The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama’s life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as ‘Accumulations’, to her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space. (Tate Modern)

Horse Play, Happening Woodstock, New York

LT I thought about religion in regard to Tlooth and then in relation to your work generally. I began to think you were saying that faith in language, as a way to communicate, is like faith in religion. That you have to believe in language, you have faith that you can communicate, even if you’re not really able to communicate, as you have in a religion.

HM I’m very moved by that. Did you know that was how Perec felt?

LT Really?

HM I’m glad to know that I ultimately agree with him, having had many arguments with him about the question of how communication actually works in language, of whether communication is possible at all. For Perec, writing was a kind of salvation. It was justification by works. You know that expression, much discussed during the Reformation? And Perec, I think that if he hadn’t felt that writing was a vocation in the absolute sense of the word, a calling, like a priest, he would have died even sooner that he did.

Well worth the read. They take a lunch break mid-interview.

Details and a view of Perec’s magnificent beard here.

They still spoke a thousand languages–Spanish, too, to be sure, but also a thicket of songs and grammars. Mexico–the sound of wind in the ruins. Mexico–the waves rushing the shore. Mexico–the sand dunes, the snowfields, the steam of sleeping Popocatépetl. Mexico–across marijuana fields, tomato plants, avocado trees, the agave in the village of Tequila.

Mexico….

All around them, in the small woods, in the caves, in the precipitous canyons of copper country, in the swamps and at the crossroads, the harsh Old Ones gathered. Tlaloc, the rain god, lips parched because the Mexicans no longer tortured children to feed him sweet drafts of their tears. The Flayed One, Xipe Totec, shivering cold because priests no longer skinned sacrifices alive and danced in their flesh to bring forth the harvest. Tonántzin, goddess of Tepeyac, chased from her summit by the very Mother of God, the Virgen de Guadalupe. The awesome and ferocious warrior god, Hummingbird on the Left, Huitzilopochtli. Even the Mexicans’ friend, Chac Mool, was lonely. Big eared and waiting to carry their hopes and dreams in his bowl as he transited to the land of the gods from the earth, he lay on his back watching forever in vain for the feathered priests to return. Other Old Ones hid behind statues in the cathedrals that the Spaniards had built with the stones of their shattered temples. The smell of sacrificial blood and copal seeped out from between the stones to mix with incense and candles. Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

Mexico. Mexico.

The juxtaposition of earth and myth, and the repetition of Mexico acting almost as a refrain, gives this passage from The Hummingbird’s Daughter a lyrical quality that begs to be reread.

Then again, it was horror and fear on the part of the publishers which kept this work, first written as the opening section of Leduc’s novel Ravages (1955), unpublished in its original form until 2000 – and in French, at that. Leduc, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir (who also had a crush on her), had spent three years writing Thérèse and Isabelle – and it shows, in a good way. So when Gallimard said, in effect, “no way” in 1954 (“impossible to publish openly,” said Raymond Queneau, of all people), Leduc nearly had a breakdown. (The Guardian)

• Georges Perec the puzzler: “Fond of linguistic complexity, Perec also worked as a fiendishly-exacting crossword-setter for the weekly magazine, Le Point, and many of his crosswords have recently been published in book form in France.” (3:AM) Must investigate.
• A review of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (3:AM)
• On rue Vilin: “The aspect of Perec’s investigations that most intrigued me was his focus on the rue Vilin, a street where he had spent the first few years of his life before his father, a soldier, was killed in the Second World War and his mother deported to Auschwitz, where she died. Rue Vilin is in the neighbourhood of Belleville, in north-eastern Paris, and stands on hills overlooking the city centre. Perec’s Jewish family lived in an area described by his biographer David Bellos as ‘a whole Yiddish town within sight of the Eiffel Tower.’” (extract, The White Review)
• And rue Vilin again: “In 1969, following the traumatic break-up of a relationship, Perec threw himself into an ambitious project which, he planned, would last for twelves years: the ongoing description of twelve places in Paris which were important to him. He utilised a 12 x 12 mathematical grid to structure the order in which he would visit each place. Every month, he would go to one of the twelve locations and note down what he saw there, and in addition, at a different location would write a memory of another place.” (p25-27, The Kakofonie)

The composition; the muted, almost drab colors broken by the gold and pewter; the white tablecloth (I judge artists by the way they paint “white” objects) and the mystery–Who dined here? Why was the table left in such disarray?: these are the things that bring me back to this painting every time I visit the MFA Boston.

Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien was originally published by Christian Bourgois éditeur, 1975

Oulipo-mania is an ongoing series on Oulipian works, constraints, and more.

An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in Paris is, essentially, a list. Perec set out to catalog the infraordinary, “what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds”; or, those things that are oft ignored or unnoticed. Attempt is the result of this endeavor, which Perec carries out from various vantage points in the bustling Place Saint-Sulpice. Over a three-day period in October 1974, he infers–“A priest returning from a trip (there is an airline label hanging from his satchel)”; he sees friends and a possible doppelganger; he finds a man who shares the same idiosyncratic manner of holding his cigarettes: between his middle and ring fingers; and sees a dog that “looks like Snowy” (Tintinophiles will recognize the young reporter’s four-legged sidekick, also known as Milou).

Illustration by Badaude

What you’ll recognize in this slim book is Perec’s microscopic attention to detail that figures in A Void (reviewed here).

tens, hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy:

conversations between two people, conversations between three people, conversations between several people: the movement of lips, gestures, gesticulations

And his wry humor: “(high heels; bent ankles)”; “A full 96 (perhaps I have only today discovered my true calling: ticket collector for the Paris City Transit Authority)”

In his afterward, translator Mark Lowenthal mentions Perec’s aim to become an absolute writer; “Perec’s legacy lies more in the effort he made in seeing and taking note of everything.” But, as Lowenthal notes, there are limitations, specifically cultural and temporal, that make this a noble but futile endeavor.

Perec’s observations of the hustle and bustle of Place Saint-Sulpice would differ greatly from, say, those of an American. Or even a fellow Frenchman of a different generation. And time, even a mere three days, works against Perec:

What has changed here since yesterday? At first sight, it’s really the same. Is the sky perhaps cloudier? It would really be subjective to say that there are, for example, fewer people or fewer cars. There are no birds to be seen. There is a dog on the plaza. Over the hôtel Récamier (far behind it?) a crane stands out in the sky (it was there yesterday, but I don’t recall making note of it). I couldn’t say whether the people I’m seeing are the same ones as yesterday, whether the cars are the same ones as yesterday. On the other hand, if the birds (pigeons) came (and why wouldn’t they come) I’d feel sure they would be the same birds.

And later

Yesterday, there was a metro ticket on the sidewalk, right in front of my window; today there is, not exactly in the same spot, a candy wrapper (cellophane) and a piece of paper difficult to identify (a little bigger than a “Parisiennes” wrapper but a much lighter blue.

Perec also admits to another limitation: his position, literally where he is situated in the square, prevents him from seeing all. He can only take note of what is happening in his line of sight. “(Obvious limits to such an undertaking: even when my own goal is just to observe, I don’t see what takes place a few meters from me: I don’t notice, for example, that cars are parking)”

The illustrations throughout this post are by Badaude, who set out to exhaust Attempt by making an infographic complete with a key that is, as she describes, “more complicated than the words it represents.”

Illustration by Badaude

In a panel where she notes her “angoisses,” it’s clear that, despite Perec’s attention to detail, there are still unknowns:

Illustration by Badaude

On one hand, you can’t help but wonder why Perec bothered to do something that was impossible and why readers would be interested in this effort. At points, the list is exhaustive and unenlightening–do we really care which busses passed through the Place?; however, the number of pages that “nothing” fills is remarkable. While full of the mundane, Attempt does give us a sense of how much we miss when we are oblivious to the space around those things that we deem important. It offers us a glimpse of what we might see should we choose to observe the things that would go by unnoticed. Undoubtedly, this is a book for the Oulipian enthusiast (guilty) but other creative types could benefit from emulating Perec.

♦

Many thanks to Badaude for allowing me to share her infographic, which you can see in its entirety in The White Review‘s Issue 3. If you aren’t familiar with her work, check out her website, where she blogs about fashion, offers comical “how to’s,” and shares the wonders/horrors of French cookbooks from the 70s and 80s (Cuisine de Meuh!).

Badaude also introduced me to the Ouvroir de Bandes dessinée Potentielle (OuBaPo), which is one of several offshoots of the OuLiPo. I hope to explore this group in the future as I find the use of constraints in illustrations fascinating.