Diligence in the Snow

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

I sit on my island, in winter, and the antigen test is negative. 

Winter in Ireland rarely means snow, but always wind and rain. From November on, storm after storm rolls in from the Atlantic, often making ferry crossings and fishing dangerous or near impossible, and howl around my house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. I was born in October, so autumn is my favourite season yet winter following is a close second. I always wallowed in the dark and the cold, as for some reason I do not seem to be afflicted by seasonal affective disorder; or maybe a reverse one: I don't like heat, or the summer.  I have no issue with maintaining a work rhythm in winter, and sometimes even feel I write better, with the fireplace lit and a glass of whiskey at hand admittedly, but it is the muggy heat of summer that drains all my focus, motivation and attention. And where for others it might be a time for a lake or park picnic with friends or to have a few cold ones by the beach, it makes me only want to lie in a dark room with air-conditioning until October arrives. 

For me, winter is never about the hope of light after the dark, never about the return of spring. It is always about the dark itself, and the chance of introspection it provides. In recent years I often think about what we humans do in face of adversity and hardship, and how the pandemic has brought to light how our greed and fear of change seem to make it impossible to react properly to these challenges, much more than I would have ever felt possible. As I write this, people in democracies everywhere in Europe are out protesting the need to adhere to science and proclaim that they live in a dictatorship, on a continent that has seen so much real oppression and totalitarianism in the last hundred years alone. 

South of Dundalk, in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, hangs one of my favourite winter paintings: “The Diligence in the Snow” (La diligence dans la neige) from 1860, created by French socialist and realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877). If you look at the upper half of the painting, there is only an empty landscape, the east of France - on occasion Courbet added “Montagnes du Jura” to the title - stretching out to the horizon in grey and white, under an equally grey and white sky, indifferent in its monotony. There are no houses, no smoke from chimneys rising into the sky, and the light portrayed here is the undefinable greyness of winter - it could be anytime from later morning to early evening.

The human chaos and drama is confined to the bottom of the painting, where a stagecoach struggles through high drifts of snow pulled by two oxen and two horses, the two oxen in front struggling with their necks down, one coachman riding atop one, slumped down and blowing on his hands with a whip held in the crook of his arm. Behind them one horse rises up in its bridles, the other, exhausted, has already sunken to the side. The coach itself, weighted down with large chunks of snow on its roof, seems to be in the moment of foundering, dangerously tilted to the right. Another human figure, the second driver perhaps, has fallen face down into the snow hurrying towards the horses, and a woman and a man behind him, the passengers, are already left behind the capsizing coach. The man reaches out an arm towards it as the woman, the last in this chain of unlucky ones, holds on to the arm of the man. There are four or five houses depicted close by, also almost sunken into the snow, but no help is coming: there is no smoke rising from their chimneys either, the windows dark.   

Gustave Courbet,'The Diligence in the Snow' © The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

What I like about the painting most is its duality, and, after a fashion, hopelessness. One moment you're hurrying along in the warm cabin of the coach swaddled in blankets looking out at a beautiful scenery, the next moment everything secure and safe is brought crashing down around you and the beautiful scenery you thought only to exist for your merriment becomes something dangerous, something threatening to kill you. 

If you live in winter, regardless on what hemisphere, you know this. You are acutely aware of the fragility of human existence, of it's often sudden and violent end in dark and windswept places, and are reminded of that fact every year when the first storms of the seasons make ferry crossings impossible.

I don't wish for winter to end. 

If we manage to kill it, which seems a distinct possibility given our rising temperatures and our incapability to do anything against the climate catastrophe here in Europe, what will make us pause and take a breath? If there is only an eternal summer, will we not manically keep on drinking and eating and using up whatever is left while the rest of the world already burns and those we abandoned making their way to us to partake in our frantic feast before it all goes to hell? 

I think we all need to learn to adjust to winter, even its dark and hopelessness. I was actually happy when in February 2021 the tail end of Storm Darcy  brought with it snow and wind for all of Ireland. Not much snow, just enough to dust the cockle fleet in the harbour and the scrapyard on the quays, but the three days it lasted may have given me more joy and hope than anything humans gave me in the 12 months before that. 

