A TRANSPECTIVE CHANA DUBINSKI

A TRANSPECTIVE
H OW
THINGS USED TO BE
N OW
CHANA DUBINSKI
ACR
SS
AND
THR
UGH
TIME
A meeting place of fluid states and core formations
Through a series of chance actions, deliberately instigated, I have been living
for most of this year in Newark, a town in the Midlands that I had never heard of
previously. The town’s original meaning was New Work and I have regarded it
as a new arc, a mid land, a trajectory in which to place myself and allow the year
to map itself, relinquishing myself from known pathways. Despite, or probably
because of, voyaging into much unknown territory, as well as initiating potential
collaborative ideas with local people, I came to dwell in a core place in myself. I
began inhabiting the primal formations in my childhood and adolescence that I
see as the fundament of my art practice. I sensed my young self recognising me.
An ongoing conversation ensued in Riverside Cottage, back and forth between
these glimpses and their manifestations. All the works in A Transpective have
arisen from these places. More than ever I have been aware of the turbulent
space one must cross to reach oneself, let alone to truly contact another human
being.
Chana Dubinski
November 2012
UNWOUND
Many of the multi-media artworks in this show are inspired by Chana Dubinski’s
Jewish/African childhood. Occupying the rooms of Chana’s Newark house,
Riverside Cottage, these pieces, become a part of the building –in kitchen
cupboards, on bathroom shelves, in recesses, as parts of windows and the views
beyond, embedded into walls and as cushions on beds as well as on chairs.
They point to a mind-set where the past and the present are simultaneously
present.
The first piece Chana created, on the top floor studio in the cottage, came
initially from her idea of ‘layering the interior of the cottage on top of itself
over the year.’ This she hoped to make a collaborative project with local
photographers but it became the trigger for A Transpective. She photographed
an old oil painting of a woman that she had bought locally, when the seller said
it resembled her. She placed this photo of the painting back in situ in front of
the painting, mounted on the cupboard edge. It shows the oil painting and the
cupboard on which it stands, as it was, with white sunlight blazing on the wall.
Like the film Peeping Tom, the shadow of photographer and camera appears at
the bottom of Chana’s image.
Here we find ourselves in the land of outlines and reversals, the world not-aswe-know-it, the past within the present, the hard skeletal inside the softness of
life. This first work April Evening Light connected directly to a visualisation from
her house in Livingstone, Zambia.
“….from inside the house I heard again my brother practising the piano.
A phrase or two of ‘The Moonlight Sonata’ played over and over like a
meditation, bookending time. Once as I lay drawing on the carpet in our
lounge, listening to these repetitions, my father got up from his armchair and
I saw the indentations of his body in the cushions. The indentations and the
music entwined. I saw the armchair as a continuum of varied indentations
of my father’s body, of changing marks and shadows, a backwards and
forwards sonata.”
This led directly to the second work she made in the cottage Continuum using
her two armchairs, side by side. Thus, A Transpective began to spread and
inhabit Riverside Cottage.
She watched, over a few months, the sunlight pass across her canvas on the
easel, as it continually made a different ‘painting.’ Since her first paintings,
as a child, she had always wanted to find a way to ‘capture’ the ephemeral.
She finally photographed this canvas on her easel during an August Morning
Sunshine.
Chana said: “I think certain ways of looking at the world are seared into us as
children. They are the hot spots from which we create our own universe.”
Born in 1950 and brought up in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia),
close to The Victoria Falls, Chana was aware of the hidden face of bigotry, in
what was an apartheid system in all but name. Her work Benchmarks reflects
this particular ‘hot spot”:
As a young child, I was called ‘a white kaffir,’ a very offensive racist term, by
some of the girls in my convent school. I was told I could not sit on the bench
in the garden. These words, ‘white kaffir,’ were the words that pinpointed the
complex layers of prejudice that, for me, as a child, embodied my bewilderment
at the toxic society we inhabited. It gave me some pride that I straddled
boundaries, but also disquiet, bewilderment and loneliness. I was aware of the
‘Whites Only’ benches in South Africa and the ‘Aryan Only’ benches in Germany
of the thirties. I felt suspended between these poles: victim and perpetrator,
both of which were unchosen, unwanted, abhorrent.
