Art Journal
Moira Roth, Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds, Part 3 Spaces and Histories I, England, March 1999 A Meeting, London, March 14, 1999
I am staying, as I always do when in London, with Rose Hacker, an English-born, East European Jew, an ardent socialist and feminist, now ninety-three years old, whom I have known since I was age seven, when she and my mother began their close friendship in World War II England.This afternoon at Rose’s apartment, we are visited by Alice Sommer, a small sturdy woman of ninety-five who swims each day and lives near Rose. A Czech Jew, she kept herself and her son alive by playing the piano for two years to camp visitors in Theresienstadt in northwestern Czechoslovakia.
Theresienstadt, a ghetto created by the Nazis in World War II to camouflage their extermination of Jews, was a ghastly "showcase"—with its orchestras, operas, theater, cabaret, and youth hostels—displayed, for example, to a Red Cross inspection committee in 1944 to prove the benign intents of the Germans.
Now, at ninety-five, Alice Sommer walks regularly across Hampstead Heath to visit friends, among them Rose, and plays the piano for them out of her repertoire of some ninety pieces.
During tea that day, we talk of Alice’s literary and musical childhood in Prague. Aged twenty when Franz Kafka had died, she had know him in her teens (her brother-in-law was one of Max Brodt’s closest friends, in turn one of Kafka’s). She remembers Kafka clearly—his overriding sense of guilt and impending disaster, and yet his humor too.
She remembers his friends collapsing with laughter when he read from his texts.
Alice Sommer’s history has taken her from Kafka, to Theresienstadt, to a life in Israel for over thirty years, to London, where she now lives.
The three of us go back and forth between the past, the present—and the ominous future.
There is increasingly ghastly talk in the newspapers, radio, and on television of the "ethnic cleansing" campaign in Kosovo.
Fairy Tales and Factories, Sedbergh, Cumbria, March 19-21, 1999
On the morning I leave London for Sedbergh, I talk with Alberto Manguel, whom I have arranged to meet in Euston railway station, about his research on the Holocaust Monument in Berlin—he is to write an article for a German publication on this—and about the nature of monuments generally. My head is spinning with this conversation as I travel north by train, finally arriving sixty miles south of the Scottish border in Sedbergh, a small town near the Lake District with a single narrow main street.
So many of the local people I talk to here were born in either Sedbergh or the nearby town of Kendall. "I was brought up on a farm, left for college in Durham, and taught briefly in Liverpool, but came back because Sedbergh is the sort of place you feel you belong to if you’re born here."
Only as a child had I been up north, and then merely on occasional holidays. I am struck now as I visit Cumbria by the sense of a divided England, North and South. As I grapple increasingly these days with my mixed identity of American and English, while brooding over the complexities of globalization, I am wryly interested to note that to most people in Sedbergh I seem merely Southern (a term I usually associate with Tennessee and Alabama), and that they are possessed by a strong Northern identity—combined with a beleaguered sense of Southern (London) power.
The long room on the second floor of Sedbergh’s old Farfield Mill (opened in 1837, and closed in 1996) is like a rural artist’s loft with its sloping low ceiling, small skylights, and wooden beams. One can hear the sounds of the nearby stream (which once sustained the mill wheels), a chain saw, and birds. To reach here I walk along a country road; on either side are wild daffodils, stone fences, and fields with black-faced sheep and sturdy horses under a cloudy sky; finally a pot-holed dirt road leads to the mill buildings. On the first floor are looms and machines. The whole mood is romantic, and I think of English poetry, especially Wordsworth’s Prelude, as well as the harsh history of the Industrial Revolution.
On Saturday morning I browse in Sedbergh’s secondhand bookstores, buying a late nineteenth-century edition of Alice through the Looking Glass and a pile of small shabby paperbacks of the Sunday Times’s "Diary of a War" ("Sunday, September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France are at war with Germany") —and a little later visit a twelfth-century church, listening to the sounds of the choir blend with the church bells. There I purchase Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, and while still in the church read the opening lines of this seventeenth-century text: "Walking through the wilderness of this world . . ."