In the midst of winter, I did not discover an eternal summer, to paraphrase Albert Camus, but instead the conviction that we can't carry on as we've done before. As strong as the urge is to re-emerge from the pandemic into a world where nothing has changed, this is wishful thinking. Doing as we've always done and rejecting science is what brought us here, to a time of rampant viruses emerging from burning rain forests and thawing permafrost, of floods and death and people fleeing a heating global south. Those of us in the midst of winter, in deep ice and snow and hiding from the storms howling outside, we need to preserve and protect these moments of stillness and contemplation. Otherwise we will just watch the coach founder and find ourselves in a hostile place, with no help coming. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Rashid Johnson, „Antoine's Organ“, 2016 / Schwarzer Stahl, Wachstumslampen, Pflanzen, Holz, Sheabutter, Bücher, Monitore, Teppiche, Piano
Installationsansicht, Rashid Johnson. Fly Away Hauser & Wirth, New York NY, 2016. Courtesy: der Künstler und Hauser & Wirth

Sara Bellini explores a new exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau:

Every Saturday at 2pm a different musician plays a piano hidden inside with Rashid Johnson’s installation Antoine’s Organ, a black steel-shelved open cube housing potted plants, video monitors and books on African-American history. Welcome to the Garden of Earthly Delights.

Named after Hieronymus Bosch’s ambiguous triptych, this multimedia exhibition in the Gropius Bau plays with the concept of garden as both an enclosed paradise and a corner of dystopia. From the 26th of July until the 1st of December over twenty international artists explore themes of migration, colonialism, climate change and nature’s beauty, highlighting the world’s contradictions and its fragile status quo. 

Some of the artworks on display include Yayoi Kusama’s giant polka dot tulips, Hicham Berrada’s jasmine terrarium and (moon)light installation, Taro Shinoda’s replica of a traditional Japanese garden and Pipilotti Rist’s intensely colourful sensual videos. Featuring blooming seeds, colonial seeds and a seed bank, The Garden of Earthly Delights brings history into nature and nature into politics.

Gropius Bau Website

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: painting the ‘contact zone’

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
"The Beautyful Ones" Series #6, 2018Acrylic, colour pencil and transfers on paper
151.8 x 108 cm
59 3/4 x 42 1/2 in
© Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

By Rachel Kevern:

During her studies at Yale University School of Art, Njideka Akunyili Crosby encountered Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’ (1990), which identifies ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other’. This idea of a ‘contact zone’ is present in all Akunyili Crosby’s work, reflecting the artist’s own experience of feeling a sense of belonging to two distinct cultures. Having left Nigeria in 1999, at the age of 16, to study in the United States, Akunyili Crosby’s work is often autobiographical, depicting domestic scenes of herself, her Nigerian family, and her American husband. The universe depicted in her compositions is, according to her, neither Nigeria nor America, but some other space, the space that every immigrant occupies.

Her pieces are large-scale depictions of domestic life, and combine painting, drawing and photo-transfer techniques. Often, Akunyili Crosby will merge very personal, intimate images with cut-outs from magazines and favourite designers; images that she has collected and stored over the years. In an interview with arts journal The White Review, the artist explained that she usually chooses “pictures that tap into Nigerian culture in the eighties and nineties – popular musicians, iconic album covers, movie stars.” She searches for images that give her “a feeling of recognition”, that will connect her with other people of her generation who grew up in Nigeria through their shared memories. The depth and richness of her compositions defies simple classification and forces the viewer to take a closer look.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby
"The Beautyful Ones" Series #7, 2018
Acrylic, colour pencil and transfers on paper
152.1 x 108 cm
59 7/8 x 42 1/2 in
© Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

Collecting picture became a way for Akunyili Crosby to stay connected to the Nigeria of her childhood, Nigeria as she knew it, which “wasn’t the same Nigeria that [she] was experiencing in the US, in terms of the questions people asked [her].” Speaking to The White Review, she explains that she “became aware that people had no clue, not just about Nigeria but about Africa as a continent”. Her pieces stem from a deep desire to share the Nigeria that she knew with other people, “in a way that felt real or sincere”: “I wanted to give people a glimpse of this other space that they weren’t familiar with.” The paintings are both deeply personal and reflect wider issues of identity, belonging, immigration, and Nigerian culture. Her compositions themselves act as personal, cultural and political ‘contact zones’, forming a space in which different cultures mingle to become one image.

Her first solo exhibition in Europe, which took place in 2016 and was entitled Portals, featured a multitude of doors, windows and screens. In the description of the exhibition, the Victoria Miro gallery notes that these portals in her work function as “physical, conceptual and emotional points of arrival and departure, while in a broader sense the work itself is a portal through which mutable ideas about transcultural identity flow back and forth.” The doors and windows, - as much of Akunyili Crosby’s work - function as gateways to new ways of thinking about multicultural identity and what it means to forge your own space and place in the world.

***
Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s website

Rachel Kevern is an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, studying English literature and French. In her spare time she writes, acts, paints (but not as much as she'd like to), drinks a lot of coffee and reads any book or magazine that she can get her hands on. She has previously been published in The Liverpool Echo, The Warrington Guardian and online magazines such as Flux and The F-Word, as well as running her own blog and being Arts and Travel editor for The Oxford Student, her university's biggest newspaper.