But in the ‘sanitary lane’ on the other side of Livingstone, Chana learned
about life’s joys, playing Isola – a bead game with holes in the ground with the
African women. They combed her hair and gave her a very different nickname,
‘Scorchiana’, meaning ‘Dreamer’.
Life here in the sanitary lane was physical, full of touch, warmth, cooking,
eating, sharing, smells and sounds.
I had seen, since I was small, the women engaged in the ritual of scarification
with their allegiances to tribes, to ancient traditions, to magical trysts. I
accepted what they did as they cut deep into another’s skin and rubbed ash from
the fire into the wounds. These later formed the distinctive black raised scars.
I had heard so many stories here; tribal stories, intimate stories, wild stories,
stories that allowed me, as a child, to feel that all my fantasies were valid and
intrinsically part of the world. My inner life had free rein and permission.
Witnessing these traditional rites put her in touch with the ambiguities of life. At
a stroke, Chana was both outside and in: different, separate AND at the heart
of being.
Chana’s artwork reflects these polarities, recognizing the deep connections
between light and dark and the strange fascination with what she describes as:
“…the great attraction of repulsion in which children often indulge.”
This can be seen in several of her artworks such as the cushion piece Threshold:
A putse fly laid its eggs under my skin and consequently maggots hatched out
in a huge abscess-like wound. As the doctor tweezered them out, I felt like I was
simultaneously giving birth and decomposing.
It is also part of the sensibility of Skin on Skin and Deep Impressions. She was
fascinated with the Jewish ritual object ‘Tefillin.’ These were prayer scrolls inside
small boxes attached to leather straps which were wrapped around the arms
and placed on the head, symbolising the binding of mind, heart and deed.
These straps left marks on the skin after praying. Chana spoke of the lack of
respect shown to African ritual objects by Westerners. She saw ceremonial
totems all serving the same purpose.
These indentations are parallelled in another work Deep Impressions, in which
Chana placed, next to each other, a relief of the concrete washstand from her
childhood garden and the marks it left on her legs after sitting on it:
When I stood up my skin was indented as an opposite three- dimensional
‘mirror’ to the washstand. I liked this sense of somehow physically reflecting
the world.
Here also, we find the artist, the voyeur, testing the body in space, stretching
the limits of perception such as by “…pulling my skin tightly from my eye
sockets and my mouth.” This work Skinless ,relates to the work Membranes in
which she creates the ‘skolls,’ skeletal dolls of her childhood, with their skulls
and skeletons showing through.
“When I first found images of the holocaust in
my parents cupboard, they tore through me.
I was very frightened. I would play with my
dolls and see skulls beneath those sweet faces.”
Similarly, in The Quick, the raw exposed flesh in Chaim Soutine’s carcass
paintings, which Chana found engrossing, coalesce with her terror of the everpresent atomic threat and the horrific wounds inflicted on humanity.
The first painting that startled her was Magritte’s Rape and her four groin-smear
paintings Underbelly recall a clandestine experiment in which she mixed up too
much paint for a painting she was doing and scooping it up to smear over her
groin, she made prints which she screwed up on hearing someone ‘s footsteps.
Chana’s art dwells in the space where as a child she felt, “…the instantaneous
disappearance of everything as soon as it exists,” as well as: “…this sense of
somehow physically reflecting the world.”
These thoughts are manifested in several works incuding Hands. Chana told me
“I remember jumping off a diving board once and everything disappearing –
as if, by being so aware of the past and the present, one was catching up with
oneself.” In this work the jump into the pool is caught and the motion stilled
whilst simultaneously the jump disappears as it drips into the wall along with
the many hands: the boy looking at his, the mother with her hand on her baby,
the hand in the air and the young girl with her hands on her stomach.