Finally I search through local historical archives.
There is a 1900 photograph of Farfield Mill workers, including their names, in an issue of The Sedbergh Historian.
George Fox preaches in Sedbergh in 1652, setting off the English Quaker movement; and just outside the town is the second oldest Quaker meeting house in the country.
I find, too, references to the slave trade and the British Empire, which created so much of the early local wealth. Local handknitters make money producing coarse wool hats, called bump-caps, which were sold for use by slaves in the colonies.
In 1808 William Findlay of Thorns Hall, Sedbergh, age forty-three, who had made his fortune in the West Indies, dies, leaving an annuity to "Black Jenny," age twenty, and their daughter, Maria. The daughter of Black Jenny and William Findlay appears again in an 1847 document as the wife of George Salthouse.
(In The Guardian, March 15, there is an article on Bristol. A bridge, part of the rebuilding of the city’s harborside, has been named after Pero, a slave (and later in England, a "personal servant") on the Caribbean sugar plantation of the leading eighteenth-century Bristol merchant, John Pinney. This is cited as an example of the "growing public acknowledgment of the city’s role in the grim trade. . . . ‘We have a large number of streets, buildings, and statues in Bristol dedicated to people who benefited from the slave trade and we felt there was a need to start redressing the balance,’ announces Paul Smith."
Bristol is the city in which I spent my childhood vacations with my father. Its central role in the British slave trade was totally unknown to me at that time.)
The scent, mildly fragrant, comes and goes as I slowly move along the edge of the seventy-foot-narrow "mantle" (the last portion and hood, lined with dried white rose petals, is on a raised mound to one end of the room). Stretched out on the soft, worn, white wooden floor, almost the length of the space, Laura Vickerson’s Fairy Tales and Factories looks like a red river with its wave-like arrangements of hundreds of thousands of rose petals.
Also coming and going are sounds on concealed speakers of muted conversations, laughter and occasional singing, recorded while Vickerson’s piece was being made. (In January the artist shipped the rose petals from Canada to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where young art students dried them and began the work of pinning each rose petal individually onto the organdy base; the work was finished in Sedbergh by older local women.)
For the two days that Fairy Tales and Factories is displayed in the Farfield Mill (later this month it will be shown in a Manchester art gallery), many people, visit it, fifteen at a time, slowly circulating, lingering, and often talking among themselves or asking questions of the artist—their voices mixing with the recorded ones. This intimate ambiance allows for many exchanges and speculations about the work’s meaning(s): "it’s a rose carpet . . . a tapestry . . . about women’s work . . . about the fragility of the factory system . . . like a giant snake skin unraveling . . . it makes me think of fairy stories, of Little Red Riding Hood . . . of royal weddings . . . of the velvety Ena Harkness roses in my garden . . . of impermanence and memory."
And why have I, since I first heard of the piece, been so attracted to it? Aside from the obvious sensual and collaborative aspects, its easy availability to multiple rich readings and historical and mythic resonances fascinates me. It also offers at the moment a sense of momentary respite from this difficult world—not exactly an escapist retreat, but rather a space from which I can look out, not only savoring beauty, but thinking about history, mine as well as the country’s.
Rose Hacker’s Apartment, Highgate, London, March 23-25, 1999
This space is so familiar to me. Whenever I come to London, I sleep in the study, a room of surprises as each time I visit, I come upon new books among its crowded shelves. For years I have sat here reading first or early editions of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie . . . This time I look at books from my childhood, including a 1930s edition of Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by a woman artist.
It is here staying with Rose Hacker that I witness the outbreak of war in Europe.
As we watch the television news and read the newspapers, Rose talks of her memories (in her 1996 autobiography, which I edited, she wrote "The 1914-18 war clouded family life, irreversibly dividing life into pre- and postwar periods. I remember Zeppelins flying over the house. The pattern was repeated in 1939-45 when I was caring for my own children.") and I recall my childhood experience, hiding in my mother’s garden air raid shelter during the bombing of London, and listening to talk of German invasion of England.
