected under the arm.

The leaves are glossy now. Alert. Active.

I’ll dust the rest.

I see rust: Tomma Abts in Cologne

Don’t calculate it; tell it like it is.

They didn’t let me down.

I’m 46 now and being disappointed is familiar territory. This isn’t a sob story. Life is not terrible. Things are just other than I imagined. Everywhere. In everything. The bolts in the trim on the decking that I thought were perfectly maintained are coming loose. I see rust. I’ll need to have someone look at that. The sunny terrace is burning up in early June. The plants described as needing full sun would prefer that sun without so much heat. The anise that thrived a month ago is crispy. A lower frond, now orange, snapped off with the gentlest touch. It isn’t just at home where my powers of observation are heightened, where I will admit to being too sensitive, where every change in the equilibrium creates shockwaves. It happened also when I walked out of the train station and the cathedral was right there, like a sonic boom. I expected to find it, to discover it, but there it was immediately: the accumulation of a million choices, for better or for worse. I knew from reading about the older paintings that they were also an accumulations of choices. Jan Verwoert called it “choosing to choose” (1) and this made an enormous impression on me when I read it because choosing to choose seems to me an excellent mandate for any made thing, like a painting or a cathedral, or a day for that matter. At the end of each, or rather an end—because choosing to choose could result in any manner of endings—what we are left with is a reckoning. A reckoning which, if it is honest, reveals something about the agency involved in getting there. Standing in front of seven paintings by Tomma Abts, this is what didn’t let me down.

And can I say how afraid I was to be let down? I had made the paintings and the practice of Tomma Abts into a lodestar of sorts. Look at this woman: making beautifully-crafted, intelligent, modestly sized paintings at a humane pace and hanging them up on a wall in a nice gallery, and not even very often at that. She is not sharing process updates. She is not sharing views of her studio or what she eats for lunch. Frankly, I don’t know anything about the way Tomma Abts goes to her studio or makes her paintings except for what the paintings permit me to discover and this, if you have the good fortune to stand in front of them, is a surprising amount. The seven paintings gathered together for this particular exhibition present structurally in three small groups: the first group are two paintings like the ones Jan Verwoert wrote about in Choosing to Choose. They are modestly-sized (48 x 38 centimetres), on rectangular stretchers wrapped with canvas and set on the portrait orientation. The titles are names; a familiar beginning. The second group are not regular stretchers. These stretchers already have a form. Here, Tomma has made the first of two other choices about beginning. She has inserted roundness into the rectilinearity of two frames and another is compressed and has opposing corners removed. It feels like a parallelogram but it isn’t. The titles are still names; a slightly different beginning. Abts makes the second of her two other choices in beginning with the third group containing two paintings. One is delicately shaped—its upper right corner has been planed off at a straight angle—and the second is large but not very large (86.5 x 63.5 centimetres). These two paintings in the third structural group aren’t stretched with canvas but what the gallery records as sailcloth. It is thin but strong. Humble in appearance but technical in its performance. Light moves over it and also into it. These sailcloth paintings are a new beginning; they are not paintings in the way that I have seen Tomma Abts make paintings.

Tomma Abts
Ayelt, 2022
Acrylic and oil on canvas
48 x 38 cm

Ayelt (2022) is closest to the paintings that I know, the paintings I didn’t want to be disappointed by. The surface of this painting—its surprising revelation of form, dimension and colour—I can’t think of a better word for it than mystical. It is earthly effort amounting to transcendence and looking at it intently for a prolonged period was like being pierced through the heart, like Teresa in ecstasy. The line which is the subject of this painting unfolds with such a glorious lilt that one cannot fathom having just arrived here. There must have been a plan; there must have been a strategy; there must have been tape! But this is not how Tomma Abts makes a painting. We must accept it in faith: this all came about in the making of the painting (2). We have arrived here with Abts without knowing from the beginning that we would. This is even the case with the shaped canvases and the two paintings whose corners hold circular forms. This beginning decision seems to dictate the foregone conclusion that a circle will be present in the composition. At first I thought this a remarkable exception but now I think it is less so. Geometry is present in any beginning, like the sun or moon on the horizon.

Tomma Abts
VI, 2022
Oil on canvas
86.3 x 63.5 cm

Tomma Abts
VII, 2022
Soluble wax crayon on cotton and sailcloth
86.5 x 63.5 cm

One of the circle canvases, VI, shares its nomenclature with a painting on sailcloth (VII, 2022). This is curious. The change in title practice from name to number and these two particular paintings in numerical sequence is the happening in this assembly of seven paintings. They made me think, suddenly, about the books and diagrams my father used while taking sailing lessons when I was very young. He had several text books and also a binder of worksheets to solve equations. I can recall charts of currents and wind, explanations of sail sizes and functions and many drawings of knots whose competent constructions could hold enormous swaths of sail taunt. My father’s books also contained an explanation of tacking and jibing, the way the bow or stern of a sailboat could be manoeuvred into the wind. It was bizarre to me then that a boat had to head in the opposite direction of a destination in order to arrive there but this doesn’t seem so strange to me now. Excess effort, tangents, detours, disruption and residue is the material of middle adult life.

Let me explain this further. Ayelt’s pristine execution had me in raptures. It is a masterful painting and (satisfyingly) what I expected but VII is the painting that has stayed with me all of these weeks. In VII, Abts used soluble wax-crayon on sailcloth in place of paint. In looking and now looking again, I imagine her approaching the surface in the way that she approaches every other beginning. She chooses to make a mark but, significantly, this wax crayon mark dissolves. It dissolves into the whiteness of the sailcloth like incense ash in a cathedral or rust on the bolts of my decking in the rain. It softens and dissipates like the parched anise fronds between my fingers. In all of the paintings I have known by Tomma Abts, I have not seen her marks fall apart. They always hold fast like a good tack or jibe but in VII, they melt into the current and drift off course. The monochrome palette of VI with its hard line and radials seems to prepare us for it. It’s wound so tight that VII is an honest release. An honest reckoning.

Don’t calculate it; tell it like it is.

Expectations are tricky. They grow from an accumulation of choices, like a painting or a cathedral, or a day for that matter. They make us think that what we can imagine is all that can satisfy us. Expectations met are satisfying but not sustaining. Arriving somewhere you want to go is nice. Arriving somewhere you didn’t expect to be is better.

Tomma Abts was presented at Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 21 April 2023 - 24 June 2023.
All images via Galerie Buchholz, Cologne.

(1) “Choosing to choose” is the subject of Jan Verwoert’s essay “Choosing to Choose: On the Paintings of Tomma Abts” included in the collection Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (2010).
(2) Jan Verwoert, “Choosing to Choose: On the Paintings of Tomma Abts” in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, ed. Vanessa Ohlraun (Berlin: Piet Zwart Institute and Sternberg Press, 2010), 240-241.