Her relationship to physical laws and her reflection of them are centrally present
in Equilibrium, with its fine balancing fulchrum point, Timeframes, with six
identical picture frames going through one process so that they completely
diverge from their initial identity and Displacement with the crystal balls adding
another kind of future dimension, another forecast.
We spoke about this word “displacement.” Chana spoke of some writing she
did in school, about Virginia Woolf having a daughter and of Virginia’s complex
relationship to this child who looked strongly like her husband’s, Leonard’s,
Jewish family.
I often pictured this daughter, whom I called Sarah, growing up with Virginia
and Leonard, symbolising all that was sacred and precious about life as well as
all that was haunting, layered, impenetrable, unsettling and compromising. It
seemed to contain some of my own tangled displacements.
In Messages, where Chana is whispering into her own ‘third ear,’ we spoke
about this ear as the equivalent of the third eye, providing perception beyond
ordinary hearing, ‘talking to oneself’; the transmitter and the receiver. Possibly
this links Chana to her mother in the triptych Hollow, placing a lucky bean in the
hollow of her neck, a message into her body.
These dualities of flesh and consciousness, of the ephemeral and eternal, are
caught in another of the triptych canvases of Hollow where Chana embroiders:
I read about the cells in our bodies continuously dying and also DNA linking us
to ancestral flesh. The clash of the fleeting and enduring within us.
Time is yet again exposed as the conjuror in the third canvas of Hollow:
The realization that there would be a last time I kissed my mother’s neck. A
splinter of the future that made time a plateau.
The work Astral Projection is another that changes our everyday perspective,
looking across, through and between time.
I read the Lobsang Rampa book ‘You Forever,’ which was about astral
projection and I practised his suggested exercises and processes. I sensed the
separation of consciousness and body, feeling like I had zoom lenses in my eyes
seeing my body outside myself, both close up and distant.
Chana’s paintings of the nearby Victoria Falls, The Smoke that Thunders, capture
the dynamism of the cascading water and also recall intense experiences there:
… in the rainy season, when there is a clear sky and full moon, a lunar rainbow,
or moonbow, is created above the cascades. Prisms of colours are suspended
in the mist beneath a dark sky, their quiet ethereality contrasting strongly
with the thundering sound of millions of litres of water crashing down into
the gorges below. People from the town would gather at this time and stand
together wonder-struck, feeling to me like one sacred entranced body.
She was aware that despite the astonishing beauty all around, there was a
complex malignant aspect of the town.
She was part of a small Jewish community, mostly the survivors and displaced
people from the genocide in central and Eastern Europe, …
Tellingly she writes:
This knowledge made the world unsafe and any pretence of civilization utterly
hypocritical. In some perverse way it liberated me because I felt I had to make
my own rules in this world I mistrusted.
Her works Starry Day and Starry Night as well as My Stars and Stripes capture
her young self’s attempts to somehow confront this. She made many versions in
different media of My Stars and Stripes when applying to Cape Town University
in 1968. The yellow star that Jewish people were forced to wear and the striped
concentration camp uniform, responded to Jasper John’s Flag living in the
same ambiguous territory : “Is this a flag or a painting?” …..”Is this a trauma or
a painting?” Possibly the latter could have been thought often by Van Gogh.
Chana’s work Constant, the same title as the artist Eva Hesse’s work that Chana
remade, makes it clear how we feed into each other; moving and inhabiting
each other by and with our own recognitions.
When I heard that Eva Hesse had a brain tumour, I made copies of her works
moving my hands with her mind.
During all this time she shared much with her friend Jenya:
We had known each other since birth and our catch phrase, half ironic, half
earnest, was “aaah sweet mystery of life.”
