Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelmann
Belgian memoir
Translator – Clem Clement
Source – Subscription book
I have a lot of book subscriptions. Living in a small town in Derbyshire, I know the only way to make sure I can read the books I want is to take one out for Les Fugitives. I reviewed a number of the early books but have lost track of them, so when I saw they had a subscription, I was interested. They also let me pick three of the books. Naturally, I went for the ones that appealed to me as a reader, and of the three I got, this book was the one I was most excited about, as it is one of those books that, in many ways, flies above my head as a reader. I am not a huge expert on art or on people like John Cage; the reference points in Yann’s world are different to mine. But it was the nature of the book, a letter of sorts to a father lost after his death, those unsaid moments, that space, that silence, and all that is in this book. I know that space, that silence, when my own mother died.
In Old French, the verb silencer means to reduce to silence. This word resonates with my own silence.
I imagined that it could have another meaning: to make everything silent, to make yourself silent, to become transparent, and to watch the world turning around you. To create a space, a retreat. My world existed at that precise point, in the dissonance of the space between those two definitions. It is not silence itself which interests me, but its incarnations, its powers – the way it acts in our lives, gaining in strength without our ever being able to grasp it, like a black hole.
The book has a lot about silence but more than just silence!
The book is one of those books that you can tell is a mind wandering, a mind thinking of his father’s death, and this all happens in the middle of the COVID lockdown, so it starts about that, about his father; this is to his father, but then wanders into what is happening: silence, the silence of music from John Cage to Ambient music. I have listened to some of the ambient music he talks about; Eno. The art from the wave pictures of Vija Celmins, I of course looked at these pictures still pictures of the ocean, but not the foaming sea of the likes of Turner; this is a still ocean of shimmering waters. Through the white paintings of Rauschenberg, I did know that the texture of the paint is the main thing. I know it’s white, but the width isn’t even; it’s textured. Then the one piece of art he mentioned I’d love to see was Charles Ray Inkbox, a huge open-top black box filled with ink that looks like a box except it has no top, so the ink is on top and the ink has a life of its own. One would imagine that, in the various rooms it has been in, the ink would be different. I was reminded of the Beuys pieces I have seen over the years.
In 1968, Vija Celmins began drawing oceans. In a multitude of hues on the spectrum from black to white, taking in every shade of grey, these works reproduce close-up views of the wave-ruffled surface of the sea. This series, which is still in progress, unfolds in minuscule variations with constant similarities and differences, centred on a single idea, on the same image. I imagine this series to be infinite.
The waves painting I’d also love see closer up to get the scale of them.
I loved this. I do like books that will have me thinking for years after and want to reread, and this is one of those books. It has grief, loss, a father who was very different from his son- or was he a labourer, but he also was a painter? A son with his own young son in lockdown, thinking about all this, and with his life in art and music, he uses them to think about the past and the present, about what it means to him and the world he is in. I said this is above my head. I like art and music, but I am not. I am a fan of both, but it was eye-opening to learn, see, and listen, too. This is a book that can be read in an evening, even with a lot of googling of the references within it. One for ART fans: if you like the book Fireflies by Luis Sagasti, you will like this book as well. Do you have a favourite book that has art at its heart?