At Bradford's Rail and Bus Interchange: What Ship is This?

What Ship is This? – Photo: Robert Butroyd

By Robert Butroyd:

Rav Sanghera wrote a play about it, Gerard Benson wrote two poems about it, and I’m standing with my back to the Victoria Hotel next to Fran, and we’re staring at it. At first glance it appears to be apologising for even being there, tucked away below the road. Apologising for replacing the double arched roof and fluted columns of the demolished Bradford Exchange with a functional angular box. But maybe Bradford Interchange is not the blight on the spirit that it thinks it is. Rav Sanghera thinks it’s a place full of fascinating stories. Someone at ‘Metro’, the ‘combined authority’, or whoever runs it now, thinks it has potential as an art gallery. Gerard Benson certainly thought it a place of poetry. So, we head across the road.

Fran spots the fractured white sails above the entrance. But what sort of ship is this? She compares it to stepping into Sydney Harbour with its famous Opera House, and its roof of white sails. In the canopy, above the queuing taxis pumping the air with diesel fumes and the drone of their throaty engines, I see the sails of an Egyptian felucca floating dreamily down the Nile. Rising above the sails the pyramid of glass resembles the bridge of a cruise ship, where the crew, thinking it a good idea at the time, took a short cut, maybe the Suez Canal, and having badly lost their way intended to moor up for a short while, but rather liked the place and decided to hang around.

Inside, the grumble of diesel is mixed with muffled conversations, instructions, exclamations, and the random bleeps of modern life: Greggs' oven warning the bacon will burn, reversing buses, pinging mobiles. The departure boards, timetables, shops, and commuters rushing for buses, trains and home remind Fran of the Paris Metro. She’s not thinking of the daily commute, but the first steps on a journey to a more romantic place. The interior reminds me of a place designed by airport architects: functional, a people moving machine, not a place to linger. But linger we must, as buses run late, or we run late, or we go to the wrong platform, or we misread the timetable, or granny is on the next bus, having missed the one we came to meet. Maybe that’s why someone thought to hang paintings along the top of the walls on the upper concourse. Something to distract, keep us out of mischief, keep us on our toes, keep us asking questions - not wrong ones like, where’s my bus? But right ones like, why are there these paintings of elephants, seals and clowns? Who painted them? Who put them there, and why haven’t I noticed them before?

Feet Not Made For Dancing – Photo: Robert Butroyd

Of course, there are other things we can do while we wait. How about a bit of dancing? Fran thinks it’s an intriguing idea. So did Gerard Benson. It was a moment three little dancing girls probably forgot as soon as their bus arrived, but it was a magical moment captured in his poem, ‘Snapshot: Interchange Bus Station.’ But dance, where? The three girls, up past their bedtime, watched over by their chatting mums, were inspired by what appear to be random patterns made by the red and blue tiles on the floor. The design may once have had an intention though it is hard to see now what that might be. Looking down Fran sees fragments of a star, oblongs, parts of a chessboard and other more peculiar shapes. Dancing to ‘an inner music’, the girls choreographed their moves between the lines, jumping together from one tile to another, flailing their arms. Children, expressing themselves in the moment, before they are told they can’t: can’t dance, can’t paint, can’t sing, can’t act, can’t write, told so often that in the end they can’t, and so, in the end we don’t. A moment of inspiration captured by a poem. Fran wonders ‘who sets down standards to tell us we are not good enough to do these things?’

On our way out we stop at the information point and Phil behind the desk is pleased that we ask about the paintings, telling us they are hung there all year, only taken down at Christmas. We are pleased too, pleased because they are unexpected, almost hidden, and that someone has made the effort, the effort to hang them and take them down, and then re-hang them. There can’t be any money in it for those who run the Interchange, whoever they are, or for the bus companies, or the artists. Until Fran pointed them out I had never even noticed the paintings below the roof, but now I see them, I hope the bean counters in accounts don’t. For now, I’ve found my ship, a ship of camels and clowns, of dancers and elephants, of stargazers, and joyful time wasters. This cruise ship can stay.  

***

This essay was inspired by:
Brief Encounters at Bradford Interchange, a new play by Rav Sanghera, Freedom Studios
‘Community Pride’, ‘Interchange Bus Station at Night’, and ‘Snapshot: Interchange Bus Station’, all by Gerard Benson (2014) The Bradford Poems, smith/doorstop books
Unnamed Artists, Bradford Interchange

Robert Butroyd is the editor of Good Companions around, an online project inspired by J.B. Priestley, who took delight in what we are often told are places of little consequence, but through closer inspection are found to be no such thing.