March 23, 1999
"NATO will be ‘severe and swift.’" (The Guardian). Inside the front page are the first of the many lists and diagrams we are to see in the next few days on television and in print: a list of the fourteen NATO countries who have pledged "aircraft for military use," and a map showing the locations of Pristina, Belgrade, the Gloucestershire-based B-52 U.S. bombers and the Adriatic Sea-based U.S. Sixth Fleet.
March 24, 1999
"War looms as Serbs defy NATO: Europe braces for biggest conflict since 1945 after Blair and Clinton justify action. . . . No plans for ground war. " (The Guardian)
March 25, 1999
"L’OTAN [NATO] dŽclare la guerre ‡ la Serbia." (Le Monde)
"Europe goes back to war." (The Times)
"War in Europe . . . The onslaught begins . . . massive air and missile strikes unleashed across a defiant Yugoslavia . . . Luftwaffe [the German air force] in combat for first time since World War II." (The Guardian). An article inside analyzes the early visual and verbal media representations of the war.
"A smiling US airman ‘relaxing’ after his B-52 raid in Serbia. Behind him is another flier, a black man, looking rather grave. The message of the picture: a committed multicultural force is doing its duty with self-assurance and seriousness. Another picture, like a still from a Hollywood movie, showed members of the 2nd Air Expeditionary Group facing reporters after their return to RAF Fairford. Every man is adopting the ‘at ease’ position, legs apart, hands clasped behind their backs. This portrait of tough, uniformed men signifying discipline and determination didn’t so much suggest that the West was going to win, but that it has already won."
The author of "Serbs face defeat in media war" offers a "lexicon of war" with examples: "degrading," euphemism for damage of a military target short of total destruction; and "collateral damage," another euphemism, for civilian casualties.
All this is far away from the literary niceties of Lewis Carroll’s wood of "lost" language, which I wrote about in my journal only two weeks ago.
Jane and Louise Wilson’s Gamma, Lisson Gallery, March 26, 1999
I wake up thinking of spaces and rooms, having dreamed for several days about war.
In the late afternoon I go to the Lisson Gallery, London, to see the work of Jane and Louise Wilson. The press release describes Gamma as:
"the Wilson twins’ new project based on their experiences in Greenham Common, an American military base in England which housed cruise missiles during the Cold War. The site became an important and generally well known point of focus for the women’s peace movement as well as the C.N.D. protest. Greenham Common was abandoned after the end of Cold War, however, it remains part of the INF treaty until 2001 which allows for Russian military inspection at any time."
In the gallery space, I am surrounded by four-screen video projections. A shrouded figure wearing a gas mask walks up an outside ramp to the sound of heavy breathing. A woman in uniform. Another woman walks across a floor. But for the most part this world is uninhabited, consisting of corridors, lifts, large sprawling spaces and confining ones, with floodlights, signs—"command center," "no alone zone," and "decontamination chamber"—and guides such as arrows, bells and other warning sounds.
Walking out together to the street, Irit Rogoff turns to me to comment: "It’s amazing that a place that had sutured onto itself the rage of a decade could absolve itself through emptiness."
April 2, 1999
On this day when I reread the texts of these first three parts of "Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds" (which has been a central focus, and a curiously stabilizing presence, in my life since December), I am struck by my interest in memory—and concern with its counterpart, the act of forgetting—be it through reading Proust, Joyce, Borges, Lessing, and Griffin, or attempting myself through writing to remember what is happening, or has happened—in Africa, Iraq, Yugoslavia, England, and this country. To remember the lives and deaths of Amadou Diallo, Mohammad Mokharti, and Robert Desnos, and of the huge numbers of people who have died in the AIDS epidemic, who died in Cambodia and Iraq, and now in Europe.
That I have written here about artworks that relate to memory and history—Yong Soon Min’s Defining Moments, the work of Yolanda Lopez, Ellen Zweig, and SuChen Hung, Claudia Bernardi, Laura Vickerson, and Jane and Louise Wilson.