The images in this show recreate those youthful mysteries, intimate explorations
and rites of passage, seen from inside, within the body of the house.
I loved spinning fast, singing out loudly, so that my voice made a ‘moiré’
pattern and I felt like I was levitating. I thought if I spun back suddenly I could
meet myself coming back. I would have ‘Unwound’.
This essay was written after a long conversation whilst looking at the work in
Riverside Cottage by the author, Leslie Tate and Chana Dubinski.
Chana met Leslie Tate when he gave a presentation to the Fosseway Writers
Group. That evening they announced the national writing competition the
Mabel Barber Memorial Award on the subject of My Home Town. The writing
in grey italics is from Chana Dubinski’s essay Old Drift, the winner of this
competition.
STAINS
On a rainy night, in the empty Riverside Cottage, (apart from a mattress and
bedding,) the first piece of paper I pinned up was the flyleaf of Imre Kertz’s
Liquidation, a novel probing the consciousness of contemporary Eastern
Europe. On it was written:
“Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating
on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” Beckett, Malloy
A few days later I saw this graffiti in nearby Paxton Court:
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”
“Words are all we have.”
Beside the quotes was sprayed a positive and negative image of Samuel
Beckett.
Many thanks to the unknown graffiti artist who has become
Transpective. I pause often in Paxton Court.
part of A
FUGITIVE PIECES
I was passing through Newark on my way west. I had to change buses and
had some time. I stopped to buy a baked potato in the market square, when
a charm I was carrying in my wallet fell into the gutter. A friend had given it to
me from his late mother, Anna Miller. It was meant to be kept close during my
journeying. This charm spelt the Hebrew word chai, meaning ‘living.’ At first,
anxious to recover it and asking for assistance, I stayed overnight to see if I
could have the grating opened the next day; but to no avail. I accepted the
symbolism of the charm destining me to stay here, close to it. Looking up from
where I dropped the charm I saw a sign saying “Here were published Lord
Byron’s first poems ‘Fugitive Pieces’ 1806 ‘Hours of idleness’ 1807.” He was 18
when he had them published and at this age he walked across this square to
these printers. There have been various mystical numerological speculations
about the fact that, according to the system of gematria, the letters of chai add
up to 18. For this reason, 18 is a spiritual number in Judaism. I often walked
across the square sensing a Kabbalistic humming from the earth underneath,
the chai charm as an electro-magnetic wave from below. I super-glued another
chai charm in the gutter, exactly at the spot where I had dropped the first one.
When I photographed this, I noticed many small pebbles all around and thought
of Jewish graves on which small stones are placed. The main explanation for
placing stones on the grave is to insure that souls remain where they belong.
The “barrier” on the grave prevents the kind of haunting that formed such an
important part of East European Jewish lore.
PANGS and ARMATURES
I often walked through Newark cemetery and inspected the Polish war graves.
I thought about a different kind of Polish war grave. I contacted Newark
council about a plaque for a woman with my name who had died in Treblinka
in November 1942. I arranged for the cemetery gardeners to plant a Rowan
tree for me, by the Polish war graves. In much folklore the Rowan is seen as
a tree of divine inspiration and seership, said to increase our psychic abilities
and connections and to facilitate visions and insights. The plaque was placed
in front of the tree at 2.45pm on 28th November, 2012, the exact moment of
the full moon.
THANKS
to the many local services who contributed to A Transpective including:
E Gill & Sons (Memorials) Ltd
Art on Glass
Kelly Summers photography/styling
printing.com
Northgate Business Centre Hypnotherapy
Hills Art Materials
Taurus Tattoo parlour
Newark Council
Newark Cemetery
East Midlands Region Embroiderers’ Guild.
