Reading was an important element of Francesca Mollet’s time in residence and for her practice in general. This reading list brings together six titles which reflect on perception, particularly in relation to camouflage and iridescence.
POIKILOS. I first came across this word in Anne Carson’s ‘If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho’. In her notes to the first line, ‘Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind’ Carson describes how ‘poikilos’ (translated as spangled) ‘is a compound adjective, used as an epithet of Aphrodite to identify either her ‘chair’ (thron-) or her ‘mind’ (phron-) as poikilos: many-colored, spotted, dappled, variegated, intricate, embroidered, inlaid, highly wrought, complicated, changeful, diverse, abstruse, ambiguous, subtle. It is as if each word in this list is turning to the next, the threads between them broadening out their visual effects and associations — bodies, plants, surfaces, fabrics, psychic topographies.
The textual body Carson creates from the remaining fragments of Sappho’s poetry is itself dappled: Carson uses line breaks and brackets to make solid the gaps and absences from the fragments of Sappho’s poetry. The poems become ‘poikilos’, shimmering with appearances and disappearances.
‘Poikilos’ surfaces again in Tavi Meraud’s Iridescence, Intimacies, a text that I keep rereading for the residency, having first read it on my MA during lockdown. Turning to their conception of iridescence as a navigational tool — a way of moving, a way of thinking — rather than a metaphor, helps me think about the potentials of surface. They explore how ‘poikilos’ is close to fast movement; the shimmering of iridescence is a form of camouflage, which, by blending an organism with its environment to survive, suspends the distinction between reality and appearance.
I like how they write about iridescence becoming a ‘mechanism of decomposing vision’ as if it breaks down an ability to see, and also how it seems to mark the site where this occurs — ‘where a surface surfaces.’ In iridescence, the reflective work of iridophores (thin cells that reflect light at different wave-lengths) exterior and interior are brought together, allowing for surface to be thought of differently: rather than a boundary, it is the site of both interior and exterior, depth and surface, ‘a scintillating site of intractable multiplicities’, which can negotiate between the apparent and the real.
Reflecting upon Meraud’s dazzling thoughts, and how my paintings dissolve images in surface, I wanted to read more about camouflage. In Hide and Seek, Hanna Rose Shell constructs a compelling history of camouflage that begins with Abbott Thayer’s research into protective colouration in animals. She explores how through activities such as stencil-making, feather painting and photocollages, humans have used disruptive patterning and obliterative colouration for their own camouflage effects.
I enjoyed her term ‘textile subterfuge’, relating to the procedures of painting, netting and veiling that were used to obscure figure/ground relations in ‘second skins’. She then describes how, as military reliance on camouflage grew, new bodily movement and instructions towards ‘camouflage consciousness’ were encouraged. This included adapting to the landscape in a kind of choreography that involved imagining yourself seen by another, often through a camera. In the desire to become part of a continuous surface the self is directed outwards: to move in the environment also involves looking and moving as the environment and the camera, the figure and the background merge.
The importance of who looks and how looking is constructed, is explored in When the Moon Waxes Red by Trinh T. Minh Ha. I find it difficult to summarise the complexity and plurality of these essays. One chapter I was drawn to was ‘Unwriting/Inmost Writing’ which looks at how identity can catalyse changes of form by resisting accepted traditions in order to articulate the specificity of a (female) experience.
She writes about cinema and how both Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman resist normative ways of looking in film by prolonging the length of looking. Here duration and intensity unsettle preconceptions about who looks, how they look and what they look at. An object, for example, when looked at for a long time can seem to speak. By making visible or unsettling cinematic conventions and processes these prolonged shots also create a perspective on time but not through the usual sequence of action as movement. Reflecting on techniques within filmmaking and writing could perhaps renew how I approach constructing the duration of looking in painting, for example, by using painting’s processes of composition, perspective and brushwork. Reading her text, I think about how looking to other mediums, we can understand how to work at the edges of our own.
In camouflage, the recognition of a flicker that something else is there, could connect to the expanding zone and wandering outline of the ‘patch’ in Georges Didi-Huberman’s essay The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer: The Detail and the Patch. How do we seek the hidden when looking closely at paintings? Didi-Huberman creates an approach to close looking by comparing what he calls the ‘detail’ and the ‘patch’. Whereas a ‘detail’ can be extracted and named (getting closer to a ‘detail’ means seeing an element more clearly), the discovery of the ‘patch’ ‘exists only as a result of not seeing well; it demands only to look, to look at something ‘hidden’, because it is obvious, there in front of us, dazzling, but difficult to name.’ The ‘patch’ confuses perception because it doesn’t have a clear intention. Instead, it is something more, or other, than the item it depicts.
Writing about two threads in The Lacemaker by Vermeer, Didi-Huberman contrasts a first, precise, representational thread, with the second, inexact, vermillion thread, which is ‘painted like paint.’ When the vermillion ‘patch’ comes into view, it is shocking, and so even more dazzling, because its insistence on surface means that it disrupts how the viewer’s perception of the rest of the painting was seen and makes its other features become less mimetic and more fluid (‘little globules of paint (liquefy), the tassel on the left becomes diaphanous’).
The perception of texture involves both the visual and the haptic and so resists the binary separation of senses by involving more than the one sense of touch. Perceiving texture includes hearing (a ‘crunch’) and seeing ‘a shine’, and it involves a kind of hypothesising about how material acts: how did it come to have this crunch or shine? These are things Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explores in her introduction to Touching, Feeling. Texture is liminal, involving ‘perceptual data’ which repeats but does not quite coalesce into a distinguishable structure, meaning that scale becomes uncertain: the interior woodgrain of a split tree and a forest viewed from above appear as having a similar texture. I liked the idea that if there is ‘no one physical scale that is to do with texture’, then textural perception can destabilise the certainty of a viewing position and the feeling of a fixed viewpoint, and so creates an imaginative space of projection.
Sedgwick also proposes the word ‘besides’ as an alternative to ‘beyond, beneath, behind’, because it resists ideas of the hidden or depth and suggests instead a planar relation. And so, returning to ‘poikilos’, English translations are laid besides one another as various alternatives to the ancient Greek word. Perhaps ‘poikilos’ and my readings exist alongside each other as a way of thinking about what comes in and out of sight, and how we become intimate with that through language.
If not, winter: Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson, (Virago, UK, 2003)
Iridescence, Intimacies, Tavi Meraud, in ‘What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection Got to Do with it? ( e-flux, Inc., Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2017)
Hide and Seek, Hanna Rose Shell (Zone Books, New York, 2012)
The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer – the Detail and the Patch, Georges Didi-Huberman, trans. by Anthony Cheal Pugh, (History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 2., No.2, June 1989)
When the Moon Waxes Red, Trinh T. Minh-Ha (Routledge, USA, 1991)
Touching, Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Duke University Press, USA, 2003)