You Had To Be There
/3
In very different books, in unexpected contexts, I keep finding references that conjure life right now. In Alma Mahler’s youthful diaries, written on a springtime afternoon at the turn of the twentieth century: “The weather is fine, our little fruit trees are already blossoming – I’m sitting at the window, drumming my fingers against the panes. – out, out! Freedom – fresh air!” I can imagine her at a window sill, more than a hundred years before me, standing by my window, watching the world slow down. In a sports book I read for research, NBA manager Phil Jackson quotes a Zen proverb: “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.”
Is it the waiting, the sitting quietly, the references to the passage of time (slow, pleasurable, noticeable) that feel so poignant to me now? Is it the outside world, or the view of it from inside, from inaction? I read these lines in books and pause at their proximity to life. It would seem normal, run-of-the-mill, to find yourself in books. But then, the circumstances. I have not been in a space that I don’t inhabit in months. My world has narrowed to the limits of my apartment. I hold the book about “White Space in White Space” and look at the photographs of “The White Apartment of Miloš Laky and Anna Lakyová” in the 1970s. In a color photograph, Natalia Florean and Lakyová sit on a white couch made up of several stacked white cushions. They wear all white, there are glasses with clear drinks in front of them. In another, black and white, Lakyová stands on a piece of furniture and looks down toward the ground. On the wall behind her are white-on-white painted squares and a set of Venetian blinds allows some light in, adding a white layer of exposure.
I look at the photos for a long time. Just looking allows me to imagine other places, possibilities, times. It’s like insisting that not being somewhere doesn’t mean you can’t be part of it. Daniel Grún writes his essay in “White Space in White Space” from the position of a “belated viewer,” whose visit has been “deferred” by several decades. In his first footnote he explains that his description of the exhibition is based on photographs. And yet, the title of his essay—”Notes of a Belated Viewer: Revisiting White Space in White Space” is revisit, a coming back, even if to somewhere he has never been. Grún writes about imagining the exhibition, its layout, its feel. From afar, from across time.
The phrase “you had to be there” comes to mind, that feeling of distance from experience. How do you write about something you haven’t experienced? You write from afar: you write about expectation, about the knowledge you come to something with, and the way that looking or reading—paying attention, that is—open up possibilities. Stano Filko, Miloš Laky, and Ján Zavarský produced a lot of writing—text-art—around the White Space in White Space project. I read it all, thinking, like Grún, about viewing unencumbered by distance and time. Then, in their manifesto, I read the part where they describe “White Space in White Space” as aiming to create “a collective liberation of art from the constraints of reality, and working to transcend reality in the name of a non-materialistic and non-subjective, timeless state of existence.”
I know. I know we inscribe our lives onto everything around us. And again, I find a bit of life—or was it hope?—in a line about a project that only existed for a day, years ago. I wasn’t there, but I know: “a timeless state of existence.” I’m stuck in time, thinking about timelessness, about being outside of time. This matters to me because everything I read and look at matters right now. I find all life in books and photographs and art I cannot see in person. It matters because everything matters, because nothing—especially art—grows old. I look at the white apartment and see it as an extension of the white space: another experiment in transcending reality. Every inhabited space becomes part of the project, of these ideas and concepts that still travel across time, place, and reality. It’s possible to write about what is no longer there. It’s possible to see it.
Orit Gat
Orit Gat is a writer living in London.
White Space in White Space / Biely priestor v bielom priestore, 1973−1982. Stano Filko, Miloš Laky and Ján Zavarský,” edited by Daniel Grúň, Christian Höller, and Kathrin Rhomberg. Publications of the Kontakt Collection. Volume II. SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR, Vienna 2021
https://www.kontakt-collection.org/bibliography/50/white-space-in-white-space-19731982
March 2021
Is it the waiting, the sitting quietly, the references to the passage of time (slow, pleasurable, noticeable) that feel so poignant to me now? Is it the outside world, or the view of it from inside, from inaction? I read these lines in books and pause at their proximity to life. It would seem normal, run-of-the-mill, to find yourself in books. But then, the circumstances. I have not been in a space that I don’t inhabit in months. My world has narrowed to the limits of my apartment. I hold the book about “White Space in White Space” and look at the photographs of “The White Apartment of Miloš Laky and Anna Lakyová” in the 1970s. In a color photograph, Natalia Florean and Lakyová sit on a white couch made up of several stacked white cushions. They wear all white, there are glasses with clear drinks in front of them. In another, black and white, Lakyová stands on a piece of furniture and looks down toward the ground. On the wall behind her are white-on-white painted squares and a set of Venetian blinds allows some light in, adding a white layer of exposure.
I look at the photos for a long time. Just looking allows me to imagine other places, possibilities, times. It’s like insisting that not being somewhere doesn’t mean you can’t be part of it. Daniel Grún writes his essay in “White Space in White Space” from the position of a “belated viewer,” whose visit has been “deferred” by several decades. In his first footnote he explains that his description of the exhibition is based on photographs. And yet, the title of his essay—”Notes of a Belated Viewer: Revisiting White Space in White Space” is revisit, a coming back, even if to somewhere he has never been. Grún writes about imagining the exhibition, its layout, its feel. From afar, from across time.
The phrase “you had to be there” comes to mind, that feeling of distance from experience. How do you write about something you haven’t experienced? You write from afar: you write about expectation, about the knowledge you come to something with, and the way that looking or reading—paying attention, that is—open up possibilities. Stano Filko, Miloš Laky, and Ján Zavarský produced a lot of writing—text-art—around the White Space in White Space project. I read it all, thinking, like Grún, about viewing unencumbered by distance and time. Then, in their manifesto, I read the part where they describe “White Space in White Space” as aiming to create “a collective liberation of art from the constraints of reality, and working to transcend reality in the name of a non-materialistic and non-subjective, timeless state of existence.”
I know. I know we inscribe our lives onto everything around us. And again, I find a bit of life—or was it hope?—in a line about a project that only existed for a day, years ago. I wasn’t there, but I know: “a timeless state of existence.” I’m stuck in time, thinking about timelessness, about being outside of time. This matters to me because everything I read and look at matters right now. I find all life in books and photographs and art I cannot see in person. It matters because everything matters, because nothing—especially art—grows old. I look at the white apartment and see it as an extension of the white space: another experiment in transcending reality. Every inhabited space becomes part of the project, of these ideas and concepts that still travel across time, place, and reality. It’s possible to write about what is no longer there. It’s possible to see it.
Orit Gat
Orit Gat is a writer living in London.
White Space in White Space / Biely priestor v bielom priestore, 1973−1982. Stano Filko, Miloš Laky and Ján Zavarský,” edited by Daniel Grúň, Christian Höller, and Kathrin Rhomberg. Publications of the Kontakt Collection. Volume II. SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR, Vienna 2021
https://www.kontakt-collection.org/bibliography/50/white-space-in-white-space-19731982
March 2021