County Signs
Wood and Toys
Julie Northage dressmaker
Newark car boot sales
Through the Lens Photography
Also for the many exchanges with people particularly in the University of Third
Age Philosophy, Creative Writing, Photography and Art Appreciation groups,
the Fosseway Writers, the Ramblers, Aqua Aerobics, Hatha Yoga, Pelham
Community Centre, Barnbygate Strollers, Akshobya Buddhist meditation,
Holocaust centre, Purelands Meditation Centre and Japanese Garden, Millgate
Museum, Palace Theatre, Barnbygate Methodist Church, Town Hall Museum
and Art gallery.
Plus, further afield, the communities, gatherings and people on benches with
whom I’ve shared experiences.
Finally to the Thinker in Residence Award
BERTHING
THE VOYAGE
The works in A Transpective:
How things used to be now
Timeframes, 1960
Constant, 1969
Smoke that thunders, 1968
Equilibrium, 1961
Hands, 1957
Messages, 1966
Astral Projection, 1966
Membranes, 1958
Benchmarks, 1957
My Stars and Stripes, 1967
Underbelly, 1967
Hollow,1954-61
Threshold, 1958
Displacement, 1963
Starry Day, 1959
Starry Night, 1955
Continuum, 1962
Morning August Sunshine, 1964
Unwound, 1959
Deep impressions, 1959
Skin on Skin, 1959
Skinless, 1960
The Quick,
April Evening Light
Fugitive Pieces
Pangs and Armatures
Stains
All works berthed in 2012.
WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF MEMORY?
Dark rooms full of faces? Tall buildings and bus stops? Wide open spaces?
Mist, smearing the edges? A maze to lose yourself in?
Here are dreams, memories in the shape of cushions. Chana writes her story on
cushions, not words spoken in the air but sewn into the substance. You sit on a
cushion for comfort, it supports your back so you can’t actually read the words.
But they don’t go away. The cushion holds them up. Some of the cushions
have faces on them, cheeks to lay your cheeks against , close your eyes and
dream.
Then the dolls. How come dolls can be so sinister? Remember the horrors in
Barbarella?
Teddy Bears are never sinister. But they are not pretending to be real. Dolls are
neither entirely one thing nor the other. They have the softness of babies and
their powerful presence, but they are all surface and no structure. Their whole
existence is to be touched, to hold and be held, to fill the gap when unreliable
parents go away. At the same time, every child knows that the doll can really
do nothing. The idea that we might be wrong, that they might actually do
things for themselves, beyond our control, in the middle of the night perhaps that’s scary.
What, for that matter, is scary about skeletons? Feel it, go on, feel your head
and there’s your skull. You can’t do without it. There was a science fiction story
where people had their bones sucked out of them until all that was left was the
flesh. That was worse than skeletons. A skeleton is supposed to have the soft
stuff round it. When there is no more soft stuff, when it has gone, that’s what
bothers us.
Chana has gone one step further. The inside of a doll – an ordinary doll - is
either empty space or else some nameless stuffing. But these are like us, there
are bones inside the plastic. Bones are not meant to be seen or touched. They
offer no comfort. These babies have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil. They know too much.
Dolls, too, are supposed to be invulnerable. They only suffer when convenient,
when needed for hospital games. Otherwise they can be thrown or dropped
and they don’t really mind. But some of these tender creatures have really
been injured – they were not invulnerable after all. That’s a worry.
Where does that leave me?
Tom Chamberlain
Group leader U3A Philosophy
Written in response to a few of the works in A Transpective
POSTSCRIPT
My grandfather, a peripatetic gold prospector in Southern Africa, had found
four abandoned lionesses that he brought up and they accompanied the family
on their travels. It would seem a complete fantasy were it not for the sepia
photos of the lionesses lying beside him and their little black dog.
A Transpective IS FOR:
Chana Dubinski 1894-1942
Eva Hesse, artist, 1936-70
Charlotte Solomon, artist 1917-1943
Jenya Iljon 1950Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s daughter, Sarah 1913-
ISBN?
Photography © Chana Dubinski & Through the Lens Photography
www.through-the-lens.co.uk/